Pyramid Lake (7 page)

Cassie turned in a slow circle, taking in the view. The facility buildings were laid out in an L, with the connected labs making up the short leg, parallel to the lakefront. The cafeteria sat in the angle, while the Navy hangar buildings stretched north, away from the lake, to form the long leg.

“Why did you bring me up here?” she asked.

I didn’t answer.

Inside the angle of the L, alongside the parking lot, four plumes of steam rose from the geothermal plant’s cooling towers, drifting north before dissipating into the air. Connecting the cooling towers to the various turbines, generators, and cooling reservoirs was a network of thick white pipelines. Beyond the machinery, the pipelines spread out across the bare ground in a ten-acre web whose endpoints disappeared into the bare dirt at various distances. These were the deep production wells and injection wells connecting the power plant to Pyramid Lake’s natural underground geothermal reservoir.

“The Navy’s Geothermal Project Office is the primary sponsor for the Pyramid Lake facility,” I said. “By 2020, half the Navy’s shoreside energy needs are supposed to be met by renewable sources. This is their geothermal pilot program: a twenty megawatt air-cooled binary power plant that supplies the entire facility and feeds the surplus back into the grid.”

I pointed at the roof below our feet, where the five-story server room lay directly beneath us.

“The supercomputer draws fifteen percent of plant capacity—enough to power three thousand households—but it’s one hundred percent renewable energy…” I grinned. “Frankenstein is
green
.”

Cassie looked past the last Navy hangar structure, where railroad tracks stretched under gates in the perimeter fence. The rail line headed northward into Fox Canyon and curved out of sight toward Smoke Creek Desert.

“Is that rail line still in use?” she asked.

“Construction materials and heavy supplies do come in by train occasionally,” I said. “But there’s obviously no civilian traffic, so the line’s pretty much dead.”

“This isn’t what we came up to the roof for,” she said.

My gaze drifted to the Navy outbuildings, where the standalone enlisted men’s club lay, with its cable-less sixty-inch TV screen. I estimated the diagonal distance from the clubhouse roof to the corner of the rooftop where we now stood. Six hundred, seven hundred meters at most. Perfect.

Cassie’s eyes tracked to where I was looking. “Why did you really want to come up here?”

“To get some fresh air,” I said. “Let’s go. Blake leaves promptly at five, which, for him, usually means four thirty, or even four.”

I held the fire door open for her, and we started down.

“What sports do you like to watch?” I asked.

• • •

Blake had PETMAN on the steel-mesh treadmill when we entered the robotics lab. The humanoid robot was walking fast, arms swinging a little spastically. Blake stood nearby, holding an iPad like a clipboard.

“Blake, Cassie,” I said. “Cassie, Blake.”

I let them finish introducing themselves to each other while I checked out the robot. Today Blake had a pair of Nike running shoes on its feet, but it was otherwise unclothed. Even the contoured fiberglass body panels had been detached from its legs, torso, and upper arms. The bare steel struts of the robot’s endoskeleton and the exposed hydraulic actuators of its joints gleamed under the lab lights. Loops of quarter-inch metal flex tubing coiled loosely around the endoskeleton, carrying hydraulic lines and control cables.

Sometimes, PETMAN wore a desert-patterned combat uniform and tan boots, as it had for Friday’s demo. In clothes, it could appear eerily human. Then the only signs that gave it away were its tubular steel forearms, which ended in blunt, rounded friction pads instead of hands, and its undersized, disturbing substitute for a head.

Where a human’s neck would be, a three-inch red plastic dome protruded from PETMAN’s collar: a small warning light that rotated like a police flasher, splashing red light across the wall behind the treadmill, and across Blake’s face, once every second.

“It walks just like a real person,” Cassie said.

I thought she was being a little kind. PETMAN did move like an aggressive human, with its chest forward and elbows wide, striding the treadmill like a gunfighter. But at a fast walk, its motions were already a little jerky. At higher speeds, I knew, the robot wobbled like a lurching drunk, although it never quite lost its balance.

“Watch this,” Blake said, tapping his iPad.

