The God Wave (21 page)

There was a part of Daisuke—a part he tried to keep under wraps—that was almost disappointed that Chuck had been won over. Yeah, sure, there was an eight-year-old, robot-loving kid jumping up and down deep inside him, thrilled to have his playground suddenly expanded almost infinitely. But while he understood the tight-lipped protectiveness and competitiveness
of academia, the level of secrecy Howard and his cohort required was unnerving.

Dice had been relieved not to have been faced with his own decision, which, once the owners of Forward Kinetics had signed the contract, was to either sign on or leave FK behind. He had given no more than a second's thought to that option.

The changes wrought by their new partnership were immediate. Some were marked—their hired security company was replaced by men and women from Howard's group. They wore suits, not military uniforms, but the suits, coupled with their military bearing, led to the inevitable comparisons to iconic movies. Within the week everyone was referring to them as the Smiths.

Other changes were more subtle. The inclusion of military robotics engineers changed the dynamic in Dice's lab. The new recruits were not inclined to blend in with existing staff. Most seemed perplexed by the give-and-take, consultative atmosphere that was the norm in Dice's domain. That had a chilling effect on his team, gradually making them quieter and less inclined to levity. It wasn't anything the government recruits did exactly, but they were so watchful and so damned serious. Even the eight-year-old inside Dice had trouble keeping up his giddy good cheer in the face of that.

His staff responded at first by trying to include the Deeps, as they called them, in their conversations, their meals, their moments of relaxation. But the recruits refused to mingle. They took their breaks and meals together and kept talk to a minimum. They spoke to the civilian techs only to ask questions, gain clarification, or make observations. Dice couldn't fault their behavior. They followed his orders respectfully and expediently, but with the exception of one young female officer named Megan Phillips,
who seemed to bubble over with ideas, they rarely offered anything to the creative process.

The FK lab techs reacted by circling their wagons more tightly. Within weeks of the start of the new regime, Dice felt as if he were the chief of two separate tribes. He knew from the muted conversations he had with Eugene that the folks on the kinetics teams were having similar experiences. Still, he—no less than his colleagues—threw himself into training the neos he'd been given and thanked God they learned quickly. Dice was used to working with robots.

Working with these androids was something else entirely.

It took roughly two months to train the first class of robotics engineers, neurology techs, and kinetics subjects sent by Deep Shield. They were assigned eight to a zeta class, with a lieutenant in each group as ranking officer. They were quick studies, focused, dedicated. They performed with military proficiency every day and disappeared every night into buses sent to return them, Chuck supposed, to their base. The kinetics trainees came in five flavors: security/combat, machine operators, programmers and VR technicians, architects/construction engineers, and holographic specialists.

They were sharp, every last one of them, and asked a lot of questions about brain waves and the Brewster-Brenton technology. Especially Lieutenant Reynolds—whose first name, Chuck discovered after much prodding, was Brian. Reynolds was the leader of the pack. Everyone else in the first class deferred to him.

Chuck was surprised to find that the biggest hurdle Howard's recruits had to overcome was getting to the gamma state in which
the brain used several different modalities in concert. Roughly half the candidates had mild difficulty achieving gamma; the remainder had moderate to great difficulty and had to work harder at it. Chuck was, of course, curious to know why. He sought—and got—General Howard's permission to put all the candidates through a series of neurological tests and to do a full profile of each one to see if any patterns emerged. None did that he could see, with the possible exception of the military training they had all received.

“Is that enough?” Eugene asked him as they pored over the results of their work in Chuck's office early one morning, before the Deeps arrived for their training. “I mean is the fact that they all had the same style of training and indoctrination enough to account for their difficulty . . . I don't know . . . letting go?”

Chuck pulled up a different view of the data, looking at the recruits' answers to a series of questions about their experiences with family, school, and the military.

“Lanfen's recruits have all had martial arts training,” he noted. “I thought that was one of the things that made her a good candidate—the mental discipline. Now I don't know. Maybe I'm looking in the wrong place. Maybe it's not the training. Or at least maybe the training isn't their first common denominator.”

“Their family and schooling factoids are all over the place.” Eugene tapped his laptop's screen with a pen. “This one's from a fully functional family—middle kid. This one's an only child. Lost his father in his junior year of high school. This one's the youngest of six, the only girl in a family of boys.” He glanced at Chuck. “What? You're thinking something. I can see it.”

Chuck
was
thinking something. The data on his screen had gone into soft focus. “I think we need to back up a step. Maybe the question isn't what they do in the service but
why
they went into the service in the first place.”

