Atomic Swarm Read online

  Jackson gazed up at the imposing dome and was amazed to see that its surface had been decorated with large conical spikes.

  ‘It’s a hack,’ said Atticus79. ‘It’s very cool, but I’m not sure what it’s supposed to be.’

  ‘I know exactly what it is,’ laughed Jackson for the first time in days. ‘It’s Punk!’

  Jackson called Brooke and congratulated her on her very risky but extremely cool way of distracting him from everything that had been going on lately, and they made a date to meet at Jackson’s favourite cafe.

  There were three things about Cyber Republic that Jackson liked: you could buy proper English tea here (‘builder’s tea’, as his dad called it), which meant milky, super-sweet tea strong enough for the spoon to stand up in. Jackson had tried to make the physics of that particular definition work, but he hadn’t managed it yet. You could also use the free Wi-Fi and each table had its own power point, which dangled, like a chandelier, from the ceiling.

  What he was less impressed by, however, was the amount of ice that arrived in the Coke he had ordered. It had always bugged him, and the big cardboard cup was so brimful of ice cubes when he picked it up from the counter that he wondered if there was any room left for his drink.

  Finding a bench by the window, he looked out across the busy street. No sign of Brooke. It was exactly 12 p.m.

  Jackson turned his attention to the problem of the ice cubes. He held the one-litre tub up to his mouth and attempted to guide a stream of Coke around the icy rock pile and into his mouth. Three mouthfuls later and it was all over. Too little liquid, too warm.

  Jackson considered the problem. He’d paid for a one-litre cup of Coke and that’s what he expected to get. What he’d been given was about eighty per cent pure ice, with Coke that was too warm if you drank it quickly, but too cold and diluted if you left it swishing around the iceberg.

  Jackson considered the drinks he got out of his fridge back in his dorm to be the ideal temperature. The dial inside his fridge was set to 1.5°C, so he decided he’d aim for a Coke that was 1.5° Centigrade.

  He grabbed a pen from his inside pocket and wrote a formula at the top of a napkin.

  He then proceeded to cover the rest of the napkin in calculations, pausing only briefly to enter ‘Energy required to turn ice to water?’ into the search engine on his phone.

  Finally, he noted that about seventy-five per cent of the ice in his cup had melted in the three minutes he’d been doing his sums. He added 0.75x to the top of the napkin and adjusted the rest of the workings out accordingly.

  ‘Keeping yourself out of mischief I see!’ It was Brooke.

  ‘You’re early,’ said Jackson.

  ‘I’m thirsty,’ replied Brooke.

  ‘What would you like?’ Jackson asked, getting up.

  ‘Well, that’s what I call service,’ Brooke replied. ‘I’ll have a lemonade, please.’

  Jackson thought the guy at the counter had an uncanny resemblance to Gordon Freeman from the video game Half Life – dishevelled brown hair, large geeky black spectacles and a perfectly trimmed goatee.

  ‘A lemonade, please,’ said Jackson.

  ‘Sure thing, man,’ said Gordon.

  ‘But this time I’d like exactly 840.3 millilitres of liquid.’

  ‘You would?’ said the real-life video-game character, at a loss.

  ‘Yeah! And 10.6 ice cubes. Please.’

  ‘Point six – you say?’

  ‘Uh huh!’

  ‘Any particular reason for that?’

  Jackson slipped the napkin on to the counter.

  Gordon glanced at the arithmetical scribbles packed tightly on to the paper napkin, then looked back at Jackson with a resigned expression.

  ‘Hey, whatever feeds your needs, dude.’

  ‘There you are,’ said Jackson, placing Brooke’s drink in front of her. ‘It will be at the optimum temperature in around two and half minutes’ time.’

  ‘Right,’ said Brooke, smiling. ‘Of course it will!’ She knew Jackson well enough to be unfazed by his mathematical exactitude.

  ‘So, come on, how did you get those spikes up there?’ asked Jackson.

  ‘A good magician never reveals her tricks.’

  ‘I’m guessing Fist was involved?’

