Drake fired at the window. The bullet starred the glass, but didn’t break it.
Drake walked up close to the window. “Please help me. I’m very sorry.” A bead of blood appeared, hanging at the tip of his nose. He backed up a few steps, and looked around wildly, and swatted at a bot circling his head. He cursed, and waved his gun around, the light beam crisscrossing the chamber. He caught a bot in the light, and fired the gun at the bot. Pointing the light around, he fired again. And again and again Drake fired at the bots, until the tensor room filled with a haze of cordite smoke.
Then he took his cell phone out of his pocket; it was ringing again. “Hello, lieutenant. Would you please come get me? I’ll tell you everything, of course. I’m in a bit of trouble in the generator room. The generator room. In the center of the building. Bots? There are no bots in here, Dan, it’s perfectly safe…” The phone slipped out of his bloody fingers and clattered to the floor. A nosebleed drenched the front of his shirt.
Drake coughed, spraying blood. He staggered forward and pressed himself against the window and stared at Rick and Karen. “I will have you killed! I swear it—!” His eyes went wide, and a bead of blood appeared in the corner of his right eye. A bot emerged through the white of his eye and began crawling across the surface of Drake’s eye, dragging blood along with it as it crawled. Drake seemed to be watching the bot as it crossed his cornea. “Get off me,” he whispered, and dug a finger into his eye, and stared at his bloody fingertip, and screamed.
Then he turned the gun to his head and pulled the trigger.
Nothing happened. He had emptied the clip shooting at the bots.
Behind Drake’s back, the giant bot had turned its eyes on Drake. It advanced upon him, dragging its arms. Its gooseneck lashed out and the blades thrust up through Drake’s body cavity from below and burst out his chest. The bot raised him up, shook him on its gooseneck, and shrugged, slinging the body across the room.
Rick and Karen had turned their attention to Eric Jansen. Rick tore off his shirt and wrapped it around Eric’s leg to make a compress. He took Eric under the shoulders and began half-carrying, half-dragging him through the Omicron lab. He was barely conscious, having lost a lot of blood.
Then they heard the humming sound of bots. Karen felt a stinging sensation on the back of her neck, and slapped at it. Her hand came away bloody.
“Room’s contaminated! Move it, Rick!” Without thinking, she grabbed Eric with one hand and tried to sling him over her shoulder, but she couldn’t do it. For a moment she thought, What’s wrong? Her superpowers had vanished.
They managed to drag Eric into the hallway, and there they were met with a team of police officers, running, guns drawn, wearing body armor. Just behind came a slightly potbellied plainclothes detective. He wore a tactical vest but clearly wasn’t a member of the SWAT team.
“Get back!” Rick shouted at them. “Bots!”
“I know,” the detective said calmly. He turned to the men. “Get them out, quick.” To Karen and Rick, he said, “Is there anybody else in the building?”
“Drake. He’s dead.”
“Everybody out,” the detective said.
The officers bundled Rick and Karen along, and they scout-carried Eric, who had lost consciousness.
The last man out of the building was the detective. He came out through the door into the light of dawn, a trail of blood streaming from his forehead. The bots had found Dan Watanabe.
“Where’s Dorothy?” he called out.
Dorothy Girt had arrived in her Toyota. She came forward.
“You brought your magnet?”
“Of course.” She held up the industrial horseshoe magnet. She had grabbed it out of the forensic lab on the way over.
“Everybody into decon, hostages and officers,” said Watanabe, as he took off his vest. “Dorothy will decontaminate you.” An EMT squad brought Eric into the tent first, then loaded him into a medevac helicopter. Last of all, after everybody else had taken their turn, Lieutenant Watanabe walked into the white tent to have Dorothy get the bots out of him.
Chapter 51
The Pit
1 November, 5:55 a.m.
I n the tensor generator room, the only thing that moved was the gigantic bot. It explored the room, shoving aside Drake’s corpse, looking for a way out. It couldn’t find a way out, so its program went into the drilling sequence. It bent its neck to the floor, and, using its knives, it cut through the plastic floor. When it had opened a hole, it broke through, crashing down into the pit full of electronic gear. There the bot continued to cut and chop, doing what it knew best.
Groaning, rending, crackling sounds came from below the floor of the generator room, the sounds mixing with blue and yellow flashes of electrical sparks. Suddenly there was a boiling hiss, and a cloud of vapor burst up through the hole in the floor. It was the sound and fury of superconducting magnets failing. The building shook as the magnetic fields in the generator went chaotic and relaxed. As the magnets failed they heated up suddenly, and the heat boiled the super-cooled liquid helium that surrounded the magnets. Helium vapor began pouring out of the pit.
