Chapter 1:
Paul Stevenson was one of those rare individuals
with an almost transcendent understanding of the world around him. “He could
see something in nothing,” was the way he was described by many of his friends.
“There were times when he would walk into the
office where a group of guys were arguing around a CAD table and, with a few
flicks on the surface, completely solve the issue without a second thought,” remembers
Jerry Harper a close friend of Paul’s. “He just saw things a different way.”
Paul Stevenson was born in 2031, the sixth child
in a rural farming family. His parents Benjamin and Samantha Stevenson were
people that had gained success in agriculture by embracing the new technologies
that were developing but at the same time maintaining their connections to the past.
Benjamin Stevenson was a shrewd businessman who always
got the better end of a deal. Not because he was a slick operator or a great
negotiator but because he saw and could create opportunity where no one else
could.
Stevenson had been a farmer all his life.
Following in his father’s footsteps he purchased his first few animals when he
left high school. Not wanting to attend college, an odd decision in the early
2000’s, he immediately set to work building his farm.
While not an officially educated man, Benjamin
was very well read and informed. He always kept a pulse on the changes in his
industry and its potential opportunities. This led him to great success in many
of his endeavors.
Stevenson had been one of the first to adopt
cloned animals, a huge gamble during the health conscious period. But, seeing
that the control of the genetics in his farm animals would guarantee consistent
quality and performance, he took the chance. This gamble paid off when
genetically modified and cloned food gained respect in the health community for
its enhanced nutritional content. Benjamin soon became a very wealthy farmer
and cattle rancher.
Though as others saw the opportunity and began
to jump into the cloned agriculture business Benjamin took another gamble and
stepped backward to resort to traditional breeding in order to diversify his
herd. This saved him a few years later when the lack of variation in the cloned
herds led to a mass die-off when a particularly potent rotavirus mutated to be
especially attracted to the few types of cloned cattle.
Paul Stevenson grew up listening to his logical
father predict the future through a series of rationalizations. Benjamin often
involved Paul and his siblings whenever he was conducting business at the
dining room table. Benjamin Stevenson’s business prowess and forward thinking
certainly rubbed off on Paul.
Samantha Stevenson was also incredibly
competent. Samantha Philips had been a gifted student and athlete for most of
her high school years. She had been accepted to attend the Google Industrial
College where she studied applied physics while designing products for the
company.
The industrial school was located near Fresno
California. She was introduced to Benjamin at a young professionals meeting in
the town. She had initially brushed him off as just a farm boy until he started
offering very detailed opinions and solutions to some of the work she was
doing. The two continued to meet for about a year before Benjamin eventually
asked her to marry him.
Samantha Stevenson immediately left her career
and studies to help Benjamin on the farm. Soon they had children running out
their ears and both Benjamin and Samantha loved it. Their large family drew
much attention, at the time, when more than three children was considered a
large family. But Samantha was a dedicated mother to all of her children. Teaching
them to read and write long before they ever entered school.
Paul Stevenson was the youngest. He had an older
sister Anne, then the twins Jeff and Ben, and then the youngest sisters Tiffany
and Alex. While there was a large amount of rough-housing the children always
knew not to misbehave because neither of their parents had any issue with
inflicting some pain to teach a lesson. But they also realized their parents
loved nothing better than to praise their children for their accomplishments
and good behavior. This system led to all of the Stevenson children becoming
quite well behaved and accomplished individuals.
The farm, where the children grew up, was very
rural. The nearest town was nearly a hundred miles away. Even with the air cars
of the time that was quite a distance. But it offered the solitude the family
enjoyed.
But such a rural location attracted another
group also. The space industry at the time was booming. Lunar Base One was
beginning to grow and actually have positive production of helium-3. Orbital
power plants were aiding to the global power shortage and Mars was just beginning
farming after the 2034 Bio-Containment Agreement was passed by the United Space
Organization.
A small launch company, Space Solutions Inc.,
had set up operations next to the Stevenson farm. Paul grew up watching tails
of fire and circles of light blast toward the heavens. And his parents were
equally fascinated by the possibilities space offered.
Some nights the family would just sit on the
porch of their home and watch a launch. Benjamin and Samantha would answer the
children’s questions as well as a physicist and a businessman could.