  ‘What, let one of my robots out, without my father’s consent?’ said Brooke with a mischievous glint in her eye. ‘Anyway, it doesn’t matter how I did it; the important thing is that my little Batman beacon worked. You picked up and called me.’

  Jackson tapped his fingers nervously on the table. He wasn’t quite ready to tell Brooke everything that had happened in the last few days. ‘How’s your lemonade?’ he said, changing the subject.

  ‘It’s fine. Look, you don’t have to tell me what’s going on between you and your dad. But you need to return my calls!’

  ‘Yeah, I’m sorry about that.’ Jackson felt bad. None of this was Brooke’s fault. And not calling her wasn’t helping. He was still angry and upset. He was no closer to finding out anything about his mum or real dad that might help him understand things better. Even so, the mere thought of opening up about how he felt to Brooke – or anyone for that matter – made him cringe. He looked up to find Brooke staring him straight in the face, waiting for an explanation.

  ‘All right, I understand what you’re saying. I’m just feeling homesick. I’m OK now.’

  There was an awkward silence between the two of them, as Brooke decided whether or not to pursue the subject. They both knew Brooke wasn’t buying it, but to Jackson’s relief she decided to move on.

  ‘I heard you stormed out of Singer’s AI class yesterday?’

  ‘Yes, well, you should have heard what he was saying about Lear. He called him a hero. It made my blood boil.’

  ‘A lot of people didn’t believe Lear was corrupt, despite the evidence we posted on the Net. I guess Singer is one of them.’

  ‘He said his death was a tragedy. I wish I could have told him about that man we saw killed on the Ukraine mission.’

  Brooke didn’t say anything. She’d been deeply affected by what they had seen on their MeX mission last summer.

  It was in a compound in Ukraine where they’d learned about Devlin Lear’s evil plan to steal millions of litres of water and seen his heartless treatment of hundreds of homeless locals. More than a year on and Jackson still remembered the horrific things they’d witnessed there.

  It was strange, but the two of them hadn’t talked about Lear for a long time. Jackson had supposed that Brooke felt the same way he did – he just wanted to move on. He’d spent the best part of the last twelve months learning to stop looking over his shoulder. Brooke, who’d been kidnapped by Lear, must have felt it even more. She was unusually quiet now.

  ‘Anyway, Singer obviously doesn’t know what he’s talking about with regards to that man.’ Jackson was worried he’d upset Brooke by bringing it up, but she smiled at Jackson’s attempt to bring her back from her thoughts.

  ‘True. No one does except for us. But Dad says the professor has some quite brilliant things to say about robotics. Did you stay long enough to hear any of it?’

  ‘Very funny. The stuff about swarm robotics is interesting,’ said Jackson.

  ‘Ah, yes! The idea of small robots working together to make one big one has been around for a while. Goulman and J.P. did some work on that technology last year – it’s actually where the electromagnetic coupling that enables our phones to stick together, and share a screen, comes from. The two of them got a few basic modular robots to find each other and form shapes, but then Dad got the government contract for Verne and put Goulman on it instead. I remember, they fell out about that. You see, I’m not the only one who finds Dad hard to work with!’

  ‘Now you mention it, the professor did have some interesting things to say about complementary personalities.’

  ‘What, like you and me, you mean?’ said Brooke, trying to get a smile out of him.

  ‘Smar
t and bossy? Yes, I guess – that works.’ Jackson grinned. ‘He’s running a competition. It made me wonder about Tug and Punk. You never know, Brooke, it could be your best chance ever of actually winning something!’

  ‘Now don’t get smart!’ said Brooke, proceeding to noisily suck the final dregs of lemonade through a straw. ‘What about the fact that they’re top secret? I’m already in so much trouble for our latest stunt with Fist.’

  ‘He just wants to see the code. I can easily hide their identity. More importantly, we can run the code for real – we could actually give them brains!’

  ‘Give a spiked wrecking ball and a flying battering ram the ability to think and act on their own?’ said Brooke.

  Jackson could see the idea had got the cogs inside Brooke’s engineer’s head turning. ‘Precisely.’

  ‘And might a project like this stop you moping around your dorm room?’

  ‘I think it would,’ said Jackson.

