Puppet Master

by Dale Brown

  4

  Boston—later that day

  Any other boss would have canceled Peter’s tests—surely the bot could not do more to prove itself that day—but any other boss would not have been Louis Massina.

  Seeing his frown deepen as he watched the robot climb over a pile of rubble in the test area, Chelsea couldn’t help but wonder at the two sides of the man. At work he was demanding and taciturn, eschewing even the tiniest chitchat in favor of a cold stare that seemed borderline autistic. It was a remarkable contrast to the person he was outside the job, one known not only for charity but also for taking a real interest in the people he helped, always anonymously.

  “Why is it moving so slow?” demanded Massina as Peter picked its way over the tangle of steel beams and wire placed at the center of the old rail yard they leased for these sorts of tests. “Isn’t it receiving the sensor information?”

  “It is,” said Bobby James, who was watching the bot’s “brain” functions on the array of monitors nearby. “It’s picking a safe route to the target.”

  “Hmmmph.” Massina folded his arms. RBT PJT 23.A had been tasked with finding and retrieving a small box that contained gunpowder hidden in the tangle. Besides its own sensors, it was receiving data from a sensor robot stationed nearby. The mech contained a sophisticated “sniffer,” which scanned a fifty-meter circle. Peter took the data and mapped chemicals in the air; the sensor had detected the minuscule plume emitted by the stash and provided the data to Peter.

  “It’s got it,” said Chelsea as the robot dug its claw into the pile. “We just have to be patient.”

  “Patience should not be programmed into the system,” snapped Massina. There was still soot from the fire on his pants and a smudge on his face.

  “Prudence is,” retorted Bobby.

  “Where’s the line between prudence and negligence?” said Massina.

  “We’re not near it.”

  Impatient as he was, Massina generally tolerated a decent amount of back talk—as long as he felt you were dedicated to your job. But his manner of questioning could be cold, and even at times cruel. Any employee who couldn’t deal with that—and stand up for themselves and their project—generally left; there were plenty of rivals who would pay handsomely for someone with experience here. Chelsea wondered if Bobby was getting close to that point; he’d recently complained about how much time he was working, something she’d never heard him do before.

  “Chelsea?”

  Chelsea turned and looked up into the face of Bill “Beefy” Bozzone, the head of Smart Metal’s security team. Dressed in a dark blue suit, Beefy looked more like an accountant than a policeman . . . albeit one in very good physical condition.

  “A couple of detectives want to talk to you and Mr. Massina about the fire,” said Beefy.

  “Not really a good time,” said Chelsea.

  “What?” snapped Massina, turning around.

  “Sorry to bother you, Lou.” Beefy started to apologize. “But there are some policemen to see you. I didn’t know if—”

  “I’ll handle it.” Massina looked at Chelsea. “Finish this, would you?”

  Massina followed Beefy out past the rows of parked trailers to the whitewashed cement building at the entrance to the yard. He didn’t like to be interrupted while working, though at this point there wasn’t more he could do with the mech. It had passed all of its tests, albeit a little slower than he wanted.

  Two men in ill-fitting suits stood just inside the doorway, shifting nervously. They smelled of cigarette smoke.

  “We understand you were at the gas explosion this morning,” said the taller of the two men. He withdrew a well-worn leather case from his jacket pocket and let the front flap drop, flashing a Boston Police Department badge; the other man did likewise.

  “Yes?”

  “Well, if you could give us your thoughts—”

  “My thoughts on what?” snapped Massina.

  “Run down what happened,” said the shorter man. “What you saw.”

  “I saw a fire.”

  “And an explosion?” asked the shorter man. “My name’s Bill Doyle. This is my partner, Cliff Lycum.”

  “A flash of light. It was dark. I heard someone say it was gas.”

  “You wouldn’t have had anything recording, did you?” asked Lycum. “Because of your . . . your robot thing? Did you take pictures?”

  Massina bristled. Now that the woman and her child were OK, he wanted to avoid giving out any information about the “robot thing” that had been involved.

  “No, I’m sorry. We had no photos. We stopped for coffee. We were on our way here. My staff told you I was here?”

  “Yes.” Doyle nodded. “The explosion came from the right?”

  “Yes, as you face Starbucks.”

  “How did you get the woman and kid out of the building?” asked Lycum.

  Massina hesitated.

  “We don’t want any trade secrets,” said Doyle.

  “What do you want then?”

  “An accurate picture of what happened. So we can figure out where the fire started, why it started. Like that.”

  “I have no idea when it started or why. There was a blast. My truck was jerked back and the air bags deployed. I got out. A few minutes later, maybe less, we saw the lady at a window.”

  “And you sent the, uh, machine to get her.”

  “Yes.”

  “What is it?”

  “A robotic device. That’s all.”

  “It went right through the flames,” said Lycum.

  “It’s designed to deal with worse than that. It’s based on a bomb disposal bot, though that’s not its function.”

  “We were wondering if maybe there’s a camera attached to it. The images might be useful,” said Doyle.

  “We have sensor data,” said Massina, “but I can tell you it’s not going to be of much use.”

