The Media Candidate (9 page)

Sherwood devoured every word and said, “So the
party is actually a platform from which to perform investigations.
But who is being investigated?”

“Anyone who might be a threat to the political
freedoms of Americans. And the duties occasionally go beyond just
investigation and data gathering. The liaison officer is sometimes
called upon to work closely with our enforcement division.” He
paused. “So it isn’t a place for pansies.”

Now Sherwood was riveted on the Asp, although he
fought to give no outward appearance of his building passion.

“I believe you may go far in a COPE field
assignment,” the Asp said to his protégé. “Since it’s viewed by
many as a steppingstone position, there’s a frequent enough turn
over in these positions that several openings come up every year.
It’s actually an excellent place for someone with strong analytical
talents and an interest in investigation. How does it sound to you,
Sherwood?”

“I can handle it, sir.”

“In that case, you’ll probably need some
grooming for the position. Your background in political science may
be incomplete, but that can be easily mediated by a stint at the
COPE Institute. After six months of intensive training in the
history, theory, and reality of politics, someone as bright as
yourself would appear to have spent a long career in the political
arena.”

Sherwood enthusiastically grasped the
opportunity and opted for the training, which he knew, would lead
him to the cloak-and-dagger world of a field investigator. Just as
he’d chosen engineering as a way to advance in the high tech world
of COPE, he embraced this new opportunity to get closer to his
ultimate niche.

But he dreamed of more than agents, hidden
cameras, and blackmail. He had spiders on his mind. He had spent
thousands of hours molding spiders into an image he fantasized for
himself. He admired their strength and swiftness, their powers of
memory and focus, their sensitivity to the most subtle disclosure.
But most of all he revered their mastery of intimidation and
prowess at homicide. He fantasized having his own spider.
I may
yet end up a real spy
, he thought,
and on the winning
side
.

“I really appreciate your taking time off from
The Institute to give us a hand, Sherwood.” The Asp extended his
hand and smiled. Then his face reflected more gravity as he
continued, but in tiny steps that most people would be unaware of
until the transformation was complete. “I’ve been reviewing our
field-report summaries and noticed a trend. The problem became more
obvious when I quizzed the field agents who had reviewed the
playback data. Jenner and I both thought it would be valuable for
you to see it and help us make some decisions about how to approach
the problem, even though you are out of the loop for actually
working the fix.”

“I appreciate your confidence in me, sir.”
Sherwood broke eye contact with the Asp to inspect the same
conference room where he and Jenner had received the Project Dagger
challenge. This time, however, the room was configured for a
holographic virtual conference.

“We three can sit over here and the virt will be
there. Her name is Maxwell. She’s the Director of Special
Assignments.”

Sherwood stood behind his chair and removed a
meerschaum pipe from his jacket pocket, filled it with a Latakia
blend, lit it with a gold-cased lighter, and exhaled a cloud of
aromatic smoke over the head of the Asp who was seated and just
filling one of his own pipes from the cherry pipe rack. He reached
into his jack pocket for a match. Then he reached into another
pocket. Sherwood handed his gold-cased lighter to the Asp who
nodded in gratitude while lifting the lighter toward his pipe. He
then set the lighter on the conference table between Sherwood and
himself.

A life-sized hologram of Maxwell appeared across
the table as Sherwood took his seat on the other side of the Asp
from Jenner.

“Maxwell, this is Sherwood, our principal
control-system engineer, and Jenner, our principal software
engineer.” Sherwood and Maxwell nodded to each other, neither
making any other facial gesture. Jenner smiled.

“As we discussed this morning,” Maxwell began,
“I uncovered this problem over the last couple of months as I
reviewed our unsuccessful engagement playbacks. Rather than explain
the problem again, I chose one that exemplifies what’s happening so
clearly that anyone can see what your gadgets are doing.” With no
hesitation or request for consent, the TV display covering the
front of the room began a presentation. The first scene occurred
well into the scenario. It showed a still picture of a man in a
business suit looking back over his shoulder directly at the
camera. “Here is the target just as it discovers it is under
attack. Now we’ll watch the rest of the sequence at one tenth
speed.”

The man’s mouth opened and his eyes filled with
terror as he recognized his assailant. He turned and began running.
It was night and he had a hard time seeing objects in his way,
although the low-light-level optical imager of the spider made the
scene look like daylight. When the man swerved suddenly, his image
became blurry until one point when the blurry image suddenly became
clear.

“There’s the high-bandwidth snap,” Jenner said,
“from 30 Hertz to 100 Hertz.”

From then on, every image was crisp. The man ran
into a street just as the spider was preparing to leap. A
motorcycle entered the field-of-view from the right and swerved
hard, just missing the man and crossing between the man and the
spider. The spider became airborne a fraction of a second later,
but the center of its field-of-view pitched suddenly during its
brief flight from the running man to the passing motorcyclist. The
picture went completely out of focus a moment later.

“Bingo! Another incorrect target,” Maxwell said.
“Fourth time in a year. You hotshot engineers want to see it again?
You want to see again how your wonderful—”

“Yes,” Jenner interrupted. “But this time give
me control of the playback and sensor prompts.”

Without saying a word, Maxwell pulled down a
menu on her computer, hit three keys, and said, “You got it,
Jenny.”

Sherwood pulled the pipe from his lips and
delivered a cloud that obscured one of the holograph laser beams
causing Maxwell’s image to break up momentarily. Jenner backed up
to where the scenario had started and watched the man’s question
turn to horror again. This time when it got to the high-bandwidth
snap, she stopped the action. Working the menus of one of the
computer terminals built into the conference room table, a bright
outline of the man appeared around him. “There’s the target edge.”
Working the menu again, a cross appeared in the middle of his body.
“And there’s the centroid. And now when we start this going again,
we should see the aimpoint selection come on in a few frames.” The
action started again, and shortly a cross with a circle around it
appeared at the back of the man’s neck. When the motorcycle began
crossing in front of the man, she slowed the playback further as
all eyes watched the evolving error.

