All the Wrong Moves (2 page)

Now, normally a program manager such as
moi
lolls around in a nice, clean office at DARPA Headquarters in Arlington, VA. I should also point out that most project managers are civilians or senior ranking officers. Due to a slight difference of opinion with my former boss at the Air Force Research Laboratory, however, I was “loaned” to DARPA and put in charge of my little team.

Our mission is to evaluate technologies developed by small businesses or enterprising individuals who don’t meet DARPA’s threshold for direct oversight. Translation: we play with gizmos and gadgets developed by mom-and-pop businesses or whacko inventors who putter around in their garages at night.

Most of the time FST-3 operates out of a nondescript office at the sprawling army base just outside of El Paso. Once a quarter we go into the field to evaluate items that might, by some wild stretch of the imagination, have potential for military application in rough terrain. Hence our isolated test site near Dry Springs, Texas.

I have to be careful how often and how loudly I complain about being in charge of FST-3, though. FST-1 specializes in cold weather technology and operates out of an igloo in Alaska fifty miles north of the Arctic Circle. FST-2 battles alligators for space on a hump of sawgrass somewhere in the south Florida Everglades.

Back to my little team. In recent months we’ve evaluated inventions that ranged from the improbable to the downright ridiculous. But this one . . .

“What is it?” O’Reilly threw at me again.

I shot him an evil look and consulted the paperwork handed to me by the crew who’d unloaded the crate. “This is the project Harrison Robotics wants us to evaluate.”

Our usual methodology is to review submissions and choose items to test well before we go into the field. This was a last minute addition pressed on us by a friend of a friend of an uncle of DARPA’s chief scientist. Or was it the uncle of a friend of a friend? Whatever. The weird-looking result was staring us in the face.

“They call it an Ergonomic Exoskeletal Extension,” I read. “EEE for short.”

Exoskeletons aren’t new. Even I know Berkeley University first developed a lower body exoskeleton they called BLEEX way back in ’04. But this guy . . .

My gaze swung back to the contraption nested in foam inside the packing crate. Metal braces formed its legs. Additional braces comprised a set of arms. These extremities were connected to a computerized spine. At the top of the spine was a circular headpiece bristling with wires, probes and a face-shielding visor.

“Geez,” I muttered. “Damned thing looks like an Erector set having a bad hair day.”

The female standing next to O’Reilly let out the snorting neigh I now know is her brand of laughter. Took me a while to figure that out.

“We should call it EEEK.” She whinnied. “Not EEE.”

EEEK, which rhymes with geek, which is the most generous term one can apply to Dr. Penelope England. Unlike me, Pen aced every one of the classes leading to her two PhDs. Very much like me, she doesn’t deal well with persons in authority. Her problem is that she’s smarter than ordinary mortals by a factor of, oh, a thousand or so. Mine is that I have a slight tendency to mouth off.

“What are we supposed to do with it?”

O’Reilly again. He also has a mouth on him. Five-two, with orange hair and glasses encased in nerdo black frames. He swiped at the perspiration dripping from his pudgy chin.

I wasn’t in much better shape. I, too, am cursed with red hair. Mine is several shades darker than O’Reilly’s bright pomegranate, thank God. My late, unlamented ex used to call it dirt red. I prefer cinnabar. And my eyes are a deep, melting chocolate,
not
muddy brown.

Luckily, I don’t have your typical redhead’s complexion. After I burn and peel a few dozen times, I acquire a semblance of a tan. Only on the patches of skin revealed by my ABUs, of course. Out of uniform, I look like a scalded raccoon.

In it, I’m usually swimming in sweat. Like now. Doing my best to ignore the torrent coursing down between my breasts, I consulted the project sheet again.

“Apparently,” I announced after perusing several convoluted paragraphs, “one of us is supposed to strap him- or herself into the exoskeleton and go for a twenty-mile run. In full combat gear. Carrying a sixty-pound pack.”

With perfect syncopation, the other four members of FST-3 took a step back. Their feet thumped the dry earth, and their interest in EEEK evaporated as quickly as the scant quarter inch of precipitation that had fallen on Dry Springs so far this year.

“Full combat gear,” O’Reilly echoed, his carroty brows soaring above his glasses. “Sixty-pound pack. Sounds like a job for an active duty military type.”

