Colliding Galaxies

Greta Volk’s recovery proceeded well over the next few days. Dr. Sinoglu ran numerous tests and scans, looking for peritumoral edema, any headaches, intracranial pressure, hemiparesis, tremors. Every test turned up better than expected.

  “I don’t see any evidence of tumor mass, either in our scans, in her cerebrospinal fluids, anywhere,” Sinoglu told the Volks one evening, gathered outside Greta’s room on the fourth floor of the Katholisches Krankenhaus. “Your new techniques, the new medbots, seemed to have worked wonders.”

  Oskar Volk beamed at his father Rudi. “ANAD worked like a charm. That new code did something I didn’t think we could do for months. Almost like it was made for ANAD…once that was operating…no more stability problems, no more effectors sticking. It was a beautiful thing.”

  Rudolf Volk agreed. “Think what this means for medicine. Now we can directly attack tumors, viruses, bacteria. No more shotgun approach. We go after the buggers like an American sheriff goes after the bad guys.”

  They went into Greta’s room. Frau Volk was propped up with some pillows, reading a novel on her slate. A TV set flickered from a pedestal on the wall, but the sound was muted. Some kind of movie.

  Rudi Volk went to his wife. “How do you feel, Liebchen? You’re looking well this evening.”

  Greta put down her slate and patted the bun of her hair. “As well as I ever look. I’m tired. I don’t sleep well.”

  Sinoglu was studying her monitors, making adjustments on the IV drips, recording the changes. “I can give you something for that, Frau Volk. Do you wake up a lot during the night?”

  Greta shook her head. “Bad dreams, I guess. One in particular…it’s like I’m walking through a wood…it’s foggy…the fog is whispering to me…or maybe it’s the trees. I hear whispers all the time…even when I’m awake.”

  Sinoglu was pecking away at her own slate, writing down what Greta reported. “You may have some residual cell necrosis in the auditory cortex…” she turned to Oskar Volk. “Can your ANAD device investigate that for us? Can it be steered to that area, get us some imagery?”

  “I’ll get right on it,” Oskar said.

  Outwardly, Greta’s recovery proceeded ahead of schedule. Rehab started right away…balance tests, locomotion tests, hearing and vision tests. Oskar Volk and his father Rudi visited daily. Sinoglu recorded and tracked the results, pronounced herself satisfied, even amazed, at the speed of her return to health.

  Rudi Volk made tentative plans to return to Engebbe, Kenya. He told his son that there was still a lot of work to be done at the dig site.

  “We’ve just scratched the surface of the find, Oskar. I’m sure there are more remains down there…we just have to find them. And the Institute’s still calling in more experts to look at what we’ve already got: geologists, chemists, physicists, engineers. Nobody can believe it. You should see them, Oskar: their eyes light up when they first encounter the remains…visions of papers and Nobel Prizes dance in their heads. Plus, I’ve got my own papers to write. But Leonard and the others at Engebbe keep sending me new things they’ve found every day. I feel like a child in a candy store.”

  Then Dr. Sinoglu called both of them in one morning for a consultation.

  “Greta has had some difficult nights lately,” she reported. She offered both of them either coffee or tea. Rudi preferred tea. Oskar declined everything. “I’ve got the nurses’ reports for the last week. I’m afraid there may be some tissue damage after all or neoplasia we didn’t suspect at first.”

  Rudolf Volk asked to study the nurses’ reports. He read silently for a few moments. “It says here that her speech is slurred…she stutters, speaks in nonsense phrases…sounds like another language? What is this?”

  Sinoglu took back the report. “I’ll ask the duty nurse from last night to come in…I think Renata’s still on the hall.” She pecked at a keyboard, sending the call. Moments later, a heavy set woman in blue scrubs came in. Renata Schneier was the 3rd shift ICU nurse for the north wing.

  “Renata, sit for a moment.” Sinoglu pointed to a chair by the window. It squeaked under Renata’s weight when she sat down. “Tell the Volks what you saw and heard last night…Frau Volk’s words—“

  Renata rubbed her hands nervously. “Himmel, it was so strange…I was re-setting the bed controls for her…just before midnight…she seemed possessed. Very agitated. I checked all her medicines, increased the diazepam two points --it’s all in my report.” She pleaded with her eyes.

  “Yes, yes,” Sinoglu said. “Go on, Renata. Go on—“

  Renata seemed to shudder with the recollection. “Mein Gott…I thought she was possessed. Frau Volk started speaking in a very loud voice…very clearly…a language I have never heard. I thought she was having a nightmare, so I tried to comfort her…she pushed me away…inhuman strength, that woman. I have the bruises here—“ Renata rolled back her sleeves, showing off several purplish spots on her forearms.

  “Renata—“ Dr. Sinoglu tried to be comforting to her nurse. “Renata, what else--?”

  “The way it came out, she was talking, almost yelling, about the Old Ones. Some kind of Old Ones, whatever that is. I’m sure it was a dream or a nightmare. She kept saying: ‘Ngai…Ngai…Ngai…they’re coming back’—. I asked her who Ngai was and she kept saying they’re coming…coming from the sky—“

  Rudi Volk coughed. “I’ve heard that word before, Dr. Sinoglu. Ngai is Maasai…it’s a Maasai word. It means God. Lifegiver. Provider of all Things. I’m sure Greta heard me mention it somewhere in the past. Most of the diggers and workers around Engebbe, the people we employ for hard jobs, are Maasai. Or Kikuyu.” He shrugged. “I’ve picked up a few words and phrases. Greta must have heard me using them somewhere. Maybe she’s just grateful for being saved…she’s very spiritual, you know. Kirche every week, even during the week.”

  Sinoglu studied Renata’s report. She turned to Oskar Volk. “You replicated copies of your ANAD device when you were inside Greta, didn’t you?”

  Oskar nodded. “Normal practice in medbot procedures. Leaving a few bots behind gives us a chance to respond to problems, react quickly to emergencies if we have to. Maybe a few thousand devices at most. I left them in Sense mode. They can’t do anything unless commanded.”

  “That may be so, but I’m putting Greta back in the OR tomorrow morning. I want you to remove all ANAD devices.”

  Oskar and Rudi both looked pained. Oskar spoke: “Is that wise? There could be residual tumor cells…we’ll have a better picture of what’s going on if we—“

  Sinoglu held up a hand. “I know all that. I just want a clean slate. Greta needs another scan series. I don’t want the results contaminated by anything foreign to her body.”

  Oskar really couldn’t argue. “I’ll have my gear ready first thing tomorrow, if you think it’s best.”

  Outside the hospital, the two Volks, father and son, talked as they headed for separate cars.

  Rudolf Volk was saying, “I’ve got a flight back to Nairobi tomorrow night. I’m sure this is just part of her recovery. Dr. Sinoglu’s being cautious. Greta’s been doing so well.”

  “Too cautious,” Oskar thought. “Mother needs ANAD inside…we can do so much with this new capability. It’s a risk to remove ANAD now.”

  “Do what the doctor says,” Rudi Volk laid a firm hand on Oskar’s shoulder. “I’ll be at the dig site for the next few weeks. I’m counting on you to look after your mother…keep me informed. I feel bad leaving, but it’s necessary. More digging, more finds, more analysis, Oskar…Engebbe’s just an incredible place. So much analysis to be done. I wouldn’t leave if I didn’t think she wasn’t well on her way to recovery. This is just a setback.” He wanted that to be true. It had to be true. Sinoglu had said that just the other day.

