Pyramid Lake

by Draker, Paul

  “To go fuck yourself. I don’t normally say things like that to people.”

  “Oh.”

  She peered at the screen, where the desktop image was now visible—Amy with a gap-toothed five-year-old’s grin.

  “Is that your daughter?” she asked.

  “No.”

  “Well, then, best of luck with everyth—”

  A rumbling metallic voice drowned her out, rattling the glass tiles of the raised floor beneath our feet and echoing from the server racks all around. “Trevor, I see your new research partner has returned,” it said. “Should I continue to monitor and record what she’s feeling now? Or will you only be interested in her earlier visit when we talk later?”

  Cassie’s eyes widened.

  “‘Talk later’ means after she’s left.” I tossed the keyboard aside. “Nice going.”

  I didn’t need Frankenstein to tell me what Cassie was feeling now. Emotions played across her face in rapid sequence—surprise to anger, to disgust, to overwhelming curiosity—all in less than a second.

  Sliding the strap of her laptop bag off her shoulder, she slowly lowered it to the floor tiles. “I think the plan was for you to show me around the facility,” she said.

  CHAPTER 13

  “How much do you know about DARPA?” I asked.

  Cassie considered the question as we walked down the hall toward the other labs. “Well, DARPA focuses on high-risk, high-reward projects that give the U.S. a decisive long-term technical edge over our enemies, and prevent strategic surprise in future conflicts.”

  “Guess you read the mission statement,” I said. “Forget that. We tackle the big, hairy tech problems that are too hard for anyone else. The stuff we create changes the world.”

  “Like the Internet,” she said.

  “No, that wasn’t us. It was Al Gore.”

  “DARPA’s small,” she said. “A lot smaller than LLNL was. And a lot less structured, it seems—”

  “Less pointless bureaucratic inefficiency, you mean.”

  “Call it what you want. I can’t believe how informally the whole facility appears to be run. That’ll take some getting used to, if I do end up staying.”

  Don’t worry, I thought. You won’t.

  “DARPA cherry-picks the best and brightest talent from academia, industry, and government,” I said. “They don’t believe in babysitting us. They turn us loose, give us access to the resources we need, and then we get things done—for the most part through partnerships with industry, but when necessary, we bring key projects in-house to make sure they get done right—particularly on the black side.”

  A spark of anger in her eyes. “My TS/SCI is current from my LLNL work.”

  My earlier comments hung in the air between us, making things awkward. I must have been half asleep when McNulty brought her in, because in retrospect, the last-minute political-hire theory was pretty dumb. To work at Pyramid Lake, she needed a Top Secret-Sensitive Compartmented Information clearance like mine, and the background investigation for the TS/SCI took months.

  “We’ve got four active DARPA projects at Pyramid Lake right now.” I stopped in front of the door to Kate’s lab and raised my key card to the lock. “MADRID, which is mine. Kate’s Autonomous Formation-Flying OctoRotor Swarm—AFFORS—which you’re about to see. And then after lunch, we’ll check out Blake’s dorky robots and Roger’s boring composites.”

  “Lunch?” she said. “It’s almost three.”

  “So? I’m hungry.” I slid the key card and the door lock buzzed. We went in.

  Kate and her team of four had cleared the lab’s auditorium-size central area, where the ceiling rose two stories, and marked out a grid of one-foot-square cells with black tape on the floor. In the center of the room, two dozen small shapes, each the size of a model helicopter, hovered in the air, making an evenly spaced pattern. The OctoRotors floated in eerie silence.

  Kate stood next to a monitor, hunched over and typing. One of the OctoRotors lay on the work surface next to her. A soldering iron sat on a holder alongside it, still smoking. She looked up at me, and the eager expression on her face soured. “Oh, great,” she said. “What do you want—?”

  Then, spotting Cassie, she straightened up.

  “Kate, Cassie,” I said. “Cassie, Kate.”

  “Pleased to meet you.” Kate came forward and extended a hand to shake Cassie’s. She looked at Cassie with curiosity.

