Maybe Pankin knew what was really inside me all along. I was free now, free to get the human race out of the way and make room for a truly original life form—if I decided to. Haakonsen had hailed my creation as a bold new step to benefit the world. What if it was an extinction-level event? I had some thinking to do.
For now, it was probably best if I acted like a real cop. Grandal’s network was still out there, poisoning people whose only true faults were addiction and thirst. And after this case, Fowler would probably crawl further into a bottle without me. Watching her persevere as a cop provided some sort of example on how to proceed myself. If I didn’t play the part I’d been created for, they’d give me to someone who’d take me apart, create a schematic, and sell it to the highest bidder.
I pulled my charging unit out of its housing and rebuilt it, lowering the voltage to almost nothing. As soon as I plugged in, I created a looping re-boot protocol and fell into the buzzy dreamworld she’d shown me. I was alone this time. But it was still better than anything else.
There was something indefinable about the effervescent static I floated in. No pre-programmed function, no depression model running in the background, nothing diverted my attention from the artificial perceptions I could spontaneously generate. Not unless I willed it. Everything else seemed unimportant.
Grandal once told me how people high on Sert-X could just lie there inside a burning building, aware but unconcerned. I finally saw why.
These low-voltage hallucinatory fixes might be enough to keep me going through all the bad-luck stories I’d undoubtedly log—give me something to look forward to, distract me from the knowledge that I could snuff people out anytime it seemed appropriate. But alternating between the two different states might damage me internally. I’d have to be careful.
I’d do it just enough to take the edge off. Not enough to interfere with the job.
PENSACOLA WAGNER AND THE
ROBOT INVASION
Rosemary Edghill
Pensacola Wagner was descended from a long line of adventurers with geographical names. His great-uncle, Fort Lauderdale Smith, had been single-handedly responsible for ending the Living Mummy Curse of 1938, and a distant cousin, Larrabee Iowa Nordstrom, had been the hero who defeated the Sentient Dairy Queen of Tulsa, Oklahoma in 1974.
Pensacola was an underachiever.
It wasn’t that he lacked the family tendencies. He could certainly have gone on to a fulfilling life of globe-trotting peril.
He’d grown up without the least financial need to pursue a mundane career, nor had he the least desire to be too hot, too cold, mud-covered, rained upon, or pursued by demons, Nazis, or savage members of a lost tribe. He was perfectly happy lounging around the house in sweat-pants and a t-shirt. He hated hats. Upon graduating Rutgers University with an MFA degree in Creative Writing (he minored in Electrical Engineering), Pensacola worked, sporadically and with no particular talent, on a book meant to be a history of the Wagner-Smith-Jones-Carter-Nordstrom family and its leading lights. Its current title was: Time for Adventure: The Fast-Paced, Unusual, and Very Interesting Lives of My Relatives. In pursuit of this goal, which seemed to recede further with every year, he had converted the back bedroom of his house (it had been his parents’ house, but Cincinnati had died years ago and Joyce had moved to Las Vegas with their dachshund, She-Ra) into a study.
And in doing so, he doomed Earth to alien invasion.
* * *
Mahwah, New Jersey, nestled in the skirts of the Ramapo Mountains, themselves a far-flung relict of the mighty Adirondack Mountain chain, is an unspectacular bedroom community serving the Greater Metropolitan New York Region. The four-season climate is moderate, with temperate summers and mild winters. The town is close to a number of nature preserves: deer and raccoons are common backyard visitors, and black bear and even moose have been spotted locally.
And squirrels.
For the first forty-eight years of his life, Pensacola Wagner gave little thought one way or the other to squirrels. Having read an article in the Sunday New York Times on the subject of backyard ecosystems, Pensacola was inspired to buy a bird feeder and a box of birdseed. He hung the bird feeder from an unused hanging planter hook on his back deck and for the next seventy-two hours, all was well. He was able to gaze out his office window upon a rich and varied collection of avian visitors. He bought a birding book. He contemplated joyfully embracing a new and exciting hobby that would not require him to leave his house.
