Drone Games (11 page)

“I didn’t mean it that way,” Robertson apologized.
Ten million dollars still isn’t trivial
. “You mentioned a transfer point?”

“Dr. Al-Aran has attended several US OPEC conferences. Members of the Royal Family feel comfortable with him, but more importantly, they trust his judgment. As an Arab, he understands the eccentricities of our business culture, not to mention the language. We wish to have him take the lead in this matter. He has informed us that he is knowledgeable enough with the drone’s design to transition and even operate the system. Do you share that assessment?”

Robertson cursed to himself. His colleague was literally stealing his project. “I do not,” he said flatly. “The good Dr. Al-Aran might be well advised to consult with me, or at least my research assistants, before making any more commitments. I need to speak with him before this goes any further.”

“Of course,” Naimi said, tapping his watch and casually lifting it to his ear. “That reminds me . . . how many drones are currently in existence?”

Robertson’s head was spinning. “Huh? I’m sorry. Um, ten . . . no, twelve. I think we have twelve assembled and ready to fly. We can make more on site right from our own lab. All the parts are modular. How many units did you say you’d need?”

Naimi pursed his lips thoughtfully and then shrugged. “If I recall correctly, Dr. Al-Aran has stated that six drones should give us more than enough insight to make a decision. We’ve worked closely in the past. He understands the Kingdom’s rather straightforward methodologies.” Naimi rose from his chair. “Then it is agreed. Six units. May I presume that we have your tentative support?”

Robertson recalled his award ceremony and that Fox reporter and her question about weapons of mass destruction. Could she have had a point? Would the federal government consider his drone project to be classified research?

It had high enough visibility now with the Pirelli Award. All Robertson had to do was raise the question. An International Trafficking in Arms Regulation (ITAR) roadblock would nip this whole transfer idea, or at least slow things down. The law certainly applied to colleges. Georgia Tech conducted its research at the highest level. The campus Security Department would never let his drone float into the hands of foreign nationals without going through a lengthy ITAR approval process. The whole idea would die on the vine. Best of all, it wouldn’t be his decision.

Robertson smiled. “An off-site transfer might require some special permission, but overall, I don’t think there’ll be any opposition, especially if it’s a temporary thing. I suppose my team could help make it a smooth transition.”

“It has been a pleasure, Professor Robertson.” Naimi offered his hand. “Enjoy Rome. Travel safe on Wednesday, and congratulations again on your technical award.”

Robertson locked the door and returned to the Jacuzzi. He let his head submerge completely before turning on the jets. He felt like he could throw up, but he was too angry.

What is going on?
His drones being relocated to some oil field in the desert? Robertson couldn’t stand Dr. Winford Garton III. He was a sixty-five-year-old, condescending, Southern-born, aristocratic salesman. The term snake oil came to mind. Though married, Garton was also a campus womanizer, who had been reprimanded twice for sexual misconduct—specifically, improper touching.

Robertson wanted to pick up the phone and stop this whole ridiculous desert surveillance idea. The patent issues had never been resolved, and if push came to shove, he really didn’t know who owned what.

Is the drone my invention or Georgia Tech’s?
he wondered. They handed him a research team and told him to develop something that could fly on Mars.
Am I that expendable?
Funny how word of the drone had spread so quickly, but after all, the Pirelli Award was an international event. This was probably the first of many weird offers. And this Al-Assaf character and his Saudi money. Talk about weird.

It really wasn’t a proposition at all
, Robertson recounted. Propositions meant you had a choice. The Saudis were known for dangling huge sums of cash in front of academia when they wanted something, and knowing an insider like Faiz certainly helped.

Rome or not, now Robertson was even more anxious to get home. He spit a stream of water upward like a fountain. He wondered vaguely, as he sank into the water again, how Al-Assaf knew that his flight left on Wednesday.

