“I understand.”
“Everything costs, these days,” the librarian said. “We’re fighting the battle with the library board to get the fee eliminated, but so far they won’t yield.”
“Yes.”
“Our only rule is no pornography. If people keep calling up pornographic sites, I’m afraid the computers will have to be removed.”
“Do you check to see what people are viewing on the Net?” Elaine asked, pretending to be horrified at this privacy intrusion.
“Oh, no,” the librarian assured her. “But people do walk behind the cubicles, and they talk, you know!”
“Indeed they do. I’m here today to do some research for my thesis.”
“Let me know if you need any help,” the librarian said and turned to help the next person, a pimpled teen with unkempt long hair who looked as if he might be very interested in porno.coms. As Elaine walked away, the library lady began briefing this intent young man on the evils of cybersex.
With the notebook of passwords and computer codes on the table beside her, it took Elaine less than fifteen minutes to get through the security layers into the main computer of the central bank clearinghouse in Hong Kong. Once there, she began searching for the code that her father assured her would be there.
Virgil Cole answered the ringing cell phone on his office desk with his usual “Hello.” He listened a moment, then broke the connection.
“The York units are in,” he told Jake Grafton, who was stretched out on Cole’s couch thinking about his wife. “Want to see them?”
“I thought Sergeant York was a paper program.”
“It’s hardware now.”
“You got six?”
“That’s right.”
“Steal ‘em?”
“No.”
“Buy ‘em?”
“Not quite. Let’s say the American government retains legal title and I have custody.”
“Let’s go look.” Jake reached for his shoes. “I was wondering how you red-hot revolutionaries were going to avoid being massacred by the division of troops the PLA has stationed in Hong Kong. This is it, huh?”
There was not much traffic on the streets at this hour, but Jake Grafton paused in the entrance way of the consulate. Half hidden in the shadows, he restrained Cole with a touch on the arm while he scanned the street in both directions.
Only when he was sure there was no one waiting did he mutter at Cole and step through the entrance.
Cole led the way across the street and along the sidewalk for fifty yards. They went down the first alley they came to, then down a ramp to a loading dock under the skyscraper. A tractor-trailer rig was flush against the loading dock.
Cole climbed the stairs, nodded at two men sitting on the dock, and knocked on the door. A man carrying an assault rifle opened the door. Cole and Grafton went in.
The Sergeant York units were two-legged robots about six and a half feet tall. The legs had three knees — back, front, back — with three-pronged feet. They had articulated arms and, where human hands would be, three flexible grasping appendages, almost like jointed claws, which ended in sharp points. Two were hinged to close inward and one outward, almost like an opposed thumb.
Mounted on the right side of the torso on a flexible mount was a four-barreled Gatling gun that fired standard 5.56 millimeter rounds from a flexible belt feed. Capacity was two hundred rounds.
And the York units had heads mounted on flexible stalks that could turn right or left, be raised or lowered. Two Yorks were standing on the concrete floor back-to-back, turning their heads and looking about with an ominous curiosity.
“The best part,” Cole said with more enthusiasm than Grafton thought he had in him, “is the tail. What do you think of the tail?” The prehensile tail was only about eighteen inches long, thick where it came out of the body and tapering quickly.
“It’s cool.” Jake could think of no other reply.
“The engineers wanted three legs, and the army absolutely refused to buy the thing if it had more than two — they were worried about their image. The tail was my compromise. It helps with stability, balance, agility, shock absorption … With the tail the York is quicker and faster, and can leap higher. And it gives us room for more batteries, which are heavy.”
“What were those soldiers thinking?”
“Yeah.”
Three Chinese men were watching Kerry Kent walk a York out of the semitrailer. She used a small computer unit, much like a laptop. There were no wires. Like Grafton the Chinese men watched the Sergeant York robots and whispered to each other.
Jake Grafton felt mesmerized by the spectral stare of the robots that were outside the trailer. Their heads never stopped moving. They had no mouth or nose, but in the eye-socket position — the widest part of the head — were two cameras. The one on the right side had a lens turret on the face. As Jake inspected the nearest one, the turret rotated another lens in front of the left camera, if it was a camera.
“What the hell are these things looking at?” he asked Cole.
“Us, the room we’re in, everything. They are learning their surroundings.”
“Smart machines?”
“These things use a combination of digital and analog technology in their central processors so they can learn their surroundings without having to carry around computers the size of grand pianos. It’s a neural network, modeled on the human brain. That breakthrough in computer design was one of the advances that took robot technology to another level.”
“I see,” Jake said as the third robot walked to a spot beside the other two and came to a stop. It tilted its head a minute amount, almost quizzically, as it scrutinized the two men.
“One of the fascinating things about neural networks,” Cole continued, “is that the network needs rest periods or the error rate increases. Nap times.”
“What is that thing looking for?” Jake asked, indicating the curious York.
“Just checking for weapons. When they’re in a combat mode, they fire on unidentified persons carrying weapons.”
‘They can’t shoot at everyone with a weapon. How do the Yorks separate the good guys from the bad guys?”
“It’s a complex program, based on physical characteristics — such as size, clothing, sex, possession of a weapon — and aggressive behavior. Some behavioral scientists worked with our programmers to write it.”
“Sex?”
“Most soldiers are men. That’s a fact.”
“I see.”
“My main contributions to the Sergeant York project were some breakthroughs in ultrawide bandwidth radio technology. They communicate with their controller and with each other via UWB, which as you probably know has some unusual characteristics, unlike UHF or VHF.
“So these things talk to each other?”
“They are a true network — what one knows, they all know. Information is exchanged via UWB on a continuous basis, which means that these six are soon working from a very detailed three-dimensional database. Each unit also contains a UWB radar, so it can see through walls and solid objects. Very short-range, of course. The radars are off-the-shelf units, stuff being used to inspect bridge abutments for cracks and look for lost kids in storm sewers.”
“What about the stalk on top of the head?”
“There is a flexible lens there for looking around corners. The sensor on the right side of the head works with visible light, the left with infrared. At night the sensitivity on the right sensor automatically increases so it can handle starlight.”
The fourth York walked out of the truck and took a position beside the others but facing off at a ninety-degree angle.
“These units are prototypes,” Cole explained, “not the refined designs the U.S. army will get as production units. These lack sensors in the rear quadrant, so they usually want to face in different directions so they will get the three-hundred-and-sixty-degree panorama.”