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Chapter 3
LeMar Wallace led the group of people who had greeted him at the helicopter towards a cluster of white government vehicles near the makeshift command center. A white tractor-trailer with a refrigerated trailer was parked alongside a converted airport fire engine with tall, bulbous tires and an actuated middle that allowed it to pivot in half. In front of these was a large RV connected to a trailer by an accordion vestibule. On the sides of the RV and the semi trailer were the FBI seal together with the NASA logo and the words ENFORSUR: Early National Forensic Support Response.
“Special Agent Wallace?” The federal prosecutor Rosen hurried to the front of the group. “I'm sure you're aware the entire Ninth Circuit Court has just finished a major review. Among the findings of that review is that early evidence preservation and handling routines are a crucial component to keeping prosecution costs down.”
“I read it,” Wallace said shortly. “Only I didn't see where the extra funding for early evidence preservation or training was coming from?”
“We're all being asked to do more with less these days,” Rosen said. “Bottom line is weak cases are expensive. I've already gotten a phone call from the State Attorney General's office about the ENFORSUR team being out here. They're relying on us to help them keep costs down, not to hand them grounds for an automatic appeal that could run court costs into the millions.”
Wallace asked, “Why would I bench my star quarterback for the big game?”
Lucinda Brown interrupted them and said succinctly, “Because every one of those cases has already been shot down in US appeals court and are now before the Supreme Court where they're most likely going to be overturned. Just having ENFORSUR here could be creating grounds for a dismissal of this case before you've even lifted a fingerprint.”
Wallace shook his head. “The Supreme Court of the United States is not going to release convicted murderers.”
“They may not have any choice,” Rosen countered. “There's no way to independently verify that the computer searches Egor uses don't violate Fourth Amendment guarantees. In fact, most of the testimony that has been presented to the Court so far has indicated that it routinely performs unconstitutional searches and invasion of privacy.”
“Egor?” Sondaricker asked.
“Yeah, that's what they call Dr. Hong's robot,” Wallace explained as he walked among the white ENFORSUR vehicles. He touched one of the trucks as he spelled out Egor’s acronym, “Evidence Gathering Operations Robot. A joint project between the Justice Department, NASA and the robotics department at MIT. It's a portable evidence-collecting robot with state-of-the-art forensic analysis capabilities. It's like taking the whole FBI Laboratory to a crime scene and then some. Every case it's been used on, Egor has pointed straight to a suspect.”
Sondaricker walked as she contemplated what he had told her.
Wallace continued, “I testified in front of the congressional committee to help Dr. Hong get the funding for ENFORSUR in the Crime Bill a few years ago. I'm kind of like Egor's uncle.”
As they walked alongside the RV, a woman's voice interrupted them. “I don't think the General Accounting Office would be happy to hear about your half-billion-dollar nephew playing in the mud.”
“Well, if it isn't Doctor Frankenstein.” Wallace looked among the RV windows for the source of the voice. “Where’s the Tin Woodsman?”
“He's smart enough to come in out of the rain.” A woman in one of the windows waved them over toward the door. “Come on in.”
Diane Hong looked like a tiny, delicate doll as she politely hugged Wallace. His impeccable suit mismatched to her blue and white striped Russian sailor's shirt and blue jeans. Her face was like an Oriental vase that got its beauty from its simplicity. She ushered them all inside the interior of the lab vehicle, which resembled a spaceship retrofitted with new components along with the outdated ones. It was alive with computerized instruments and video monitors and half a dozen technicians in white clean-room suits and booties over their shoes, many peering intently into microscopes.
“Don't worry about contaminating anything,” she assured them casually. “Anything that's going to be used in court is stored in a separate trailer.”
“Well, congratulations,” Wallace said. “You've got the Supreme Court mad at you, you must be doing something right.”
He pointed to Sondaricker. “Connie Sondaricker, meet Dr. Diane Hong. NASA liaison to the Justice Department and ENFORSUR's mom.”
“How's it going, Hong?” Sondaricker shook her hand once. She explained curtly, “I'm surrounded by PhDs and Jurisprudences all day. I only call people doctor if they've been to medical school.”
