The God Wave (19 page)

Matt exhaled gustily, feeling the tension leave his body in a rush. He had hitched his wagon to Howard's stars and stripes. There would be no looking back.

Mini's demonstration the next day was an anticlimax in many ways, but Chuck, still reeling from Matt's surprise, was gratified to have a standing-room-only crowd for which Mini could perform. And perform she did. She created computer-generated images as free as her ability to imagine them, rendered them in three dimensions, and animated them, sending them dancing and flying across the screen.

The three-dimensional quality of the images was stunning. Chuck was almost willing to believe that Mini was driving the high-def TV screen to do things it had not been engineered to do. The creatures seemed to break the plane of the screen as if emerging from a still pool. The landscapes seemed alive, seemed to beckon the viewer through a window into a world at once real and super-real. The audience was amazed.

They were more amazed when Lanfen repeated her perfor
mance of the day before. Matt had asked that she be allowed to do so; Chuck had conceded without argument and stood in the wings, grinning until his cheeks hurt. Once that particular genie was out of the bottle, attempting to put it back was futile. Then there was the fact that he really wanted to see the demonstration again himself. The other members of the team were somewhat less eager. Mike was losing time with his family. Sara felt cheated at a chance of using the VR. And Tim just plain hated to be upstaged. Still, mixed with the jealousy and resentment was unmistakable awe.

By the end of the day on Sunday, Chuck was exhausted and vaguely anxious. The audience reaction had been mixed and marked, but they'd had a gratifying number of requests for tours of their facilities from various institutions. The one that most excited him was NASA. He had never considered what full kinetic control might mean in outer space. Now he did. The ramifications were revolutionary. What astronauts had previously done in dangerous and costly EVAs might be possible to do from within a space station or space transport, either via robot or servos or—dare he hope?—by direct control of the vehicle's mechanisms.

He'd been toying with the idea of direct control a lot, and as the show closed down on Sunday evening, he zeroed in on Chen Lanfen, hoping to engage her further about her experience with the ninja bot. He offered to buy her a chai latte, for which she admitted a particular weakness. The two of them strolled down the red-carpeted aisle between swiftly disintegrating booths to one of the ubiquitous coffee carts.

“So when you're working with the bot,” he asked as they meandered back to the booth, “are you aware of your interface with it? I mean are you aware of how you're interfacing with it?”

“Wow,” she said, sipping carefully at her chai. “That's a question no one's asked me before.”

He blinked. “Really?”

“Really.”

“That surprises me. I would've thought Matt might've asked you.”

“He's only ever asked about the amount of control I have. We had problems with that early on. It was hard for me to . . . to make that final connection. Not sure why. Dice thinks it's because of my training and my tendency to multitask. His particular theory is that my mind isn't solidly concentrating on one thing but is flitting around, trying to cover multiple points on a grid.”

“Now that you think of it, though,” Chuck persisted, “do you have a sense of what it is, exactly, that you're connecting with? I suppose I mean: what's your sense of the robot?”

She stopped in a red-carpeted intersection. “Well, the closest I can come to describing it is to say I inhabit the robot. I extend myself into it—imagine that its body is my body.” She shrugged artlessly. “It's hard to articulate.”

“Would you be willing to come into the lab to do some tests? I'd like to take a close look at your brain wave profile while you're engaged with the robot. I don't suppose Matt and Dice . . .”

She laughed. “Them? I assure you they were less interested in my brain waves than what I could make Bilbo and his little friends do. They were quite focused on impressing Mr. Howard.”

“Mr. Howard?”

“You saw him. He was front and center at my show yesterday, surrounded by a group of his close associates.”

Frowning, Chuck glanced down the aisle, toward the Forward Kinetics booth, which the take-down crew was efficiently dismantling. “Who is he?”

Unease flashed in the young woman's dark, almond-shaped eyes. “I'm not sure, to be honest. But I'm pretty sure he's military or ex-military. I know his interest is in security applications.”

Chuck felt as if the carpet had shrugged beneath his feet. Had Matt lied to him? He'd let him believe they'd had no interest from the military when all along . . .

