As soon as he entered the unprepossessing concrete-block building, he could feel the data rush. Vibrating, racing, dancing. Whatever made a place blaze on the very edge of the information front, this place had it.
His contact entered the lobby just as Allan did. On top of the moves. She was an Indian woman in her late thirties, dressed in khaki slacks and a red shirt. All her movements were quick and light. Her black eyes shone with intelligence.
“Allan. I’m Skaka Gupta, Chief Scientist at Novation.” Although of course Allan already knew that, plus everything relevant about her career, and she knew that he knew. “Welcome to our Biorobotics Unit.”
“Thank you.”
“Would you like a max-effish print-out of our current status?” A courtesy only; Novation’s official profile would have been supplied to his firm yesterday. With an update this morning, if anything had changed overnight. And she’d know he’d prefer the figures and projections put together by his own people, in which the official profile was only one factor.
“No, thank you.” Allan smiled. “But I am very eager to see your work directly.”
“Then let’s do that.” She smiled back, completely sure of herself. Or of her work. Allan hoped it was of her work; he could sniff genuine success here. It smelled like money.
“Let me babble about the basics,” Skaka said, “and you jump in with questions when you want to. We’re passing through the biolab now, where we build the robots. Or, rather, start them growing.”
Behind a glass wall stood rows of sterile counters, each monitored by automated equipment. A lone technician, dressed in white scrubs and mask, worked at a far counter. Allan said, “Let me test my understanding here. Your robot bodies are basic mass-ordered cylinders, with electro-field intercommunication, elevation-climbing limbs, and the usual sensors.”
“That’s right. We’ll see them in a minute—they look like upended tin cans with four skinny clumsy legs and two skinny clumsy arms. But their processing units are entirely innovative. Each circuit board you see here, in each clear box, is being grown. We start with textured silicon plate etched with logic circuits, and then seed them with fetal neurons, grown on synthetic peptides. The fetal tissue used comes from different sources. The result is that even though the circuit scaffolds are the same, the neurons spin out different axons and dendrites. And since fetal brains always produce more neurons than they ultimately need, different ones atrophy on different boards. Each processor ends up different, and so the robots are subtly different too.”
Allan studied the quiet, orderly lab. Skaka merely waited. Finally he said, “You’re not the only company exploring this technique.”
“No, of course not. But we’ve developed significant new variations—significant by several orders of magnitude. Proprietary, of course, until you’ve bought in.”
Until, not if. Allan liked that.
“The proof of just how different our techniques are lies right ahead. This way to the primate house.”
“Monkeys?” Allan said, startled. This had not been in the pre-reading.
Skaka, walking briskly, grinned over her shoulder. “P-r-i-m-e E-i-g-h-t House. It’s a joke. Currently we have eight robots in each of two different stages of development. Both groups are in learning environments modeled on the closed-system forests once used with chimps. Follow me.”
She led him out of the lab, down a long windowless corridor. Half-way, Allan’s tie-tack beeped twice.
“Excuse me, Skaka, is the men’s room—”
“Right through that door.”
Inside, Allan flipped over his tie tack. The PID icon for Charlie had completely stopped vibrating. Immediately Allan phoned his son.
“Charlie? Where are you?”
“What do you mean, where am I? It’s Friday, right? I’m at school.”
“In…”
“In Aspen.”
“Why aren’t you in Denver?”
“Not this week, Dad, remember?”
Allan hadn’t. Mrs. Canning’s tutorial schedule for the kids’ real-time educational experiences was complex, although of course Allan could have accessed it on his meshNet. Maybe he should have. But Charlie’s physical location wasn’t the issue.
“What are you doing in Aspen, son? Right now?”
“Nothing.”
Allan pushed down his annoyance. Also his concern. Charlie—so handsome, so smart, twelve years old—spent an awful lot of time doing nothing. Just sitting in one room or another, staring into space. It wasn’t normal. He should be out playing soccer, exploring the Net, teasing girls, racing bikes. Even reading would be more productive than this passive staring into nothing.
Allan said, “Where’s Mrs. Canning? Why is she letting you do nothing? We don’t pay her for that, you know.”
“She thinks I’m writing my essay about the archeological dig we did in the desert.”
“And why aren’t you writing it?”
“I will… look, Dad, I gotta go now. See you next week. Love you.”
“But Charlie—”
The phone went dead.
Should he call back? When Charlie got like this, he often didn’t answer. Got like what? What was wrong with a kid who just turned himself off and sat, like a lump of bacon fat?
Nothing. Nothing was wrong with his son.
“Allan? Everything all right?” Skaka, rapping discreetly on the men’s room door. Christ, how long had Allan been staring at the motionless Charlie icon on his PID? Too long. The schedule would be all shot to hell.
“Fine,” he said, striding into the corridor. “Sorry. Now let’s see the Prime Eight house.”
“You’ve never seen data like this,” Skaka promised, and strode faster to make up for the lost time.
He never had seen data like this.
Each of the two identical “learning environments” was huge, two point three acres, circled by a clear plastic wall and furnished with gray platforms at various heights and angles, steps and ramps and pot-holes, mini-mazes and obstacles that could be reconfigured from outside the enclosures. The environments looked like monochromatic miniature-golf courses that had undergone an earthquake. In the first enclosure were eight of the tin-can robots, moving slowly and ponderously over the crazed terrain. Each was painted with a bright logo: “Campbell’s Tomorrow Soup,” “Chef-Boy-R&D,” “Lay’s Pareto Chips.”
“Programmer humor,” Skaka said. “This batch was only activated yesterday. See, they haven’t learned very much about navigation, let alone how to approach their task efficiently.”
“What is their task?” Allan said. Now they were getting to the maneuvers not covered in the prospectus.
“See those green-gray chips scattered throughout the environment? The robots are supposed to gather as many of those as they can, as fast as they can.”
Allan peered through the plastic. Now he could see the chips, each about the size of a small cookie, lying in holes, on railings, between walkways, under ramps. The closest robot, Processed Corn, reached for one with its tong-ended “arm.” It missed. The chip slid away, and the robot fell over. Trying to right itself, it thrashed too close to the edge of a large pot hole and fell in, where it kept on thrashing.
Allan laughed. “ ‘War is hell.’ ”
“What?” Skaka said.
“Nothing. How many chips have the robots gathered so far?”
“One.”
“And how long have they been at it?”
“Six hours. Now come with me to Prime Eight Two.”
Allan followed her again. They passed Chef-Boy-R&D and Net-wiser Beer jammed up against each other. Each time one moved to the right to go around the other, the second robot did the same. They ended up deadlocked against the plastic wall, four spindly legs marching futiley against each other.