The God Wave (23 page)

“We're already top secret, aren't we?” she asked.

Tim cast another glance at the Smiths. “Yeah, well, apparently so are some of the projects our trainees are working on.”

“What do you mean?”

“I went up to my lab to snag my coffee cup before I came down here, and one of my students—the lieutenant, what's his name . . . Pierce—was sitting at his computer. I don't think I imagined how fast he shut that puppy down and put up the piece we were working on yesterday.”

Sara leaned in. “Did you get a sense of what he was really working on?”

“Something using the same software. He was designing something. Armor, looked like to me.”

Mike chuckled. “You caught him playing games, Tim. He's probably designing a video game in his spare time.”

Tim seemed to think about that for a moment and grinned. “A man after my own heart.”

Sara glanced back at the two agents, who were now sitting at a nearby table, looking anything but relaxed over their cups of whatever. “I wouldn't be so sure.”

“What if I told him I noticed he was working on a personal project and suggested I'd be happy to help him with it? Then he'd show me, right?”

“At your own risk, Timmy.” She stood and picked up her coffee. “Almost time for class. I'm heading down to my lab. Be careful poking your nose in their business, okay?”

“You're paranoid,” Tim said.

“So are you, usually,” she reminded him. “Why not now?”

She left Tim with that thought and went off to teach her class.

SOMETHING WOODSY AND FLORAL INVADED
Chuck's olfactory senses. Something that made him imagine he heard running water and felt grass under his feet. He knew that fragrance. Smiling, he glanced at the door of his office and found Lanfen standing in it.

The expression on her face put a damper on his smile. “What's the matter?”

She made a closing gesture at the door. “Can we talk?”

Ah. The three most feared words in the English language. “Sure. Come on in.”

She carefully closed the door, making sure the latch bolt clicked in the strike plate.

She sat in the chair across from his desk, her arms crossed over her chest. She frowned at the Camden Yards snow globe on his desk as if it had done something rude.

“Where were you today?” he asked when she didn't say anything.

That apparently startled her. She lowered her arms and looked up at him. “You don't know? You really don't?”

“No. What happened? What's wrong?”

“I got hijacked this morning. Bilbo, too. By the Deeps. They carted both of us off to their facility, where we spent the day with our team of recruits and their shiny, new and improved robots.”

“They . . . they did?”

She nodded.

He'd known about the new bots but not that the Deeps had planned on changing the venue for their training.

“No one told you this was going to happen?” she asked.

“No. I had no idea. Have you talked to Matt about it?”

“Matt is strangely absent from his office. And his lab. And everywhere else I've looked for him this evening.” She leaned forward and put her clasped hands on the edge of his desk. “Chuck, I don't mind working with them at their facility. I don't mind that they gave Bilbo cool new appendages. I
do
mind that they didn't tell me they were planning on doing either. Can you . . . will you talk to General Howard about this? Can you make him understand that we're not used to being hauled around like . . . like ordnance? I'm not government property. Neither is Bilbo. It's not right for them to just take us like that.”

“No. No, it's not.” Chuck fought the momentary sensation of swimming in a very deep pool, the bottom of which he could not see. There were currents here he didn't understand, much less trust. “I'll talk to Matt. We'll get this straightened out.”

“Thanks.”

“You said they made changes to Bilbo?”

Her expression brightened a little. “They installed these handy new feet with situationally opposable thumbs.” She waggled her thumbs up and down. “Based on Dice's design, they said. In addition to that, their bots have built-in GPS and infrared units. For rescue work.” She frowned again. “Am I being ridiculous? I mean we're all on the same team, right? Why should it bother me if they change the drill?”

“You're not being ridiculous. Being a military agency or being our chief client doesn't give them the right to just change everything on a whim. I'll talk to Matt.”

“Thanks,” she said again and shrugged. It was as if, having divested herself of this problem, she was simply slipping it off the way one slides out of a too-warm coat. Her posture straightened, her face lost its pensive expression, and her eyes brightened.

“It's six o'clock,” she announced. “Have you eaten?”

He shook his head, still pondering unseen currents.

“I know a great Szechuan place about a mile from here. You like Szechuan?”

“Love it,” he said, though he was pretty sure he couldn't tell Szechuan cuisine from Cantonese or Mandarin. He really didn't care. He decided that if it meant having dinner with Lanfen, he would have said he loved lima beans.

EUGENE LOOKED UP FROM HIS
laptop screen at the pinecone that had just tumbled to the middle of his office floor. He turned his gaze to the door to find Mini standing there watching him, smiling enigmatically.

He practically leapt out of his chair. “Wow, is it that late already? I'm sorry. I said I was going to come down to your classroom and rescue you, didn't I?”

She didn't say anything, only crooked her finger at him and backed out of the doorway.