Atlanta, GA

Tuesday, May 12

KEVIN JONES set his guitar—a Taylor acoustic six string—next to an open window in the fourth-floor robotics lab of Georgia Tech’s Technology Square Research Building. He reached for a pair of binoculars and rolled his fingers over the focus dial until a Domino’s Pizza delivery car on Fifth Street came into view. Target acquired.

“Yo, Zee. Pavlov was right.”

Roman “Zee” Zibinski stopped trimming the rough fiberglass edge of a newly molded drone wing and cocked his head thoughtfully. He’d heard the name before in some distant class and associated it with canines, but it, along with a gazillion other lecture facts, were sound asleep in his head, refusing to awaken. He visualized Cesar Milan, the Dog Whisperer.

“Who’s Pavlov?”

“The father of stimulus-response,” Jones replied. “When Ivan Pavlov rang a bell, his dogs knew they were going to be fed and started to salivate. When I see a pizza delivery car, I start to salivate. Pavlov was right. It’s an involuntary reflex.”

“You’re always salivating,” Zee quipped. “It’s either food or girls. We’ve had pizza three nights in a row. I’ll pass.”

“Did you hear that Domino’s wants to use aerial drones? What a great idea. No traffic lights, hot food, and you don’t have to tip the driver.”

“Are they hiring?” Zee asked halfheartedly. “Maybe I could be an unmanned delivery technician.”

“Hang tight,” Jones said, reaching for his instrument. “You’ll get a job offer. Even I figured I’d have to play and sing at a local bar to pay the bills before I won the lottery. They’d call me Pavlov with a guitar—guaranteed to make women salivate.”

Zee stretched a rubber band and snapped it across the room. Amazingly, it clung to the back of Jones’s shoulder-length mane. “You are truly disturbed. You can’t hang around a research campus strumming old Simon and Garfunkel songs forever. Instead of playing ‘The Sound of Silence’ all day, you might want to learn the sound of scissors and get a haircut. Seriously, what are you going to do?”

“Put it in a ponytail.”

“I mean your future,” Zee clarified. “The drone project is finished. There’s nothing more to do except negotiate with NASA, and neither of us has any say in . . . wait, you won the lottery?”

Jones slowly picked each note of a D chord and heard a slight offkey wave. He gently twisted the tuning knob of the stubborn B string and set the guitar in its case.

“Yep. I get to move to a place where I can work on my tan and sing for the women. Someplace warm and sunny with the Padres and Chargers.”

Zee set the drone wing down and put his glasses on. “Space and Naval Warfare Systems Center Pacific? In San Diego?”

Jones smiled. “I’m in.”

“Why didn’t you tell me? Dude, congratulations. That’s awesome. Which one?”

“The New Professional Program,” Jones replied. “I wanted to tell you, but I felt guilty. I was hoping there were two openings.”

“I’ll be fine,” Zee said, the disappointment obvious on his face. “What project?”

“Robotics and marine mammal research.”

“I’m proud of you, man. You earned it,” Zee said, hugging Jones tightly. “That’s Christy Liepmann’s team. One of her dolphins found that Howell torpedo. I’m really happy for you.”

A US Navy dolphin looking for mines off the coast of San Diego found a museum-worthy, nineteenth-century torpedo on the seafloor. The brass-coated torpedo was invented by Lieutenant Commander John Howell in 1870. The Howell torpedo could travel four hundred yards at twenty-five knots and carry a one-hundred-pound warhead that detonated on contact. Only fifty were ever made.

Jones gave his friend an impish smile. “I’m happy you’re happy. Pick a color.”

Zee froze suspiciously. “Kevin Jones, don’t you dare.”

“Relax. Just pick one.”

“Kevin, no. You might not think so, but we carry a certain level of prestige on this research team. Not to mention working our butts off. We can’t afford a negative background check. We could get in a lot of trouble, especially with your new job and now with this Pirelli exposure. I need things to look good on my résumé.”

“Please?” Jones begged. “Consider it operational training for one last pizza. I’m leaving tomorrow forever. You gotta give me one more chance.”

Zee exhaled a deep breath. “Black.”