“Oh,” Hong regarded Sondaricker. “Well, then you can call me doctor if you’d like. My medical degree is from Harvard, specializing in forensic pathology. My other doctorate degrees in robotics and cybernetics are from MIT.”
As Sondaricker stood motionless, Wallace hit her playfully on the shoulder and said, “And she's an astronaut.”
Sondaricker forced a smile and said, a little more quietly, “Well, half the people at NASA call themselves astronauts. I think people should have to make an actual space flight first.”
Still entirely un-offended, Hong pointed out a picture hanging near the entrance of the ENFORSUR vehicle. “See that?”
Sondaricker leaned over to see a photograph that captured the unbridled fury of the space shuttle's solid rocket boosters during ignition, taken from off of the coast of Cape Canaveral where the exhaust was vented out to sea away from the other buildings.
“That's nice,” Sondaricker said. “Standard publicity photo of a shuttle launch. What about it?”
Hong said, “That's me driving.”
As those crowded into the RV moved into the enclosed vestibule and into the trailer that housed Egor, a few of them politely covered their mouths to conceal a repressed ripple of laughter. Sondaricker retreated into the small kitchen in the lab vehicle the size of an airliner's galley where she encountered Jack Corbett, who handed her a cup of coffee.
Sondaricker asked as she accepted the coffee, “How can she be an astronaut? She looks like she's about twelve.”
Corbett took a sip from his own cup. “Maybe instead of a pony she wanted a rocket ship?”
“Hey, hot damn! LeMar Wallace in the flesh.” A large, overweight man leapt up from his seat at a computer terminal and stopped Wallace as he entered the Egor transport trailer from the covered vestibule that connected it to the RV. The portly fellow had rosy cheeks and soft, pale skin except for an unevenly grown beard. He was slovenly dressed in surfing shorts and a wrinkled Advanced Dungeons & Dragons t-shirt. Before Hong could move to stop him, he grabbed Wallace's hand and pumped it fervently.
“How you getting on with your bad self these days, homey? I'm Codepheater,” the man said, beaming.
Wallace smiled cordially. He leaned closer. “Your name is Codepheater?”
“That's me,” the heavy man grinned unabashedly, “With the amazing feats of code.”
“Also known as Rubin Sutton,” Hong explained. “Mr. Sutton is on loan to us from the National Infrastructure Protection Center. He is a convicted computer hacker who has volunteered his expertise to help us in lieu of federal prison.”
Wallace wrenched his hand away from Codepheater and placed his finger only millimeters away from the programmer’s nose. “You call me by my first name again and you'll be eating soup through a straw back in the federal lockup. I am Special Agent in Charge Wallace to you.” Then he added, his voice thick with sarcasm, “Codepheater.”
In the rear compartment, towering over the human technicians moving around it in the small support trailer, weighing as much as a compact car, was the robot called Egor. It was surrounded by an array of sophisticated computer and diagnostic equipment and a horde of specialists watching blinking readouts. The robot’s superstructure had been created by an elite group of scientists, robotics engineers and computer programmers with an obvious eye on its public appeal. Egor was big and sleek without being intimidating. The simple addition of a third dimension in movement—especially its shoulders and hips that moved with naturalistic ease—together with its uncanny fluid stance and ability to sway from one side to another made it appear far too human.
The machine's motions had surpassed bipedal movement and appeared for all the world as if it were a person inside the giant suit of space armor who was constantly surprised how little their limbs weighed. Its movement approximated organic motion in a way no other machine had before. It struck something profound within a human to see it, something familiar, and made the machine appear infinitely brighter than mere electrons flowing through circuit boards. There was a connection. There was no beeping, whirring or clicking to dispel the illusion. In spite of its great size and weight, it was silent.
Wallace whispered in amazement, “It’s alive!”
Hong and the other team members only smiled proudly.
Wallace slowly walked around Egor. He ducked a number of power cables that connected the robot to the vehicle. “Can it talk?”
