“You sent money. Why?”
There was a glimmer of something in his face then. Recognition, definitely. Then a little confusion. Then his mask of impertinence was back. After a moment, he gave me a cold yellow smile.
“I want my lawyer,” he said.
I smiled back.
“Don’t worry, Al. A lawyer will be provided for you. That’s what makes our country so great, you see. Free lawyers, stuff like that. Maybe one day you might want to ask yourself why you want to wreck it so badly.”
He started laughing then.
“More amusement, Al?” I said. “I got you all wrong. You’re just a big teddy bear, aren’t you?”
“You’re here about the attacks,” he said. “The mayor, the bombing, the EMP.”
“Why, yes,” I said. “Have you heard anything about these things, by chance?”
“No,” al Gharsi said calmly. “But I must admit, I am quite a fan of whoever is so brilliantly attacking New York City and bringing this corrupt-to-the-core Great Satan to its knees.”
Al started chuckling again.
“You think I have something to do with it. Me! You come up here with your helicopters and men kicking in the door. But you are clueless. You are losing. You are flailing. You don’t even know which direction to duck. Allah willing, you are about to be defeated, I think.”
A minute later, I left the living room and followed Emily out of the house and onto the back porch.
In the farmyard’s sole electric light, thirty yards to the south, some shoeless middle-school-age kids, al Gharsi’s, probably, were kicking a basketball around as troopers interviewed black-clad, burka-wearing aunts and mothers. I wished suddenly that I were home with my own kids.
“What do you think?” I said to Emily.
“I think what you think,” Emily said. “I think we just dug ourselves another dry hole.”
Chapter 47
Sixty-five miles due south, betwee
n the Brooklyn neighborhoods of Fort Greene and Bedford-Stuyvesant, three glowing windows stood out sharply on the top floor of the Pratt Institute’s otherwise dark North Hall building.
On the other side of the translucent window shades was a large, white-walled lab space that was the showpiece of Pratt’s brand-new robotics facility. At its center, a young man and two young women sat at the largest of the stainless steel lab tables, side by side, working busily.
They had an assembly line going. Aaron started off with the brushless motor controller and flywheel and the flywheel’s braking mechanism. Gia, who had a light touch with the soldering iron, fit in the tiny electronics board and the radio receiver, while Shui popped in rolling-pin-like magnets and put additional magnets onto the face of the small, square white plastic panels.
The finished product was a white-and-silver cube about the size of a quarter. It looked innocuous enough, like a tiny futuristic children’s block.
But these definitely were not Junior’s LEGOs, Shui thought as she clicked on the mini robot’s test software on the iPad.
Immediately there was a whirring sound as the computer-initiated radio signal activated the bot’s interior flywheel. When the computer-dictated amount of RPMs were reached, the flywheel halted suddenly, catapulting the bot across the table. Another whir and flip, and the bot snapped into position onto the end of a line of six minibots that were already arranged in a straight row.
Then, with another click on the iPad, the magic really began as the tiny minibots started leapfrogging each other, moving steadily across the table just as a half-track would roll over a tank. Shui knew she was supposed to place the bots carefully into a foam-lined box at the end of the counter, but the boss wasn’t around, was he? One by one, she made the minibots whir and flip into the box.
“Ah, my aching wrists!” said Gia, a 4.0 junior, as she removed her magnifying goggles. “There has to be a labor law against this. How long have we been at it? Ten hours now? I feel like one of those kids in India forced to hand-roll cigarettes. I mean, I really think I’m getting carpal tunnel syndrome.”
“Now, now. Time is money. We’re not getting paid by the hour but by the minibot, remember? Keep rowing the slave boat so Aaron the Baron here can score himself some nice front-row seats at Coachella,” Aaron said, snapping components together and flicking them toward Gia as though they were lunch-table footballs.
“No one is going to get paid a dime if these bots are damaged, damn it,” said Dr. Seth Keshet as he stormed in.
Fresh from running the world-renowned PhD program at Carnegie Mellon’s Robotics Institute, tall, dark, and cocky Keshet was one of the top three people in the world in digital topology. But with his meticulously tailored casual suits and visible chest hair, he acted more like a scuzzy Eurotrash club lizard than a famous scientist.
“How many?” he wanted to know.