  ‘Then let’s do it!’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Don’t be so surprised.’ Brooke grinned. ‘After all, we do have complementary personalities!’

  CHAPTER 10

  Over the next few days Jackson and Brooke transformed the laboratory into something that resembled an operating theatre.

  Carrying out the ideas they had picked up from Professor Singer was a complex procedure, but it helped that Punk and Tug already had the required hardware. They each had a bank of sixteen multi-core processors. These ‘brains’ decided everything from how to navigate to which battery to draw power from when a surge of energy was required to move faster or electrocute an unfortunate target. The robots also possessed some Artificial Intelligence already in the shape of their fly-by-wire flight management systems.

  Since the dawn of the computer age, thanks to the ability of computers to perform lightning quick calculations, processors had been used to keep even the most unwieldy of machines airborne – the F16 Fighting Falcon, the Eurofighter and the Stealth Bomber were all examples of aircraft that needed more than a pilot’s brain to stay in the air. With computers constantly monitoring and micro-adjusting every flap and surface, it was theoretically possible to make a dining-room chair fly. Brooke had built the same kind of technology into Punk and Tug – thousands of lines of code and assorted hardware modules kept them in the air, while their remote operators, Brooke and Jackson, simply pointed them in the direction they wanted them to fly.

  Brooke and Jackson had spent the last two days working at providing their robots with the ability to join the dots – the ability to think entirely for themselves and link what they already knew about flying, navigating and scanning to a series of simple tasks. Using GPS, for example, Punk could already work out the quickest route between waypoints, or markers on a map. He had a focused beam of infrared radiation, which enabled him to see targets in the dark or people lost in the thick smoke of a burning building. And he had radio detection and ranging, or radar, which could magically highlight terrain and objects miles in the distance by bouncing pulses of high-frequency electromagnetic waves off them. But the key point was that at the moment neither Punk nor Tug could act on any of this information independently of whoever was controlling them – they just couldn’t join the dots.

  Importantly, there were two subtle differences in the way Jackson was coding the two robots. Tug was designed to be the daredevil of the duo, fearless and forceful in the face of a challenge, whereas Punk’s new AI programming was designed to make him more cautious and analytical – two contrasting personalities, designed to complement each other and provide the best possible chance of completing a task successfully.

  Brooke couldn’t help but notice that her plan to drag Jackson out of his doldrums, by focusing him on a project, was working. She might not be any closer to knowing what had gone on during his father’s visit, but in contrast to the last few days he was feverish with enthusiasm. None of the problems they came against could curb his energy for the project, as he excitedly programmed and scrawled numbers and mathematical symbols on every available surface, including the glass doors of J.P.’s office.

  At around 1 p.m. on the third day, Jackson surfaced from a particularly intense typing session in which he’d worked out the final code sequences he needed.

  ‘OK, that should do it,’ he said, popping up from under the table where he’d been sitting, inputting code into his tablet computer.

  ‘All right, Fly-boy,’ Brooke whispered to Punk as she fitted the top half of his spherical body in place, ‘this might tickle!’ Using an electric screwdriver, she moved smoothly around the metal sphere, securing the robot’s two segments together with a noise that reminded Jackson of the pit crew in a Formula One paddock.

  ‘Clear!’ she shouted, dramatically throwing both arms in the air.

  ‘Tug ready?’ asked Jackson.

  ‘Yessir!’ said Brooke, tapping her fist on the chisel-shaped robot’s reinforced tungsten-carbide nose.

  Jackson began to root around the untidy lab, tipping out boxes of small electric engines, tools and various plastic containers on to the workbench and scrutinizing each object.

  ‘If you’re looking to trash the joint, I’m down with that,’ Brooke commented wryly. ‘But I’m told a TV through a hotel-room window is a lot more therapeutic.’

  ‘I’m looking for an object that they can track.’ Jackson continued to talk while he searched. ‘We know they can see and use autopilot to follow a route. What I want to know is whether the all-new thinking Punk and Tug can find and follow their own target, without any help from us.’

