Concord, Massachusetts
Tuesday
Massina’s annoyance at being ripped off and then treated like a dunce by the bank had subsided by the time he woke the next morning in his house outside Boston. There were, after all, many other things occupying his mind, most especially the morning’s test of a new autonomous bot they were working on.
It was just before five o’clock, and still dark. Winter lingered in the low hills around Boston, fogging Massina’s breath as he walked onto the concrete veranda in front of his house. The low-slung, postmodern structure had been situated to take advantage of the view; had it been a little later, Massina might have gazed at the mirror-edged Hancock Tower and the Pru off in the distance. In winter, much of Boston was visible, not just those tall landmarks: you could see the Custom House and even, if the air was clear and the light good, a church spire or two. Thick evergreens obscured things closer to the east and south; the highway, so convenient for his work, was out of sight, as was the industrial area that had first attracted him to the location. If Massina had been more of a dreamer, or rather one who dreamed in a certain way, he might have fantasized that he lived in the middle of untouched land, sufficiently removed from the distant city to be immune from its charms as well as its vices.
But Massina was not that sort of dreamer—no Emerson and certainly no Thoreau; if there was an American he might emulate, it would be Edison or Bell, great thinkers whose thoughts turned to things far more tangible than nature. Though in many respects Massina might be said to be the modern embodiment of the vision Emerson articulated in the essay “Self-Reliance,” Massina’s world was one of computers and robots, of nanotechnology and forces far beyond Emerson’s ken.
The lights at the far end of the winding driveway switched on, announcing the arrival of Chelsea Goodman, who was taking Massina to work today while his car was being serviced. This was a matter of convenience for both of them, since Chelsea didn’t own a car and was using one of the company trucks to transport both herself and the subject of the morning’s test to the proving grounds south of the city.
The gates at the foot of Massina’s property swung open, activated by a coded input from the driver on a small touchpad next to her console. The security system had already read the truck’s license plate, comparing it against its database and DMV data; it had also examined an infrared scan of the interior, making sure Chelsea matched the associated profile. Another sensor “sniffed” the air around the truck, analyzing the molecular contrail that had been enhanced by a light stream of vapor flowing from vents at the side of the driveway; had the contrail contained even a few molecules related to explosives, additional barriers would have sprung up just beyond the gate and an alarm would have sounded.
None of that was actually necessary; Massina in fact disliked security measures of any kind and kept as low a profile as possible in any event. But the system was being tested by his company; grounds security seemed like a growth area, and one where the company’s expertise in advanced AI systems and robotics might possibly give it an advantage.
As it happened, the driver had worked on a small part of the system a year before and was probably as familiar with it as its owner. Chelsea Goodman had joined Smart Metal as an AI specialist barely two years ago. Since then, she had been promoted three times until, at the tender age of twenty-three, she was now Smart Metal’s lead AI developer.
Neither her age nor her rapid advancement was particularly unique, either at the firm or in the industry in general. Even the fact that she was a woman did not make Chelsea Goodman particularly unusual at Smart Metal, which Massina had established as the purest of pure scientific meritocracies from its earliest day. The unique thing about Chelsea was her personality: she practically bubbled when she spoke. Her enthusiasm was infectious, and not just about her field—she could get even a die-hard Red Sox fan, such as Massina, rooting for their longtime nemesis, the New York Yankees, if she wished.
Which made the uncharacteristic frown on her face when she pulled up all the more obvious.
“Problem?” asked Massina, climbing into the Ram 1500 cab.
“We’re good,” she said, lips barely moving, teeth held close together.
“Coffee,” he told her, recognizing the problem.
“I—”
“Starbucks. Go.”
“Thanks.” Her expression brightened; by the time they reached the street she was more or less back to her usual self, adjusting for the hour.
“Long night?” he asked.
“I didn’t sleep. We had some trouble with the secondary logic section.” Chelsea said this with the tone of someone describing their stupendous vacation in Barbados. “In optimizing the memory section, Bobby had used a random fill to get around the zero-bit problem. Of course, he hadn’t been able to test every last permutation, and wouldn’t you know, we hit on a combination that caused a bizarre overload, adding twenty nanoseconds where we should have saved at least sixty-four. . . .”
As Chelsea described the problem and its solution in great detail—in layman’s terms, or as close to it as possible, it had to do with what was essentially a trick in utilizing memory more efficiently than the logic chip’s cache was designed to do—Massina’s thoughts drifted, scattering among some of the other projects his company was working on. While applications for industrial robots were Smart Metal’s major moneymakers, the company had projects in a vast array of areas; not all involved AI and robotics. One of his engineers had designed a golf club whose head corrected for imbalances in its user’s swing, practically guaranteeing long and accurate drives off the tee.