“Did we ask them that?”

Chuck ran a quick search of the survey. “Number twenty-four.”

The question had produced some interesting results. Every one of the responses was a variation on a perceived need for order, certainty, a place to belong. Additionally there were refinements that had to do with wanting to be part of a team, wanting to be part of something bigger than oneself, wanting to be of service to the country. But when all had been asked and answered, Chuck Brenton was looking at a group of people who, for various reasons, felt at a loss to define their own futures. Except for the two who had been determined to go into the military at a young age—both from military families—none had a deep-seated calling, secret talent, or sense of purpose that had to be expressed in a particular way.

Certainly they had passions. Reynolds loved martial arts and had learned a variety of different styles. Seneca Hughes liked to paint but thought of it as a hobby (“who pays for art anyway?” she'd asked). Steve Flores collected baseball memorabilia, which he shipped home to his dad in California. But none had risen to the level of a calling that the individual felt he or she must pursue. Each of them had, instead, handed many major life decisions over to the military.

Trust
.

Chuck sat back in his desk chair. Every member of his zeta team trusted his or her own perceptions, his or her own inner voice, his or her own intuitions. In order to work for an agency of government such as Deep Shield, these operatives had to put their trust in their government, their command structure, the officers giving them their orders.

Was that it? Was it a matter of whether trust resided inwardly or in an external power? Surely the martial arts training, which called upon a practitioner to learn to trust his or her own reflexes and judgment, was a balancing factor.

Brian Reynolds had achieved gamma late the previous afternoon. Chuck got up from his desk and went to see if the lieutenant had arrived yet. He found him in the company café (dubbed Steampunk Alley because of the glorious, copper-clad espresso machine that was its centerpiece) making himself an espresso.

“I need your help,” Chuck told him. “I need a breakthrough to get the bulk of your team to the next level.”

“Of course, sir. What can I do?”

“I want you to think about your own breakthrough yesterday. How it felt. What caused it. What its genesis was. Then I need you to get your team and see if they can't take that same . . . leap of faith.”

“Leap of faith,” Reynolds repeated. “Sounds sort of religious.”

“Yeah. Yeah, it does. And maybe that's not a bad thing. I'm not sure it matters what you have faith in, just that you have it.”

Reynolds nodded and looked down at his hands. “For me it was just coming to the realization that if I could master kung fu and tae kwon do, I could master this. Then I just got into it.”

“Any imagery associated with that?”

“Imagery?”

“Did you use some sort of image or sound or other element to
get into it
?”

“Yes, sir. Swimming. I imagined I was swimming. Backstroking across a pool.”

Chuck smiled. “Backstroking. That's great. Blind, trusting the water to keep you afloat, moving all your limbs. Yes. That's a great environment. Let's see if that or something like it will work for your team.”

BY THE TIME LANFEN GOT
her first class of recruits, they had all achieved trustworthy zeta states. Chuck had shared with her how hard-won the gamma state had been and that they'd resorted to
guided imagery to get everyone up to speed. Reynolds's trick of imagining himself floating and swimming in water had sparked the others in the class to come up with things they could use in the same way, to pry the fingers of focus off their thought processes so they could glide into gamma.

That made sense to the martial artist. Lanfen had used guided imagery her entire life for everything from quelling childhood night frights to avoiding panic attacks when she made a foray into new social territory. The few times she had been required to speak publicly in college, she had used a purely mental version of her kung fu warm-up routine as a nerve-calming device.

The questions the neos in her first class asked her had mostly to do with technique and how she so easily maintained the VR connection when in direct contact with the bot—what they had come to call “ventrilokinesis.” Matt had laughed at that characterization of it, and Lanfen had admitted, ruefully, that it was her doing. She had repeatedly referred to her technique as “throwing her self,” and Steve Flores had said, “You mean like a ventriloquist?”

“Personally,” she'd told Matt, “I'd prefer something more elegant—
kinetoquism
maybe.
Ventrilokinesis
is too long and makes me think of creepy dummies.”

Whatever one called it, it proved to be hard for even the dedicated Lieutenant Reynolds to master. Lanfen found this interesting; the trainees found it frustrating.

So did Matt Streegman.

“Why aren't they picking it up?” he asked her at the end of almost every session in which she tried to teach the “throwing” method she used.

“I honestly don't know,” she'd told him at the end of her most recent session, in which Reynolds and one of the female recruits had managed a few seconds of connectivity after Becky's hard
interface was deactivated. “They're certainly dedicated enough. They're disciplined. They're . . .” She lost the thread of the sentence in a minor epiphany.