“You chose wisely, my son.”

Zee cursed to himself. “I hate it when I do that.”

Jones walked to a large metal cabinet and turned a combination dial. He slid a plastic case from a shelf and brought it to the table. Inside, twelve colored drone frames rested between forty-eight sets of matching wings: blue, yellow, red, and black. He lifted a set and turnclipped four together, twisting each pair into locking slots on the rear and front sections of the drone’s thorax. Next, he inserted four pliable legs coated with rubberized silicone into the frame’s underside. Each leg tip had a textured pad that, when pressed toward its counterpart, locked into position to grip and hold.

Assembly took less than a minute.

Jones placed the drone upright on the table. It looked like some evil queen hornet. He plucked a thin plastic cartridge from the case and held it up to the light. Next, he inserted a syringe into a container of bright-orange liquid labeled “polynitrogen propellant” and drew back the plunger. He injected the liquid and snapped the cartridge cover shut. He turned the drone upside down and removed a thin plastic shield from the tip of a camera lens. Finished, Jones inserted the fuel cartridge. The wings twitched once, twice, then instantly blurred.

Zee opened a laptop and connected a USB cable. “I need you to focus.”

Jones gently tossed the drone into the air and quickly moved a toggle on the controller-transmitter. When he rolled the toggle’s tip between his fingers, the drone obediently turned, pointing its camera at Zee.

Zee’s screen showed his fuzzy image sitting at the laptop. He adjusted the picture quality and then raised one thumb.

“Okay, it’s time for the Georgia Tech slalom,” Jones said, approaching the window and surveying Fifth Street below.

The drone had flown this street course autonomously as programmed by a flight control algorithm. The record was one minute and eleven seconds. Jones had come close to beating it manually before but had never succeeded.

He positioned the controller firmly on the window ledge. “The bet is one large cheese and pepperoni pizza. The course is eight streetlights, four up the block and four back. The drone must circle each pole. When it reaches the last light, it must dock on the upper banner arm and then return through this window and back to this table. Seventy seconds or less.”

“Without losing a wing,” Zee said.

“Without losing a wing.”

Zee set a stopwatch on his phone. “Ready . . . go.”

Jones raced the drone forward into the night sky, gliding it downward against the building’s façade, around the first aluminum streetlight, expertly approaching and then looping around the second, third, and fourth lights like some Olympic downhill skier. It was missing the pole shafts by mere inches.

“I can’t believe we’re doing this,” Zee sung, noticing several pedestrians pause on the sidewalk and scramble for their phones. “You’ve got thirty seconds.”

Video game–like, Jones contorted his body with the controller as he guided the drone across Fifth Street and through the backstretch, winding around streetlights five, six, and seven, and then deftly setting the drone onto the upper-most of two horizontal banner bars on streetlight number eight.

“We have surface locomotor grip,” Zee’s voice proclaimed in an official tone.

Jones pressed a control button with his thumb, and the insect’s legs released.

“Twelve . . . eleven . . . ten . . .”

Hovering free, the drone streaked for the fourth floor, narrowly missing the treetops on the grassy perimeter below.

“Six . . . five . . . four . . .”

Jones centered the drone at the window, took a split-second to eye the path and angle, and then eased the drone over the threshold and back into the lab. It skidded to rest on the table next to Zee’s laptop. The wing beats petered out.

“One,” Zee announced. “Unreal. You made it.”

“
Yee-hah!
Mission accomplished, sir!” Jones, shouted, raising his arms. “I ought to be in the military. Precision drone pilot extraordinaire.”

“That was pretty cool,” Zee admitted, removing the drone’s fuel cartridges and wings. “If Robertson ever knew about this, he’d have a stroke.”

There was a loud knocking on the lab door.

Jones quickly disconnected the laptop cable. He slammed the window shut an instant before the door clicked open.

“Who is in here?” The voice was male and stern. It wasn’t maintenance. “Mr. Jones? Mr. Zibinski? Why is this door locked?”