  They shook hands, hugged briefly the way men do, and parted. “I’ll keep you informed,” Oskar called after h
im. “I want to do a little post-mortem on ANAD anyway…after all this time in vivo, there might be some maintenance needed.”

  Rudolf Volk took the train to the Berlin airport that afternoon and, as the late afternoon sun was glinting off the River Spree, his flight to Nairobi was in the air, headed south toward Africa and the Engebbe dig site.

  3.

  (Eight weeks earlier….)

  The diagnosis came as a shock to everyone. The doctors’ words still haunted Rudolf Volk: oligodendroglioma…advanced necrosis…ataxia…hemiplegia…six months, maybe more…we’ll do everything we can….

  Greta Volk had always been a robust, big-hearted woman. How could this happen? How could this happen at the greatest moment of his career, on the verge of this great discovery? It wasn’t fair.

  “What about the medbots?” Volk asked. “The oncobots…I’ve read a lot about them…my son Oskar is working on these things right now, at the Institute. They’re making a lot of progress—“

  Dr. Miriam Sinoglu was the principal oncologist at the Katholisches Krankenhaus. She had short dark hair, black glasses, an understanding face, lines of concern around her full lips. “I know how you must feel, Dr. Volk. Believe me, the hospital’s planning an aggressive treatment protocol…chemo, radiation, I’m afraid surgery’s out…the location of the tumor makes that difficult. You asked about medbots…yes, it’s true. We are working with prototypes even now. But they’re just that: prototypes. Experimental. Not proven. Too hard to control…too risky. We’ll schedule Greta for her first chemo next week.”

  Rudolf Volk went to see his son Oskar, an engineer at the Max Planck Institute for Medical Nanorobotics. It was two buildings over, almost lost in thick linden trees. He asked Oskar how the ANAD project was coming along.

  Oskar had a high forehead, wiry dark brown hair, data specs that made him look like a History professor. “She’s right, you know. It’s all in the algorithms. ANAD has all kinds of effectors…carbene grabbers, pyridine probes, electron abstractors, bond disrupters. But the blasted things are damnably hard to control. ANAD can grab a molecule but he can’t manipulate it…atoms are like that. Fine motor control is a big problem when you’re dealing with van der Waals forces, Brownian motion. Atoms clump together like wet sand. Or they fly off when you come nearby…we need a better algorithm that smooths out ANAD’s movements…gives us more sensitive touch. Perhaps your ancient robot builders had some ideas—“

  They met at the IMNR cafeteria, overlooking a snowy field that fronted a pair of kidney bean-shaped lakes, now frozen over.

  “It’s frustrating,” Rudolf admitted. They discussed Oskar’s problem and the balky medbots and wondered out loud why more couldn’t be done to help Greta out.

  “But those control and stability problems are the key to everything,” Oskar said. “We’re working night and day as it is, modifying the algorithms, modifying the effectors, trying everything we can think of, testing everything. We’re so close, Papa…so close.”

  Rudolf sipped at his tea, stared unconvinced at his plate of wurst and sauerkraut. “Engebbe’s caused such an uproar. Everything’s turned upside down now. I get twenty phone calls a day…reporters, archaeologists, paleontologists, chemists and geologists, even ministers and pastors. My neighbors won’t speak to me…one of their children…little Dirk, I think it was…ran off when I tried to help him back onto his bicycle. He was crying all the way back to their house, like he’d seen a ghost.”

  “It’s a fabulous discovery,” Oskar decided. “People can’t agree on what it all means. I just wish we could have the same breakthrough with ANAD.”

  Rudolf closed his eyes, raised the steaming tea to his face and inhaled the aroma. “You’ve got good people working on it, Oskar…the answers are there somewhere. We have the same problems around the dig site…everyone has his own opinion of what all of this means.” Rudolf smiled at something he’d just remembered. “There’s a Maasai man…his name is Lekati Leaduma…he oversees all our diggers. But he’s also a shaman, a faith healer. The Maasai call him a laibon. It means diviner. He thinks the remains we found are a curse on the dig, put there by another sorcerer…just the other day, right after sundown, he was out there beside the excavation with his cattle-horn gourd and his trinkets, casting rocks, trying to read what they all meant. I guess everybody reacts to this a different way.”

  Oskar nodded, played with the beans on his plate, pushing them around with a fork into different formations, making faces. “Your dating techniques are sound? The remains are coincident in time with the other fossil remains in the strata?”

  Rudolf said they were. “Nobody has done a test that proves otherwise. I’ve tried to not make any conclusions so far, just deal with the data. But it’s hard not to speculate, Oskar. Are we descended from these robots? Were they put there by someone? That’s my thinking…we’ve been visited in the past. The ‘Aliens Have Landed’ theory, that’s what the press is calling it. Maybe Leaduma is right…maybe someone did put them there.”

  Oskar sighed, finished off his beer. “I wish some of your success would rub off on us. To be honest, the team is stuck. We’ve run out of ideas on how to make these damned algorithms work. Unless we can get ANAD to grab molecules and hold them, all we’ve got is a museum curiosity. And Mother’s stuck with chemo and radiation…that’s like using a howitzer to kill a fly. We can do better than that…we have to do better.”

  The next morning, Rudolf Volk got a long-distance call from his engineer at the Engebbe dig site, Sanders Leonard. It was a call that would change everything.

  4.

  Rudolf Volk had never seen Sanders Leonard so agitated, so excited. The words tumbled out of his mouth faster than the vid screen could track his lips; there was a disconnect between the sound and the image. Leonard was in the dig site headquarters tent, candles burning all around. Night outside, Volk decided.

  “Dr. Volk, I don’t believe it myself…I’ll send you the files and the images…we were examining some of the flat pieces very closely…six hundred mag, you know we’ve got that new ultrascope down here…we can see individual atoms—“

  Volk knew how excitable Leonard could be. “Sanders, calm down…calm down…what have you found?”

  “All of us think it can’t be anything else…given the physics involved. Memory arrays, Dr. Volk. Or at least, fragments of memory arrays. There are holes and pits and bumps, like we saw before. Widmer thinks it’s some kind of electron transport mechanism…Rudi, the answer’s staring us right in the face. The device has a memory and we’re looking at part of it.”

  Volk was cautious, mindful of how this would look to the Institute’s Board of Directors. “We need lots of evidence, Sandy. Lots. Why don’t you—“

  “Rudi, you don’t understand…there’s more. We ran tests.”

  “What kind of tests?”

  Leonard’s face looked like it was about to explode. “Widmer and I found what we thought had to be some kind of power connection…we hooked it up to a voltage source, finagled with it some…Rudi, it’s some kind of operating system. We were actually able to operate, maybe ‘animate’ is a better word, some of the effectors. There are things inside—we don’t really know what they are—but they’re turning, extending and retracting, stopping and starting. Somehow, we’ve turned the damned thing on…now we can’t seem to stop it. But it’s well contained, don’t worry about that. We’ve got it well contained.”

  Volk wasn’t even listening anymore. Sanders Leonard’s mouth was moving, his arms were waving about on the vid, he was shoving one item after another in front of the camera, but Volk was scribbling notes elsewhere, paying no attention.

  Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Volk knew someone had said that once.

