Cargoship 14: Chapter 1 (Part 1)

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.