Okay. She was in one of her playful moods. He liked those well enough, though he was sometimes afraid they were a coping mechanism she'd adopted because she was often perceived as young and cute and harmless.
Two out of three of those are true
. But she had a strong will and some cutting insights. The girl could do some damage if she wanted to. Luckily she rarely wanted to.

Eugene rolled his eyes at his own concern. Who was he to worry over someone else's coping mechanisms? He had about three dozen of them himself, from the geektastic use of Yiddish to flaunt his native nerdiness to the clothing choices he made to hide it.

Right now he decided to embrace his inner geek because Minerva liked it. He got up from his desk and moved to the doorway, dragging one foot and hunching one shoulder, so his right arm dangled crookedly.

“Yeth, mithtress,” he lisped. “Igor hearth, and Igor obeyth.”

He reached his office doorway to find Mini beckoning him from the middle of the A lab.

“Here, Igor,” she called.

There was an odd quality to her voice that he couldn't quite put a finger on. Before he could, she stopped beckoning, smiled brilliantly, and held out a hand to him. He reached out his dangling hand to take hers and shivered as their fingers met. It felt wrong—cold, soft . . . like liquid. His mind had barely processed that bit of weirdness when she disappeared. Literally and completely. Vanished. As if she'd never been there in the first place.

Eugene, still hunched over in Igor mode, stared at the spot where she'd been standing, his mind scrambling to make sense of the situation.
I'm asleep,
he told himself.
I've fallen asleep at my desk, and I'm dreaming. I need to wake up.

He said the words aloud. “Eugene Pozniaki, you need to wake up.”

A trill of laughter answered the observation.

He raised his head. Mini was peering at him from around one of the lab's outer doors.

“Did you like it?” she asked pertly.

“Did I like . . . ?”

“My doppelgänger. My apparition. My projection.” She came fully into the room on a wave of laughter. “You should see the look on your face.”

“No, I'm sure I shouldn't. What . . . what did you do?”

“I projected! I made another me. I fooled you, didn't I? You really thought it was me, didn't you?”

“I . . . I did.” He took a couple of steps toward her, then reached out and touched her, just to make sure. She was solid, warm, real.

She beamed at him.

“That was amazing. Does Chuck know you can do this?”

“Not yet. I wanted you to be the first to see it.” Her smile faltered. “I haven't shown the Deeps yet. Is that bad of me? I wanted you and Chuck to know first.”

Eugene was staring at the spot the doppelgänger had occupied a moment before. “It—she looked so real. So solid. Not at all like a projection, but . . .” He rubbed his fingertips together, vaguely remembering the creeps he'd gotten when he'd tried to touch the ersatz Mini. How could a projection feel like anything at all?

“Yeah. I've worked hard on that,” Mini said.

Eugene shook off his heebie-jeebies and grinned at her. “I'll bet you have. Let's go show Chuck. Maybe then I can take you and your twin out for some—”

Before he could finish, he felt an all-too-solid and sharp elbow in his rib cage.

Dice stared at his reflection in the opaque window of the government Humvee and sighed. Working with Deep Shield was like trying to see through that darkened glass. They'd told him they were having a problem with a mechanism but wouldn't tell him which one. He'd asked which tools to bring. They said none—they would provide the tools. He had to assume, therefore, that this was one of the units they'd developed themselves, which brought up the question:

Why am
I
being asked to troubleshoot and repair it?

He became aware that he was arriving at the Deep Shield facility by a subtle shift in the road noise—as if the Humvee were driving down a narrow alley or possibly a tunnel. He ended up, as always, inside the big hangar. He was escorted to the workshop he always used when working with the Deeps and was presented with a robot brain case that might have come from one of his bots . . . except for the fact that it was twice the size
and oddly shaped. The Forward Kinetics robot brain cases were nearly spherical; this one was roughly football shaped.

Well, there was that, and the CPU was missing. He could tell that without even opening the case. All the weight was in one end.

“What's this from?” he asked the tech who'd been assigned to him—a sergeant named Cherise Kelly.

Sergeant Kelly didn't even blink. “It's from one of our new units.”

“Based on the Hob-bot, Bilbo designs?”

“Yes, sir.”

“I'm flying blind here, Cherise. What else can you tell me about the unit?”

She looked momentarily uncomfortable. “Sorry, Dr. Kobayashi, but I'm not authorized to tell you any more than that.”

“Well, you're going to have to tell me more, because I need to know what the heck you expect me to do with this.”

“We were hoping you could fix it.”

“Fix it. What's it doing? Or not doing, as the case may be.”

“It's not working. The unit loses its balance.”

“Where's the CPU?”

“In our lab.”

“I'll need to see it.”

“Sorry, sir. You can't. It's classified.”

He thought about that for a moment, then said, “Okay. You realize I might not be able to do anything without seeing the CPU.”

She said nothing.