  Micro robotic fragments in a fossil dig. Things spinning and extending. Stopping and starting. There had to be some kind of control system. More tests wer
e needed. Careful measurements made. What caused what to happen? If they applied power or somehow activated this gizmo, what happened? It all had to be documented meticulously. Volk wished he could be there; he needed to be there. But Greta was still undergoing her own tests. He couldn’t leave Greta, not even for the ‘find of the century’, as some reporters were calling Engebbe. Dr. Sinoglu called Greta’s condition a “kind of glioblastoma.” More scans were needed to pinpoint the location. MRI, CT, T-1 weighted scans, histological samples…nothing would be known for days.

  If only Oskar could get his ANAD device working…they could insert the bot, probe around and locate the exact position and nature of the tumor, take samples, maybe even zap the thing on site. That was the future of medicine. Go inside the body and deal with the problem directly. No more biopsies. No more scans. No more guesswork.

  The idea slammed him like the winds that often threatened to overturn his little single-master out on Lake Thurin…fetching up quickly, knocking the little boat sideways, nearly capsizing her. You had to react fast when the winds came up.

  Sanders Leonard was still on vid, explaining something, showing something on the camera, slides, graphics they had made of the memory arrays.

  “Sandy, shut up for once, will you? Listen to me…I want to try something.”

  Leonard paused in mid-sentence, his mouth made a perfect “O.” “What is it?”

  “I’m just thinking out loud here, follow along with me…these fragments, these memory arrays…do you or Widmer think you can read them? Can you understand the underlying code? Patterns, relationships, configurations, that sort of thing.”

  Here, Leonard broke into a faint smirk. “We’re already ahead of you, Rudi. Last night, we extracted what we think are some basic algorithms from the array pattern…literally the patterns of holes, bumps and pits. It’s got to be tested, of course, but if Luke’s theory holds, we should be able to apply one of these—let’s call them quasi-algorithms—patterns to our actuators and effectors and cause something to happen. We’re just taking baby steps—statistical analysis of the pits-- here but Luke and I are both optimistic—we think, given enough time, we can develop a basic understanding of how these devices work…and maybe even control them in some rudimentary fashion.”

  It was just what Rudolf Volk wanted to hear. “I can’t leave Greta right now, Sandy. The doctors are running tests, doing scans…it’s pretty serious. Glioblastoma and it’s inoperable. She’s facing chemo and radiation, at best. Recovery will take months, so I’m stuck here. But as soon as you have something, send it to me.”

  Leonard signed off. “You know I will. And we’re praying for you and your wife down here. Our thoughts are with you.”

  A week later, the first copies of the Engebbe algorithms came to Volk’s office at the Institute…a set of disks with dozens of files, all of them verbal code describing what functions and actions each subset of pits and bumps on the fragments performed.

  Luke Widmer and Sanders Leonard had exceeded even their own expectations. Not only did the disks contain verbal descriptions of what the memory arrays seem to control, but Widmer—the geek of all geeks—had somehow managed to compile the array patterns into a rudimentary form of machine language.

  Which meant Volk could run the same logic, the same algorithms, on computers at the Institute. Or at least, he could try.

  The same operating system logic that had been proven to animate fossilized fragments of ancient robotic devices dug from the ground at Engebbe could now be tested on modern computers right here in Leipzig.

  Rudolf Volk didn’t waste any time calling up his son Oskar at IMNR.

  Dr. Irwin Frost, Oskar’s boss at IMNR, was skeptical, to say the least. “We have to be cautious about running this stuff. Just because this code runs your fossils doesn’t mean it’ll run ANAD. We have to test and evaluate what it does.”

  Dr. Rudolf Volk watched the tiny bot hanging from a scaffolding inside the containment tank. It looked like a bunch of grapes hanging from a trellis. Ever since Greta had been diagnosed, all he had heard was tests and tests and more tests. It was time to stop testing and start doing. Glioblastomas didn’t wait for tests.

  “Oskar, you tell him—“

  Oskar Volk was at the console, joystick in hand, ready to ‘drive’ ANAD with the new software. “You understand our concerns, Dr. Frost. Mother’s in a critical situation…the chemo’s not that effective, she gets really sick for days afterward. The radiation is like blasting ants with a machine gun. ANAD will work…I know it will. We’re so close…anything we can do to speed up the process….this code may be just what we need.”

  Frost was unconvinced. “I know how frustrating it must be, but ANAD is a delicate mechanism. When we put ANAD inside a patient, we have to be sure of what we’re doing. I don’t want ANAD running off, replicating like a cancer, eating good tissue, whole organs. I want to understand what this code does…in every situation.”

  So they tested. The testing went on for a week.

  The fragments of code sent up from Engebbe had to be massaged by Oskar and Dr. Frost to work properly with the bot. More code had to be added. Code had to be debugged. Code had to be shifted around, deleted, re-compiled, tweaked. After a week, ANAD showed some signs of good response.

  “At least, he can grab and hold molecules now,” Oskar told his father one day. “That’s progress. Now, if we can just smooth out the motions of the other effectors, crank up his propulsors, maybe re-design his outer casing to cleave better, so replication is more efficient.”

  And each day, Rudi Volk came back from the hospital more and more depressed. Greta was dying. Nothing was working. ANAD, in whatever form they could make it work, seemed the only hope. But Frost was still cautious.

  “We’ve been able demonstrate ANAD attaching to selected cells, disassembling cells or zapping them with his bond disrupters, Dr. Volk. That’s real progress. I can make ANAD assemble cells as well, as long as the right feedstock’s around. That’s more progress. We’re very close now to having a workable bot, but ANAD’s still showing responses we don’t understand. Your fossil code has some sections that cause ANAD to act in ways we don’t understand. We have to research that, test it, prove it’s controllable. You understand?”

  Volk sat down heavily in a chair beside the containment tank. Frost was joysticking ANAD through its paces: basic replication, basic maneuvers. “I understand that time is running out for my wife. You’re dealing with a device, Dr. Frost. I’m dealing with a human being. The testing has to come to an end, for both of them. We have to act, do something now—“

  Frost tried to be sympathetic. “I’ll talk with Dr. Sinoglu tomorrow morning. Maybe we can work something out…limit ANAD’s responses enough so it won’t be a danger to your wife…I know of some ways to do that.”

  Volk shook his head. “Dangers? What dangers? Greta’s dying of a brain tumor. She’s being tested right into her grave. Can’t you do an insert right now? Call it a test, I don’t care. Just do something.”

  “But the code, Dr. Volk…we still don’t understand all it does…this takes time—“

  “So does the dig…we don’t understand everything we’re digging up at Engebbe. But we still dig…we sort it out later. Look, any time fossils are uncovered, the clock starts ticking. We have to preserve context to interpret the dig but conditions work against us. Weather, grave robbers, bureaucrats, animals…it all puts a time limit on what we’re doing. If we waited for perfect conditions, we’d never dig. If you wait for perfect understanding of this code and how ANAD responds, the blasted thing will never leave containment. And Greta—“ Volk took off his glasses…he didn’t want tears dribbling onto the lenses.

  Frost was grave. “I’ll see if we can set up something with Dr. Sinoglu, Rudi. Tomorrow.”

  The next morning, Frost and Oskar Volk brought their gear to the Katholisches Krankenh
aus and made ANAD ready for insertion into the brain of Greta Volk.