Abruptly the lights in the building went out—circuit breakers had tripped. Meanwhile the giant bot still churned through the guts of Drake’s machine.
There was still somebody alive in the Nanigen building. In the pit, while the big bot hacked at machinery, a slender man watched. He moved slowly, carefully, no jerky movements, nothing to attract the bot’s attention. He removed a hard drive from a rack, pulling the data feed tapes out of their snaps. He slipped the drive into his jacket and left the pit quickly, climbing up a ladder, and from there he entered the fire escape tunnel. Behind him, he heard a thump, then a roar: the bot had started a fire.
The escape tunnel, lined with corrugated metal, went horizontally and ended at a ladder. Dr. Edward Catel, the liaison man from the Davros Consortium, climbed the ladder. The hard drive in his pocket contained five terabytes of data—all of Dr. Ben Rourke’s designs for the tensor generator, along with priceless engineering data from test runs of the generator. When he had put two and two together and decided that Vin Drake had probably ordered murders of his own employees, he realized that Drake had become unstable and therefore could no longer serve effectively as a chief executive. He had gotten in touch with certain people, who for some time had been trying to discover what Nanigen was doing, and had told them that for a certain price he could get them designs of the generator. He had gone into the building that night. He hadn’t realized Drake was in there, too.
Now, he stopped at the top of the ladder, below a hatch, and listened. What was going on above? He heard sirens, a helicopter thudding. Maybe he should wait here for a few hours. Give things a chance to settle down.
He felt something wet run down his cheek, drip on his collar. He reached up to his face. Yes, a bot had gotten into his cheek. The escape tunnel had become contaminated. He could feel the bot burrowing through the tissues of his cheek. It would not be good if the bot entered a major blood vessel: it could swim to his brain and start cutting there, give him a hemorrhagic stroke. He would have to exit and take his chances.
He pushed open the hatch. It led to the middle of a patch of acacia brush by the parking lot. A fire truck was parked at the corner, but the crew’s attention was focused on smoke pouring from the building.
He walked quickly into the underbrush, picking at his cheek with his fingertips. Had to get that bot out. He reached into his mouth with two fingers, pulled it from the tissues of his cheek, and pinched it between his fingernails, hard, until he felt it crunch. He kept walking. Thorns on the acacias caught at his clothing. He went from one empty lot to the next lot, and crossed behind a warehouse. He emerged from the business park and got on a sidewalk, and walked briskly along, until he reached a bus stop on the Farrington Highway, and he sat on the bench in the booth. Morning sun kissed the scene with a golden glow. It was a Sunday morning; the bus might not come for hours. He’d just have to wait.
It gave him satisfaction and a sense of safety to be wearing a ripped jacket spotted with blood. He smiled. He could have been a homeless person, and very ill, the kind of person nobody wants to look at too closely. And he had the hard drive that contained the only complete set of Ben Rourke’s plans for the tensor generator. The only plans.
A dark spot began spreading across the leg of his trousers. It was blood. This worried him. He opened his trousers, and felt around on his thigh, and got it. He held up the bot on the end of his fingertip and squinted at it. He could just see the little blades sparkling in the light. “Whither wander thou?” he murmured to the bot. This was quite good, he thought. He looked like a madman talking to his fingers. He was a free agent. Representing only himself, at the moment.
Catel crushed the bot between his nails and wiped his bloody hand on his pants. It was like crushing a tick. A fire truck rushed past, sirens screaming.
A week later, Lieutenant Dan Watanabe adjusted the angle of a laptop screen that sat on a hospital bed table; in the bed lay Eric Jansen. The screen showed an image of a bot cut neatly in half, with its insides laid open. “We got an ID on the Asian John Doe I told you about. His name was Jason Chu.”
Eric nodded slowly. His leg was wrapped in bandages, and his face was pale and wan: anemia from loss of blood. “Jason Chu,” Eric said, “worked for Rexatack, the company that owned the patents on the Hellstorm drone technology.”
“So Mr. Chu organized the burglary of Nanigen to try to get information on what Nanigen was doing with his company’s patents?”
“That’s right,” Eric answered.
“And you programmed these security bots?”
“Not to kill anybody. Drake reprogrammed them to kill.” He closed his eyes and kept them shut for a while, then opened them. “You can charge me. My brother is dead and it’s my fault. I don’t care what happens to me.”
“You will not be charged at this time,” Watanabe answered carefully.
A nurse came in. “Visit’s up.” She checked Eric’s monitors and said to Watanabe, “Can you guys take a hint or do I need to call a doctor?”
“I’m not a guy, ma’am,” Dorothy Girt said politely, standing up.