It was unavoidable that Paul would catch the bug
of space. He soon was digesting everything he could find about space travel. He
learned the history, he learned how rockets worked, what the latest
technologies were. He started following influential engineers and
entrepreneurs. He would write them messages by which many were greatly surprised
that the person on the other end of the line was a child under ten years old.
“The questions he asked and the ideas he shared were some of the things that
many companies had hidden in a backroom, waiting to reveal and yet here was
this kid asking how this stuff would work,” stated Sam Stricken an engineer at
SpaceX at the time.
Wanting to promote their son’s interests
Samantha and Benjamin Stevenson pulled in some of their friends from Space
Solutions to talk to Paul and help him with his ambition. By this point Paul
was designing spacecraft and planning businesses around them.
Stanley Wilkers, an engineer at Space Solutions
and a friend of Samantha’s, recalled, “When I met Sam’s twelve year old boy for
the first time I had been expecting to tell him to work hard in school and learn
as much as he could. I found that he knew about as much about the industry as I
did. And was also doing some pretty detailed engineering. All I could say to
the kid was “keep it up.” He was ahead of some college kids I knew.”
Paul maintained his passion for space all the
way into high school. Though intellectually several grades ahead of his age
group, his parents had required that he not skip any grades and participate in
sports. While at first this seemed to Paul as holding him back, he eventually
started to become, by all appearances, a very normal teenager. Engaging with
friends and activities during the day but engrossing himself in space at night. Bill
Akin, a high school friend of Paul’s said “Paul was a weird guy ‘cause he was
as normal as any other kid when you saw him in the halls at school. He had a
lot of energy, a real sharp wit, and was a good basketball player. But if you
ever looked in his backpack you would see textbooks on math and engineering and
if you ever made it to his room it was like a nerd’s paradise. Paul was just
really rounded.”
Unfortunately, Paul’s choice of careers changed
suddenly his sophomore year in high school. He was walking across the street to
head home from school when a smartcar went out of control and hit him on the
street. It was later found that the car had been hacked. The owners of the car
weren’t able to get manual control of the vehicle before it crushed both of
Paul’s legs. The damage was so severe that even stem cell therapy wouldn’t
help.
Paul’s parents walked into his hospital room
after the doctors gave them the news and told Ben that his legs would have to
be amputated.
Amazingly Paul responded with a bright smile and
said “Cool I’ll get to try out this idea I had.” Paul had been diversifying his
interests the last year or so and had gained an interest in prosthetics.
“I never saw anyone so excited about being
crippled,” said Dr. Sandling the surgeon who amputated Paul’s legs.
Paul was given a set of biomechanical legs to
work with. While they were high quality and the link to Paul’s nervous system
was stable enough, Paul was incredibly disappointed with their performance.
They were lightly built and felt as if they would easily break if put through extreme
abuse. Paul was used to running around in the dirt and the mud of the farm. Now
he had a pair of high tech legs that let him walk and even run but on nothing
other than clean floors and asphalt.
He immediately set to work in the farm’s shop to
build himself something that was a bit more rugged. “He started building
something that was completely different from any of the prosthetics out there.
It started as if he was making a wheel chair but then it started getting
taller,” said Benjamin, who often helped
his son with the fabrication.
The result was neither wheel chair nor legs, but
a hybrid of the two. Paul called it the BiPed, which was actually a play on the
word bicycle and the appendages he had lost. The device stood about three feet
tall. It had an electric base with four rugged tires. Then a thick trunk that
rose from the center of the base. This trunk had a single hydraulically powered
knee and “ankle” that allowed it to crouch and lean forward. Paul was able to
fit the stumps of his legs into a socket at the top of the trunk and then link
his smartband to the system to control the knee and ankle.
The first design was actually quite crude. Most
of the parts Ben had scrounged from a few nearby scrapyards. Hydraulics was
beginning to be replaced by electromagnetics so there were many operable units
that were just thrown away.
Ben soon started using his BiPed instead of his
highly expensive legs. But his parents didn’t mind. “We were just happy that he
found so much enjoyment hacking his injury for the better,” stated Samantha.
Paul continually upgraded his robotic prosthesis.