My glance zinged to the only other military member of my team.
His
zinged to the purple smudge of mountains in the distance.

We played the waiting game. Ten seconds. Twenty.

“Well, Sergeant Cassidy?”

All right. So I caved. I usually do in face-offs with Staff Sergeant Noel Cassidy. A Special Ops noncom with two tours in Iraq under his belt, he was assigned to FST-3 after beating a charge of lewd and lascivious acts with an underage female.

(There’s that Uniform Code of Military Justice again. I’m telling you, it’s a piece of work!)

Cassidy’s attorney got him off by proving that the underage female he solicited—Cassidy, not the attorney—was actually a he-male well past the age of consent. Sergeant Cassidy would have much preferred a jail sentence. His steroid-and-muscle-bound masculinity has yet to recover from the shock of messing around with a drag queen. As he reminded me when he finally met my determined stare.

“You know my shrink hasn’t cleared me for return to full duty.”

“She would, if you’d haul yourself up to Fort Bliss.”

Fort Bliss is our home station. Three-point-four zillion acres of desert straddling the Texas/New Mexico border. Host to the army’s armor and air defense artillery training centers. And FST-3. The main post itself isn’t bad, but there’s nothing blissful about
this
remote corner of the post unless you’re a Gila monster or diamondback.

“You’ve missed the last two appointments,” I reminded the sergeant.

“I’ll schedule another for next week.”

“You’d better make this one.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

I scowled but couldn’t bring myself to come down too hard on the guy. After all, the sight of Charlie boinking our neighbor messed
me
up enough to land me in uniform.

“All right.” I signed the acceptance sheet and gave it back to the driver. “Let’s haul this contraption inside. If and when we figure out how to work the thing, I’ll climb aboard and take it for a spin.”

FST-3 includes two PhDs, a software genius in the person of O’Reilly, and Sergeant Cassidy, who’s racked up more than twelve years of service. Throw in my admittedly mediocre academic credentials and relatively few months in uniform, and you’d think we would have sufficient collective smarts to decipher EEEK.

You’d think wrong.

It took several days, a slew of emails, countless phone calls and the belated arrival from Phoenix of a rep from Harrison Robotics before we could make sense of the schematics. All the while the weird-looking piece of equipment stood in a corner of the CHU that served as our test facility.

Excuse me. That’s C-H-U, pronounced choo. It’s short for Containerized Housing Unit. Our site has five of ’em. Two are linked together to form our test and administrative center. One serves as a combination rec room, dining facility and workout area. The latter is used exclusively by Sergeant Cassidy, by the way. The rest of us wouldn’t be caught dead on a Universal Gym.

The remaining two CHUs constitute our sleeping quarters while forward deployed, e.g., stuck out here in Dry Springs. The three guys occupy one. I share the other with Pen. Unfortunately, she snorts and whinnies while asleep as well as when she’s awake.

I think I mentioned that we’re pretty much at the bottom of the DARPA food chain. The thing is, even DARPA’s rejects are state-of-the-art. That’s where the “advanced” in Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency comes in, you see. As a result, our test lab is crammed with enough computers and high-tech instrumentation to re-orbit the International Space Station.

Our test engineer is a skinny, nervous twitch by the name of Dr. Brian Balboa. Naturally, we immediately anointed him “Rocky” but I challenge you to find anyone less Sylvester Stallone-ish. Rocky isn’t as out-there brilliant as Pen, but he’s darn good at making all those black boxes of instrumentation sing. Remind me to tell you sometime why he’s no longer assigned to DARPA Headquarters.

Even Rocky had trouble with EEEK’s computerized components, however. And the more frustrated my team became, the more the contrivance smirked at us. I kid you not. With its head full of wires, crossed arms and casually bent knees, all it needed to complete an air of sardonic amusement was a cigarette dangling from its lips.

“Look.”

As agitated as the rest of us, the Harrison Robotics rep stabbed a finger at a monitor. He was bald as Britney Spears during her weird phase and at least two hundred fifty pounds heavier. His name was Benson, Al Benson. My team had instantly dubbed him All Bent.

“You folks have to stop thinking of these as machine parts and . . .”

“They
are
machine parts.”