Watanabe stood up and said to Eric, “Dorothy would really like a functioning Nanigen bot to analyze.”
Eric shrugged. “They’re all over the Nanigen core area.”
“Not anymore. The place burned to crap. All that plastic. It took two days to put the fire out. There was nothing left. No bots. We found what we think is Drake. Dental records will tell. And that shrink machine—it’s a charcoal briquette.”
“Are you going to charge anybody?” Eric asked, just as Watanabe and Girt were leaving.
Watanabe stopped in the doorway. “The perpetrators are dead. The DA’s getting pressure not to do any prosecutions. The pressure’s coming from—let’s say from government entities. Who don’t want these robots talked about. My guess is this thing gets played as an industrial accident.” His voice took on a note of disappointment. “But you never know,” he added, and glanced at the forensic scientist. “It’s the kind of conundrum Dorothy and I like to noodle with, don’t we?”
“I enjoy conundrums,” Dorothy Girt said rather primly. “Come along, Dan. The gentleman needs his rest.”
Chapter 52
Molokai
18 November, 9:00 a.m.
T he rain over West Molokai had passed, and the trade wind had grown stronger, raking the palm trees along the beach and tearing spray from the surf. Set back from the water, a cluster of tents made of canvas and bamboo thumped and fluttered in the wind. The Dixie Maru eco-tent resort had seen better days.
Affordable on a student stipend.
Karen King sat up on the cot and stretched. The wind lifted a muslin curtain in the window of the tent, revealing a view of the beach, the palms, an expanse of blue water. Close to the beach, a white explosion burst from the sea.
Karen grabbed Rick Hutter by the shoulder and shook him. “A whale, Rick!”
Rick rolled over and opened his eyes. “Where?” he said drowsily.
“You’re not interested.”
“Yes, I am. Just sleepy.” He sat up and looked out the window.
Karen admired the muscles across Rick’s back and shoulders. In the lab in Cambridge, it had never occurred to her that Rick might have a decent body under those ratty flannel shirts he liked to wear.
“I don’t see anything,” he said.
“Watch. Maybe it’ll happen again.”
They observed the sea in silence. In the distance, across the Molokai Channel, the misty outline of the Ko‘olau Pali of Oahu lay along the horizon, the mountain peaks capped with cotton puffs of clouds. It was raining on the Pali. Rick put his hand around Karen’s waist. She placed her hand over his, and squeezed it.
Without warning, it happened again. First the head and then most of the body of a humpback whale appeared, breaching and turning in the air, followed by an incredible, bomb-like splash.
They watched the sea for a while longer, but it was quiet. Maybe the whale had sounded, or moved off.
Rick broke the silence. “I got a call from that cop. Lieutenant Watanabe.”
“What? You didn’t tell me.”
“He says we’re free to leave Hawaii.”
Karen snorted. “They’re hushing it up.”
“Yeah. And we get to go back to boring old Cambridge—”
“Speak for yourself,” Karen said, turning to him. “I’m not going back to Cambridge. Not now.”
“Why?”
“Because I’m going to find a way back…there.”
“The micro-world, you mean?”
She just smiled.
“But, Karen, that’s impossible. There’s no way—and even if there were, you’d be crazy to try it.” He looked at his arms. The bruises still hadn’t faded completely. “The micro-world kills humans like flies.”
“Sure—every new world is dangerous. But think of all those discoveries…” She sighed. “Rick, I’m a scientist. I haveto go there. In fact, I can’t imagine notgoing into the micro-world again. The technology exists—and you know as well as I do that with technology, once a thing is invented, it never gets un-invented.”
“The bad things, too,” Rick agreed.
“Exactly. Killer bots and micro-drones are here to stay. People will die in terrible new ways. Terrible wars will be fought with this technology. The world will never be the same.”
A gust of wind shook the tent, and the canvas flapped against their duffels in the corner.
“What about us?” Rick asked, after the wind had died down.
“Us?”
“Yeah. You and me. I mean…” He tried to pull her back onto the bed.
But Karen was lost in thought. In her mind’s eye, she saw the view from their camping spot on the cliffs of Tantalus: a mist-filled valley, cloaked in green, clear waterfalls trailing…a lost valley, not yet explored, or even truly seen by human eyes. “There has to be—” she began.
Something had caught her attention. A glint of metal, flying out of one of the duffels. A chill ran through her, the memory of bots whirling through the air like insects…
Whatever it was, it flew out the window, so small it passed right through the holes of the screen. It was nothing, she thought.
She turned to Rick. “There has to be a way back.”
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This field is blessed by some of the best science writing for the general reader, as well as some of the clearest exposition for the college-level reader.
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