Read Online Edge of Danger by Cherry Adair - Free Book Online

“Dr. Kirchner has been— was my mentor for a huge chunk of my career. Everything I know I learned from him,” she told him stiffly.
     
      “And,” she added, “Marshall Davis is one of the smartest people I know. He’s invaluable to this company and to me.” Eden wasn’t subtle about her steps out of range. “Not only does he work with me, I consider myself fortunate to call him my friend.” Another demerit for Mr. Verdine. He was racking them up fast. How could she have ever thought of him as her fantasy man last night? “I’d appreciate it if you’d grant him the same respect you grant me. I’m serious, Jason.”
     
      He gave her an assessing look. “I intimidate a lot of people. But not you.”
     
      “Not in the least,” she told him, trying to keep her voice calm. What was he referring to? Her refusal to his frequent requests that they sleep together? Or the fact that he’d been pressuring her into taking the development of Rex into a military application for more than two years?
     
      As yet she was undecided about the former, but it wasn’t looking good, and she refused do the latter. She wasn’t prepared to budge on either stance. She’d already gone further than she’d wanted to. Just for her own curiosity. But Jason, no matter how much he paid her, wasn’t privy to that information.
     
      “I understand that you were devastated by Dr. Kirchner’s death. But since you refuse to take any more time off, I want you to reconstruct your research on the Rx793 as quickly as possible. I don’t have to remind you that the government has a sizable contract with us. We’ve already been paid ten million dollars for the prototype. Just because the robot was stolen doesn’t mean we don’t have to give them what they paid for.”
     
      He held up his hand when she wanted to speak. “Hear me out, would you, please? We’ve gone over this a dozen times, Eden. You know damn well it’s a practical, and in the end, humane application of something you’ve already developed. A humanlike robot going into war zones to treat and retrieve wounded soldiers will save thousands of lives. A machine won’t cut it in this application. I don’t understand your reticence now, when you’ve already done most of the work already. I know you’ve experimented with a flexible silicone skin and can make it look human. A few more tweaks is all it would take. They’ve already paid us to produce a dozen adult-sized humanoid androids.”
     
      “Money isn’t the issue,” Eden told him, wishing that her damn ego hadn’t been so eager to invent something so potentially open to misuse. “We already have a model of motion perception utilizing the output of motion-sensitive spatiotemporal filters with Rex.”
     
      Jason frowned.
     
      “The power spectrum occupies a tilted plane in the spatiotemporal-frequency domain,” Eden explained, noting the glazed look in his eyes. She laid it on a little thicker. “The Rx uses 3-D Gabor filters to sample his power spectrum for a fixed 3-D rigid-body motion, depth values parameterize a line through image-velocity space…” He had that blank expression she was accustomed to seeing on people’s faces when she started expounding on her passion. Jason wasn’t a scientist, and she usually attempted to put what she was doing in layman’s terms for him. But not today.
     
      Her research had been directed at the electrical circuit domain, but she’d branched out. Way out. It was a damn good thing Jason didn’t understand one word in a dozen of what she was telling him.
     
      Artificial intelligence was a primordial soup of computer and cognitive sciences, psychology, mathematics, linguistics, and computer sciences. The field had been just waiting for that bolt of genius that would bring it all together in a new life-form.
     
      Eden, God help her, had made that life-form.
     
      “Never mind,” she told him, wishing he’d go away and stop insisting on