At least according to its inventor. Massina had never tried it himself. He didn’t particularly like golf, and while he had taken a few swings with the club, he could not personally say that it did anything an ordinary driver couldn’t. He did, however, like the idea that the pros they’d hired to test it raved about it.
“Want anything?” Chelsea asked, pulling into the lot of a strip mall dominated by Starbucks.
“I don’t have any cash,” said Massina, suddenly remembering that he hadn’t managed to get to the ATM.
“I’ll spot you,” laughed Chelsea. “Black, no sugar. Tall?”
“Medium. Or small.”
“That’s tall,” said Chelsea, slipping out of the truck. “Twelve shot latte for me.”
“Hmmph,” he said, mentally calculating the effects of that much caffeine on her small frame.
Chelsea Goodman shivered involuntarily as she stepped from the truck. Despite the fact that she had lived in the Northeast for some six years now—four while studying at MIT, and two with Smart Metal—the San Diego native still had not adjusted to the climate. Winter itself didn’t bother her as much as the long wait for spring that characterized the end of March and beginning of April. Mentally done with ice and snow, she wanted flowers and much longer days, or at least days where she could comfortably bike to work without a parka.
Though it was barely past five, the line at the counter snaked around the ground coffee display to the mocha pots at the store entrance. This Starbucks was one of the few in the area that opened before six, which made it an oasis for caffeine-starved early risers.
Chelsea took a step back and did a high lunge, a basic yoga move that stretched her lower body. The man in front of her glanced around, clearly concerned that she might do something more dangerous.
“Just staying warm.” She smiled at him, twisting left and right. He rolled his eyes and turned back toward the counter.
Chelsea was excited about the morning test; now that they had solved the memory problem, she felt the bot would easily pass its functional tests. The robot was an offshoot of an earlier design used by the military to retrieve mines and IEDs without exposing soldiers to their dangers. Where the original was operated by remote control, this one was completely autonomous; it could be told to locate ordinance, safe it, and then place it in a robot vehicle for transportation or disposal. While these tasks were relatively straightforward—Smart Metal had a “mech,” or programmed robot, that could do all of those things already—the bot’s size and production costs were the real innovations. RBT PJT 23.A—more commonly known to the developers as “Peter”—folded itself into a tool-bag-sized case. The AI computing unit and sensors were all off-the-shelf, the former actually centered around a processing unit used for the latest version of the Apple iMac. Pushing an architecture designed to run a home computer into areas ordinarily reserved for the human brain had been, and continued to be, an exhilarating challenge.
Exactly the reason she was here.
A strange scent tickled Chelsea’s nose as she moved up in the line. It was an off note, a double-flat in the olfactory symphony of coffee blends and roasts.
Rotten eggs?
It reminded her of the ancient gymnastics studio where she’d spent much of her elementary school afternoons.
Mold?
Natural gas?
The Starbucks building was in a small strip mall directly across from a row of much older residential buildings; in a few hours the close-in suburb would be clogged with work traffic, but at the moment the streets were nearly deserted. Massina gazed at the row of late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century row houses surrounding the plaza. Varying between three and five stories tall, each building housed several apartments, some two or three on each floor.
The inventor had spent much of his childhood in a succession of similar houses. There was nothing to be particularly nostalgic about; his childhood had been far from gilded. And yet he remembered bits and pieces fondly, and knew he had learned a great deal, whether in the hardscrabble streets or the strict Jesuit grammar school where his abilities were first recognized.
Massina had started working at ten, sweeping the floor of a butcher shop several blocks away from here. His boss, a cousin of his mother, had been difficult; work had nonetheless been an oasis compared to his home, where his mother’s erratic, alcohol-fueled behavior had filled the small rooms with danger as well as . . .
. . . The building he was looking at suddenly flashed yellow, then red, as fire surged from a dozen points at once. The air filled with glass, wood, and brick. A shock of air yanked the front of Massina’s truck upward and back; it slammed down so hard that the air bags exploded.
Dazed, Massina grabbed for the door handle and grappled with the seat belt. He fell out to the pavement, the car alarm blaring. Flames seemed to be everywhere, sucking air so quickly it whistled.
Get Chelsea, Massina told himself, struggling to his feet. Get Chelsea to safety, damn you, old man!
