Chapter 4

Nikki’s turn:

It’ll lift and move a full-sized car or SUV, so, loading The New Batch on it is no real test. What it IS, though, is part of a day where our kids get a little view of what Mom and company do.

“It” is an outgrowth of 3Sigma Robotics’ development of motion technology. What started out as ‘Bubba-bot’ and is now ‘Luggage’, a robotic construction site assistant, but with more muscles, less brains. When that point was noted in one of our free-for-all meetings, Vicki elbowed her honey Billy Hardesty hard in the ribs.

He yelped. “Hey...”

She giggled. “Just like real life!” Billy Hardesty’s path from jock to engineer and husband of Vicki is a well-known story among us.

Anyway, It, got lower, stronger, order of magnitude in lifting and carrying ability, its flat top covered in a tough, soft polymer and split into two segments that could either close together to make it five feet long, or to stretch to nearly fifteen feet.

The fun part? Right now it’s got Little Stoney, Elise, Kathy, JW all piled on top, riding.

The also fun part? An operator can guide it under a vehicle, position it, expand the deck, and lift all four wheels off the ground, then roll it in any direction.

The design sold fast. Big lump up front, nice royalty checks on subsequent sales. Nice. Nice too, seeing a bunch of kids laughing, riding the unseemly device. When it’s fully lowered, it looks close enough to a magic carpet to get that name.

So the robotics and automation business is good. What’s interesting to me is that we have employees working in seven different states now in our R&D sector.

Collaboration between remote workers has come a long way since the first days when Cindy and I were doing our first experiments with programmable controllers. People don’t have to be in the same building when writing code and doing design work any more. Digital communication is instant and we use multiple platforms to get together for collaboration.

It works.

It also works when one of our planes happens to be in the vicinity of one of our remote people who just might want to visit the mother ship.

Cindy was making a round trip to a power engineering project in South Dakota and Oakley Higgins was just outside Kansas City. ‘Oakley’ is a just-graduated girl, second-generation programmer, her mom being an IT person for a large financial institution. She heard about us through one of the 3Sigma Digital teams.

Oakley drove herself to meet us in Auburn, no email, no phone call, no letter, just showed up at the front desk with “Laci Decker-Elkins said I needed to talk with Cindy and Nikki.” We hired her that day.

Anyway, Oakley expressed a desire, after working with us for a year, that she’d like to spend a week or two in the mother ship.

That was easy for Cindy, an added stop to a little airfield named Roosterville. Oakley was waiting there when Cindy landed a Pilatus to pick her up. Her mom and dad had brought her to meet the flight. Cindy was typical Cindy – tour of the empty (except for copilot Mandy) plane, small talk, then off the ground and on the way to us.

“Mom said she never expected my job to include Cindy and that airplane,” Oakley giggled.

Her two weeks weren’t just spent in front of a monitor, either. She had opportunity to see, touch and watch her code working on some our robots, at least the ones we can show people without security clearances. She caught a return trip with three technicians on their way to another project.

We’re not a cubicle farm. That’s why we have a waiting list of prospective employees to choose from. And we STILL make room for students to participate. Doctor Ashuram at Auburn still does us the favor of pointing capable and interested students our way.

That’s part of our happy pyramid. The other tier came through the door laughing. Sometimes I get a twinge – the Munchkins are at the age now that I was when I walked into this place – fifteen and sixteen.

“Hello, wedding girl,” I say, acknowledging the impending ceremony to make official the reality that has been Rachel and Derek since they first laid eyes on each other.

“A week!” she laughed. “Then I can parade around in public.”

“You’re doing that already,” Terri said.

“Yeah, but you know what I mean. I can tag stuff with ‘Mr. & Mrs. Helton’. Means something.”

“Yeah, that’s a big point, but you two will STILL be sixteen.”

“But nobody will be able to tag us or anybody around us with criminal activities,” she asserted.

“Speaking of criminal activities, Captain Daniels asked about the meaniebot.”

The meaniebot was evolutionary – using our software and our configurations of hardware to make an ‘inexpensive’ (at least in government terms) robot that might be able to perform scouting and surveillance, with options for energetic interaction with opposing forces.

“Yeah, he came in and talked with me and Cindy and Aaron a few days back. Wants to take Meaniebot to Fort Benning to let some of those people look at him.”

“That oughta be fun...” Terri started.

