Chapter 5

Mandy’s turn:

Working with Terri. Meanybot is priority right now. Selling technology to the Federal government is a path to getting rich, I’m told. We won’t really have government checks coming in. They’re going to come from Boeing or Raytheon or somebody with a bit of an insider influence, but they’ll be using our patents and our platforms and our software.

Adding a paintball gun to our previous platforms wasn’t much of a stretch when we did it. Paintball ‘markers’ – calling them ‘guns’ offends too many sensibilities – are lightweight and low recoil. The stuff that might interest the military is orders of magnitude heavier and more robust.

Well, between Luggage and Magic Carpet we can do ‘heavy’. We have engineering drawings of an M-240 machine gun, so our group put together the necessary mounts and actuators.

What we didn’t have was the actual machine gun.

What we DID have was a new DOD liaison in the form of Army Captain Jeremy Daniels, the belated replacement for Air Force Major Aaron Kettler who is now husband of Tara and step-dad to Derek.

Jeremy Daniels’ turn:

Please, do NOT call me “Jack”. Kids in school started calling me “Jack” as soon as they were old enough to know what whiskey was. I’ve heard enough of that to last about 2 centuries, including from my own family.

Worse, I’m a redhead, sorta. “Sandy red” they call it, but still it’s unusual enough to get teased. “Carrot-top” was a popular jeer in high school. Umm, guys, carrot tops are green, if you hadn’t noticed.

Then, when I was in college at Kansas State, one girl insisted on calling me “Stormy”. I didn’t get that one figured out until one of my buddies showed me a pic of a female porn-star. Don’t get me started. But if you can say “silicone”, you get the idea.

Frankly, I’m not sure I belong here, but some civilian secretary at Army HQ decided it was a good idea, shortly after I returned from reviewing the new canal works in Panama with a team of experts.

Colonel Franklin called me into his office and handed me the orders, saying, “Jack, you have to be the luckiest man in the Army, right now. You won’t need BDU’s, but probably should take a couple of sets. Take several class B’s, a couple of sets of A’s, and some Blues. And do NOT piss off ANY of those kids. Any questions?”

What could I say? So here I am in Auburn, anyway, and I’m making the rounds of the companies I’m supposed to support. One of them is 3Sigma Robotics, you know, and within 15 minutes of my arrival, EVERYONE was calling me “Captain Jack”. Dammit.

It’s disconcerting – I know tech companies are seldom populated by older workers. This place has ONE, a machinist who actually does this instead of retirement.

The rest? Nobody over thirty.

On my first visit I stopped at the desk in the building’s lobby, presented myself to the young lady behind the desk. She had to look up from a college textbook.

“Oh, hullo! You must be the new DOD liaison. I’m Kylie.” Pleasant-sounding lilt to her voice.

“I’m Jeremy Daniels...”

“Captain, right?” she queried.

“Correct. The accent?” I asked.

“Ireland. I read about this robotics program associated with this university. I simply had to be here...”

“And you’re the receptionist?”

“It’s my turn. It’s a chance to be part of this and yet study. Tomorrow it will be another’s turn and I will go back to working in the laboratory.” She pronounced it ‘lah-BORE-a-tree’. “I mostly handle a few phone calls. We’re not a curiosity shop. You’re my first walk-in.”

“Actually I have an appointment with Cindy Richards.”

“Oh, you’re one to go straight to the top...” she smiled. She punched buttons on her desk set, spoke into her headset, “Cindy, you have a visitor.” She looked back at me. “She’ll come get you or send somebody for you.”

I was told that the whole 3Sigma entity was unconventional.

Starts with the ‘My turn to sit up front’ Irish girl. Veered hard off-track when the door opened and this young red-headed female person strode out.

“Hi, I’m Cindy. You’re Captain Daniels, right?!?”

“‘S what it says on my nametag today,” I said.

Snicker. “So it does. Come on back. Let me give you the fifty-cent tour.”

“Lead on,” I said. I nodded to Kylie. “Thank you, Kylie.”

“Abandon hope,” she lilted.

‘Cute’, I thought – both the comment and the young lady who issued it.

Cindy, on the other hand ... Wow! Not a centerfold type. Not a runway model type. Just ... Wow! Something in that rather short red-headed package that passes normal judgments of physical attributes.

Big open layout. Benches around the periphery, desks in the middle, walkways winding throughout, the expected computer monitors on many but not all desks. Various people, both male and female, interspersed throughout, some odd-looking hardware on those benches.

“We started with this much space when we put up the 3Sigma shingle,” she explained. “Before that we had bench space in part of 3Sigma Engineering’s workshop. Built Bot-bot, Terri Addison’s first robot. She’s Terri Stengal now. And you’ll hear her referred to as the pTerridactyl. She’s out today, but if you keep showing up, you’ll meet ‘er. And Aaron Kettler.”

“He’s your CEO, right?”

“Yessir,” Cindy said. “Used to be Major Kettler, USAF, until he married into the company.”

“I heard the name but I have no idea of the back story,” I admitted.