“There it is,” she said, stopping the action
again. “Break lock!”

“There may be more to it than just edge
congruence and centroid matching,” Sherwood said. “It may also be
velocity dependent.”

“Right. And that gets into the stereo processor.
We probably didn’t see it during the validation tests because we
never stressed the stereo processor and the SPP simultaneously in
high-bandwidth.”

“We need to look at the convolution of the edge
spatial-frequencies on each side separately,” Sherwood said. “Maybe
the FFT is not good enough, and we need a full PSD peak level for
each frame.”

“Why don’t you two save all this nerd crap for
the bedroom,” Maxwell said. “All I know is that when we hit the
wrong target, it’s a very inefficient use of COPE resources—besides
tipping off the real target. And how about our embarrassment? We’ve
always got a cover story to leak to the media, but it really
presses our creative juices to come up with a new story about some
random jerk.” Jenner’s and Maxwell’s virtual eyes met momentarily.
“Sometimes even
we
aren’t that good.”

Maxwell paused for a moment while she reloaded
her verbal slingshot. By the time her weapon was leveled, she could
see that Jenner and Sherwood were deep into a technical discussion,
but that just pushed her to pull back the sling an extra notch and
point it at the Asp. “Besides getting this piece of shit fixed
yesterday, could you tell me in a few words I can understand, just
what the hell is wrong with your goddamn gizmos?”

The Asp stood up and said, “I’ll try to do that
in language that even you can understand. During the end-game
segment of the attack, the spider is updating its track file one
hundred times-per-second instead of the normal thirty
times-per-second used during the earlier part of the engagement.
The spider’s stereo video images might not be processed
sufficiently during this one hundredth of a second between TV
frames to maintain the desired video separation between two
objects. In other words, under certain conditions, the
one-hundredth of a second it has to study the TV picture of its
target might not be sufficient to prevent it from being confused by
some similar-looking target that might be very close to the desired
target. It’s possible then for the terminal-intercept computer to
break lock from the desired target and lock on to the interloping
target instead. The higher data-rate of a hundred stereo
frames-per-second is needed for end game accuracy, but it pushes
the real-time processor capabilities pretty hard and could cause a
fatal error at this critical part of the scenario.”

“Yeah … that’s what I thought. So when are
you—”

“We’ll be back to you ASAP.”

With the conference concluded, they replayed the
engagement video two more times. “Look at the airborne timer,”
Jenner said. “This thing was almost 900 milliseconds into its
terminal leap when it broke lock. Target contact occurred at 1.2
seconds, so it had only 300 milliseconds to acquire the wrong
target, define the new centroid, change the aimpoint selection, and
reconfigure the strike parameters for a successful termination of
the new target. That’s incredible. I had no idea it was that good.
Better than any Olympic athlete.”

“Too bad it was so successful against the wrong
target,” the Asp said. He looked at Jenner who nodded and then at
Sherwood who remained focused on the frame showing the new aimpoint
at a tenth-of-a-second before target contact.

The three sat in silence until the Asp spoke.
“It looks like we have some real work ahead of us.” He picked up
the gold lighter and relit his pipe.

“At least we have a pretty good handle on the
problem,” Jenner said. “We knew something like this could happen.
There just isn’t enough room in the beast to add any more parallel
processors. We probably need about eight or ten more vectors to
handle the data rates.”

Sherwood’s mind raced ahead, envisioning the
infrared and ultrasonic data streams merging with the enormous
high-resolution, stereo-optical image-streams, inundating the
stacked vectors of the parallel preprocessor at the rate of several
billion bytes-per-second, about the same data flow that a thousand,
twentieth-century TV channels used to carry. He could see the
module where the data streams merged, the Fast Fourier Transform
processing, the remerging, the reprocessing, and finally the
payoff—the Strike Parameters Processor package that transformed all
this information into signals that drive the logical and
electromechanical modules. And what should have been done in a
computer workstation was crammed into a Cracker Jack box.

He suddenly became aware that two pairs of eyes
were on him. His fingers fondled the weary embellishments on his
pipe bowl as he said, “I will help all I can, however I do owe some
time yet to the Institute.”

The Asp turned toward Jenner and asked, “Can you
effectively use him in a part-time capacity until his stint at the
Institute is finished?”

While the ASP’s attention was focused on Jenner
awaiting her response, Sherwood picked up his lighter and placed it
silently in the carved recess atop the cherry pipe rack.

“I’m sure I can, sir,” was her answer.

Their eyes returned to Sherwood who said, “I
have already begun my new mission.”

Jenner’s new task was technically more
challenging than Project Dagger had been. Monocle consumed her and
her dedicated staff, but she still continued extracurricular
hacking. The system manager had terminated her access at the system
manager level at the end of Dagger. She then complained to the Asp
that this might slow down her progress on the new project, which
was more complex and just as critical as Dagger. He granted her the
desired access once more.

She kept her notes all on paper now instead of
in an electronic notebook, cross-referencing decisions and actions
taken by the system manager. Certain decisions began to attract her
attention, like those that appeared illogical or to override
certain operating principles. Most decisions she analyzed resulted
from such a complex or obscure data set that she was unable to
judge the merit. Some notable exceptions, however, puzzled her
because she couldn’t trace the erroneous data back to a specific
person.

COPE’s style of management put the computer at
the core of every operations decision. Conclusions depended on an
elaborate system of decision criteria driven by policies that had
been translated into a nightmare of mathematical algorithms.