“I caught a glimpse of what I thought was a crude metal sculpture.” Obviously, I missed a connection she’s made. A big one.
“A robot, and not just any robot,” Lucy informs me. “A prototype developed for the military, what was supposed to be a tactical packbot for the troops in Iraq, and then another creative purpose was suggested that went over like the proverbial lead balloon.”
A glint of recognition, and an ominous feeling begins working its way up from my gut, tightening my chest, creating awareness, then a memory.
“This particular model didn’t last long,” she continues, and I think I know what she’s talking about.
MORT. Mortuary Operational Removal Transport. Good God.
“Never made it into service and is obsolete if not silly now, replaced by biologically inspired legged robots that can carry heavy loads over rough or slippery terrain,” she says. “Like the quadruped called Big Dog that’s all over YouTube. Damn thing can carry hundreds of pounds all day long in the worst conditions imaginable, jumps like a deer and regains its balance if it trips or slips or you kick it.”
“MORT,” I go ahead and say it. “Why would he have a packbot like MORT in his apartment? I think I’m misunderstanding something.”
“You ever see it in person back then, when you got into a debate about it on Capitol Hill? And you’re not misunderstanding anything. I’m talking about MORT.”
“I never saw MORT in person.” I saw it on videotaped demonstrations only, and I got into more than one debate, especially with Briggs. “Why would he have something like that?” I ask again about what Lucy claims is in the dead man’s apartment.
“Creepy as hell. Like a giant mechanical ant, gas-powered,” she says. “Sounds like a chain saw when it’s ambulating slowly on its short, clunky legs with two sets of grippers in front like Edward Scissorhands. If you saw it coming at you, you’d run like hell or maybe lob a grenade at it.”
“But in his apartment? Why?” I remember demonstrations that I found horrifying, and heated discussions that became nasty skirmishes with colleagues including Briggs at the AFME, at Walter Reed, and in the Russell Senate Office Building.
MORT. The epitome of wrongheaded automation that became the source of a controversy in military and medical intelligence. It wasn’t the technology that was such a terrible idea, it was the suggestion of how it should be used. I remember a hot summer morning in Washington, the heat rising off a sidewalk crowded with Boy Scouts touring the capital as Briggs and I argued. We were hot in our uniforms, frustrated and stressed, and I remember walking past the White House, people everywhere, and wondering what would be next. What other inhumanities would be offered by technology? And that was almost a decade ago, almost the Stone Age compared to now.
“I’m pretty sure—in fact, more than pretty sure—that’s what’s parked inside the guy’s apartment,” Lucy is saying. “And you don’t buy something like that on eBay.”
“Maybe it’s a model,” I suggest. “A facsimile.”
“No way. When I zoomed in on it, I could see the composite parts in detail, some wear and tear on it from usage, probably from R-and-D on hard terrain and it got scraped up a little. I could even see the fiber-optic connectors. MORT wasn’t wireless, which was just one of a number of things wrong with it. Not like what they’re doing today with autonomous robots that have onboard computers and receive information through sensors controlled by man-wearable units instead of lugging around a cumbersome Pelican case-based one. Like the military guys are doing so their field-embedded operators are hands-free when they’re out with their robotic squads. This whole new thing with lightweight ruggedized processors that you can wear in your vest, saying you’re operating an unmanned ground vehicle or the armed robots, the SWORDS unit, the Special Weapons Observation Remote Direct-Action System. A robotic infantry armed with M-two-forty-nine light machine guns. Not something I’m comfortable with, and I know how you feel about that.”
“I’m not sure that there are words for how I feel about it,” I reply.
“Three SWORDS units so far in Iraq, but they haven’t fired their weapons yet. Nobody’s sure how to get a robot to have that kind of judgment. Artificial EQ. A rather daunting prospect but I’m sure not impossible.”
“Robots should be used for peacekeeping, surveillance, as pack mules.”
“That’s you but not everyone.”
“They should not make decisions about life and death,” I go on. “It would be like autopilot deciding whether we should fly through these clouds rolling toward us.”
“Autopilot could if my helicopter had moisture and temperature sensors. Throw in force transducers and it will land all by itself as light as a feather. Enough sensors and you don’t need me anymore. Climb in and push a button like the Jetsons. Sounds crazy, but the crazier, the better. Just ask DARPA. You got any idea how much money DARPA invests in the Cambridge area?”
Lucy lowers the collective, losing altitude and bleeding off speed as another ghostly patch of clouds rolls toward us in the dark.
“Besides what it’s invested in the CFC?” she then says.
Her demeanor is different, even her face is different, and she’s no longer trying to hide what has come over her. I know this mood. I know it all too well. It is an old mood I haven’t seen in a while, but I know it like I know the symptoms of a disease that has been in remission.
“Computers, robotics, synthetic biology, nanotechnology, the more off the wall, the better,” she continues. “Because there’s no such thing as mad scientists anymore. I’m not sure there’s any such thing as science fiction. Come up with the most extreme invention you can imagine, and it’s probably being implemented somewhere. It’s probably old news.”
“You’re suggesting this man who died in Norton’s Woods is connected to DARPA.”
“Somehow he is, in some capacity. Don’t know how directly or indirectly,” Lucy answers. “MORT isn’t being used anymore, not by the military, not for any purpose, but was Star Wars stuff about eight or nine years ago when DARPA stepped up funding for military and intelligence-gathering applications of robotics, bio and computer engineering. And forensics and other applications germane to our war dead, to what happens in combat, in theater.”
It was DARPA that funded the research and development of the RadPath technology we use in virtual autopsies at Dover and now at the CFC. DARPA funded my four-month fellowship that turned into six.
“A substantial percentage of research grants are going to Cambridge area labs, to Harvard and MIT,” Lucy says. “Remember when everything became about the war?”
It’s getting harder to remember a time when that wasn’t true. War has become our national industry, like automotives and steel and the railroads once were. That’s the dangerous world we live in. I don’t believe it can change.
“The brilliant idea that robots like MORT could be utilized in theater to recover casualties so troops didn’t risk their lives for a fallen comrade?” Lucy reminds me.
Not a brilliant idea but an unfortunate one. A supremely stupid one, I thought at the time and still do. Briggs and I weren’t on the same side about it. He’ll never give me credit for saving him from a PR misstep that could have injured him badly.