Chapter 25

Deena’s turn:

I’m in a video session with Rachel over the progress with our new hand. It’s sitting on a mount on the lab bench, a bowl of candy in front of it, mixture of M&Ms, jelly beans and spice drops. Three different candies, all colored, but the average two year old can choose one over the other.

The hand’s reaching into the bowl, picking up a candy, depositing it into one of the three bowls set off to the side.

“It DOES know...” she said. “How?”

“Color’s optical, natch,” I said. “Touch is capacitive.”

“Ahhhh,” Rachel said. “Didn’t think of that.”

“As long as they’re dry, it works,” I said. “Has to be essentially purely capacitive...”

“But it works.”

“Yeah, but we’re using a whole processor and I/O suite to do that. Kind of a lot of overhead.”

“Neat hack, though.” Snicker. “Bad boys rape our...”

“There you go. You need sensitivity training.”

“I know ... Had it explained to me in historical context. We females weren’t expected to worry about such things.”

“That’s what Dad said,” I replied. “Now ... But you know, for a buncha teenaged girls we do pretty good.”

“Well, that sensor thing, that’s one of the Auburn students. A guy.”

“And here we are.”

The arm was busy picking out one unit at a time, putting it in a separate bowl, incrementing an on-screen counter.

“They already do something like this, high-speed, in a lot of sorting environments, you know,” Rachel said. “I have videos...”

“Yeah, but ours’ll do it on a module of the centipede and THAT thing’s very mobile.”

We’ve seen the videos of the centipede ‘playing’ paintball. I was impressed, but that’s a weaponized use.

I talked about it in a video conference later.

“Yeah, we know,” Terri said. “But you know what? Weapons pay GOOD money. We use the R&D money from the military and government contractors, and we catch the overflow for peaceful use.”

“Like the microwave oven,” Derek said. “Much of microwave technology was military advances.”

See?!? I didn’t know that. Derek apparently does, so I need to either research on my own or ask him for sources. Since we’re not trying to improve on the microwave oven, it’s not that critical, so I’ll likely take his sources at face value.

“Lots of modern technology came off the space program, too,” Cindy said. “But you KNOW that behind the idea of ‘we can put a man in space’ there was the implied “and he can shoot at stuff...”

“So on the paintball field, he scuttles out before anybody knows what to look for, camouflaged with a scrap of old carpet they use out there, and he sets BOMBS...” Derek said.

“We had to have FOUR people with cameras videoing. Three were decoys, because if the other players saw us pointing ONE camera at a spot, they’d KNOW where the bug was at,” Vicki said. “Everybody got clips of ‘im. Then we put all four together to get the clip that they’re rolling over at Raytheon.”

Haley elbowed me. “Raytheon’s BIG money...”

“Yeah,” Terri said. “They wanna send a couple guys from the army to watch us, then they want US to take the bug to Fort Benning...”

I related that conversation to Bill when he got home.

“Oh, that’s gotta be rich. All those hard-charging special ops guys versus - what was the term Cindy used? – a middle school math club?”

“Yeah,” Haley said. “But right now our hand has no military function other than data gathering.”

“Everything has a military function,” Bill said. “‘Specially with that bunch in Alabama. I’d worry about weaponized Care Bears.”

I giggled. “Good one, Dad. That one’s goin’ out right now...”

It did. Email. Flurry of snarky comments, then a solemn one. Apparently, there were booby-trapped toys used when the Soviets occupied Afghanistan. Don’t research that topic. You won’t be happy with humanity when you go through the results.

That kind of brought me a reality check. Yes, all of this is fun. It’s a set of problems that we can toss our version of technology at, and we can find solutions, but there at the back of the room is the idea that we ARE building weapons. I just pray that they stay in the hands of those who use them for noble purposes.

Our hand, though, is doing its job. You have to be careful how you put those words together because if you’re teleconferenced into the conference room in Alabama and you put ‘hand’ and ‘job’ too close together, somebody starts snickering.

We’ve managed to get Sandy running ahead of the system at college. I think that’s neat. Sandy’s pretty. She’s also smart. Double major – music and engineering. At least we can help her with engineering. None of us can do a thing with music, and she, darnit, is very adept at piano. Or other things with keyboards. Plays organ and piano at church.

First time I saw her in action was at Tara and Aaron’s wedding in Alabama. Sweet little old lady on a Steinway grand piano. She and Sandy collaborated on a boogie that had the place rocking.