He balanced the brain case on the palm of one hand. It tilted to the side the gyro was in. “If I have no idea how the casing balances with the CPU in it, I might not be able to troubleshoot this.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Right.” He sighed.
Science without communication rarely ends
in progress,
he thought.
How can these guys not get that?
Dice put the case down on the workbench and assessed the tools they'd supplied. They were like the ones he had back at FK but reengineered to fit the closures of the larger unit. Weird. He didn't see any reason the standard sizes wouldn't have worked. No wonder military-issued tools cost as much as a fleet of Teslas.

Dice snagged a tool, slipped the locking pins out of the brain case, and laid it out, open, on the bench. Inside, opposite the empty recess where the bot's not-so-little brain should have been, was a closed housing for the gyro mechanism. Looking at it, Dice realized he had a pretty good idea of what the problem was without even popping off the housing.

Should he let his handler know? He almost groaned aloud at even having the thought. Secrecy was the closest thing to a Newman engine he'd ever encountered—it fed on itself. He'd always worked in an open environment in which everyone shared information. Pooling information was the fuel that drove the engine of creativity and invention. Yet despite that, when confronted with Deep Shield clamminess, he felt less like sharing than he ever had in his life.

He took a deep breath, shook off the momentary lapse of reason, and unseated the gyro cover. Yep, suspicions confirmed.

“So the bot can't maintain its balance, you said.”

“Yes, sir. It can't remain upright during the simplest maneuvers. In fact, it's unstable even when standing still.”

“That's about what I'd expect. The brain case sits at the vertical, right?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Then I suspect you've got two problems. One is that the gyro mechanism is too small; the other is its placement. Either you need a larger gyro that rests on top of the CPU, or you need two gyros a hair bigger than this one—one to each side of the CPU.
That's especially true if you ever plan on having the brain case balance horizontally, which I assume you do.”

“I couldn't say, sir.”

“Of course not.”

The tech was regarding the brain case thoughtfully. “If I may ask, Doctor, why do your bots not require a double gyro?”

“Your engineers changed too many variables at once, Sergeant. They altered the size, shape, and orientation of the brain case, changed the placement of the gyro within it, and—unless I'm mistaken, and I don't think I am—they also increased the size and weight of the CPU. And they did all of that without modifying the gyro or supplementing it to compensate. That'd be my educated guess anyway.”

A smile tugged at the corner of the tech's mouth. “Megan said you're a smart cookie, Dr. Kobayashi. She was right. You could tell all that just by looking at a nearly empty brain case?”

“Sergeant Kelly, I live, breathe, and dream robots. Well, I used to dream about them . . . until I got a girlfriend.” That didn't get the laugh he was looking for. “Anyway . . .” He gestured at the mechanism lying on the worktable. “That was never gonna work.”

“No, sir. I can see that.”

“You know this would get fixed a lot faster if you'd just let me into your lab to work on it.”

“I'm sorry, sir. We can't do that. It's—”

“Yeah, yeah. I know. It's classified. Why, though? What've you got in there that I haven't already seen?”

She didn't answer.

He ran a hand through his hair in frustration. “Look, Cherise, I just want to see the robot this came from. I don't want access to anything else.”

She just looked at him for long moment, then said, “You can't see the robot, sir.”

“What the hell are you talking about? I designed the damned things!”

“I'm sorry, sir. You can't see the robots. Except for the improved Hob-bot and the Thorin series, all of our robots are classified.” This was delivered in a cool voice that brooked no argument.

“Let me talk to Megan.”

“I'm sorry, sir. Lieutenant Phillips isn't available right now. She's engaged in field testing.”

Dice didn't even bother to ask what Megan Phillips was field testing. He wasn't sure he wanted to know.

He made some recommendations for a redesign of the robot skull based on the sketchy information he'd surmised and then climbed into the big Humvee for the return trip to Forward Kinetics. He was surprised to find Lanfen already ensconced in the backseat, apparently on her way back to home base from her training class.

He said very little to her on the ride, but as soon as they disembarked at their facility and the Humvee had driven away, he said, “I need to talk to you.”

She gave him a sideways glance. “Sure. Your office?”

“Yeah. No, wait.” He stopped and peered at the building. What if his office was bugged? For some reason, the idea didn't seem as crazy as it would have a year ago. “Let's just take a stroll around the park, okay?”

“Ooookay,” she said and followed him out along the garden path.

He headed away from the building, carefully avoiding the gardeners who were bent over their plantings. He was pretty sure he'd spooked Lanfen but kept walking without speaking until he felt sort of safe.

Finally he stopped. “I have no idea how to start this conversation, so I'm just going to dive in,” he said. “Have you noticed anything really spooky out in the Deeps?”

She didn't seem that surprised by the question. “Define
spooky.
”

“Do I really need to?”