His mouth and throat filled with a mist of fine powder from the air bag. Massina began to cough. The air blackened as a furl of soot descended over the buildings; it gave way slowly to a red and yellow glow, the fire pushing away the smoke as it rose. The street looked as if a tornado had cut through a war zone: debris, big and small, littered the road and parking lot.
Legs shaking, Massina steadied himself against his truck, then started toward Starbucks.
He found Chelsea lying on the sidewalk just in front of the building. She had just stepped out when the explosion occurred; knocked backward, she lay on the ground, stunned and surrounded by glass.
Massina bent to her, not sure whether she was dead or alive. He caught a glimpse of people inside the store trying to help each other, moving as if in slow motion.
Chelsea moved her head.
“Up!” Massina barked at her. “We got to get away from the building.”
Chelsea’s face and clothes were speckled with blood where small bits of stone-shrapnel had peppered her skin. She was in shock.
“Chelsea!” Massina barked. “Get up!”
She blinked, then slowly got to her feet. “My coffee!”
“Come on.”
Massina helped her to the side of the Starbucks building, struggling to get his own bearings. The blast had muffled his hearing, and he felt as if he had a helmet over his head.
“Are you bleeding?” he asked.
She waved her hand; she didn’t seem to be hearing well either. But she seemed OK, just dazed.
Massina reached his right hand—the artificial one—into his pocket and took out his phone. “Nine-one-one,” he told the custom dialing app. “Report fire at this location. And an explosion.”
There was already a siren in the distance. People from the buildings across the street came out to see what was going on.
“People!” yelled someone. “There are people inside the building on fire!”
Chelsea looked at Massina and blinked. Her eyes seemed to focus. In the next moment she was on her feet, running toward the far end of the building.
It took Massina a moment to react, and several more before he realized that, rather than running away to safety, she was running toward the fire. “Wait! Wait!” he yelled, running after her.
The Starbucks had received barely a glancing blow from the explosion; the only damage was to the windows. The two stores next to it were similarly pockmarked by flying debris and shattered glass; the masonry fronts on both were caved in but still intact. The real damage was to the older building adjacent to them. The explosion had obliterated the front half of the building, a three-story Victorian-era house that had been clad in shingles; the back wall was twisted and shriveling, though its panels had somehow managed to resist the fire. The two row houses that abutted it on the other side had been largely untouched by the explosion, but they were now on fire, as were two more beyond them.
Chelsea stopped in front of the destroyed building, gaping at the twisted wreckage. A woman in a cotton nightgown stood nearby, her face covered with soot.
“Mrs. Stevens! Mrs. Stevens!” shouted the woman.
“Who’s Mrs. Stevens?” asked Massina.
“Look!”
Massina saw a shadow in the top window. He guessed it was Mrs. Stevens.
“We have to get her out of there,” said Chelsea.
As if on cue, flames flared behind the woman, throwing her silhouette in sharp contrast. She had something in her arms—a child.
Chelsea had stopped a few feet away. She stared up at the house, then started for the front door.
Massina ran to grab her. “No, no, no!”
A ball of flames burst through the first-floor façade. Chelsea stopped short.
“Get the bot!” Massina shouted to Chelsea. “Get Peter.”
She stood motionless for a moment longer, then twisted around and ran back in the direction of the truck.
“She’s going to die,” said the woman in the nightgown. “Where are the firemen?”
“We’ll help her,” said Massina. He looked up at the window. The woman had disappeared.
Chelsea’s thoughts moved in four directions at once; she felt as if her brain were physically bumping against the confines of her skull. She ran in the direction of the truck, or what she thought was the direction of the truck, only to realize that she had gone out to the road; she corrected and darted back toward the rear of the pickup.
The bot’s container was in a large box at the back of the truck bed, wedged between two larger boxes that contained monitoring gear and backup controls. Chelsea grabbed the box and, despite its size and weight, hauled it on top of the truck cab; she had to pull over one of the other boxes to get high enough to reach the snap locks at the top of the case.
Come on, come on, she mumbled to herself. Get it out!
Peter looked a little like a headless horse designed by Picasso. Made primarily of carbon fiber compounds and titanium, the small robot had four legs that articulated from a slim, seven-sided irregular central box; it could stand and move on two or four of any of these legs. The six-fingered claws at the end of each could pick up and hold items as small as a dime. Despite its size—unfolded and standing on four legs, it was only .683 meters tall, or a little over two feet high—it could carry roughly five hundred pounds.