“How long?” he asked through numb lips. “How long has Howard been involved?”

“Months.” She hesitated, then added, “Like I said, I'm not sure he's military, but he's asked for a private audience.”

“A private . . . ?” Chuck looked toward the booth again. Matt had appeared in the aisle. His partner—his possibly treacherous partner—was waving at them to hurry up.

“When?” he asked Lanfen. “Where?”

“Tonight. I don't know where. He's sending a car to pick us up in about”—she glanced at her watch—“twenty minutes.”

Chuck turned and strode down the aisle toward Matt, driven by a completely alien surge of anger.

Lanfen murmured a breathy “damn” and hurried along in his wake.

“When were you going to tell me?” Chuck demanded, bearing down on Matt. “When were you going to let me know about this
private audience
?”

Matt's eyes widened. Then he nonchalantly shoved his hands into his pockets and smiled wryly. “Well,
now,
I suppose. Mr. Howard and his associates are vitally interested in what we're doing, but they need proof absolute that we're not hoaxing them—using electronics or offstage operators.”

Chuck glanced at Lanfen and back at Matt. “Who is Howard? Is he military?”

Matt opened his mouth, probably to lie, and closed it again. He nodded. “Some government agency. He called it Deep Shield.”

“Deep Shield? Seriously?”

“Yeah, seriously. Very Marvel Comics. I think they're part of Homeland Security.”

“HOMELAND SECURITY? AND YOU HAVE
a meeting with them tonight?”

“Yes,” Matt said, checking his watch. “The car should be here in about fifteen minutes. You can come along if you like. I might be able to get you on the guest list.”

“Who's on it now?”

“Me, Dice, Lanfen . . . and Bilbo, of course.”

“Yes,” Chuck said tightly. “Yes, I'd like to go along for the ride.”

In the end, though, Howard's men didn't let him go along for the ride. The driver—a young corporal rigged out in a uniform Chuck didn't recognize—had explicit orders about who was going on the junket. Chuck was not on his manifest.

“But I'm the co-owner of Forward Kinetics,” he insisted, a pronouncement that impressed the young soldier not at all.

“I'm sorry, sir,” the man said firmly. “I can only transport the persons I'm authorized to transport.”

“Then none of them are going.”

“Now hold on,” Matt said, Dice and Lanfen standing uncomfortably behind him.

“Why can't he just call and have me added to the list?” Chuck said to his partner. “Don't you see this doesn't make any sense?”

“What do you think is going to happen? This is our own military.”

“Oh, really? And what branch of the military are you?” Chuck asked the corporal.

“I'm not allowed to speak to that, sir. You'd have to ask General Howard.”

“
General
Howard?”

The corporal ignored that and started loading the cargo.

“Matt—”

“It's okay, Chuck. They just want proof of concept. We haven't signed away anything. And we won't . . . yet. Not without you.
But if you're so worried, it's better that we
don't
go together.” Without waiting for a response, he helped Lanfen into the truck and followed in after her.

“I'm sorry, Chuck,” Dice said. “I didn't realize—”

“Go with them,” Chuck said, no anger in his voice. “Just . . . make sure Matt is careful.”

Dice nodded and got in the Humvee. The corporal closed the doors and moved into the driver's seat.

Chuck watched with a trembling dread taking root in his stomach as the Humvee pulled away from the curb. He went back into the convention center, where he found Eugene and Mini waiting for him in the lobby. Eugene looked particularly hangdog and seemed suddenly to have trouble meeting Chuck's eyes.

“Please tell me,” Chuck said, “that you weren't in on this.” He waved a hand at the covered turnaround in front of the center.

“Not in on it, no. Although I did have sort of a heads-up. Dice told me Matt had a surprise planned while we were setting up. I told him we had one, too. We sort of swore each other to secrecy. It didn't . . . I mean I had no idea it'd be something like this. I knew about the ninja bot and Lanfen and all but not about the scary guys in suits and the evil black stretch Humvee.”