Says two things. First is that Sandy’s NOT bashful. She has confidence in her skills and is comfortable in a crowd. Second, she can PLAY.

Haley and I have gone over to her house for study, and I always gig Sandy until she plays something for me. I love listening.

I mean, who would’ve ever figured that out about ME? I was a fairly typical teenaged girl in that respect. Well, I knew that Dad listened to classical music, and some of my friends before I stepped sideways out of school, those kids were into EVERYTHING – rap, metal, rock, even country and western, and it was a big deal to some of them.

Never was, to me. You know, though, I’d never seen live musicians. I never saw people playing because they wanted to play for their friends. I actually never recognized any of the commercial musicians as LOVING their music. Maybe that’s short-sighted, but it has become MY view.

I guess that’s why I loved listening to Sandy. When she was playing, she was IN the music. Same thing I saw in Alabama. When they played, they were IN the music and music was a way to share something good with friends, just like bringing a dish to one of our community meals.

Hey! I just realized it. Here, it’s us and the Johnsons and the Gleasons, but we’re already coalescing into a community. Maddie’s in there, too, and I guess a couple of the techs. But a community.

When Haley showed up at the lab, I told her what I’d determined as we started boxing up things for the move.

Yes, the office is moving to the airfield. It won’t be quite as convenient to use as a hidey-hole from campus, because it’s way out of the other side of town, but that’s okay. We can still use the house.

Of course, by this time NEXT year we’ll have months in the new house out there, too. So, convenience?

“I’m right, ain’t I, Maddie?”

She snickered. “You’re the boss’s daughter. You’re almost ALWAYS right.” She smirked at Haley. “Haley’s even MORE right.”

“Seriously,” I said, “When I talk to ‘em in Auburn, they talk about each other like family. You don’t think...”

“Oh, I do, Deena. Nikki told me that she thought that’s what would develop here, back when it was just y’all, and then when I saw us picking up Carlita and Brindy ... And then Nina and Sandy...”

“We got something good going on here,” Haley said.

Maddie’s laugh is cute. “Yeah, we really do.”

Saturday was a busy day. We’d boxed up OUR stuff at the old office. So had Maddie and Dad and the others, but there was a lot that had to be gathered and moved.

We paid a moving company. They showed up at, as Carl the technician says, ‘the butt-crack of dawn’ and Dad let ‘em in, then Dave stayed at that end and we drove to the airfield to open the new office.

“Oh, so you have an ulterior motive...” I said to Haley.

“Dad got his license...”

Bill’s turn:

I probably had MORE apprehension when I showed up for the examinations for my PE (Auth. Note: Professional Engineer – a government exam and licensure to act as an engineer for many official business purposes) exam. It was a LOT more work – four years of college, the EIT (Engineer in Training) exam, four years under the eyes of another PE and then a day’s testing.

If I’d messed up the PE exam, well, I would’ve just walked out under a pall of disappointment.

Today I’m piloting a fifty year old airplane four thousand feet over the woodlands of central Louisiana to get my private pilot’s license. I. Am. Flying.

Nobody else around. Screw up, there’s a black ragged smudge in the trees below, and a funeral.

Oh, yeah, Bill. You wonder where your daughter gets her melodramatic streak?

I got this. Forty hours of flight time in the logbook on the seat beside me. the airplane might be fifty years old, but two months ago it was subjected to a required annual inspection by a licensed mechanic. The little Cessna performs flawlessly.

I like to think that I do, as well. There before me in clear view is the destination airport, five thousand feet of asphalt runway. A Unicom call.

And landing.

And meeting a fifty-ish guy who was designated as an examiner by the FAA.

“Rob says you’re not a problem,” Mike Mitchell said.

“Rob’s a good guy,” I returned. “And I paid close attention.”

He looked through my logbook. “What the HELL?!?”

“Problem?”

“You have a landing in a Pilatus PC-12?”

“Company I work for owns two of ‘em. The pilot put me in the seat for a landing. Said she wanted to log my time. It’s more for fun than anything...”

“Hell of an airplane...”

“Lemme show you the instructor,” I said, flicking at my iPhone. I showed him the picture. “One on the right’s my wife. One on the left is my daughter. One in the middle is Doctor Cindy Richards, PhD, and licensed out the kazoo.”