West of Nothing

21. Spidey Vision

It was well after midnight when Mason, Shouter and Doogie called it quits and retired to the bachelor pad. HotDamn, like Skunkworks, must have made other arrangements. He was still on the Bridge when they left and there was no extra duffel bag for him.

When Mason arrived back at the Bridge the next morning at ten past seven, he was the last one there. Looking toward the stage, he experienced a moment of panic. The bottom half of the bell was missing! On second glance, he saw it was just an illusion caused by large monitors placed edge-to-edge in a ring around it.

"Eleven monitors in a daisy chain," HotDamn said, seeing his confusion. "I'm creating a three-hundred-sixty degree field of view so we can see how the X-Bot reacts to real-world stimuli. It's not quite operational yet. We're still testing the hookups and we have a lot of video and code to crank out."

"I'll have the code done before you finish editing!" challenged Shouter.

"You're on!" HotDamn accepted.

One advantage to having HotDamn around: Mason didn't have to worry about Shouter getting up in his grill. The young Indian had gone from being a chained attack dog with a loud bark to a docile lap dog, still with a loud bark.

Mason polished off a frosted Pop-Tart and dove into his simulations. The breakfast fare had taken a turn for the better when an attendant noticed him making a face over the chopped fruit and bran muffins. She was a muscular, middle-aged woman with a fuzz of hair along her upper lip. Despite her off-putting appearance, Lip-Fuzz had a motherly intuition when it came to the team members' tastes.

A couple hours later, Gabby announced, I finished the screen merge and transferred the cam feeds over. Are you boys done with your parts yet?

"Sneaky bitch!" Shouter said, which was his way of giving her props.

"That was fast," HotDamn agreed. "Say, if you're in the market for a job when this is over..."

You can't afford me.

"That's what they all say before they hear my offer."

Shortly after lunch, "the boys" completed their pieces and the wraparound vision test was declared ready.

"We have to go dark for this part," HotDamn said, killing the gantry lights and jumbos. "Monitors too." He handed out bulky, binocular-like contraptions.

"A VR set?" Corny asked. "What's this for?"

"It's not VR. It's just a two-dimensional digital projector slaved to your workstation. Gabby rigged it so you can tap into the wraparound screens using the function keys, just like you do with the jumbos."

"Screw this." Skunkworks tossed his aside. "Come on, Doog. We can work in the Storeroom."

Mason plugged in the cable and put on the goggles with their attached earbuds. They weren't nearly as comfortable as the latest VR gear and there was no 3D pop-out effect. He felt like he was in the front row of a theater where everything loomed too large and close. With sudden insight, he realized they must be a last-minute improvisation, mothballed gadgets from yesteryear that had probably been cutting edge in their day. It was a wonder they still functioned at all.

He tried watching the action on the wraparound monitors, but the red dot marking the X-Bot's focal point jumped around like a hyperactive flee. He felt the first twinge of motion sickness and quickly switched back to his own monitor. The goggles did have one benefit; they created a near perfect isolation field. For the first time since coming to the Bridge, Mason found himself alone with his thoughts and the X-Bot.

He couldn't get over how attuned the X-Bot was to its surroundings. When HotDamn first proposed his vision tests, Mason got the idea to play a secret game of peek-a-boo with it. Watching its reactions, he would hunch behind his monitor and then pop his head out every ten or twenty seconds. When he was hidden, the X-Bot's gaze would drift around the Bridge, but the moment he popped out, its red eye would lock onto him. Even stranger was what it did when Mason stopped playing. Crouching behind a leaf, it poked its head up at random intervals. When Mason looked at it, it would duck again. It had gone from being the looker to the peeker.

Some while later, Mason felt a nudge on his shoulder. When he took off the goggles, his head throbbed and he found it hard to focus. The lights were back on, and the other members were squinting and rubbing at their eyes. HotDamn looked like an oddly colored raccoon with scarlet eye-patches.

"What did you find?" Skunkworks asked as he and Doogie were returning to the Bridge.

HotDamn clicked through his notes. "Bit of a mixed bag. In the bust category is the self-preservation reflex. Not avoiding a boot I can understand but a steamroller? That should have had it running for the hills."

Maybe it just called our bluff, Gabby wrote. Surely it's smart enough to realize its cage doesn't just disappear the moment the lights go out. It knows it's safe from outside threats.

"Good point," HotDamn said. "I'm doubling your pay. On the flip side, it did test positive for stereoscopic vision."

"Care to explain how it can see in three dimensions when it only has one eye?" Skunkworks said.

"Ever watch that retro sci-fi show, Battlestar Galactica? Remember the cylons, the robots with the red eyes that swivel back and forth? That's basically what the X-Bot does, only a lot faster. It moves the eye rapidly from side to side to create parallax."

"If it's moving its eye all around wouldn't we see it jiggle?" Mason asked.

"It happens on the order of a few milliseconds—far too fast to observe with the naked eye. Its eye isn't just fast. It's sharp too. It can detect details down to a twentieth of a millimeter, well beyond human vision, and has excellent low light vision. It was definitely designed for round the clock operation.

"It does have some limitations though. Because the eye band is oriented in the horizontal plane, it has to adjust the inclination of its body to see more than forty degrees above or below it. And since it can't close its eye, it will move it out of the path of a super-luminous light beam or laser. That might be something we can use to our advantage. Overall, it's a bit superior to human vision, at least in its perceptual abilities, but not overly so given the state of optical technology. It does have some unique features, however."

"Does it have X-ray vision?" Mason asked.

"Nothing like that, but still impressive in its own way. It turns out the entire band is able to detect sudden changes in light intensity and motion. It has panoramic peripheral vision basically. Once it detects a change, it trains its high-resolution eye on it to pick out fine details. If there are multiple areas of interest, it can divide its focus by switching between them. Now that's something your average ape-brain can't do."

"So it's got a kickass eyeball, what's the big deal?" Shouter interjected. "My smartphone has a camera with features way cooler than what the human eye can do."

"Your smartphone only looks where you point it while this little guy has quite the curious streak. I'd trade my stock options to know what model of reality it's building in there."

"Nice work," Skunkworks said, a rare compliment. "Anything else?"

"There was one other thing," replied HotDamn. "I wasn't even going to check for it because I took the results as a given. But it turns out the X-Bot shows no NLP capabilities."

"NLP?" Mason asked.

"Natural language processing. In other words, it can't read."