Chuck stared out at the spot where the aforementioned Humvee had been sitting moments before. “Matt says these guys are Homeland Security. But I don't believe that for a moment. Do you?”

“You're asking me?” Eugene said. “I see conspiracies in my breakfast cereal.”

“Is that really the question you want an answer to?”

Both men turned to look at Minerva. She stood with her arms wrapped around herself, as if she were cold, and returned their gazes with a gravity that Chuck found unsettling.

“Don't you really want to know whether
Dr. Streegman
believes it?”

“Matt,” Chuck spat out, “only believes in Matt.”

LANFEN HAD ALWAYS TRADED ON
her ability to look icy calm on the outside while her insides were doing anything from Snoopy dancing to trembling in abject terror. True control, she had come to appreciate, was like a holographic garment one wore. She could generate it from within but relied on a willing audience to keep it in place.

Right now she was more nervous than she could remember being, even when walking Baltimore's less safe streets at night. Self-defense against those with clear and evil intent was straightforward. She knew what to expect; they didn't. Now, though, she was the one who didn't know what to expect. She wondered if Matt did. He also had mastered the art of cool under pressure, so it was hard to tell.

Dice, on the other hand, was the antithesis of cool. During the ride to wherever they were going, he gave up trying to see out through the deeply tinted windows and stared straight ahead at the equally opaque glass between them and the now-invisible driver. His fists were clenched on his knees; his mouth was set in a grim line.

“Where are they taking us, Matt?” he asked once.

“What makes you think I know?” Matt returned. “I'm as out of my element here as you are.” He smiled. “Kind of exciting in a cloak-and-dagger way, don't you think?”

“No, I don't,” Dice said and subsided into silence.

Eventually, of course, the vehicle stopped, and the driver came around to open the door. They stepped out into a huge shell of a building, with a ceiling and walls that seemed to be miles away. An aircraft hangar maybe.

Howard came out to meet them himself and had the robot carried away and out of sight. Lanfen was separated from the men and taken to a sterile room, where she was searched with embarrassing thoroughness before being issued a formfitting, one-piece uniform of pale gray and canvas boat shoes. She bore it all with silent calm, knowing that no amount of martial arts knowledge, strategy, or skill would do her an ounce of good there. The woman who had been assigned to her was businesslike and nonthreatening. She even managed a smile when Lanfen asked her for a cup of water.

Lanfen was reunited with her companions in a lab that was no less pristine than every other part of the installation she had seen, which wasn't much. They were dressed just as she was. Matt looked unruffled, though his earlier nonchalance was gone. Dice looked freaked out; he kept wiping his palms on his grays. Lanfen couldn't help but wonder how long he'd last in prison.

“We checked the bot over thoroughly,” General Howard told them. “We're satisfied that it contains nothing that was not included in the specs you gave us.” He turned to Dice. “You may begin your demonstration. I assume there won't be a problem if we give your martial arts expert a set of instructions?”

“Why don't you ask her?”

Lanfen stepped forward. “There shouldn't be any problem at all. What would you like me to do?”

“First, bring the robot out to the hangar. We'll do the demonstration there.”

She did as asked and found they had prepared an arena for Bilbo to operate in. It was surrounded by screening devices that looked like curved, silver solar panels on short stands. She guessed they were meant to intercept and perhaps screen out any attempt to control the robot electronically from outside the circle of screens. A moment later Howard confirmed it.

“These panels will eliminate any electronically generated signals. Is there a problem with Ms. Chen guiding the robot from outside the screens?”

After a moment of silence, Dice realized he was the one being addressed. “I don't know. I mean, her brain waves
are
technically electric signals. All we can do is see what happens.”

Lanfen took her cue, cutting short Dice's nervous stammering. She guided Bilbo onto the mat at the center of the screens, visually measuring the area. About thirty by twenty, she figured—a good-size area to work in.

She had the robot do a cartwheel, a handstand, and a somersault. Even with the screens, it was easy, like Mike moving the backhoe without seeing it. She turned to Howard expectantly. “What would you like us to do, General?”