That came from O’Reilly. Naturally.

All Bent scowled and directed his comments to me. “We designed the exoskeleton as a natural extension of the human body.”

“Just out of curiosity,” I asked, “how many human bodies has it extended so far?”

“Several.”

He didn’t quite meet my eyes. Not a good sign.

“Including yours?” I wanted to know.

“Well . . . No.”

“Why didn’t Harrison Robotics send us someone with hands-on experience?”

All Bent squirmed and provided a reluctant answer. “One of our engineers broke a leg when a brace failed. Another slammed into a concrete wall at full speed. He’s still on medical leave. But we’ve worked out the bugs in the power unit,” he rushed to assure me. “You’ll be in complete control at all times.”

I may not be the sharpest pencil in the box, but I’m no dummy. I know how many billions DARPA pours into the civilian sector to develop new technologies. Harrison Robotics was a small firm. Until now, the company had specialized in computerized artificial limbs. EEEK would take them into the much broader—and far more profitable—arena of direct combat support. Naturally they’d brush aside little things like broken legs and head-on collisions with concrete walls in pursuit of Big Bucks.

On the other hand, if their device lived up to its hype, maybe it
would
increase the capability of our war fighters. The robotic legs could carry infantry grunts farther, over rougher terrain. The frame attached to the spine could support heavier loads of equipment. Mechanical arms could push or pull extreme weights.

I have to admit such esoteric matters as extending troop endurance and improving combat capability never mattered in my other life. The civilian one. Minus the boots and ABUs. It might not have mattered all that much to me now if DARPA hadn’t insisted on a month-long orientation before exiling me to Fort Bliss.

Part of my familiarization program included a tour of the Soldiers’ Support Center at Natick, Massachusetts. That was pretty interesting, actually. Those guys are doing some slick stuff. My orientation also included visits to several advanced research centers like MIT and Boeing’s Skunk Works. The kicker, though, was a trip to Bethesda Medical Center, just north of D.C. While there I talked to men and women who might not have lost legs or arms or eyes if they’d been better equipped.

I’m not going to get schmaltzy on you, but . . . Well . . . Those interviews changed my perspective on a lot of things, this job included. I guess that’s why I get that annoying feeling I told you about, the sense that I’m part of something important. I can’t shake the hope my team might stumble across a new technology that could alleviate some of the pain and suffering I saw at Bethesda.

Even more irritating is the thought that sneaks into my head when I don’t guard against it. If I stick out this assignment . . . If I complete my four years in uniform . . . Maybe, just maybe, I’ll break the downward spiral that’s been my life up to now.

Which is why I refused to let EEEK get the best of me. Determined to crack him, I scowled at the metal carcass. The skeletal creature smirked back. With some effort, I managed to suppress the notion that it was only waiting to get me in its clutches.

“Let’s go over the power ratios one more time,” I insisted. “I want to know precisely how much movement it takes to work the extremities.”

NOT much, I discovered when I finally decided to climb aboard.

A simple on-off switch activated EEEK’s built-in computers. Once he was powered up, I shed my tiger-stripe ABU blouse, tucked my dog tags inside my standard issue yucky brown T-shirt and folded myself into the metal frame.

Correction. It wasn’t actually metal, but a feather-light composite that looked and felt like steel. The leg braces attached to my combat boots at heel and ankle. A springy tongue extended below each boot to air-cushion my steps. A web vest secured my spine to EEEK’s. My hands slid through loops on the arm braces and into glove-like controls.

Encased in the frame, I felt a weird sort of reluctance to connect the headpiece and flip down the visor. I had the uneasy notion I was sublimating my brain to EEEK’s. I couldn’t escape the fact that his circuitry could process more data, more rapidly, with more accurate results, than mine.

I mean . . . Electronic “eyes” that register images in a continual, 360-degree sweep? Infrared sensors capable of identifying the heat signatures of everything from field mice to an incoming missile? A visor with more three-dimensional graphics than the latest version of Mortal Kombat? Gimme a break!

Most of it was off-the-shelf electronics available in games sold to pimply teens and perennial adolescents like my ex. What made EEEK truly innovative was that Harrison Robotics had combined the electronic circuitry and lightweight composite frame with an advanced ergonomic design that blended technology with robotic muscle.