CHAPTER FIFTEEN
An Awkward Enforcement
“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.”