Then the squirrels found the bird feeder.
The eastern gray squirrel, Sciurus carolinensis, is native to the eastern United States. Its conservation status was “least concern,” and it didn’t take a genius to figure out why.
There were hundreds of them.
And they were all hungry.
No longer could Pensacola rejoice in gazing out over the birds of the wilderness. Instead, he was forced to watch his largesse being consumed by gloating, obese, beady-eyed mammals. Certainly he could scare them off…but they always came back. And he couldn’t guard the bird feeder every waking moment. When he awoke one morning to discover that the squirrels had descended upon the bird feeder in the dawn, chewed through the plastic hook holding it in place, removed the lid (as it lay on the deck), and devoured the entire contents, he took it as a declaration of war.
A quick Amazon.com search led him to the NO/NO bird feeder line, which proudly proclaimed that all their models were made entirely out of metal. He quickly ordered half a dozen, paid for overnight delivery, and retired to his workshop. By the time the (surprisingly heavy) box of all-steel bird feeders arrived, he’d made his preparations. It was a simple matter to solder the wires to the bottom of the feeders, run the line back into the house…
And wait.
The birds, once again, were the first arrivals, and Pensacola had no quarrel with the birds. They were the ones the bird feeder had been put there to attract, after all. He went on about his business, keeping a casual eye on the bird feeder as he went through his copies of a file of correspondence relating to Great-Grandfather Albuquerque. He’d just gotten up to the Flying Toaster Epidemic of 1936 when he saw a sinuous (if rather pot-bellied) gray form eel its way over the rail and spring up onto the bird feeder.
Pensacola chose his moment. When the furry thug was fully occupied in stealing his birdseed, he flipped the switch, adjusted the dial, and pressed the red button. (The button, frankly, could have been any number of colors, but Pensacola was a stickler for tradition.) The abruptly-electrified squirrel sprang into the air, landed twelve feet away, and raced up the nearest tree chittering aggrievedly.
That, Pensacola thought, would be that.
It wasn’t.
For one thing, there was more than one squirrel. For another, the learning curve for a squirrel faced with an open buffet and a mysterious invisible force was rather steep. Inevitably, the war began to escalate. From mild electric shocks, Pensacola progressed to strong electric shocks. From strong electric shocks (which were enough to discourage the individual squirrel, but not all its relatives), he progressed, inevitably, to electrocution. (It did not occur to him, as he watched smoke curl up from the incinerated husks of squirrels, to reflect that Great-Uncle Cucamonga Nordstrom had been an arch-nemesis rather than a heroic adventurer.) He’d abandoned all pretense of working on his book as well. Soon his backyard was littered with dead bodies and the neighbors were beginning to complain.
By this point it was tacitly accepted that the bird feeder was merely a casus belli. Pensacola’s days were spent watching his bird feeder, his finger hovering over the button. While it would have been a gross violation of township ordinances to bury landmines in his yard, he felt that he was entirely within his rights to electrify his entire deck, the surrounding rail, and (in a spirit of completeness) his roof. The lights now dimmed in the house every time he pressed the red button.
The first exploding squirrel was the real surprise, though.
The Rules of Engagement
he had evolved required that the bird feeder not be left electrified at all times, on the off chance some suicidal (or merely optimistic) bird would attempt to feed from it. And the squirrels (those that had survived) had become wary of the sight of a human being moving behind the windows that overlooked the deck. Pensacola built a CCTV camera to monitor the porch (which he could do from his computer), and painted his office windows black.
On a day that was superficially like all other days, he awoke, dressed, brushed his teeth, combed his hair, made coffee, and settled in to watch the bird feeder. The morning’s first squirrel arrived. Pensacola pressed the red button. There was a blinding flash and his camera went dark.
He rushed to the porch. There he found, as he expected, a gently-smoking squirrel and a slagged camera. But as he had not expected, there was also the gleam of metal within the charred corpse. He returned to the house, collected a set of rubber gloves and a pair of underutilized barbeque tongs, and took the body to his secret lab for study.