  5.

  Engebbe, Kenya

  The lifters crossed the Great Rift Valley, and began their descent across vast acacia woodlands and open grassland, thick with galloping herds of wildebeest and zebra. Through light chop surrounding the twin summits of Mawenzi and Kibo, the formation settled onto a dusty plateau rimmed with massive outcrops of rock, hillocks of lava known as kopjes, in the local dialect. As the lifters touched down, a few hyrax and a solitary leopard scuttled away into the grass.

  "Welcome back to Engebbe Valley, Dr. Volk," said Major Dikesi. The Kenyan officer ordered his detail of soldiers to dismount and form up a perimeter around the dig site. "The birthplace of Man--" the Major proudly announced.

  Engebbe was a dry, sere wasteland of ash fall and rock, desiccated as the bones that often turned up on its pockmarked ground. The Valley itself was little more than a wide spot in the meandering streambed of the Engebbe River, a waterway in name only for most of the year. As Volk stepped out onto the hardpan of the ravine, he saw only a sinuous ribbon of slightly damp soil marking the outlines of the river's course.

  The dig site itself was situated on a sloping shelf of rock and solidified ash north of the riverbed, surrounded by rugged slopes of rock and crushed ash heaps. Roughly trapezoidal in layout, the dig site was a series of concentric trenches circling the outer, surface-level perimeter of a vast pit. Each trench was meticulously laid with grid lines of laser lights and rows of mobile mirrors and flood lamps arrayed in and among the grid lines. The entire pit bottomed out some sixty five feet below the top surface of the ledge.

  Just upstream of the dig, a small gathering of huts and trailers had grown up, given the name of Camp Matterhorn. Above the camp, a sheer cliff rose in a near vertical escarpment to a patch of level ground overhanging the valley. In the middle of this ground, the ruins of an old Arab trading fort, known locally as El Mareb, lay in piles of stone and broken wall. The riverbed coursed and undulated downstream to the southeast. Some miles away, a turnoff from the Nairobi Highway led to a small village called Longido, the closest thing resembling a town. The border with Tanzania was less than four miles north of the dig itself.

  While the lifters were being unloaded and a secure post set up a few hundred meters from Camp Matterhorn, Dikesi and Volk picked their way along the streambed toward the edge of the dig. Sanders Leonard came up to greet them.

  “Come right away to the tent, Rudi…you’ve got to see this. We found more pieces yesterday afternoon…one of Leaduma’s people found them…just the most amazing pieces--”

  Volk went immediately to the dig site tent. Looking under the ultrascope, both archeologists threw out theories and ideas…more robotic elements…that could be another effector…this could be some kind of propulsor, maybe a piece of limb…what could this be?

  Both spent hours poring over the new finds, ignoring the calls to dinner and huddling over the latest discoveries well into the night. By the time Volk pronounced himself satisfied, they had categorized the pieces and examined them fully, so the two men called a halt to the evening.

  “I’m exhausted,” Leonard admitted. He was a short, stocky red-haired Englishman, with sunburned cheeks and freckles. “Why don’t we grab a bite from the mess tent…maybe Ndaba’s left a few scraps for us.”

  Volk demurred. “I’ll be along. I want to go back down to the pit. Just to check the layout…there’s something I’m missing, some piece of context. Maybe it’ll come to me.”

  Leonard was already headed out. “Suit yourself. Me… I’m famished. See you later for drinks by the river.” That was a standing joke, to call Engebbe’s pitiful little streambed a mighty river. He disappeared through the tent flaps and was gone, heading across the open ground to the mess tent on the other side of the compound.

  Volk lit up a pipe and wandered out to the excavation pit. It was a short ten minute walk, through scraggly acacia bushes to the sloping edge of the dig. The sun had gone down hours ago, but a twilight glow still permeated the site, refracted through a haze of ever-present dust from the pit. Volk stopped at one corner of the trapezoid, checking the alignment of the laser grid. It seemed okay. Then he spotted a man crouching on the opposite slope, right on the edge of the pit.

  It was Lekati Leaduma, their dig leader. The Maasai laibon had laid out a blue cloth on the dirt, and surrounded himself with a variety of paraphernalia.

  Volk hung back by a light pole, in the shadows. Leaduma was focused on his work, unaware that Volk hovered a few meters away.

  “Tell me truths, not lies…” Leaduma was mumbling. He cast stones from his nkidong gourd, thirty two in all, tumbling out onto the blue cloth.

  “—tell me what is to happen…truth, not lies….” He threw nine stones, then re-adjusted a tying amulet around the tumbled stones. The amulet consisted of two cowry shells with assorted black and white rocks, forming semi-circles around the edges of the blue cloth.

  “Is this ground cursed…I ask you this now….” Leaduma shook the gourd vigorously, then let it spill more items, a bullet, a hyena’s tooth, some clear crystals.

  Volk was about to step into the light, when something over the center of the pit caught his eye. The dust haze had grown thicker as the sunlight failed. There was a reddish tint to the haze and it coiled and boiled like a miniature thunderstorm. Pinpricks of light shot through the haze…what was this?

  Volk stared at the gathering cloud. It crept toward them like a silent thunderstorm, backlit from within by flashes and speckles of light. Even as he watched, the cloud had swollen and spilled up out of the pit, advancing on their position, a flickering ground fog with faint whispers on the breeze, hushed voices barely audible. Leaduma shifted uneasily. Volk stayed where he was.

  “Who did this thing…tell the truth, no lies—“ Leaduma was crouching, gathering items from a necklace of leather amulets hung from his neck. He threw five stones.

  The fog thickened and billowed, but Leaduma didn’t move, though he was visibly shaken. Volk stepped back deeper into the shadows, letting the fog curl around his feet and legs. There was a definite pressure there, and a high keening buzz.

  Locusts, Volk decided. Flies. He backed away.

  Leaduma was now completely enveloped in the fog. Only the shadow of his form could be seen, backlit from the light poles blazing down into the excavation.

  “I am protecting this ground…you see that, don’t you? You can’t hurt this ground…go back…go back where you came from and hurt others—“ He poured out the contents of another amulet, a piece of lion’s skin, more black and white stones, tiger cowry shells sealed with tree gum.

  Volk decided it would be best if they both retreated into the tents, where netting could protect them from the locusts. But he couldn’t move his legs. He was stuck…as if anchored to the dirt. He squatted down, stuck his hand in the swirling fog and immediately yanked it out…something had stung him. Now, his feet hurt…he was losing his balance…he saw Leaduma leaning, wobbling, keeling over onto the ground…Volk dropped to a knee and was pulled, sucked down to the dirt and was on his side, flailing…swatting…lashing out…trying to fight it off…but he couldn’t breathe…the red haze…like a cloak smothering him…couldn’t…get a…couldn’t…and then …and then it came. A snap flash, like a camera going off. An image of geometric forms—icosahedrons, polygons, trapezoids—all compressed into a tunnel, a long curving corridor and he found himself hurtling at breakneck speed down this corridor, until—

  With a hard bump, his whole body jarred from the impact and when he opened his eyes, caught his breath and came to his senses, he was …where?

  An image unfolded before his eyes and he felt he was in a place he recognized …a world of blues and greens, a world of great oceans and steaming continents. He was airborne somehow, drifting down like dust, descending through thick carbon dioxide-rich air and purple, li
ghtning-racked clouds to a hover over what looked like a primordial swamp.