He eventually added electrodes to the socket to read the nerve signals coming
from his stumps. The electrodes he actually took from his original prosthetic,
this did create a stir in the Stevenson household when his mother found out
about it.
He also continued to improve the look. He
started smoothing the edges and grinding down the welds he made. He added coats
of black paint, inspired by early stealth aircraft. As time went by his
creation morphed from a thrown together do-it-yourself machine to a near work
of art.
Paul was able to dance in his creation and even
crawl up stairs by twisting and flexing. The machine soon had his friends
calling him “Cyborg.”
Paul’s friend, Bill Akin, best described the situation.
“He was probably one of the most popular people at school by his senior year
since his personality actually grew more infectious with his creation of a half
robot body.”
Paul graduated from Skybrook High school in 2049
ready to take on the world and begin on a degree in mechanical engineering.
Amazingly he was denied by some of his top picks for colleges. For some reason
his interviews at some of the Ivy League schools didn’t impress enough. His
mother had recommended attending some of the Inc. Colleges as she had, but Paul
wasn’t interested in having his ideas given to him. So he went down his list
and eventually ended up attending a small aerospace engineering school in New Mexico. So he packed up the
BiPed and a couple of suitcases and headed out. (Unfortunately, he had to check
the BiPed in as luggage and take a wheel chair onto the plane. Paul later
recalled that he never forgot how people felt sorry for him on that flight,
even though he wasn’t hampered or discouraged by his lack of legs at all.
Smith and Hatley University was founded in 1914
when the world of flight was just getting started. William Hatley and James
Smith had started the school to train pilots and explore the science of flight.
SHU provided many pilots in both WWI and WWII. But it never really came into
its own in engineering until the 1990’s and early 2000’s when they began to
explore the applications of robotics in aircraft. The drone developments
achieved at the school put it on the map. It also gained notoriety in the
aerospace industry for creating high quality engineers that performed well in
the established companies and the emerging space industry.
Having had such a close connection to the
military for a very long time, SMU was almost a private Air Force Academy. It
had a heavy ratio of ROTC programs and was a major place for inactive veterans
to complete their education.
Paul wheeled onto the campus and was quickly a
point of attraction. He would introduce himself at the orientation groups and
would quickly be bombarded with inquiries concerning his accident and where he
obtained the device. As this continued into the semester Paul began to calmly
answer the questions and then move on with whatever he was doing.
Paul considered his prosthesis to be the status
quo. He used it naturally as if it was truly a part of him. This attitude came
through in his daily activities on the campus.
One of Ben’s professors was most impressed when
“On the first day of class Paul wheeled into the middle of the front row with
his lower half, and actually sat down without so much as a smirk, when everyone
started murmuring about how naturally he used the machine.”
There were a few people however who, initially,
were not very impressed with the clunky tree trunk of metal which was Paul’s
lower half. This group was the combat hardened veterans who were also amputees.
“The prosthetics of the time were incredibly complex. Able to mimic the
biological leg in every way, even allowing direct neural control. Ben’s chunky
“stump,” as we all used to call it, just seemed like something the kid built to
get attention but wasn’t really very practical. I liked my legs just fine and I
wasn’t going to replace them with a tank to have to wheel around.” This was the
opinion of Sergeant Phil Peterson.
Peterson was an amputee from the counteroffensive
against North Korea. He had lost both legs when he was hit by a rail gun round.
His legs had been replaced with the best prosthetics of the time and he was
allowed to live a normal life. Though he often missed getting dirty, just as
Paul had.
Peterson and many of his fellow amputees ate
their derogatory words about Paul when they were walking around one day in the
early part of the semester and saw Paul fly by them at around thirty miles an hour
and then proceed to spin some wheelies in the muddy ground before ducking into
a nearby fountain to clean off and then continue on.
Now Ben was really getting attention. The BiPed
was no longer thought of as a rebuilt wheelchair but as an upgrade. A machine
that gave a person super abilities in place of disability. And though its
design was still very home grown all the veterans that wanted to get the
adrenaline pumping again, after losing a limb, wanted one.
Peterson was actually integral in getting Ben
started in the business. He pulled together a few of his buddies and had Paul
give them a demonstration at the school track. He wowed them all and several
offered to buy his on the spot.