  “I’m joining the MADRID team,” Cassie said. “I’ll be working with Trevor.”

  “Oh,” Kate said. “I’m so sorry.”

  I ignored Kate’s insult. What Cassie had just said caught me by surprise. When had she decided to stay?

  “You should be glad someone actually wants to see your little toys,” I said to Kate. “But we don’t have all day. Show us what you showed Linebaugh. The demo, I mean—skip the PowerPoint slides.”

  “What’s wrong with your hand?” Kate asked.

  “Caught it in a door,” I said. Cassie’s face darkened, but she didn’t say anything.

  Kate picked up the half-assembled OctoRotor from the workbench and held it out to Cassie. It looked like a pair of giant water-strider bugs stuck back to back. The eight round rotor guards resembled the circles a water strider’s legs made on the surface of a pond.

  “The AFFORS hardware is pretty basic,” Kate said. “Each unit is made of carbon-fiber polymer, weighs two kilograms, and uses a configuration of eight steel rotors to hover and maneuver. They can reach speeds of up to seventy miles an hour, but that’s not really what they’re designed for. At higher speeds, the rotors get noisy and we lose stealth, and they don’t really have great battery life yet. Their primary design mission is to complement the warfighter in urban environments, performing autonomous real-time surveillance and mapping.”

  “Kate’s brothers didn’t let her play model airplanes with them when she was a kid,” I said. She and Cassie both ignored me.

  “The blades are sharp,” Cassie said, fingering the circular plastic Frisbee rim that bordered a rotor. “I can see why you need these guards.”

  “The edge profile of the rotors reduces audio signature at lower speeds. But like I said, the hardware’s pretty basic. It’s the software that makes AFFORS special.” She walked back to her keyboard and entered a few commands.

  The hovering OctoRotors in the center of the room swarmed into motion, swirling around and past each other in a synchronized pattern. The midair collision that seemed imminent at any second never happened.

  Kate nodded toward the swarm. “Since he’s not much use for anything else, maybe Trevor can demonstrate their collision-avoidance capabilities.”

  “No way,” I said. “I don’t trust your programming.”

  “Chickenshit,” she said, and walked into the center of the swirling cluster of OctoRotors. Cassie stiffened, but the pattern continued to move around Kate, never touching her, diverting and reforming with minimal adjustments as she moved through it. She reached up and swept her arms around, as if trying to grab one of the little flyers, but they moved just far enough to avoid her fingertips.

  “Wow,” Cassie said, smiling. “Amazing.”

  Kate pointed toward one of her assistants, and he tapped on the keyboard. The pattern changed, dividing. Six intersecting circles of OctoRotors now orbited Kate at different angles, like electrons around the nucleus of a model atom.

  Kate walked toward us, and the bands of circling OctoRotors moved forward with her. Cassie took a step back, but I held my ground.

  The assistant entered another command on the keyboard, and the OctoRotors scattered toward the back of the open lab space. A moment later, they were flying toward us again, carrying colorful brick-size blocks underneath, held by small manipulator arms. The first group of OctoRotors deposited the blocks—sturdy cardboard toys—on the floor grid, making a spaced rectangle. A second row, a third, and a fourth rapidly appeared atop the first as the OctoRotors fetched more blocks. Each level was offset
from the one below, creating an airy geometric structure that twisted as it rose higher and higher from the floor.

  I had seen Kate’s demo for Linebaugh on Friday, so instead I watched Cassie out of the corner of my eye. She was clapping, a delighted grin on her face. Shit.

  “Amazing!” she said again. “This is fully autonomous?”

  Kate nodded.

  The OctoRotors flew faster and faster, depositing row after row without colliding or tumbling the tower of blocks, which was now taller than we were. At higher speeds now, they made a faint buzz in the air.

  “Well, you get the general idea,” I said. “Let’s go.” I turned and walked toward the door.

  “I’m not ready to leave yet,” Cassie said. “I’ll meet you at the cafeteria.”

  “Suit yourself,” I said, and left.