  It was Earth. Earth from millions of years ago.

  From within what seemed like a great swarm of flies hovering over the landscape, Rudi Volk saw a smaller swarm emerge and descend to the ground. The swarm had no discernible shape, resembling only an amorphous twinkling fog, a whispering fog, nearly lost in the mist of the swamp. Only the twinkle of light from within made it distinguishable.

  The swarm settled onto a rock outcrop at the edge of the swamp. As the mists cleared, Volk could see that the rock was covered in some kind of mossy growth, a gray-green mat darkening the rock up and down the edge of a sluggish pool.

  The swarm formed some kind of instrument and hovered directly over the moss. Squinting to see through the mist, Volk realized that the swarm was injecting something directly into the mat.

  Volk wondered. Was this how life got jumpstarted on Earth? A cloud of mechs from space came down and injected something into a patch of moss? Maybe this was the original creation. Maybe this was the Engebbe dig site or what it looked like a few billion years ago.

  All along the patch of moss that darkened the wet slopes of the rock, the detached swarm translated and shifted like a maneuvering hypodermic needle, moving along, writing new code inside the cells of the moss. Volk wondered how long the process would last. Would the injecting swarm suddenly retract itself back into the main swarm?

  In the days that followed, the swarm would be called ‘Ngai.’

  The power of life and death came from Ngai, who lived on a mountain called Kirinyaga, overlooking a swamp.

  ‘In the beginning, Ngai who is the God and divider of the Universe, called Gikuyu the father of the tribe. Ngai gave Gikuyu a share of his land with rivers, valleys, forests rich with fruits and animals of all types. Then Ngai went to live on Kirinyaga.

  ‘Now Ngai used to go round inspecting and admiring the beautiful earth. One day he took Gikuyu to the top of Kirinyaga. It was at the highest point of the mountain. He showed Gikuyu a spot in the center of the country where there were many mugumo trees, which means wild fig trees. Gikuyu saw that the land was very beautiful. And Ngai said to Gikuyu, ‘Go. Build your homestead on the spot with the mugumo trees,’ and he called the selected place where the mugumo trees grew Mukurwe wa Gathanga.

  ‘Then Ngai said, ‘You will at times need my help…when the time comes, slaughter a goat for sacrifice, then raise your hands towards Kirinyaga and Ngai will come to your help.’ Gikuyu went to the chosen spot. Here he found a beautiful woman whom he took as a wife. He named her Mumbi, which means molder or creator. They had nine daughters—they did not have any sons. Now Gikuyu went to Ngai and said that he wanted sons to marry his daughters. Ngai said: ‘Go, take a lamb and a kid. Sacrifice these under the big mugumo tree near the homestead and the blood and the fat, pour onto the trunk of the tree. Make a big fire under the tree. The meat will burn as a sacrifice to Ngai. After you take your wife and daughters home, go back alone to the mugumo tree. There you will find nine handsome men who will marry your daughters. Your people will increase and multiply and fill all the land.’

  The Maasai word for sleep is injio. The Maasai word for dream is a-idetidet.

  After this, Rudi Volk woke up.

  6.

  Volk rubbed sleep from his eyes; his vision was blurred. A form moved in his field of vision. As his eyes cleared, he realized it was Sanders Leonard. It was dawn. Orange light stained the horizon…the sun would be up soon.

  Leonard was heading for the mess tent. Volk struggled to his feet and went after him. His head felt like it was stuffed with cotton.

  Leonard grabbed some breakfast and spied Volk. They sat down together at a table in the corner of the tent. Volk nursed a mug of coffee. He was dirty, disheveled.

  He told Leonard what had happened overnight. When he was done, Leonard hadn’t touched his eggs. His muffin was half-eaten. He stared at Volk like he had just landed from another planet.

  “You’d better go see the medic…you must have fallen, Rudi…hit your head. We did have locusts the last few days, usually early evening or early morning. That’s what you saw.”

  Volk didn’t know how to make Sanders Leonard understand. “Sandy, we’ve known each other a long time. You know me…have I ever done or said anything you couldn’t put your money on? Have I ever fabricated evidence at a dig?”

  Sanders sipped at his rapidly cooling coffee. “No. But Rudi…what you’re telling me sounds—“

  “—crazy. I know it does.”

  Leonard ticked off the points Rudi had made. “If I’m to believe what you’re telling me: there are tiny micron or nanoscale robots still buried out there. Functioning bots. And they rose up from the dig last night like a cloud—a ‘swarm’, I believe you called it. They’re actually survivors of some extraterrestrial race of robots that seeded life here on Earth…they kick-started life itself. Only their plan for evolution went off track…am I getting this right?”

  Volk snatched a piece of Leonard’s muffin and wolfed it down. “I know it sounds incredible but—“

  “Hold on, let me finish….so something stirred these surviving bots into action…maybe we did something during the dig. Now they’re mad. They’re coming back to fix evolution, which isn’t working right. And they’re called the Old Folks, or Old Ones or something like that? According to their plan, something like an evolved, intelligent virus, still a bot, mind you, but like a virus was supposed to have become the dominant life form on Earth. So Man is a mistake, an evolutionary fluke and they mean to get rid of us and start over? Have I got the gist of it?”

  Volk just shook his head. “I know what you’re thinking, Sandy. It’s the stress. It’s Greta…her situation. It’s all the politics here at Engebbe…Dr. Akamba, the Ministry of Antiquities, the press, the media. But it’s all true…I swear on my poor old mother’s grave. Look, if you don’t believe me, ask Leaduma…he was there. He saw it all.”

  Leonard’s face darkened. “Leaduma’s dead, Rudi.”

  Volk was truly stunned at the news. “What? What the hell…he was there with me—“

  Volk turned in his seat and looked out a side flap at the bare ground outside, the ever-present dust now stirred by breezes as the sun rose higher over the valley. “It must have been a lion. Maybe a pack of them, overnight. Diggers and guards found his body at the bottom of the pit this morning. The body was half-eaten, consumed by something. His face was covered with some kind of yellow powder.”

  “The powder is one of his conjuring potions, I’m pretty sure. Ntasim, he calls them. Carries them in those amulets around his neck. He was conjuring and divining like crazy last night…you know how he is with that stuff.”

  “Yes, well now the diggers are pretty spooked. Major Dikesi has his soldiers out scouting around the valley and surrounding grounds now…trying to find the beasts.”

  “Leaduma…he ran the diggers…we’ll have to—“

  Leonard finished off his coffee with conviction. He set the cup down with a rattle on the table. “Rudi, you had a dream, that’s all. You fell, hit your head, you had nightmares. We’ve all been under a lot of stress lately…the dig, all the pieces, the discoveries and having to control and document everything so we don’t look like fools. Stay out of the pit today, why don’t you? Rest up. I need help in the lab, getting these pieces catalogued….”

  But Volk was already pushing back from the table, getting up. “Where’s Akamba? I’ve got to talk with Akamba.”

  “Probably still in his tent…he doesn’t get up with the hyenas like we do…why?”

  Volk had a determined set to his face. “Sandy, we’ve got to shut down the dig. Don’t look at me like that…I’m serious. Close it all down. Fill in the pit. Destroy everything—“ He slapped a tent flap out of the way and disappeared into a dust devil, heading across the compound for Julius Akamba’
s tent. Akamba was from Nairobi, from the Ministry.

