One stealthy step at a time, I’m careful not to scrape and bump my bags, my gear against the banister. Trying to be quiet, I don’t take into account the rumbling and thundering of fighter jets on the nearby runway until they fire up like a rocket just now. I end the call abruptly as if my battery died or the signal was dropped.
And I sure hope Joan didn’t hear the background noise and realize I’m not stuck in traffic after all, that I’ve been misinforming her, lying after leaving her in the lurch this afternoon. Or that’s what she’ll conclude.
“Stupid! Stupid! Stupid!” I could kick myself. “What were you thinking?”
I don’t understand, ART texts in my lenses.
“Not directed at you, I was talking to myself,” I tell him. “But don’t answer if Joan tries me back. Have it go straight to voice mail, please. I don’t want her figuring out where I am. Or better put, where I’m not,” as I step out into the blustery afternoon, Raptor F-22s ripping up the skies like Batplanes.
The parking area behind Dodd Hall is empty, not a vehicle or person in sight. The snow is churned up mainly near the door I just came out, and looking around, I don’t spot my so-called Chase Car at first. When I do, I can’t believe it.
“Are you kidding me?” under my breath.
I don’t understand, in my lenses.
“Again, not meant for you. But I don’t understand either,” I stare out at my new take-home Chevy Tahoe, which couldn’t be parked farther away.
About two-thirds the length of a football field, I estimate, it’s on the far side of the parking lot near other Tudor-style buildings that look empty. All by itself in the cold shadowlands of huge magnolias, stands of evergreens, and shrubbery, and there’s an obstacle course of slush and ice between here and there.
“Why the hell-o park it way off in the hinterlands?” I declare, and ART has no answer. “Seriously? Why isn’t it right here at the back door?”
“Unauthorized,” out loud, and he’s not going to divulge why Dick or someone decided such a thing.
Or maybe it wasn’t deliberate. Maybe it was thoughtless and not intended for any rational reason. But there’s an acre of unplowed wintry slop to navigate according to ART, and I ask him to remote start the Tahoe. The engine growls to life, the headlights blinking on.
Next, it needs to drive autonomously to the back entrance, I further instruct because fair is fair. Why should I carry my stuff through such a treacherous mess, and risk getting hurt in addition to wet and filthy.
“Function disabled,” ART replies audibly, infuriatingly.
“For Pete’s sake! Well, enable it, please.”
“Unable to access programming without authorization,” he says, and if I’m understanding him correctly, he needs permission from on high, from the wizard behind the curtain, Dick, no doubt.
“Well, it’s not going to be workable if I’m micromanaged like this. Not to mention, him or anyone else getting back to us anytime soon,” I reply, annoyed as heck. “We’ll be waiting until the cows come home,” as it begins crawling by in my lenses that the average dairy cow can run a surprising 40.2 kilometers per hour (25 mph).
Meaning if the distance back to the barn is one mile, then the cows literally could come home in 2.4 minutes. Which isn’t much of a wait, more like a stampede.
“We need to work on your comprehension of idioms,” I say to ART, stepping away from the back door, onto the sloppy brick sidewalk. “I sure hope I don’t break my neck,” as I set forth in a gritty pudding of coarse sand and blue-tinted rock salt.
The icky wet stuff gets all over my boots, my cargo pants, and I puzzle over the logic of deicing paths for foot traffic but not bothering to plow the parking lot. The chemical-looking soupy slush stops short of the pavement, and as I’m noticing this, another message appears in my lenses:
. . . Silicon dioxide (SiO2). And calcium chloride (CaCl2) with heat-attracting dye added. Not pet friendly . . .
Tracking where my eyes linger, ART must have gleaned technical data from my SIN. Microspectrometers were among the scores of sensors implanted under my skin and built into my CUFF, I recall from various schematics Dick and I discussed.
00:00:00:00:0
“WHOAAA . . . !” I yell as my feet almost go out from under me.
“WAIT! WAIT!” audibly in my earpiece, ART resorts to a loud jarring mechanical crosswalk voice to get my attention before I land on my butt.
Prompted by built-in nano-accelerometers, I can only suspect, I’m halted in my sloshy tracks 56.9 meters (187 feet) from the Tahoe. Next, I’m given a map in my lenses, a close-up real-time synthetic view of the terrain I battle.
Icy areas and other potential hazards are highlighted in different colors based on current temperatures, elevation, the amount of light, the direction of the wind, satellite images and other metadata. I’m more than a little familiar with the Features Integrated Navigated Direction (FIND), AI-assisted mapping that Dad and I have had a hand in developing.
The software implements image processing with NASA’s Artemis lunar mission in mind, and while not everybody worries about getting lost on the moon, I happen to obsess about it constantly. Currently there are no GPS capabilities 384,472 kilometers (238,900 miles) straight up as a rocket flies, and no magnetic poles, meaning a compass won’t work either.
Unmanned probes and vehicles crashing, getting stuck or wandering about aimlessly are bad enough. But God forbid astronauts ride the lunar rover blindly in a cave, running on empty or about to plunge into a crevasse. A commonsense solution was to create programming similar to facial recognition, mapping physical features such as craters, lava tunnels, rocks, landing pads and lunar stations that an autonomous vehicle can use to navigate.
It’s not so different from taking a left at the firehouse. Or hanging a right at the third traffic light. Relying on physical features and waypoints, except FINDs are dynamic and harder to outsmart. They change their minds in real time like the rest of us as AI-assisted quantum computing incorporates alterations to the landscape, hidden booby traps and pitfalls.
The landmark no longer there. The wind shear no one’s talking about. The bird about to crash through the windscreen. The sinkhole waiting to open up beneath the road you’re driving on.
“You may proceed along your highlighted FIND,” ART says as I’m given a hash marked path in electric yellow.