‘Impressive chaos’ was my initial assessment. I was acknowledged, smiled at, and when I expressed interest I was schooled in a gentle and adequate fashion. I was introduced to several robots, including ‘Meanybot’ which at that time was just starting to come together, mechanical systems mating with the brains.

Second trip I showed up, I met the pTerridactyl. Seventeen. Wedding band, too. Holds college degrees and patents on distributed computing in robotics applications.

She and her husband, whom somebody tittered sotto voce “the Jerridactyl”, noted the paintball ‘marker’ installed – mounted – atop it.

“You’re not supposed to call it a ‘paintball gun’ because that’s too violent,” Terri explained.

“We’ve been using paintball groups as test beds for quite a while,” Jerry told me. “Several iterations and platforms have been to the fields, but we’re limited.”

“What are your limits?” I questioned.

Terri has a delightful giggle. “First, EVERY paintball field within a hundred and fifty miles KNOWS what it means when we show up. They change tactics to account for non-human players.”

“And range is too limited. Basically, paintball is close-quarters – forty meters is almost long range.”

“And the gun doesn’t really put loads on the platform that a real unit would...” Jerry added. “We can fake the weight, but we really want...”

I can see where this is going. “You want a real one...”

“M-240.”

“Seriously?!?”

“Seriously,” Jerry told me. “We watched every video we could find, did the on-line research, all that. It’s time to get our hands on one and run our hardware through its paces.”

“Charging, firing ... we have no way to simulate that,” Terri said. She smiled sweetly. “So ... pretty please?”

I eyed Jerry. “You ever say NO to that?!?”

Jerry waved his ring finger. “Said ‘yes’ once.”

Someone else’s turn:

Well, the army didn’t just up and give us a machine gun. Captain Daniels paid a visit to a local National Guard unit, came back with a machine gun and a sergeant with a curious look on his face.

“This is Sergeant Grimes,” Captain Daniels said. “He’s part of the 240 deal. It goes back to the armory every day.”

“And I don’t get paid overtime, so if we could time you getting done with it in mid-afternoon, I’d appreciate it,” Sergeant Grimes told us.

I’m looking at Sergeant Grimes. Middle-aged guy. Mostly fit, from what I can see. Intelligent expression. I’m thinking that right now we’re unknown, but he’ll get drawn in sooner or or later.

Well, introducing real combat machinery into our lab is a momentous event. We got a pretty good crowd going. Sergeant Grimes put on his quite capable instructor persona and gave a class. Everybody got to pick the gun up. Okay, maybe ‘pick up’ is a bit mild. ‘Fondle’ or ‘caress’ might be more in order. The guy is good. Gave us a little time to go over disassembly and assembly, loading and unloading with a belt of dummy cartridges.

That took up the first of our ‘machine gun’ days. We asked Sergeant Grimes if he’d come back in three days to give us a chance to react to what we’d learned.

After Sergeant Grimes’s second visit, we had essential basic weapons functions hardware in place – looks like it meets all the needs for it to work.

Captain Daniels was there to look at our progress. “We need to actually shoot it.”

We’ve been looking forward to that event. “Well, that’s on you,” I said. “I can talk with the local police department. They have a range. We can run a few rounds – just check that the whole thing doesn’t fall apart, but past that...” I looked at Sergeant Grimes. “ ... what do you guys have?”

“I’ve been talking,” Jerry said. “We have a few veterans in the organization. I think we want to do a series of steps. We can start with something like the police department range to make sure the whole thing doesn’t shake apart or roll over. Then maybe one of the ranges where you teach gunners the basics of their trade – stationary shooters and targets. After that, moving shooter. We will run scenarios to try things out, if we can.”

“And the ultimate,” I said, “is to put Meanybot into an actual tactical group, first to see if he can keep up, second, to see how they’ll use him.”

“Doctrine and employment are outside your scope,” Captain Daniels said.

“We realize that. None of us comes close to being able to describe real-life parameters, but we want to get some field input to see if we’re at least in the ballpark with capabilities,” Jerry replied.

“Well,” Sergeant Grimes inserted, “If you’re open to a weekend thing, in a couple of weeks we’re taking some machine gunners to a range at one of our camps. We have the capacity. And the ammo.”

“Send us the details,” Jerry replied. “We’ll make it happen.”

That idea leaves room for some interesting possibilities both from the interaction between disparate groups of humans – us and the American military establishment, and for bank accounts all around.

Other interesting possibilities arise when a pair of the Munchkins – “The Original Batch” - formalize the fact of their marriage. That’s a very big, significant, and PLANNED event in our community. ‘Planning’ is nice.

Sometimes our events aren’t planned. One hardly expects a female college student/doctoral candidate to make herself an overnight college athletic name, but we’ve had that TWICE. Dana – unofficially known among us as “Peppermint Patty”.

Her first spike in the athletic world was as a fill-in for the university’s women’s soccer. I’m sure you’re aware that the publicity bubble for womens’ sports is comparatively small compared to the footprint made by the university’s MALE football team.

The repercussions have been memorable and haven’t yet died away.

Ed Allen’s turn:

Taking a break from a proposal document on my monitor, I decided to see what the day looked like for my Dana.