The first test was actually the toughest on the system, a barbell squat. We had borrowed one of those strongman style frames from a powerlifting gym in town, and loaded it with over a thousand pounds of plates. In total, it came out to over fifteen hundred pounds including the frame, which I supported by the spinal column of the skeleton. Since the exoskeleton was a bit taller than I am, getting under it was a bit of a challenge, but once I did, the squats were easy, no harder than getting up and down out of a chair.
I did twenty before letting the frame down feather-light, much to the amazement of the audience. “While adjusting for the power and speed of the skeleton takes some practice, notice that Wes didn’t have to do anything unnatural with his movements. He just squatted up and down like you might do in the gym every day. By the way, yes, Wes is a big man, but his lift was over three hundred pounds heavier than the current world record, and any one of you could’ve lifted it,” Robin expounded, and I could see we had them.
For the rest of the hour, I demonstrated different capabilities of the Mark IA. Taking the guests outside into the industrial park behind the lab, I jumped, ran, dragged a truck across the parking lot, and more, all while barely breaking a sweat. When I was finished, I nimbly maneuvered the unit back inside the lab, ducking my head to avoid the door, and latched into the recharging stand, powering down. I could tell by the look in my Dad’s eye that we had made it.
Collins Robotics was a success.
Chapter 12
Robin
Wes’s initial assessment was a bit off, but not too far so. While Gerald and the Brandt Medical executives were enthusiastic about our product, it was still a long way to our final goal.
Thankfully, investment from Brandt Medical, which agreed to share in development of the Mark IA for medical purposes, gave us the financial backing we were looking for, and sales of the unit brought us to the attention of industrial and other applications. Soon, you could find our units being used in everything from helping old people take walks with their grandkids to mountain climbers using it to scale peaks like Everest and K2. It got so bad that eventually the Nepalese government stopped counting ascents of the major Himalayan mountains using the Mark IA.
When the Department of Defense approached us, we showed them the Mark III, our first unarmored full-body exoskeleton. The shoulders were, as expected, the hardest to replicate, along with the spine. Still, the suit worked great, and the DoD soon looked to use our suits in various jobs behind combat lines. The first time I saw a two thousand pound cargo container being loaded onto an Osprey aircraft by one of our suits to deliver humanitarian supplies for tsunami relief in the Philippines, tears were in my eyes.
Despite my mom’s words to Wes, we set our wedding date pretty far in the future. It’s just the way Wes and I are. We finally got Mom and Gerald off our backs by promising that when the Mark X was ready, we’d have our ceremony.
That day took us a while, and in that time, Collins Robotics went from that old laundromat and just me and Wes working, to a fifty-person team, including assembly, testing, and coders who were more skilled than even Wes and me. It was actually a relief, letting him and I work more on the designs of the next stages of our series, while our employees worked on enhancing our previous designs.
They had some good ideas, and our designs got better and better. We even had our own doctor on staff, whose whole job was to give her input on how to better connect the suit’s skeleton to the human body. It was another edge we got a leg up on.
The Mark X was our crowning achievement, a total prototype that we worked on in private. It was a one-of-a-kind unit, customized for only one man, Wes, to wear, and was a total publicity stunt. We even debated painting the thing red and gold until our legal department advised us that we didn’t want Marvel, Sony, and maybe two or three other corporate conglomerates down our throat.
In the end, the Mark X was coated in black and gold, in homage to our high school alma mater if anyone asked. Standing almost seven and a half feet tall, it weighed over seven hundred pounds.
Wes
I swear, it wasn’t my idea. Robin and I were lying in bed one night, when suddenly she rolled over to me with the idea on how to debut the Mark X. “We told Mom we’d get married after it was ready for the public,” she said, “so why not make it part of the ceremony?”
“Babe, that thing is armed,” I replied, kissing her hand and stroking her face. “I mean, do you really want to have a fully armed exosuit as part of our wedding ceremony? It intimidates me, and I’m the guy that is supposed to be wearing it.”
“Hey, don’t forget that the Mark X2 is for me,” Robin replied, mentioning the Mark X’s shorter twin, scaled just for her. “We could have them both completed at the same time.”
“We could,” I replied, warming to the idea. “But before that, I had another idea.”