The robot slowed its pace and came to a stop, the steel-mesh treadmill also sliding to a stop beneath its feet. The featureless, microcephalic head continued to flash red at us. PETMAN raised his arms and stepped wide, touching the rounded nubs at the ends of its wrists together above its head. Then it brought its arms down and feet together again, in a calisthenic movement like a slow-motion jumping jack. The robot repeated this several times, conveying a sense of great strength held in check. The powerful hydraulic actuators made its frame jerk and shudder with every motion.

“It has Alzheimer’s,” I said.

“I could increase his frictional damping,” Blake said, “but that would slow him down.”

Even though I knew it was stupid, watching PETMAN move always made me uncomfortable. The gunfighter posture and the forward cant of that smooth, blank nub of a head projected a brute threat whose silent inexorability made it all the more menacing.

“Robosoldier,” Cassie said. “Scary. What’s his intended mission?”

PETMAN squatted, and swiveled at the waist, those steel-tube forearms sweeping the air around him like a man batting away a pack of angry dogs. It went to one knee.

“Load carrier,” Blake said. “A thirteen-person infantry squad lugs almost a thousand pounds of supplies, ammunition, and water—nearly a hundred pounds per soldier. Offloading that weight to autonomous logistics support lets them focus on their primary mission.”

“PETMAN’s a pack mule,” I said.

The robot was on both knees now. It leaned forward to touch the blunt friction-pads at the ends of its wrists to the ground and straightened its legs behind. Its chest dipped and rose jerkily in a series of pushups.

“Why the anthropomorphic shape?” Cassie asked.

“The earliest prototypes were wheeled autonomous vehicles,” Blake said. “But the modern battlefield is often in urban terrain—moving over broken rubble, fighting house-to-house, even. Wheeled platforms could not always follow the warfighter to where he or she needed to be.”

He led us deeper into the lab, which resembled a machine shop. Prototypes and parts lay among the CNC-controlled lathes, milling and cutting machines, and drill presses. We passed variant PETMAN torsos, arms, and legs lying on worktables, and older models that did not resemble human anatomy at all.

“The second-generation platforms—BIGDOG, ALPHADOG, and CHEETAH—were modeled after rescue canines.” Blake pointed at a group of waist-high quadrupedal robots with horizontal bodies. “ALPHADOG was optimized for carrying capacity, BIGDOG for stable movement over broken terrain, and CHEETAH for speed.”

The spindly, multijointed legs of ALPHADOG and BIGDOG looked like they belonged on a metal gazelle rather than a dog. CHEETAH’s longer legs were different, tucked under its body in exaggerated Z-shaped folds. They tapered to end in sharp metal points.

Cassie looked at them and shuddered. “
Ugh.
Like the arms of a giant steel praying mantis.”

“And they move as fast as a mantis can strike,” Blake said. “CHEETAH can run thirty-five miles an hour. But PETMAN is a far superior platform for the mission. We needed a solution that could accompany the warfighter anywhere, in and out of vehicles and buildings—”

“—as long as the elevators still work,” I said, and snickered.

Blake’s pouchy face soured.

“Stairs are still a problem for PETMAN,” he said. “But we’re making progress.”

He led us back to where the robot was still banging out pushup after relentless pushup.

“Every time it tries the stairs, it falls,” I told Cassie. “Like some wobbly old drunk.”

“I still don’t understand why,” Blake said. “He’s got great dynamic balance.” He tapped his iPad. PETMAN rose to stand upright, red light flashing, and began to walk again. Then it accelerated to a lurching run on the custom treadmill. The soles of its Nikes struck the treadmill’s steel mesh with loud hammering sounds.

“Watch.” Blake reached out and gave PETMAN’s shoulder a hard push. The robot took a sideways step but maintained its balance, never breaking stride. He shoved it again, causing it to stumble slightly, but once again PETMAN recovered.

Blake grinned at us and raised a foot high, planting it against PETMAN’s hip. He thrust his leg violently, sending it staggering.

My stomach tensed.

This time the robot’s arms came up as it stabilized itself, but it maintained its forward run.

The blank equanimity with which PETMAN took the abuse was disturbing to watch—like it was holding itself back, biding its time. I half-expected it to take a swing at Blake any moment now.

Cassie turned away, but I caught the troubled look on her face. “How much can PETMAN carry?” she asked.

Blake dragged a thick ceiling-tethered power cord over and plugged it into the running robot’s back. “He weighs four hundred seventy-five pounds, and can carry eleven hundred additional pounds of payload,” he said, sounding like a proud father.

