* * *
Elliott was not the only one making progress, however. The robot had soon determined that Elliott’s car was lacking an occupant and began a methodical backtrack. The exploration progressed slowly but exhaustively, using the robot’s visual, infrared, and chemical sensors to their fullest. The hunter worked onerously backward, searching for any trace of Elliott. It appeared to be more tracker than automobile as it scouted both sides of the street back along its path. Shuffling forward, backward, to each side, it moved like a bloodhound, systematically comparing and analyzing; intensively exploring, sniffing, scanning, until it reached the two parked cars where Elliott had taken refuge. It probed the invisible bloodstain on the pavement, noting the residual heat where Elliott had lain, interrogating the surroundings to determine the direction he had gone. It easily located the trail from Elliott’s DNA scent.
But now the gray car needed support. The rear hatch popped up just a crack, then checked itself. Some event swelled the shadowed interior, some ritual driven not by zeal but by millions of lines of computer code, a program so complex that no human genius could decipher it in a human lifetime, yet so basic in function that it radiated an artform, a lifeform, all its own.
The hatch then sprang open with a snap, splitting the Sunday dawn silence. Out of the inner gloom emerged a slender, black leg. Its curved shape extended, then straightened, then curled, then waved in a circular motion as it searched for footing. Once it located the ledge, it probed briefly to locate its edge, all the while the leg growing, twisting, curling sinuously like a shiny black-racer snake seeking prey. It probed further, locating the ground a few inches away.
Having surveyed the bounds of its environment, deliberation and caution transformed into quickness and confidence as it rose from the car in an artfully choreographed and executed assemblé. Each of its eight legs danced to some unheard melody, anticipating the needs and movements of the other seven. Eight legs acted in concert as the spider scrambled in quick but fluid movements onto the ground.
It was a spider, yet it was not a spider. It lived but was not alive. It saw and felt but had no passion or vision. It engendered vitality but propagated death. When the spider walked, its legs seemed to be dancing like a principal of the Bolshoi. When running, its legs seemed simply to disappear and then reappear in a different place, each reappearance furthering the ambitions of the brain within.
The spider had more-highly-developed functions than the gray car. But what made it such a terrible adversary had less to do with its sensors and cunning than with its incredible mobility. Each of its jet-black, seemingly jointless, legs actually comprised over a hundred joints made of piezorestrictive materials, which allowed the legs to tie themselves into knots if desired. In spite of this amazing flexibility, a spider could arm-wrestle eight men to a draw and run down a target like a panther.
Its body was the size, shape, and color of a pure-black house-cat, but turned sideways. It could move in any direction equally well without turning. Two camera-like eyes were attached to a pair of telescoping tubes to elevate or separate the eyes when it needed stealth or extreme stereo vision. A third lens for infrared gleamed spitefully like the mirror of the wicked Queen Aurora and was confined to the body of the spider.
It hunted and killed in almost total silence, the only sound coming from the tap, tap, tap of its carbon and urethane feet when it charged across a hard surface, terror writhing from it like an octet of cobras.
Now those finely honed hunting instincts had been released. It lunged forward with electronic zeal on the trail of today’s target, Dr. Elliott T. Townsend.