Chapter 7

Bill Carmody’s turn:

I’ve heard the idea more than once, that being the father of a teen-aged daughter is God’s wrath for the indiscretions one might have committed at a young man.

Honestly, Lord, I wasn’t THAT bad. Really.

Here’s MY teen-aged daughter, all red-headed and blue-eyed and cute, bright like step-mom’s OTHER daughter. And she’s cornered my wife and me.

“Jeremy’s coming over to talk with you.”

Since I recall the guy dancing with my daughter, I can read the handwriting on the wall.

The fact that she answered the door and brought him into the den with her fingers intertwined in his, I think you call that a sign.

I glanced over at Donna. She was NOT frowning. I guess I won’t go to jail for strangling an Army captain. Do I get extra points for self-restraint when I noticed they sat on the LOVE seat?

Jeremy Daniels’ turn:

When Mandy patted the loveseat beside her in her family’s living room, I started having flashbacks, like one of the early conversations with her dad:

“I wasn’t looking, sir,” I told him. “Really.”

Bill smiled, shaking his head. “I wasn’t either, when I met Mandy’s mom. Or her step-mom. Donna’s got that touch of red. All it takes is a little bit.”

“But I come off like a predator. She’s fifteen.”

“Sixteen in a couple of months, and among her group, that makes her practically an old maid.”

“Well,” I said.

Bill had a grin and asked, “So what’s on your mind this morning, Jack? Mandy again?”

I said, “Yes sir, and if it’s OK with you, I’d like to invite her and Leesie out for dinner. Don’t know where, yet -- I’ll have to work it out with Mandy.”

He asked, “Leesie TOO? What’s that all about?”

I said, “Well, I’m thinking that Leesie can be the chaperone -- maybe she can protect me.” He raised an eyebrow, so I said, “The thing is, I’m a little scared of Mandy. I worry that she’ll try to take advantage of my youth and innocence.”

Big belly-laugh from Bill, and he said, “You’re right, and redheads are like that, Jack. I like you, partly because you’re so full of shit. You’d do well here, after you get out of the Army. Have you ever considered that idea?”

I said, “Actually, I’d been thinking about that, but it’s a year away. What are your thoughts?”

He said, “Jack, I need to retire in a couple more years. I’m getting too old to deal with field work, in most places. We need another mechanical guy, or maybe two. You could be a big part of the solution, if you’re interested.”

And there was the ‘grape incident’. Dammit, it had to be grapes. Don’t ask.

This evening I had the dubious fortune to be seated with redheads. Mandy, of course, plus “Leesie”, Jo and Stoney, and (just introduced) Jo’s Dad and Mom. Colonel Solheim and Mizz Bridgette, who also has red hair.

Delightful dinner: An Italian chicken salad on rotini noodles, with sliced almonds, sliced green onions, mushrooms, a serious garlic flavor, all that.

The bread sticks -- oh Lord!

I was chatting with Colonel Solheim when I saw Leesie slip back over to the buffet, returning with a small bowl of grapes. She stepped up between me and Mandy, carefully placing the bowl on the table. She tugged my knee and held her arms up.

OK, I lifted her up onto my lap, and saw smiles around the table. She reached over to the dish, took a grape, and moved it to MY mouth. OK, I opened up and she popped it into my mouth, very pleased with herself.

Most of the room laughed and applauded, including Mandy. Colonel Solheim was delighted, too. He said, “Captain, I think you have just received new orders.” I was embarrassed, but I managed to say, “Thank you, Leesie,” before I put her back down.

Mandy said, “Jack, you already passed Cindy’s test, and that was important. But you just passed a more important one: Leesie has decided that SHE likes you. We think her approval is very important.”

I winced to clear my thoughts.

“Bill, when I took this liaison assignment, I figured on another routine job. I know, Air Force. I belong to them. But since I started working with 3Sigma I end up belonging to others.”

“Mandy,” Bill said softly.

“Yessir. And she sold off part of me to Cindy for a pilot license.”

“I’ve heard about that part, too,” Bill said. “You’re Cindy’s latest experiment. You’re gonna be a magazine article about the first student to go from zero to private license in a Stearman in sixty years.”

I have to laugh. I mentioned my flying to others of my acquaintance in the Air Force. Nobody’s been trained with a Stearman since World War II. I showed a picture of me and the Stearman AND the instructor. I didn’t have the heart to tell them I was involved with her little sister. If I only THOUGHT I caught hell for chasing a civilian pilot license, finding out I was messing around with a fifteen year old would be disastrous.

“Messing around”? Only in the most general terms. She grabbed my hand after the first dance, where SHE scooped me up.

“You’re holding my hand, Mandy.”

Snicker. “Can’t get anything past you military types, huh?”

“Significant?”