Cassie asked about PETMAN’s battery life. While Blake answered her, I turned away and slipped out my phone. I tapped a few commands, then put the phone back in my pocket.

“…three hundred fifty watt-hours per kilogram.” Blake held out a flat, silvery battery module the size of a DVD case. Cassie inspected it and handed it back, then he slid it into a rectangular array that held dozens of similar modules. “PETMAN’s fifty-pound battery pack allows twelve hours of strenuous untethered operation,” he said.

Behind them, the robot slowed and stopped. The treadmill slid to a halt beneath its feet.

Blake turned to stare at it, frowned, and poked at his iPad screen. “I must have brushed this by mistake…”

PETMAN extended one arm in front of its chest. And then the other. It rotated its extended forearms one at a time, turning them one hundred eighty degrees. Then it raised bent-elbowed arms high, one after another. The robot’s wrists shuddered to a halt behind its flashing red nub of a head.

Blake’s frown deepened, tapping faster at his iPad. “For some reason, he’s not responding…”

PETMAN lowered its right arm to reach behind its back, followed by its left, and swiveled its hip joints in place. Then it crouched and sprang a foot off the treadmill, rotating its body ninety degrees in the air.

Cassie and Blake jumped back.

PETMAN’s Nike-shod feet slammed back down on steel mesh surface with a resounding crash. Side-on to us now, it raised its arms again, one at a time.

Blake slowly lowered the iPad to his side and stared at his robot. “What the hell is he doing?”

“Looks like the Macarena to me,” I said.

Blake’s face went red. “You little shit! How…?” He turned to Cassie, “I’m sorry, he—”

“I’ll come back at a better time,” Cassie said. She turned on her heel, and walked out.

The robot continued its jerky dance movements, punctuated with those ninety-degree leap-turns that shook the floor beneath our feet. It should have made PETMAN look ridiculous, but somehow it didn’t.

My stomach muscles clenched again, and I looked away.

Blake was breathing heavily. “I have to get McNulty and security involved, Trevor. I
have
to.” He looked more upset than angry now. “Why would you sabotage my project, my hard work—?”

“Relax,” I said, turning to leave. “Reboot that thing, and it’ll be back to normal.”

At the door, I spoke over my shoulder.

“Better than normal, actually. Try it out on the stairs now.”

“T
his isn’t going to work,” Cassie said once we were back in my lab.

“That’s too bad.” I kept my voice neutral. “I was kind of looking forward to working with you.”

“See?” She laughed. “That’s what I’m talking about. You’re very smart, Trevor, but maybe not as smart as you think, because you’re not giving
me
enough credit for intelligence.”

“I know you’re smart,” I said.

“Do you?” she asked. “Then why do you think acting like an ass and treating your coworkers like shit in front of me is going to bother me in the least?”

“Don’t flatter yourself,” I said. “I wasn’t making any special effort on your behalf.”

“What I mean is, why would I care? It’s not my job to go around apologizing for your behavior or to keep you out of trouble. So trying to get me to quit that way isn’t going to work.”

“Sounds like you’re overthinking this a bit,” I said.

“Frankenstein,” she called out, “what’s Trevor feeling right now?”

Oh, shit.

“Resentment,” came the rumbling voice that shook the floor tiles. “Surprise. Embarrassment. Grudging respect.”

“Nice,” I said. “You’re taking orders from her now?”

“She is your research partner and co-lead,” Frankenstein said.

I didn’t have an answer to that, so I kept my mouth shut.

Cassie looked at me and shook her head. “You’re too intelligent for this, Trevor. So here’s what I propose.” She looked at her phone, checking the time. “I’m going home now—”

“To California?”

“…to my uncle’s place in Wadsworth, to visit with family I haven’t seen in a while. But tomorrow, we can start as early as you want. You can give me an overview of Frankenstein’s software, and we’ll take it from there.”

“I’m out tomorrow,” I said. “Prior engagement. So there’s not much point to you coming in and sitting around bored, either.”

“Don’t worry about me,” she said. “I’ll just dive in and get started on my own. I’ll probably have a bunch of questions for you when you’re back on Wednesday.”

“But to access—”

“Frankenstein,” Cassie asked, “how am I set for access?”

“Your account privileges are the same as Trevor’s,” came the rumbling answer.