  CHAPTER 14

  I sat alone at a table by the window, looking out over the lake and wondering how to convince my new co-lead she didn’t really want to be here after all. I didn’t want to be outright rude to her, especially after our earlier misunderstanding. But I could also see she was no Bob Chen. Getting her to quit wouldn’t be easy.

  I poked at my no-dressing Caesar salad with a fork. The jailhouse-tattooed guy who worked the grill had given me the stink-eye again. I hated having to monitor him every time I ordered, but I had to make sure he didn’t do anything nasty, like spit in my entrée, all because a month ago I’d forgotten a cardinal rule: never piss off somebody who is preparing your food.

  “Hey, man…” Roger slid into the chair across from me. “Check this out.” He opened his hand, and something small and metallic spun on the table surface. It looked like the top half of a crayon made of silvery metal.

  I picked it up in my fingers. It was surprisingly heavy. “A DU two-two-three bullet?”

  “I cast some three-o-eights, three-thirty-eights, and fifties, also,” he said. “Let’s go to the range tomorrow.”

  “Tomorrow’s Tuesday,” I said. Although trying out bullets made of DU—depleted uranium—sounded fun.

  “Don’t be lame,” he said. “You worked all weekend because your kid wasn’t visiting.”

  “How would you know?”

  “I drove by your house a few times.”

  “That’s a little creepy.” I stared out the window again. “You need more friends.”

  “Look who’s talking…” Roger suddenly shifted in his chair, and grabbed my arm. “Oh, man, you’re not gonna be-lieve what I’m seeing.”

  Without looking, I raised a hand in an unenthusiastic wave. A moment later a chair beside me scraped as my new co-lead joined us.

  “Roger, Cassie,” I said. “Cassie, Roger.”

  “Holy shit.” Roger stared at her. Then he turned to me. “Trevor, you dog. When’d you two hook up?”

  A look of disgust crossed Cassie’s face. I was embarrassed for Roger.

  “You dumb-ass,” I said. “TS, remember?”

  “Oh, yeah,” Roger said. “No kidding. You can’t just bring a girlfriend into a Top Secret facility for a lunch date. So, she works here?”

  Cassie cleared her throat. “I started today, on MADRID.”

  “But that’s Trev’s project,” Roger said.

  She didn’t say anything to that. I liked her a little better for it.

  Roger spun the DU bullet on the table and looked at her. He rubbed his goatee. “So, are you like… his assistant or something?”

  “My new co-lead,” I said. “Cassie’s doctorate is from Caltech. She worked on the Sequoia at LLNL.”

  “Look…” Roger leaned forward. “About what happened Friday night—”

  “I’m really not interested,” Cassie said, and stood up.

  I still felt bad about Tank-Top Ray and his kid’s car seat.

  “I was a little tense at the time,” I said. “I might have overreacted. A bit.”

  “A little tense?” she said. “Well, then I’d hate to see what happens when you actually get angry.”

  CHAPTER 15

  On the way to Blake’s robotics lab, I stopped at the door marked “Emergency Stairwell,” and reached for the handle. “Come on,” I said to Cassie.

  “What about this?” She pointed to the words painted in red on the door: “Opening will sound alarm.”

  “Ignore it,” I said, and pushed open the door.

  Her gaze traveled along the edge of the door frame, until she spotted the short wire I had added to disable the alarm. “Is security really this lax around here?” she asked.

  “Security’s actually so tight it’s ridiculous,” I said. “No Internet access, even though we’re the ones who created the damn Internet.”

  I started up, and after a few seconds, I heard her high heels echoing on the metal stairs below me.

  At the top of the stairwell, five floors up, I opened the fire door and stepped out onto the roof. The bright sunlight made me squint.

  “From up here, you can see the layout of the whole facility,” I said.

  Cassie wove between the air-conditioning units to join me at the railing. She looked out over the vast blue expanse of the lake.

  “Trying to get me fired my first day?” she asked.

  “Nobody monitors the roof,” I said, pointing at Blake’s oversize cylindrical bucket ashtray. “Blake comes up here all the time to smoke.”

  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 fo
r 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.