Blue eyes and red hair. “Might be. Seems like you’re holding mine back.”

“I know how old you are. Or aren’t.”

“More of those powers of observation. Yes, I’m doing this on purpose. And yes, I won’t scream if you drop my hand. But I really think there’s something ... aside from business...”

I glanced in the direction of her dad. She caught that, too.

“Of course, much past this interaction and we will have to discuss with Mom and Dad and Gramma. And Cindy. And Elise. And Billy Jeff.”

“The whole family.”

“Worse than that, Jeremy,” she said. “DO you REALLY know how this community works?”

“I get some idea. And you didn’t call me ‘Jack’.”

Nikki’s turn:

Meaniebot’s first day at the range with the national guard machine gun mounted went exactly as well as we expected. From a static position first. The mount didn’t fall apart. Sighting the gun was easy, using a camera that fed back a targeting image to a controller. From the control console, it was nothing new to a bunch raised on ‘first person shooter’ video games.

Oh, but we went past that. A set of sensors on the bot tracked its motion while under way, and if that motion wasn’t too radical, the targeting allowed it to shoot very accurately while moving.

Said Derek, “If a tank can do it, so can Meaniebot.”

But that’s NOT the big news.

“I don’t know why we haven’t glommed onto it before,” Terri said in an informal meeting. (we seldom do ‘formal’ meetings) “It was there from the beginning when we got Bot-bot to follow us.”

Now it’s not JUST Bot-bot. It’s a chunk of code. I’d call it targeting code, but it’s more than that. Combine a high-resolution camera, a really fast chunk of computing power, and a capable mobility package, and the ‘operator’ can pick a ‘goal’ (much more benign than ‘target’) and the package will latch onto it and stay with it.

Bot-bot would follow Terri or Rachel through a room. Meanie-bot will keep his evil little eye on a particular person (“Hello, Commander!”) or thing (“That’s a nice missile battery you have there. Would be a shame if something happened to it.”) and decide to shoot the appropriate weapon, ‘paint’ the target with a laser designator for another more capable weapon, or make the ultimate sacrifice and drive itself into its target. In the last case, if it was riding along with a few hundred pounds of energetic chemistry ... Well, you get the idea.

Captain Jack watched our first trial runs and almost wet himself. We’re just about ready to go to Raytheon with it. I see dollar signs.

“Mother ship,” Derek said. “Shows up in a lot of the alien invasion stories. We do the ‘mother ship’ thing. She carries several of our meaniebots, maybe a selection for a variety of missions. She has the range to get to the active area, then she can release the meaniebots as the situation requires.”

Conversation with Captain Jack over coffee: “You people needn’t worry about targeting and warheads. That’s outside your arena.”

“Meaniebot could be delivering flowers,” Rachel said. “Or a box of chocolates.”

“Or Silly Putty,” Derek added, smirking. “Or Serious Putty. You know...” snicker “C-4.”

“What do YOU know about C-4?” Captain Jack asked.

Derek grinned. “Terri’s dad. Mister Dan – both of ‘em – were combat engineers.”

“I knew that,” Captain Jack replied. “Didn’t know they discussed those kinds of things with...” He paused.

“Silly kids?” Terri trapped him.

“Ooo-kayyyy. You got me.”

“It’s not like we’re trying to get you,” Nikki soothed. “You’re still learning what this bunch can do.”

Cindy’s turn:

Boy, Step One was a war somewhere else where drones play a part. Step Two is being in the middle of probably the hottest, most innovative robotics team in the country.

Step Three appears to be “PROFIT”.

As soon as word was out that 3Sigma Robotics had something working well in the robotics field, that we had a bit of programming that could be incorporated into a lot of different ‘platforms’ we had the military (Thanks, Captain Jack!) breathing down our necks along with a bevy of major defense industry types, many of whom we’d already had pleasant (read ‘lucrative’, mostly) experiences.

I’ll be honest with you – the core of the technology is that you designate something, and the bot follows it. The ‘something’ could be a vehicle, a person, a big ‘ol’ BEAR, an elephant, a particular zebra at a wildlife park.

I can shrug my shoulders and say we didn’t build a weapon, but the Department of Defense got plumb giggly over it after we locked onto a Prius in traffic in Birmingham, tracked it through a wildlife park, and took pictures of one of our interns and her boyfriend on an excursion.

They were unaware of us following them. The next trial, a National Guard Humvee at the state’s training center, those guys were told they were being watched and to try and lose their tail. We watched the video feed. It doesn’t need a video feed, but we’re in development so we added one anyway. The guys in the hummer gave it the ol’ college try, as much speed as they could with a stock hummer, which isn’t much, course changes, taking a trail through a dense wooded area, another trail under a pretty dense canopy, where they stopped, turned around and tried to fool any predictive algorithms we were using.