  Rudi Volk knew they didn’t have much time. And there was Greta…the blasted things were still inside her too.

  After rousting Akamba out of his bed, Rudi Volk knew he’d better give Oskar a call.

  7.

  “She was just released from the hospital yesterday,” Oskar’s voice and image came over Rudi’s wristpad, as the archeologist made his way around the edge of the excavation, heading for his tent, ticking off items to be packed in his mind. Diggers, porters and a few science team people were already gathering by the pit, ready for a day’s work.

  “She’s home…how’s she doing? How is she feeling?”

  Oskar smiled. “A little weak, but otherwise pretty good. She sleeps a lot. Dr. Sinoglu says she can’t find any evidence of the glioblastoma or any tumor cells. ANAD zapped them all.”

  Rudi slipped into his own tent and was already pulling out clothes, tossing them into his bags. “Oskar, I’m coming back to Leipzig…we’re shutting down the dig. There’s been a problem. I’ve got to see Akamba in a few minutes.”

  “Shutting down---what the hell’s going on? You’re all over the news, all over the Net—just the other day, Solnet—“

  “Look, Oskar, believe me…we have to do it. It’s a long story. I’m trying to get a flight out of Nairobi tomorrow morning.”

  Oskar’s face was a moue of concern. His forehead was all wrinkles; he did that when he was worried. “Father, this is insane…it’s the greatest archeological discovery since…since ever. What’s happened?”

  Rudi Volk told him what had happened…the fog, the laebon Lecati Leaduma, the dream or trance or hallucination or whatever the hell it was. The Old Ones. The swarm of bots. Ngai.

  “Greta talked about these very things a few weeks ago, Oskar. Remember.”

  “She was delirious. She was dreaming.”

  Rudi Volk waved his son off. “Those replicated bots you left inside her brain, the ANAD replicants…they’re still there?”

  “I haven’t removed anything.”

  Rudi Volk sucked in a deep breath. “ANAD has the same malignant code, the same algorithms that drove this swarm I saw last night. It was a cloud of bots, Oskar. Came right up out of the dig. They…it…killed Leaduma. The authorities are trying to pass it off as a lion attack but I saw what happened. I was there—“

  “Father, you’re imagining things. You’ve been listening to too many Maasai fairy tales. The medbots inside Mother’s brain are working fine. I just scanned them yesterday…they’re buzzing around doing just what they’re supposed to be doing, hunting down tumor cells and disassembling them. Maybe you need a few days off.”

  Rudi Volk knew then what he had to do. It was a terrible duty but there wasn’t any way to avoid it. And he knew he couldn’t have this discussion with Oskar, not over his wristpad.

  He had to get back to Germany. Fast.

  8.

  Leipzig, Germany

  As Rudi Volk rode the Leipziger Verkehrsbetriebe from the train station to their apartment, he told himself they could never be allowed to gain a foothold on Earth. That much was clear. Ngai could not be allowed to come down from Kirinyaga again and make mischief. Leaduma had been right. The Maasai diviner knew the truth.

  Oskar was with Greta at their apartment when Rudi arrived. He kissed her on the forehead. “How do you feel, Liebchen?”

  Greta Volk had a broad face with an easy smile. Today, she wasn’t smiling. Her hair was blond, tending to gray along the temples. It was tied back in a bun as she puttered about the kitchen, trying to pull a strudel together. “Like hell, if you really want to know. I’ve got a headache, my ears are buzzing and I’m tired. You want more?”

  In the kitchen, Greta was in charge. She wore a print dress and a blue apron. Her hands were covered with flour. She bustled about from counter to pantry and back.

  Oskar got out of her way. “Dr. Sinoglu released her two days ago. Just amazing. The latest scans showed nothing, no mass, no indication of glioblastoma at all. She’s got more scans tomorrow—“

  “Enough with the scans,” Greta decided. “There’s work to be done…how can I get anything done when I’m always at the hospital?”

  “Well, you sound as grumpy as usual,” Rudi decided. He watched her for a moment, then waved Oskar to follow him into the family room, to a wine cupboard. He poured them both a finger of Riesling. The two of them stared out the window, where light snow was falling on the trolley tracks and pedestrians were bundled against a biting wind, as they crossed the ancient cobblestones of the Augustenplatz.

  “She sounds normal,” Rudi told his son. “How has she been acting…anything unusual?”

  Oskar sipped. Then he shrugged. “She acts like Mother. I know what you’re thinking…that those ANAD bots still inside may fail or deteriorate in some way. That can’t happen. The devices have inhibits programmed in. They’ll self-destruct before anything can happen…we made sure of that in testing.”

  Rudi looked Oskar right in the eye. “You didn’t see what I saw at Engebbe. There are remains we haven’t uncovered yet at the dig site. And they’re active. They’re operating. They replicate just like your ANAD and they swarm…fast. I’m concerned about your Mother, Oskar…she’s got ANAD inside her, with some of the same code that’s driving these bots at Engebbe.”

  “There are no obvious or measurable side effects. The scans show nothing unusual. When I communicate with ANAD, it performs normally…it reports normally. Effectors, propulsors, everything seems normal. You’re imagining things that aren’t there…that can’t happen.” Oskar put a hand on his father’s shoulder. “Look, I know it’s been stressful for all of us the last few months… all the pressure of getting the dig organized, documenting everything, the media and the press conferences… I know you’re exhausted. Mother’s medbots are working fine. You don’t have to worry about ANAD. The real miracle is that ANAD did what we wanted it to do…thanks to some help from your fossil code. That is amazing, when you think about it.”

  Rudi wasn’t convinced. “These algorithms you developed…the ones that used patterns from the fossils…have you explored them fully? Tested them fully?”

  “We’re testing now. There are some things we don’t understand…I won’t deny that. Sanders Leonard has sent all his work too. You must have talked with him. But I’m confident we understand what we’ve done with ANAD. It was just a small bit of code. But it was what we needed to help us through some problems. I’d say your Old Ones, or whoever put the Engebbe devices there had a good handle on how to operate nanoscale robots. We had to massage the code a bit, write some new sections, but the underlying algorithm was just what ANAD needed. Dr. Frost thinks we’ve uncovered some kind of fundamental control principle that may be common across different types of developers…even other cultures. We’re looking into that now.”

  Rudi stared out at the pedestrians slogging across the Augustenplatz. “There’s more than you know in those fossils, Oskar. More than Sanders Leonard or anyone knows. I’ve told the Kenyans—Dr. Akamba—that we’re shutting down the dig, pulling out. We have to. It’s too dangerous.”

  Oskar sighed. “I don’t understand you, Father. It’s the find of the millennium. How can you just shut it down? It’s an affront to scientific inquiry and truth. It’s like the Church trying to muzzle Galileo. Or burning witches. New knowledge may make us uncomfortable. But it shouldn’t frighten us. New knowledge gets us closer to the truth.”

  “Spoken like a true classroom professor, Oskar. But we don’t live in a classroom. There are some things we shouldn’t know. “

  Oskar looked oddly at his father. “That’s not what you taught me as a boy…what’s got you spooked? What did you see in that pit?”

  Rudi knew Oskar would never believe him. “Something that needs to stay in that pit. We should never have un
covered it. Now it’s out. It’s free.” And it’s inside Greta, he didn’t add. He knew now he could never discuss this with Oskar. What he had to do, Rudi knew he would have to do alone.