  “Could we see it?”

  “I’ll have one of my people work through it with you.” Massina explained that the data was not video as commonly understood but rather an array of data picked up by a combination of sensors—infrared and sonar as well as optical—that supplied a multidimensional matrix. It needed to be interpreted and translated from its native format; you couldn’t just download it to a Windows machine or your TV.

  “Wasn’t there a surveillance camera on the building?” he asked.

  “It was damaged by the fire,” said Doyle. “We haven’t been able to recover the video.”

  “Maybe we could help with that,” said Beefy. “We have some good technical people.”

  “We would appreciate it.”

  “No guarantees,” said Massina. “Bill, you can work out the details. Excuse me. I have work.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Massina,” said Doyle. “If there’s anything we can do.”

  “Sure,” said Massina, hurrying back to Peter’s test.

  Many hours later, having concluded the day’s tests and checked things on a multitude of projects at his office downtown, Louis Massina arrived at Grace Sisters’ Hospital. Walking briskly through the front lobby, he aimed for the rehab ward, eyes fixed straight ahead.

  A familiar twinge jerked through his shoulder as he neared the oval-shaped threshold of the wing’s reception area. It was a mere flash, yet one that pained him greatly. For in that moment, he felt not the stump or the electrodes or the muscle impulses that worked the relays . . . but his missing arm.

  What came next was memory: the accident.

  More pain, this across his entire body.

  He was on his motorcycle, a car suddenly in front of him. He was in the air, flying into blackness.

  A truck. The front of a building.

  Blackness.

  No arm.

  That was what he had a memory of. What he couldn’t remember, what he had blacked out all these years, was the sensation of his wife clinging to his back behind him.

  It was the dark hole he never ventured near.

/>   “It must be Thursday,” said the ward’s official greeter, wheeling out from behind his desk. “How are you, Mr. Massina?”

  “Good, Paul,” said Massina. “How are you?”

  “Still not scheduled, but I’m hopeful. Then once that’s squared away, we go to the prosthetics.”

  “Hopefully it will be worth the wait,” said Massina.

  “A step up.” Paul laughed.

  Massina knew that was supposed to be a joke—people said something similar all the time—but he had never seen any levity in anything relating to injury.

  “We have some fresh-baked pastry tonight,” said Paul. “Still hot.”

  “How about coffee?” asked Massina.

  “We have cappuccino, you know. Sister’s new machine.”

  “Just coffee.”

  Paul wheeled himself to the large counter area at the side. Selecting a French Roast from the rainbow of K-Cups, he loaded the single-cup maker. Fresh coffee poured through the coffeemaker at the side of the lounge, its heady, caffeinated scent overwhelming the slightly antiseptic smell of the rest of the hospital.

  The lounge was in many ways a pressure lock, a transitional space between the hospital as a whole and the amputee ward. The array of drinks—the automatic espresso maker and coffee machines were well complemented by refrigerators stocked with juices, sodas, and water—was just one of the subtle amenities designed to make the place more welcoming. The ward was unlike any other part of the hospital, and in fact differed greatly from most conventional health-care facilities. The closest parallels could be found at Brooke Army Medical Center in San Antonio or the handful of units sponsored by the VA or military to rehabilitate stricken soldiers.

  Like the military hospitals, Grace Sisters’ had a large residential facility next door where families, as well as patients not needing bed care, could stay for extended periods. But what truly set the ward apart from other rehab centers was the tight-knit community atmosphere. Patients, loved ones, and staff spent considerable time with each other, as if they were one large, extended family.

  That, and Massina’s inventions. They were the reason most came here in the first place.

  One of the lounge walls was covered with monitoring screens, each of which could be configured to show a different part of the ward. One displayed the exercise pool; another the small lab where Massina’s prosthetics were fine-tuned for patients. Video feeds from the six operating rooms could also be turned on, making it possible for families to follow what was going on.

  The ward’s ethos was one of openness; information was freely shared between everyone, doctor, patient, friend alike. That extended all the way to Massina’s prosthetics, to the great consternation of Smart Metal’s corporate counsel, who objected to their lack of trademark protection.

  “The goal is to heal,” Massina told the lawyer. “If people take my ideas to help others, even better.”

  There had been other words, none too polite, as well. The lawyer wasn’t used to losing many battles and having his advice go unheeded, but it did in this case. He continued to bring the matter up every six months or so for form’s sake, though he had long ago conceded this wasn’t something he would prevail on. Presumably his annual increases in fees provided some consolation.

  Massina had just taken his first sip of coffee when a diminutive woman burst into the lounge from the main hallway, arms pumping as if they were piston rods in an internal combustion engine.

  “Louis!” she snapped. “And how are you tonight?”

  “Very well, Sister. How are you?”

  “Blessed.” Sister Rose Marie had given this answer every time Massina had asked, which, given that he had known her for forty-five years, meant he had heard it quite a lot. He’d met her as a boy in grammar school, long before she’d been assigned to the hospital. Sister Rose was the most positive and enthusiastic person he knew when he was seven; she was still that now.