Something exploded in the distance. Chelsea froze, bile creeping into the back of her mouth.
Go, girl, go!
The words were her father’s, seemingly implanted at birth. It was his voice she inevitably heard when in trouble, whether on the uneven bars as a five-year-old or a work project now.
Go, girl, go!
His voice was as strong now as it had been in the gym at the state gymnastics championships—embarrassing then, galvanizing now.
Go, girl, go!
The heat of the fire on Massina’s face felt like a sunburn. No more than two or three minutes had passed since the explosion, yet it seemed like an eternity.
Where are those fire trucks? Where is Chelsea with the bot?
“Here we are!” Chelsea dropped to her knees, skidding on the hard concrete. She had RBT PJT 23.A in her arms.
“The control unit!” said Massina. “Go back and get it.”
“No time,” said Chelsea. “And we don’t need it.”
She reached under the robot’s body and found a small slide; pushing it back revealed a fingerprint reader. Seconds later, the bot stiffened its limbs, signaling that it was powering up.
Massina went down to one knee opposite Chelsea. The bot was between them. He reached underneath, sliding his fingers around until he found the slot where the reader was. The machine, now alive, beeped in recognition.
“Skip diagnostics,” he told the robot. “Natural language mode.”
It beeped, acknowledging the order.
“Proceed to the four-story building that is on fire. Retrieve woman and child from floor four.”
The robot didn’t move.
“Go,” Massina added. “Take the woman and child to safety one at a time.”
The bot still didn’t move.
Massina’s hasty and frankly vague instructions had to be translated and analyzed before they could be acted on; not only were they fairly generic, at least to a machine, but they also related to a task that the machine had never encountered before. Though it had climbed numerous buildings, and it did know what a woman and a child were, it had never had an exercise anywhere near as complicated as this.
“We’re going to have to get the controller,” said Massina. “We need to make sure it knows what to do.”
Chelsea grabbed him as he got up to run. “Wait. Look.”
RBT PJT 23.A beeped and started toward the building.
Massina and Chelsea followed. The heat seemed blast-furnace hot.
But what had happened to the woman? She wasn’t at the window.
The robot continued into the flames.
Turning, Massina ran to the truck. The control unit would be the only way to alter the bot’s commands at this point, and very possibly the only way to get the small machine out of the building if it got stuck.
If this had happened in six months, even three, the bot could get them out. Now, though . . . there is still so much to do.
Massina grabbed the case and started back to the building. It was a long box, awkward to carry, though not heavy. Firemen were arriving, pulling out hoses, directing a ladder truck. In the confusion no one questioned him; the case made him look as if he belonged.
By the time he reached Chelsea, the woman had reappeared at the window. She was holding her child in one hand and pushing at the glass pane with the other. Someone nearby yelled at her not to open the window, to wait for the firemen to arrive, but even if she could have heard them, the advice would have been difficult to follow, flying against all instinct. She finally succeeded in breaking the glass with the palm of her hand, pulling it back and knocking at the rest of the pane with her elbow. Wind whipped through the opening; the wall at the far end of the room caught fire, flashing red behind her.
“Oh God! She’d better jump,” said Chelsea, running toward the building.
Massina left the control unit in its box and followed, thinking they might at least catch the baby. But the flames at the base of the building pushed them back.
More glass shattered above, raining through the fire and smoke.
“Look!” yelled Chelsea.
Peter had bulled its way through a second-story window. Crawling up the frame, it clawed at the shingles, moving up the outer wall like a slow-motion spider.
“Hey! Get back!” Someone grabbed Massina’s shoulder, pulling him around. It was a policeman. “The place is going to explode!”
“We have to get that woman out of the building!” yelled Chelsea.
“Let the firemen work!”
The officer began pushing Massina back. Massina raised his right arm, took hold of the officer’s uniform, and lifted him backward and out of the way.
Clearly surprised by the strength of the rather short man before him, the officer grabbed at Massina’s arm. It was then that he got his second surprise—never much on appearances, Massina hadn’t bothered to put the “flesh” covering on today, so the cop gripped several tubes of steel and protective carbon tunnels for the wiring.
A fresh explosion rent the air. Flames shot from the top of the building next to them. Massina released the policeman and turned back, searching for Chelsea through the smoke and dust.
“Chelsea!”
“I have her,” yelled Chelsea, emerging from smoke with the baby in her arms.
RBT PJT 23.A followed, moving on three legs; the fourth held the woman it had rescued a foot above the pavement, as if it were an ant retrieving a prize grasshopper for the queen.