  Greta and Rudi said goodbye to Oskar after dinner. “I’ll be there at the clinic tomorrow,” Oskar told them. “Dr. Sinoglu wants to do some follow-up exams.”

  “More exams…I feel fine,” Greta assured him. “I just need more sleep. And keep that coat buttoned up…I don’t want you getting chilled out there.”

  “Yes, Mother.” Oskar headed off toward the tram station.

  After cleaning up the kitchen, Greta announced, “I’m tired, Rudi. I should go on to bed. Could you fetch some tea for me…maybe a little milk with it? I have medicines to take.”

  “Surely, Liebchen. Go on to bed. I’ll bring them up.” She disappeared up the stairs. That’s when Rudi Volk went looking in the pantry.

  He had already decided on poison…the question was how to do it. He rummaged through the pantry and another storage closet before settling on a box of rat poison they kept in the closet beside the door. He examined the box carefully: prothombin, 4-hydroxythiacoumarin, warfarin. He read the side effects, the precaution and hazard statements. Perhaps a few scoops in her tea, along with some milk and sugar.

  It was sad, what he had to do. Hell, it was tragic. Who would do such a thing? Oskar would never understand. He didn’t understand it himself. This was either murder or assisted suicide, whichever you preferred. Rudi tried out several answers, then decided he would call it ‘saving Mankind from extinction.’ He wondered if the authorities would understand that.

  Of course, any cursory examination of Greta after she had died would turn up trace evidence of poison. That’s when all the suspicions would fall on him. He could explain that he had done it to keep the contaminated ANAD medbots inside her from going berserk, from carrying out the plan he had witnessed in the fog one night at Engebbe. Just verbalizing the explanation made him realize how lame it sounded. He would have to think of something else.

  Nobody would ever believe it. He wasn’t sure he believed it himself.

  And yet, Rudi Volk was as sure as he could be that the Old Ones were real, that the bots rising up out of the dig site were part of a larger menace and that the bots inside Greta were made of the same stuff, had the same programming and would soon be a threat to everyone.

  As Lekati Leaduma often said, ‘the zebra takes his stripes wherever he goes.’

  Volk took the rat poison and, after the tea was made, dropped a few spoonfuls into the cup. He poured in some tea, stirred it carefully, added sugar cubes and a small teaspoon of milk to the tray and went upstairs.

  Greta was already in bed, propped up with some pillows, reading lamp on and a copy of Allgemeiner Zeitung balanced on her knees. She studied her husband as he placed the tray on the nightstand.

  “Rudi, you look like you’ve seen a ghost. I’m not that bad, am I? Maybe a little pale—”

  Volk fussed with her covers and handed her the steaming cup. “Of course not, Liebchen. I’m just fatigued, that’s all. The flight and all…you know how it is. It’s a long way from Nairobi to Leipzig. Want anything else?”

  “How about a good night kiss from my husband?” Her lips were already puckered and ready to be smacked.

  Rudi bent down and gave her a peck.

  “You can do better than that. When we were dating, I couldn’t tear you away my lips. Cancer’s not contagious, you know. I am getting better.”

  Rudi tried a smile, figured it looked more like a grimace, and sat down on the side of the bed. “I know that. It’s just that—“

  “It’s all these gizmos in my head, isn’t it? You’re thinking I’ll become a robot, run amok and destroy the world, like the cartoons Oskar used to watch when he was young.”

  Rudi swallowed hard. That was too close. Have I got it written all over me? “No, that’s not it. I just want you to be better, that’s all. We all want that. How do you feel tonight? Any side effects?”

  She shrugged. “Just tired. I want to sleep a lot.”

  “Any more dreams…nightmares…voices, like you had before?”

  She shook her head, then pointed to her skull. “All quiet on this front. Even my headaches are pretty much gone.”

  “Have some tea,” Rudi told her. He handed her the cup. “I’ll check the doors, turn out the lights downstairs. I may stay up for awhile and read.”

  She sipped at the tea, made a slight face—did she suspect?—and then closed her eyes and sipped more. “I’ll try to keep my tentacles under control tonight—“ her eyes sparkled at her own little joke.

  “Very funny…get some sleep.” Rudi left the room and went downstairs. He figured he would give the poison an hour, then check up on her after that.

  It was the longest hour of his life.

  He told himself it wasn’t murder, not really, although he knew the authorities surely wouldn’t see it that way. No, this was going to happen anyway. Greta had cancer. It was inoperable. Medbots saved her, but at what cost? What was ANAD but another form of cancer, even a programmable cancer? The glioblastoma was defeated but the cure….?

  Volk decided there had to be some sort of balance to this approach.

  An hour passed. He went upstairs and went into the darkened bedroom. He could hear her gasping.

  “Rudi…Ru…help me….arrrggghhh…”

  Instantly, he flipped on a light by the bed. “What is it, dear…what’s the matter?”

  Greta was tangled in the bed sheets. She had vomited all over the bed and floor; the bedroom reeked of it.

  “…my stomach….I can’t—“ She gasped and coughed violently.

  He felt her forehead…it was cool. But her eyes were wide, the pupils nearly bulging out and yellow spittle drooled from the corner of her mouth. Seizures spasmodically convulsed her and she shivered and shuddered between bouts.

  “I’m calling the doctor…” Rudi decided. He picked up a nearby phone and dialed the emergency number. Even as he explained the problem, he saw his wife convulse violently one last time and lie still, athwart the bed, her pale feet sticking out on the other side. “Please, hurry…I think she’s…just hurry….”

  The ambulance and paramedics were at their apartment in fifteen minutes.

  Even as the medics were littering Greta downstairs to the front door, Rudi Volk knew she had died. The medics attached tubes, took measurements, cleared her throat and started cardio support, but one of them gave Rudi a knowing look: she’s not going to make it. Volk didn’t have to feign shock. It was horrific enough what Greta was going through. Maybe cancer would have been a better outcome.

  He regretted ever pushing Oskar into trying the medbots on her. None of this would have happened if—

  Rudi Volk rode with the ambulance to the Katholisches Krankenhaus emergency room. Greta was deathly still for the whole ride. He occupied himself following the beeps and graphs of the monitor screens; Greta was enveloped in wires and tubes and cables. Most of the graphs showed minimal activity.

  Hospital attendants and medics wheeled Greta into the ER. Rudi was firmly told to wait outside. The wait lasted ten minutes, then a white-coated doctor whose name plate read Mauer came out with a grim face.

  “I’m sorry, Herr Volk…we did all we could…it was cardiac arrest…she’s at peace now…you can go in for a few minutes….”

  Rudi went into the ER and stood beside the bed. Greta Volk was pale, her lips clenched even in death and her eyes were still open. Even as he looked on, a nurse in blue scrubs reached over and gently rubbed her eyelids down.

  “I’m sorry,” she whispered. Nurses and doctors discreetly backed away to give Volk some time with his wife.

  He didn’t know quite what to expect, quite how to feel. Greta had suffered mightily the last six months; she wasn’t herself half the time. She had some paralysi
s in her facial muscles, some seizures, some bleeding in her skull. Glioblastoma did that.

  In death, she looked like a wax figure, like something you’d see at Madame Tussaud’s. He half expected to see a fog of tiny bots issuing from her ears. But that was nonsense. This wasn’t Engebbe and Greta wasn’t an archeological site. He wondered if he had dreamed the whole thing.