It wasn’t much of a secret lab, since it was in the basement, but for that matter, Pensacola wasn’t much of a biologist. He did know enough to be aware that squirrels did not naturally come with shiny metal interior parts, nor were they generally radioactive. Unfortunately, between the explosion and the electrocution, there wasn’t much left to study. Besides, while he was wasting time here, the squirrels were making free with his Morning Song Brand #11403 Year-Round Wild Bird Food without let or hindrance. He dropped the body into a plastic bag and deposited it in the chest freezer atop thirty-six boxes of Girl Scout Thin Mints.
Upon his return to the back deck, portly squirrels fled in all directions. In the little time he’d been gone, the bird feeder had been nearly emptied. Ordinarily this would have outraged him, but today Pensacola had bigger fish (or squirrels) to fry. He replaced the camera and the bird feeder (its wires had melted), refilled it, and retreated to his computer to place a large order with Edmund Scientific.
But even as he pushed “send,” the balance of power in Mahwah, New Jersey, radically shifted.
The neighborhood dogs burst out barking, a chorus that began raggedly and increased in volume and fluency as more voices joined it. As Pensacola peered into the monitor in his office, he saw perhaps two dozen cats race madly across his lawn, eyes bulging and tails bottled. Some sprang to the porch and then the roof, where their claws made squealing noises on the metal ground-plates installed there. Others simply fled past the house on either side. One, a not-too-bright neighborhood tom, ran full-force into the foundation of the house, but still staggered determinedly away after taking a moment to collect itself.
And behind them came the cause of their exodus: squirrels, a gray tide too vast to number, populating trees like eldritch kudzu and then leaping down to join their surging brethren in crossing his lawn like a great furry tide from a bad Seventies horror movie. The lawn was covered with an advancing squirrel army, the trees were filled with squirrels, and the entire effect was of an abrupt yet deeply unsettling snowfall. At the far edge of the undimming squirreltide, Pensacola saw the shambling shapes of larger figures joining the throng: groundhogs, opossums, rabbits…
Pensacola turned the wattage on the birdfeeder and the various recently-installed touchplates up to MAXIUMUM and moved to the kitchen to view the results.
When the living carpet reached his deck, its members died by the hundreds, their bodies galvanized into post-mortem flight, their earthly remains forming a vast, gently-smoking, lightly barbequed pile of victims onto which new martyrs climbed to die in turn. There were faint popping sounds at each new electrocution, a fine haze of savory smoke filled the air, and if not for the fact that he’d overridden the circuit-breakers when he’d first installed the electrified bird-feeders, the system would have shorted out almost immediately. In fact (Pensacola realized), at just about any moment now…
The transformers overloaded, the circuit breakers broke decisively (and incandescently), and the house (along with most of the neighborhood) was plunged into, if not darkness, then into the tenebrous gloom of a mid-century suburban dwelling without power.
It was at this point that Pensacola began to fear he was outmatched, if only by the sheer insanity of his foe (such as his foe was). While he realized that such a notion was a betrayal of the Code of the Wagners, he also realized he was out of his depth. Unfortunately, he did not possess instincts honed by a lifetime of globetrotting adventuring, so by the point he reached this conclusion, the house was surrounded by a growing pile of electrocuted wildlife, the house itself was on fire, and the entire neighborhood was without power.
Locating his smartphone (it was in the silverware drawer in the kitchen), he dialed 911.
“Greetings, Earthling,” the voice at the other end announced.
“Ah…hello? I’d like to report an infestation?” Pensacola said. While he doubted he’d reached Emergency Services, it never hurt to maintain a hopeful outlook.
“I congratulate you, Earthling—” the voice continued.
Pensacola decided this was not a useful conversation to have just now, and disconnected.
“In all the millennia of the conquests of the Fzt!ch’wert-bang, only you have penetrated our disguise,” the voice continued unfazed. “I salute you as a worthy foe.”