“What?” He was reading her face, which, she figured, must have been doing something peculiar.

They were standing in Steampunk Alley, fixing hot beverages. Lanfen turned to face Matt, her lapsang souchong momentarily forgotten.

“They're monotaskers.”

“You mean unitaskers?”

She laughed. “No. A unitasker is someone or something that can do only one thing. I mean they can do a variety of things, but they've been trained to do them sequentially. Step by step. They don't juggle or multitask well, or at least that talent hasn't been cultivated.”

“Can you help them cultivate it?”

“To be honest, I don't know.”

His face said clearly that was not the answer he'd wanted to hear. “Lanfen, this is of critical importance. They must be able to master the VR connectivity. They must be able to learn to see through the robot's eyes without the hard interface. Hear with its ears. Otherwise—”

“Latency issues. I get it.”

“I'm not sure you do get it,” Matt said tersely. “I'm not sure you understand what those latency issues mean to these people. The seconds of lag between the operator's perception of the bot's position and his translation of what he's seeing into action may make the difference between success and failure, life and death.”

“Trust me, Matt—I get it,” she said, thinking of her fight with Reynolds. “I'm just not sure I know how to teach multitasking.”

“How did your master teach you?”

“He didn't. I come by it naturally. In fact, he claims I taught him.”

Matt stared at her a moment, then burst out laughing. “Stop apologizing for being a prodigy, Lanfen. Just see if you can teach them what you taught your shifu.”

“It's hard to teach something you do naturally. You do understand that, don't you?”

“Honestly,” he said, “I never really thought much about it.” He raised his espresso in a toast then and left her standing at the beverage bar.

Always enlightening talking to you, Matt
.

She went into her afternoon training session with a box full of beanbags and hacky sacks, determined to teach her recruits how to juggle.

INVOLVEMENT WITH THE MILITARY BRED
a certain level of order in the affairs at Forward Kinetics. Chuck reflected that while he had always appreciated order, the sort of regularity General Howard's people brought with them was anathema to the creative dynamic he thrived on, and as Dice and Eugene had seen with their teams, it was changing the dynamic of the company. The crew that had been ever eager to throw ideas at the wall to see which ones would stick was becoming careful—timid even—in its approach to the work. He understood that any organization went through stages, but he knew without a doubt that Forward Kinetics' research and development teams were not even halfway to the norming stage for any of their processes. The military presence was forcing changes that Chuck feared would have an adverse impact on the very processes an enterprise like theirs needed to drive development.

Which was why he was both surprised and pleased to enter the martial arts classroom to find Chen Lanfen and her team playing something he could only describe as beanbag Jeopardy.

Standing in two facing rows, eight recruits tossed beanbags
back and forth, moving them up and down the rows. There was a catch, of course: the recruits were expected to snag a bag with one hand while tossing one with the other, shift the bag to the opposite hand, and toss it to the person standing kitty-corner to them even as they caught the next beanbag from their upstream neighbor. All of this while Lanfen fired questions at them.

“Reynolds! Choose a category: firearms or movies?”

Catch. “Firearms!” Shift. Toss.

“What's the difference between a single-action and a double-action firearm?”

Catch. “Double action requires cocking the gun before pulling the trigger.” Shift. “Single action does not.” Toss.

“Flores! Category: television series or music?”

“Television!”

“Who played the title role in
The Man from U.N.C.L.E.
?”

“Uh . . .” said Flores, catching a beanbag with his left hand while tossing one to his opposing neighbor with his right. “Solo something.” He shifted the new beanbag to his right hand.

“Wrong. That was the name of the character.”

“Oh, ah—” Toss, catch. “Uh, um, Robert-Robert-Robert . . . Vaughn! Robert Vaughn!” He shifted the incoming bag and missed it with his right hand. It plopped between his feet. “Dammit!”

His upstream partner smiled, and the whole line of Deeps relaxed. Lanfen clapped her hands sharply. “Keep it going, guys! No stopping! Keep the bags moving until everyone gets back into the swing of things. Don't drop the ball, okay?”

She glanced over at the door and saw Chuck standing there watching (and, he thought, probably looking goofy).

He straightened. “How's it going?”

She glanced back at her group and nodded. “It's going well. In fact, why don't you guys take a break?”

Lieutenant Reynolds frowned. “I think we'll keep going, if
you don't mind. Practice the catch-throw sequence without the trivia questions.”

Lanfen looked like a proud parent glancing back at her prodigies as she left the room.

“I didn't mean to interrupt,” Chuck told her as she joined him in the hallway.