“Yeah, you can start thinking of a key team. We want everyone to be over twenty-one, at least for this one.”

She laughed. “Figures! Age discrimination. What’s the number to HR?”

I mirrored her laugh. “Yeah, I know ... At least it’s not a MIDDLE school math club any more.”

“Nope, we’re definitely a high school math club,” she returned. “Just what you want to see interacting with a bunch of those hard-core special forces types. I think Vivek makes our team, though.”

“And definitely Aaron’s there.”

“Yeah, because former Air Force is ALWAYS compatible with those SF types.”

“What we need,” I said, “is a technical team that can do quick reaction to both mechanical and electronic systems. We let the client...”

“The US military,” Terri snickered.

“ ... see some of the capabilities, give them something to think about and come up with some testing, possibly some changes...”

“Mechanical. That’s my Jerry. And I agree – Vivek. Let me think about it.”

“And what are you thinking about your sister’s wedding?” I asked, changing the subject.

“Her mom and Tara are handling it. It’s gonna be more like Tara’s. Traditional Jewish, rather than Princess Di.”

“I can stand that,” I laughed. “Brianna wants to borrow Bot-bot for HER weddings.”

“I know she’s getting married,” Terri smiled. “We’ve been seeing her and Harris together for weeks.”

“And she wants Bot-bot for a ring-bearer. We might’ve missed a market for wedding-assistance robots.”

“I’m just surprised that Brianna’s the first,” said Terri.

“She’s been here almost from the beginning,” I replied. “Answered that note on the CompSci bulletin board right when we got started.”

“She’s been to all OUR weddings. Maybe we’re starting a cult. I need to get you a baseball cap with wings on it so you’ll be a proper goddess.”

“Don’t you dare!”

Snicker.

I think I’ll end up with wings on my head.

Dana’s turn:

Monday morning. Ughh. More Purdah, as Cindy calls it. Self-isolation. Nobody but me on this doctoral track but this dissertation HAS to be finished, and I have flights on Wednesday and Friday. One crew delivery out to Oklahoma, and one retrieval back. I need the hours to stay current on the PC-12, so, whatever.

I was deep into the recent research reports on superconductors when my phone buzzed. Annoying -- my black box on the community calendar app means that NOBODY phones me when I’m studying. But that’s for the Community. Caller ID says “Ruth Blackwell.”

Lord, what now? I’m NOT playing soccer for her, any more. Still, she’s a friend and deserves consideration. So I answered, “Good morning, Coach. How are you today?”

She said, “Good morning, Dana. I have an odd situation, not related to soccer. I hope you can help, but you need to hear the situation and see what you think. Could you meet me at my office at 11am?”

I said, “Yes, ma’am -- I’ll need a break about then. But what’s this all about?”

She said, “Dana, this is kinda off-the-wall, and you may not like it, but there’s a man who wants to talk to you, and you need to hear what he has to say.”

I said, “Yes, ma’am, I’ll be there. But this guy better REALLY be up front, or I’m walking out. Lots of stuff on my plate right now.”

Good Lord. I do NOT need this. But at 11am, I walked into the soccer office and was met by the receptionist AND Coach Blackwell. I smiled, and Coach said, “Thank you for coming, Dana. Let me remind you that I’m a member of the Athletic Department, and we coaches talk to each other. Let’s step into my office.”

I followed Coach as we stepped through her door, to find a tall, muscular, LARGE young man, sandy-blonde hair, staring out her window.

He turned and said, “Jim Scribner, ma’am. May I presume you’re Dana Allen?” He offered his hand, and I took it. Firm handshake, polite, and he was smiling.

I said, “Yes sir, and it’s nice to meet you, but what’s this all about?”

He said, “Dana, I’m having a problem, and we hope you can help. So you’ll know, I’m the special teams coach for the football program, and our place-kicker is ill. It’s sort of a one-game issue, we hope, but we need a substitute. Have you ever kicked a football?”

Didn’t see THAT one coming, did you, Dana?

I was startled. I said, “No sir, and I don’t want to. I don’t know anything about football, and I’m not interested. But if you need a kicker, why not look at the men’s soccer team? They’d probably know more about it than me.”

He chuckled and said, “That was my first thought, too, Dana. And I tried, but all those guys refused, with concerns about being injured. They’re right, in the sense that NCAA football CAN be a bit dangerous, but of all the parts of the game, place-kicking ranks REALLY low on the “danger” scale.”