Paul was in business. He contacted an
engineering firm that was near the school and had them start building copies of
the BiPed, with a few upgrades, which he then sold to his fellow amputees. To
market it even more Paul started a group on the campus which was like a
motorcycle club for the BiPeds. There were probably thirty veterans that had
lost limbs, all of them wanted a BiPed but until Ben could get them built they had
to share the few available.
As each man got his Biped there was always a small
ceremony where he would get it painted, like a custom car, and then take it for
a spin.
Though the building of the BiPeds was actually
very lucrative and helped pay the bills at college. Ben still was more
interested in space. He was actually one of the few people that didn’t get a
huge rush from the BiPed. It was good, but it wasn’t better than what he
imagined riding a spaceship would be like. He wasn’t planning on building a
career around his invention quite yet.
This changed in 2050 when an army colonel was performing
a standard check of the ROTC cadets at the school but instead became more
interested in the group of men zooming around on the hillside behind the
training field.
“I thought they were all riding some kind of new
ATV,” stated Colonel Peter Knells. “They were kicking up dirt and flying over
humps like a SuperCross race.” When Knells went over to the area to investigate,
he was surprised to find that the group was actually composed of the disabled veterans
on campus.
He grew more and more impressed as the men
quickly and easily formed up in a line to salute the colonel whom they all knew
very well. Knells asked them to give him some more demos of the things that
they were wearing. The men gladly obliged showing the colonel many maneuvers
that could be done with the machines. From actually lying on their bellies and
crawling under bushes, to beating through bushes and over rocks.
Knells asked who the company was that made the
machines, and was amazed when the response was that a kid on campus built them
for the veterans. Knells quickly worked to find out where Paul was on that
Saturday.
Knells was in charge of the Army’s Infantry Research
Division. He focused on many of the combat suit designs that were being
implemented at the time. He had hated where the technology was going. The war
department had forced him to focus on stealth and minimalist design. The wars
in the Middle East in the early part of the century had changed the fighter into
someone that had to work in an urban environment and perform like a controller
for a robot army. This meant information was more important than actual action.
Many of the exoskeletons in use by the infantry at that point were too petite
for Knells’ taste and had actually been the cause of most of the Infantry’s
casualties during the Korean Counter-Offensive. Knells wanted a machine that
was better, faster, and stronger and he saw the potential for it in Paul’s
Biped which was giving amputees superhuman abilities.
With a few questions Knells found out that Paul
would be in the library studying. Knells went there immediately. Upon entering
the building Knells scanned the groups of students for Paul. He located the
prodigy in large reading chair with his Biped parked next to him.
When Knells approached Paul, the boy didn’t even
look up until he had completed the page he was reading.
“I had thought that it was one of my ROTC
friends coming to bother me and I never gave them my attention until they
either said something or I was at a good stopping point in what I was doing. I
was shocked when I looked up to see an Army Colonel take a seat across from me,”
recalled Paul.
But Paul quickly shifted from slight shock into
his charismatic personality, extending his hand for a shake and jokingly apologizing
for not getting up.
Knells introduced himself to the confident boy
and started to explain why he was there. “I told Paul that I liked his design
for a rugged prosthetic and could probably get him a contract to develop it
even further. But I also wondered if he could design something that would be
more of an exoskeleton which could be used by people that still had their legs.
I was then amazed as Ben pulled his tablet from his backpack and proceeded to
show me several successions to the design of the BiPed. One with arms to give
more support and abilities to amputees and even one for the average person to
use. Paul had already laid out a development map for his idea.”
Knells asked Paul to present some of his ideas
to Knells engineers. Paul recoiled at first with the fear that his ideas would
be taken away from him. But Knells promised there was no danger of that. Trusting
the Colonel’s word Paul agreed.
This was the point when Paul diverted from his
path to the space industry. He was 19 years old and was about to be given
military contracts to build stuff. Paul liked the idea of running his own business
where he could be a free designer. Though space had always been his passion
Paul had always loved to tinker. The developments for the BiPed only fueled
that desire more.
So after Knells left him with the potential for
military contracts Paul quickly went online and started searching for potential
names that he could use for his company which were not already trademarked.