  Jackson suddenly bent down and pulled a tube of tennis balls from a sports bag under Goulman’s desk. ‘Perfect!’ he said, popping the top off the tube and rolling a bright yellow tennis ball into his hand. ‘It’s really easy to see. It contrasts with just about everything in the room. And, if I use it with one of these…’ he slid a tennis racket from Goulman’s leather holdall, ‘it’s really fast!’

  *

  It was surprising how loud the robots were with their electric-ducted fan thrusters and rotor blades spooled up in the enclosed space of the lab.

  ‘Ready?’ Jackson shouted from across the opposite side of the laboratory.

  ‘Let’s do it!’ called Brooke, her words almost lost in the whirr of the engines.

  Jackson opened the terminal window on his tablet screen and entered a final command line – then he touched the ENTER graphic and threw the yellow tennis ball over his shoulder.

  Tug’s engines screeched as his new programming selected full throttle. Jackson barely had time to dive for cover as the robot made straight for him, ploughing through two 26-inch flatscreens on a workbench and leaving a metal desk lamp snapped clean in half.

  Jackson was dusting himself down when he remembered that, as he’d thrown himself out of the way, he’d sent his tablet computer skipping across the concrete floor. He checked in the direction he had thrown the ball and, to his horror, realized that it had disappeared somewhere under a line of metal benches on which sat several expensive-looking pieces of lab equipment. If Tug caught sight of the ball, the equipment would be history.

  Meanwhile, Punk was cautiously zigzagging around benches and chairs, just a few centimetres from the laboratory floor and so Jackson decided, as the errant Tug ripped past just millimetres from his head again, that he knew which robot to focus his attention on.

  ‘Now would be a good time to press Tug’s stop button!’ shouted Brooke, from inside a metal cupboard where she’d taken cover.

  Jackson frantically crawled on all fours towards where his tablet computer had landed. At least twice Tug made passes low enough to take his head off, and when Jackson eventually saw his computer, he understood why. The hapless tablet was wedged under a line of three metal workbenches – right next to the bright yellow ball’s resting place.

  Tug was like a dog with a scent, darting erratically across the laboratory, looking for any sign of the brightly coloured object he had b
een ordered to fetch. Punk, on the other hand, was now harmlessly hovering overhead, methodically examining and recording the details of the scene below on his multiple cameras.

  Jackson knew that the robot’s battery was good for several hours and that the only thing that would stop Tug was a line of code from his computer, the very computer that was now within kissing distance of the robot’s target. Jackson was only a few metres from his tablet PC when suddenly Tug’s engine began to howl. He’d never heard it up close before, but Jackson knew he was listening to Tug’s shunt function, sucking up energy in readiness for a strike.

  The force with which Tug hit the line of metal benches that sheltered the ball and slimline tablet was terrifying. The middle bench buckled to the point of being virtually folded in half, sending an electron microscope and a particle-size analyser crashing to the ground. As Tug wrenched himself free from the wreckage, he left a gouge in the painted concrete floor that exposed the steel mesh and power cables built into the Fire Proof building’s concrete structure.

  Tug circled overhead and, as the robot took a brief second to decide its next move, Jackson made his. He scrambled under the remaining two benches and reached out for the computer. As he fumbled to grab it, he could hear Tug spooling up for another run. This sound he knew. It was the high-pitched whine of one of the ‘upgrades’ Brooke had given Tug since Jackson had moved to Cambridge – an electric turbo that increased Tug’s shunting power by three hundred per cent. His next dive for the ball would carry three times the force of the last one!

  Jackson didn’t even think about it. He grabbed the ball next to his computer and chucked it across the laboratory.

  The sound of a thunderous crash filled the room.

  The line of four metal cupboards on the other side of the laboratory fell like dominoes. Jackson wasn’t sure which one housed Brooke – he just hoped it wasn’t one of the two now wrapped round a retreating Tug. To make matters worse, the ball’s new resting place – by the lockers – hadn’t gone unnoticed by Punk. He had obviously caught sight of the ball’s last known position, in the vicinity of Brooke. Jackson knew he would be using all the technology at his disposal to find or predict his target’s location and then would feed that information wirelessly to Tug, just as Jackson had programmed him to do.