  He swallowed hard and something heavy and malignant sat down in the pit of his stomach. My God, what have I done?

  “Would you sign here, please, Herr Volk?” Dr. Mauer handed him a clipboard with an official form on it. “It’s the death notification…I’m assigning cardiac arrest as the cause of death. We’ll do routine lab work on her to back that up, but based on the evidence at hand, her heart gave out. I know she had been fighting cancer as well…that would be a contributory cause and will be so noted.”

  Volk signed the form automatically, in a daze. One of the nurses gently escorted him back to the waiting room. “Dr. Mauer will be out in a few minutes, Herr Volk. He’ll need to know all your preferred arrangements…funeral home, cemetery…those things.”

  Volk nodded perfunctorily. “I’ve got to call my son…Oskar. He should be here—“ The nurse ducked out of the waiting room. Volk made the call on his wristpad.

  Greta’s body was transported early the next morning to the Mehlkopf Funeral Home. Dr. Norbert Hume was the pathologist on staff and did the initial exam. Rudi Volk had asked to be on hand when the examination was done; this is highly unusual, said Mauer, but he shrugged it off and let Dr. Hume know of the family’s request.

  Oskar and Rudi Volk sat in cold silence in the waiting room the next morning, idly thumbing through magazines and checking their wristpads while Hume performed the prep exam. The Mehlkopf staff had already informed the Volks that an autopsy had been ordered by Dr. Mauer to determine the exact cause of death, the underlying cause of Greta’s cardiac arrest.

  “It’s routine,” Dr. Hume had told them that morning, “but it’s important to have the best information. Unfortunately, you’ll have to wait outside. But I or my staff will keep you informed. After the autopsy, we’ll talk about disposition of Greta’s body…your burial preferences.”

  So they waited.

  Ten minutes later, Hume appeared at the door to the waiting room.

  “Herr Volk, could you come into the examining room for a moment?”

  Rudi Volk looked up. “Both of us? What seems to be the problem?”

  Hume was grim. “Just for a moment…please—“

  Rudi and Oskar Volk both followed the pathologist into the cold tile and strong fluorescent lighting of the exam room. Greta Volk lay pale under a light sheet on the table.

  Hume pointed to Greta’s right hand. It was twitching, moving slowly. “I’m in the process of hooking up some monitors now…in itself, autonomic reactions like this aren’t that unusual…just random muscular contractions…something has discharged. But she’s breathing as well. Herr Volk…somehow, your wife is alive. I was just about to inject the first dose of preservative—“

  “What?” Rudi Volk was incredulous. “You can’t be serious. Let me see—“

  He went to his wife’s side, steering clear of the slowly twitching fingers of her right hand. He bent down, felt a faint puff of breath. It smelled of formaldehyde. The hairs on the back of his neck stood up. “Oskar…it has to be—“

  “—ANAD,” Oskar completed the thought. “They’re still active, still replicating. I need my interface controls…I could shut it down with the IC. Incredible—“

  At that moment, Greta’s eyes fluttered open. The color had already begun returning to her cheeks and forehead. Under the harsh glare of the lights, a small bead of sweat had formed above her lips.

  “This can’t be—“Rudi Volk muttered. “Greta…Liebchen…can you hear me? Can you hear what I’m saying--?”

  Her lips trembled and that was when the faint sparkling fog began. Her lips parted in a low moan. At first, Rudi thought he was seeing dust particles dancing in the overhead lights. But the dust particles sparkled and grew thicker. It wasn’t dust. It was the same thing he had seen at Engebbe.

  The mist grew thicker in the fluorescent beams. There was a reddish tint to the haze and it coiled and boiled like a miniature thunderstorm, hovering right above Greta’s face. Pinpricks of light shot through the haze…he knew what this was.

  “The bots…they’re exiting the body…” Oskar breathed. “That can’t happen—there’s no—“

  Rudi knew now that it was no dream he’d had at Engebbe. The Old Ones were here, right in front of them. Ngai na-nyokie…the Red God…the Vindictive One…the Bringer of Death…he knew Leaduma’s chant by heart. He’d heard it often enough.

  “Let’s get out of here,” Volk said. “We can’t stop this…not now.”

  “I’m calling the hospital,” Hume told them. He was already pecking out the number on his own wristpad. “If she’s alive—“

  “She’s not alive,” Rudi Volk told them. “Not in any way we’d understand. It’s ANAD. It’s the bots. Somehow, they’ve animated her…and they’re replicating now. We’ve got to get out of here…call the police.”

  Oskar stared transfixed at the apparition. “In the lab, we used electron beam injectors. And high-energy radio freq guns…in case ANAD started replicating too fast. I just can’t—”

  “Too late for that now,” Rudi Volk said. He swung the door open. “Come on—“

  The fog was thickening visibly by the second. Already it was spreading across the exam room, flowing like a yellowish miasma off the exam table and across the tile floor. Before Hume could finish his call, coils of mist had encircled his feet. Hume cried out and pitched to the floor. He was enveloped in seconds, swatting at the mist, flailing away, but it swarmed in an exponentially thickening haze. A shrill, keening buzz filled the room.

  Oskar leapt to Hume’s defense and fell heavily to the floor himself. Rudi grabbed an extended hand and tried to pull him free but the bots were already on him and he lost his grasp on Oskar. Rudi stared in horror as the sparkling mist quickly enveloped both men, Hume and his son, coagulating into a throbbing, beating cloud, boiling like a slow-motion storm.

  There was nothing he could do for them now. Greta was already half-dematerialized. The ANAD bots, or whatever the hell they had become, had already partially disassembled her body…only her legs and hands were still recognizable…all else was haze, dust, mist, swarmed into atom fluff by the bots that had erupted out of her.

  Rudi Volk slid by the end of the exam table, slid by the writhing forms of Hume and Oskar still thrashing about on the floor. He ignored their muffled screams; nothing could be done for them now. He slid out of the room and slammed the door shut, then left the funeral home through the front door. Hearses were lined up outside.

  It didn’t matter what you called them. ANAD. Ngai. Gikuyu. The Trickster. The Old Ones. Greta was lost to them. So too was Oskar and Hume. Rudi knew he had to alert the authorities. He stared out at the street. The Hauptstrasse was thick was traffic, horns honking, cars screeching. He stood next to a hearse, rubbing his hands in the cold air and had an idea, then ducked back inside the funeral home.

  After a few minutes search, he found a rack of keys in a cupboard behind the receptionist’s desk. He went back outside and tried keys in every hearse until he found one that worked. The engine started. He backed out of the parking spot, then sped off down the circular drive, fishtailing through the snow and ice, running over bushes and flower beds as he left the grounds.

  Out on the Hauptstrasse, he triggered the lights and siren, then screeched off into traffic, nearly colliding with delivery trucks, taxis and scrambling pedestrians. He had to tell someone what was happening. He had to get the word out. Maybe the police….

  Rudi Volk sped off down the street in a borrowed ambulance, lights flashing and sir
en blaring. The nearest police station was the Zentrum-Sud precinct, fifteen minutes away, where the Antonienstrasse crossed the WeissEster canal. If he hurried, he could make it.

  Rudi Volk never saw the faint sparkling mist even then coiling at his feet in the foot well of the hearse.

  END