“You bet your ass he can,” Codepheater said. He then added in a sudden blurt, “Mr. Special Agent in Charge Wallace, sir.”
Wallace continued to examine the machine.
The programmer continued, “He has artificial intelligence programming for verbal interfacing. He can perform his own diagnostics and tell us where to look for problems. He rounds off numbers in his speech and uses pronouns and contractions correctly, stuff like that. He learns. He can talk and solve problems on his own. Talk to him.”
“Do I have to say 'Good morning, Hal' or something?” Wallace asked. The look on Hong's face told him he didn't. He asked out loud, as if speaking to a slow person, “Hello, Egor, how are you doing, my man?”
The robot responded. Its synthesized voice approximated that of a monotone, genderless drone. “Good morning, Special Agent Wallace. I hope you are having a good day. How is the sports team that you enjoy following performing so far this season?”
“How does it know who its talking to?” Sondaricker interrupted.
Codepheater explained, “Aw, that's nothing. He stores a visual record of people he's encountered before, just like we do. For feds—err—federal officers, he also has access to FBI personnel photographs.”
Wallace grinned. “And he's polite, too.”
Jack Corbett had been watching Egor while he idly sipped his coffee. He turned to ACLU attorney Lucinda Brown, who was standing next to him in the narrow doorway. “Just what we need, another government robot.”
Sondaricker persisted, “I don't see how that can help if he doesn't have a record of somebody? I mean, how is he going to identify human remains?”
“Egor,” Hong drew the robot’s attention—readied it for a query—as she clasped her hands behind her back. “Tell us what Special Agent Sondaricker had for breakfast, her present blood pressure and total cholesterol level, the grade she got in American History in seventh grade, the outstanding balance on her best credit card and the last time she had sexual intercourse.”
A light illuminated on Egor's chest, and words were broadcast from the speaker located on the robot’s head approximately where a human mouth would be. “Special Agent Sondaricker consumed twelve ounces of liquid dietary supplement and one powdered raspberry jelly donut forty-two minutes ago. Her blood pressure is one hundred and twelve over seventy and her total cholesterol is one hundred and sixty-five. She did not attend seventh grade, but submatricated from sixth to eighth grade where she received an A. She has a Platinum Visa card with an outstanding balance of six thousand, four hundred and twenty-two dollars and she has not had sexual intercourse within the parameters of my detection capabilities with an active, living subject.”
“Which is how long?” Hong asked.
“Five-thousand hours.”
The people gathered in the trailer all turned to Sondaricker.
“What's everybody looking at?” she asked defensively. “I used that card to put in a hot tub at my condo. Ended up costing as much to install the damn thing as it was to buy it.”
Wallace shook his head doubtfully, returning to Hong. “How in the world does he do all that?”
“The secret is his computer processor,” Hong explained. “He has access to a first-of-its-kind processor in California. It takes images from his various onboard telemetry and accelerates those images to obtain higher resolution than has ever been possible by any other means. He can see inside the human body better than a medical MRI, using less power and no radioactivity. Instead of sending out a powerful source signal to get better return, he can take very faint signals and relay them to his external processor where they're amplified into usable data. His radio imagery telemetry emits less voltage than the clock radio on your nightstand, and yet he can view substances on a subatomic level with far greater detail than an electron microscope. He can tell who walked through a room by creating a complete DNA profile from the skin cells that naturally slough off your skin as you walk. He can analyze the composition of microscopic fibers with a light spectrograph that uses less voltage than a pocket flashlight and he uses his artificial intelligence programming to cross-check himself. Examining the microscopic crumbs on the front of somebody‘s shirt to verify their stomach contents, for example.”
Sondaricker looked down at the front of her blouse and began to discreetly brush at it with one hand.
“Sound waves never eliminate themselves,” Hong explained. “They only become inaudible after a period of time. It takes a few fractions of a second for what I'm saying to reach your ears and then they become inaudible, but the sound is still in this room. Egor can detect those latent sounds and amplify them. Depending on the absorption rate of the wall materials and other environmental factors, Egor can detect and recreate a conversation that took place weeks ago.”