  “Come,” she told him, “there are some people I’d like you to meet. Bring your coffee—no cappuccino? You really should try that machine. It was a donation.”

  Massina followed the nun as she reversed course and revved down the corridor. Despite the years, Sister Rose seemed the same age she’d been when they met: ancient. The soles of her thick shoes clicked on the freshly waxed floor as she increased her pace. Massina had trouble keeping up.

  The Sisters of Perpetual Grace had given up their thick wool habits and long veils even before Massina had encountered them in grammar school. They wore what even the younger nuns called “civilian clothes”—long dresses that came to midcalf and very modest blouses that neither left anything uncovered nor hugged a body part. All wore necklaces of thick beads that signified their membership in the order, as well as a wedding ring that showed they were “brides of Christ.”

  Dressed in her typical blue skirt and a slightly darker top, Sister Rose wore one additional item tucked into the side of her waistband that set her apart from some of the others: an old string of rosary beads. These were special to her for many reasons, not least of which was the fact that they had once belonged to her best friend: Massina’s aunt, now deceased, with whom she had gone through the novitiate.

  “Would you like to look in on young Thomas?” asked the nun.

  She veered left toward a clinic room before Massina could answer. Inside, a child of ten was bent over in the middle of the room, pulling new shoelaces through the loops of his shoe. His mother and father beamed behind him.

  Tying a shoelace was hardly much of an achievement for a ten-year-old—except that in this case, the fingers he was using were prosthetic. He had lost both of his forearms two years before when a hurricane had taken down his house, crushing them.

  More interesting, at least to Massina, was the exact construction of the arm. The “skin” was actually an inflatable membrane of special vinyl that was the most lifelike Massina had ever touched; it was difficult to distinguish it from flesh. Instead of steel rods inside, the internal skeleton was made of flexible tubing inflated like balloons. Small internal pumps gave the arm far more flexibility than normal prosthetics; it could be bent at a ninety-degree angle, for example.

  It would take quite some time before the boy could control that ability. For now, he was still learning the very basics, directing the machine with his nerve impulses.

  The arm was an outgrowth of Smart Metal’s work with so-called soft robots, a cutting-edge area that so far had not produced marketable or even practical items. But the “conversation” between brain and mechanical fingers was already a tested technology. Remarkably, it had been only a theory at the time of the hurricane that claimed the boy’s arm.

  That was how they worked: fast.

  The kid glanced up from his shoe and smiled at Massina. Massina nodded, then watched with quiet contentment as the child finished the bow. The doctor who had helped develop the hands stood at the side of the room, frowning.

  The boy’s parents applauded as the child finished. Massina nodded to them, then stepped outside. The physician followed.

  “Still a bit of a delay in the software,” grumbled the physician. “We’ll get it.” The complaint pleased Massina—he wanted perfectionists working with him. The doctor was one of the best.

  “You think it’s the flex functions?” Massina asked.

  “It would make sense. If it would be possible to have D.J. go over the systematics personally . . .”

  “I’m sure he’d welcome the opportunity.” D.J. was one of the systems engineers who had helped develop the arm but had recently moved on to another project. “If there’s trouble, let me know.”

  “Thanks, Lou.”

  Massina decided to drop in on another patient whom he’d met a few weeks earlier. A soldier who had stepped on a mine in Iraq, he had received a custom-made leg a month before but was still confined to a hospital bed because of continuing complications with his lungs.

  The doctors who worked with Smart Metal had developed a series of drugs
that could greatly speed his recovery, but they were holding off using them because of concerns over the long-term effects. Massina had actually pulled strings and gotten an FDA waiver for them, but they were holding off until and unless they were convinced that he couldn’t recover without them.

  Massina knocked on the door frame, then took a step inside the room. It was completely empty: no bed, no patient.

  “Jason’s gone home,” said Sister Rose, catching up.

  “What?”

  “He’s with the savior,” said Sister Rose.

  “Why didn’t they use the drugs?”

  “You’ll have to ask the doctors, Louis.”

  Damn it. He could have been helped.

  “You needn’t feel sorry for him, Louis. He was a good Catholic.”

  Massina’s thoughts about religion and the afterlife were considerably more complicated than those the nun preached, but he didn’t feel like having that discussion at the moment. He followed her back to the hall, brooding as they walked to another room.

  The occupant was a boy who’d had his arm and leg severed in a train accident. He’d been fitted with a prosthetic months before but was back on the ward because of an unrelated flare-up of pneumonia. The boy’s face lit up as Massina entered the room—the two were old friends, not least of all because they suffered from the same general injuries. Massina had been very fortunate not to lose his own leg.

  They spent a few minutes talking about the video games the boy was playing lately. They were all “shooters,” and he had very high scores online—a good sign, since it meant his artificial limb let him keep up with kids who had their original hands.

  The boy’s father stood in the corner, watching intently as his son chattered on. Finally, Sister Rose broke up the mostly one-sided conversation, explaining that Massina had a meeting upstairs.

  “Fist bump!” said the boy.

  Their artificial fists clinked against each other. Massina left the room with a smile.