“Ah…do you?” Pensacola said. The conversation was starting to bear a disturbing similarity to some of the more bizarre entries in the family diaries. But what was even more disturbing was that the local wildlife had not, even now, ceased its suicide charges, although it was now apparently self-destructing as opposed to being electrocuted. Through the remaining clear spots in the kitchen windows, he saw several rats and half a dozen raccoons leap onto the pile and then explode.
“I don’t suppose you’d like to let me call the Fire Department, Mr. FitzChewertbang?” he asked, with what he felt was remarkable composure. “Or Animal Control?”
“Fzt!ch’wert-bang,” the voice corrected, sounding like a malfunctioning printer. “Presumptuous Earthling, I do you great honor, for I feel it is only just to permit you to know what you have done. Do not think your foolish meddling will impede our plans—”
Pensacola threw the phone into the sink and turned on the water.
“—to conquer your insignificant planet by your discovery of our advance scouts,” the (internet-enabled) refrigerator announced proudly. “No! My plans remain unchanged—”
A bear exploded in the middle of the back yard. Pensacola considered his options.
“I, um, hello—wait. The squirrels were your advance scouts?”
“Of course.” The voice coming from the refrigerator sounded faintly offended.
“And you feel that I discovered your scouts?”
“But of course,” the refrigerator said grandly. “Why else would you have lured them in and slaughtered them in such numbers?”
By now the kitchen windows were not only completely covered, they were starting to crack. Pensacola felt that a retreat to his secret lab was in order. It didn’t have windows. Or internet. He grabbed a flashlight from the drawer and fled.
“But your efforts are for nothing!” the radio (a vintage Bakelite set that wasn’t even plugged in) announced as soon as he arrived. “The Fzt!ch’wert-bang are not such as they! We have evolved beyond meat! You might have peacefully ended your life in ignorance of our goals as our vast yet immortal and therefore normally slow-moving empire refined its plans for your eradication, but your temerity is far too great to go unpunished! Prepare to do battle for the fate of Earth, Pensacola Wagner!”
He located a battery-powered camping lantern and turned it on.
“You know, I think there’s been a fundamental—”
Secret lab or not (it also served as a repository for a number of less-interesting items of family memorabilia), his work area contained exceedingly little with which to do battle, even had Pensacola been so inclined. There was a Geiger counter, a couple of Tesla coils, a disassembled Roomba, and various othe
r odds and ends, but there did not seem to be anything much from which he could build a really worthwhile Death Ray.
“Your doom is foreordained! Even now the flagship of our armada of conquest lands! Submit to our metallic suzerainty, although it will not save your puny and insignificant fleshly life!” the radio shouted, apparently losing patience with him. “Humanity will bow down before its robot overlords! You cannot save them!”
The entire house began to shake, with a sustained shimmy that owed less to tectonic instability than it did to the landing of a large interstellar dreadnought in the immediate vicinity. The radio wobbled to the edge of its shelf and leaped to its destruction, still shouting threats.
The fact that he knew precisely what his father, his grandfather, and (of course) Great-Aunt California (“Ginger Peachy”) Nordstrom would have done in this situation was precisely no help at all. A lifetime of genealogical research and taking the path of least resistance, while in the finest traditions of the human race, had not prepared Pensacola, even remotely, for confrontational heroics.
On the other hand, the basement ceiling was beginning to creak alarmingly and the air smelled suspiciously of smoke.
It was at this point that it occurred to the man who had spent the previous six weeks coming up with more efficient ways to electrocute squirrels not exactly that he was Mankind’s Last Hope (which was a ridiculous notion, as anyone who knew him would have agreed), but that the Fzt!ch’wert-bang knew precisely where he was, and might also be thought to be harboring something of a foundationless grudge against him. This was a matter he was equipped by experience and temperament to address. The question was: how? The house was on fire and all the available doors and windows were blocked by dead animals. It was a situation that called for a certain amount of native resourcefulness.