That got him a wry smile. “Not really. What's the matter?”

“I got called out to troubleshoot a part—a gyro they thought was malfunctioning. It was in a brain case created from one of my designs, but they'd changed the size, shape, everything. They wouldn't show me anything but the malfunctioning bit. They wouldn't even let me see the bot's CPU, never mind let me in the lab with the bots. I had to do everything in the hangar.”

“Yes. I know they're making changes. Their fu-bots are bigger, heavier. Is that what it was—a fu-bot skull?”

“No. I helped with the fu-bots. This brain case was several times larger than even their fu-bots, and it was a different shape.” He pantomimed an oblate spheroid. “Whatever it was, it was falling over.”

“So . . . secret government designs. That was to be expected, right?”

“Was it?”

She chewed her lip. “I don't know. The secrecy does seem a bit excessive. Unless . . .”

“Unless they're doing something that's not in the contract,” Dice said, finishing her thought.

“How could we find out? I mean they're not going to let one of us—”

She stopped walking and stared at him. He felt a shot of something tingly go down his spine. He was pretty sure they'd had the thought in unison or at least in close harmony.

She smiled. “
I
can get into their lab. That's what you're thinking, isn't it?”

“It had occurred to me.”

“Okay. Tomorrow. I won't be able to stay long.”

“You don't need to. You just need to see what's back there.”

“I'll try.”

“That's all I can ask.”

They swung around as if by mutual agreement and strolled back to the building as nonchalantly as possible for two people who had just decided to spy on their own government.

BEEN THERE, DONE THAT, BOUGHT
a T-shirt and already shredded it.

That was the way Mini had started to think of her involvement with Deep Shield's crew. She was over the first flush of exhilaration at having something to teach these übercompetent people. They were a singularly focused lot who looked at her strangely when she enthused about the art she was teaching them. To them, she realized, this painting with pixels and photons served a purpose external to the art itself or the joy of creation. They concentrated on that external purpose absolutely and drilled obsessively at constructing seamless pictures generated entirely by their thoughts. They were good at it, too, but in Mini's opinion they lacked real passion. To them it was an exercise in control, not creation. And control kind of bored her.

By the end of that Friday's session, she was ready to climb the walls. Several times she had almost lost her temper with the group leader, Rachel Cohen. If it weren't for the puppy in the group—a corporal named Morris Baxter, who seemed to appreciate the sheer joy of creation—she would have snapped. She didn't like to snap. It wasn't a good look on her. Something like the mouse that roared.

When the last of the Deeps had left her lab at the end of the day, she saluted the empty doorway sarcastically and thought about throwing up a middle finger or two, then felt an immediate wave of guilt. They were to be pitied, not scorned. Except for Corporal “Call Me Bax” Baxter, they had no idea what they were
missing by focusing so entirely on the product that they failed to derive happiness from the process.

“I need a fix,” Mini told herself aloud and headed for the gardens to look for Jorge. A quick talk with the gardener—someone who was passionate about something, even if most people would say they were just plants—would make her forget all about her frustration with her class.

Usually at that time on a Friday, Jorge was cleaning up the tool barn and prepping for the next week's work, but when Mini reached the barn, he was nowhere to be seen. She poked around, looking for him, then gave up and decided a walk along the garden paths would have to suffice to detangle her snarled mood. She'd gotten almost all the way back to the Forward Kinetics building when she saw him working in the shade of a small cluster of maples. But as she drew closer, she realized it wasn't Jorge. She figured it must be another member of his crew, though, who would surely know where his boss was. It was only when she got practically on top of the man that she realized he was a complete stranger.

He turned to look at her as she reached the little grove of trees and smiled. “Hello, miss,” he said. He was nothing like Jorge. He was much younger, his black hair cropped rather than slicked back.

“Hi,” she said. “Um, have you seen Jorge?”

“Who?”

“Jorge Delgado, the head groundskeeper. He's not sick or something, is he?”

“I'm sorry, miss. Jorge doesn't work here anymore. His company's contract was terminated.”

“Why?”

“I don't know, miss.”

“So you're with the new groundskeeping company?”

“Yes, miss.”

“Who hired you?”

“I don't know, miss. I was just assigned here effective Wednesday.”

“I see,” she said. “Well, thanks.”

She made her way back toward the building, with her mind in a worse tangle than before. Jorge hadn't known his company was going to be terminated the last time she'd spoken to him, which had been—good God—Wednesday morning. It wasn't her imagination that this new guy sounded just like the guys in her art class. “Effective Wednesday”—that was almost formal, as were the “miss” this and “miss” that.

Military speak—that's what it was.

Nor was it her imagination that he'd had a walkie-talkie peeking out of his pocket. She paused to pick a bloom from a shrub rose and watched him out of the corner of her eye. He was speaking into the walkie-talkie. Reporting on his conversation with her?