There was a stunned silence among those gathered in the trailer with Egor.
Wallace stepped up in front of the robot and looked up at its inhuman, ergo-dynamically shaped face. “This is going to change everything.”
“Special Agent Wallace?” Rosen spoke up nervously, “This has all been very informative, but Dr. Hong and her people are on their way back to Quantico, remember?”
“Egor is the only machine capable of using that processor,” Lucinda Brown added. “Which leaves everyone else with no way to verify its results.”
“There's no way to verify what all it goes through while performing those searches,” Rosen agreed vehemently. “There's no way to protect the public from it.”
“I've already testified in front of the Supreme Court about this,” Hong explained to Wallace. “No matter how much data he searches, he's still just as limited by storage as any other system. He can’t possibly store even a fraction of what he goes through. Even if he could, it would be such a huge volume of data it would be impossible to organize, let alone for anybody to look at it all.”
Wallace looked at her and asked flatly, “Can this machine identify them folks out there?”
“Yes, he can, LeMar,” she insisted. “This is exactly the sort of case this program was put together for.”
“All right.” Wallace looked at Egor and nodded, “Your Tin Woodsman can wear a badge for today. Bring your can of oil in case he freezes up.”
“Absolutely not,” Rosen argued. “Every American is guaranteed the right to be secure in their homes from unreasonable searches and seizures. The only way any authority can violate that right is with a warrant based on demonstrable probable cause that specifies exactly what is being searched for, and signed by a human judge. What if he finds something critical to the case out there? We won't be able to use it.”
“Special Agent Wallace,” Brown said hotly. “You don't have the authority for this. There is an injunction in place that states this thing is not to be used during the Supreme Court appeals process.”
“People are not evidence,” Hong immediately confronted the attorneys. “You want these women's parents to find out they've been murdered by having a TV camera crew show up on their front lawn?”
“I hate to agree with the lawyers, but maybe they're right,” Sondaricker said, as she eyed Egor suspiciously. “Catching this guy is only half the battle. We've got to make a case stick and we don't want to hand a defense any wiggle-room to plea bargain with. Maybe we should wait on the Big Court before involving this thing in a case like this?”
Wallace held up one finger and silenced everyone. “I want to thank all of you for your input. You know I like to run an open investigation. I like to hear everybody's opinion. But, there's something ya'll don't understand. Make no mistake,” he said, “there's going to be a time that I am going to go looking for whoever did this. Have no doubt, whoever did this done spent their last restful night. I am going to hound them to the ends of creation. I will never stop looking for them and when I catch them, they are going to be punished to the ultimate extent of the laws of this country. Somebody is going to make that long walk to the gallows at Walla Walla for this.”
He looked at Sondaricker, then Brown and finally at Rosen. He said very calmly, “But not yet. Right now there are people lying out there in the rain. People with families, mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers, husbands, boyfriends and children, some of them. Yeah, we gonna find some whores out there. We gonna find some drug addicts. Some runaways. But somewhere there's somebody out there waiting for them to come home. Every one of them, sometime, somewhere had a place left for them at the dinner table some night they didn't show up. Right now I have a job to do for those folks at those dinner tables. So they can stop waiting. So they aren't stuck for one more night between hope and grief and they can start trying to piece together what's left of their lives and begin moving on as best they can.”
Wallace turned to Lucinda Brown and looked down at the attorney. “Nobody's going to fault me for that. Supreme Court's not going to fault me for that. Not just every American, nobody in any country is going to fault me for that. Because that's what anybody would want me to do if it was their people out there.”
Wallace returned to stand in front of Egor. ”I’m gonna tell you something else.” He reached out a hand and laid it on the robot’s mechanical chest. Patting it three times with his fingertips. “When that court decision comes down, I am gonna put the dogs on him.”
As the group began climbing down from the ENFORSUR vehicle, Sondaricker carefully balanced her coffee cup as she descended the steps and found herself next to Diane Hong. She asked, “So, what’s that mean? Cholesterol one sixty-five?"