“About four point four seven,” chirped Walt. He talked so rapidly that it was hard to understand him.
“I think your new chip has double the old chip's clock speed,” said Roger. “Please take that into account in your vocalizations. Try halving your output frequencies.”
“Is this better?” said Walt in something like his former voice.
“Fine,” said Roger. He went on to do some more tests, and when everything worked, he went ahead and changed Perky Pat's chip as well. Having watched how Roger had adjusted Walt, Pat came through the transformation with her voice timbre intact. If anything, she sounded more mellifluous.
“This is fabulous, Roger. And the other two chips are for us?”
“Yes, yes,” said Roger, laying the two new Y9707-EX chips on the lab bench. “Walt and Perky Pat, I want you to build these two chips into child robots like we've been talking about.”
“Oh yes,” said Perky Pat, fondling the chips. “Dexter and Baby Scooter! We'll build them tonight! All by ourselves.”
“Piece of cake,” said Walt gratingly. “Now why don't you two humans get out of the way and let us work.”
Weird, weird, weird. I felt weak as a leaf. If I didn't warm up my feet I was going to catch the flu. It was time to get out of this sealed concrete room. I looked at Roger and asked, “Do you have any food?”
“Yes,” he said, as discouragingly as possible. He wanted to stay here in the lab.
“Can I have some of your food, Roger?”
“Oh, all right,” he sighed. “There's a camera that Kupp installed in the ceiling, so I guess I can keep an eye on things over the monitor.” Sure enough, there was a big lens in the center of the ceiling overhead.
“Good,” I said, pushing the elevator button. “Now give me some warm food and something to drink, for God's sake, and show me where I'm supposed to sleep.” The two robots stared impatiently at us until we left.
Outside, the rain had slacked off and the gray sky was veined with the golds of sunset.
“It will be better weather tomorrow,” said Roger. “The first day of a new world.”
The front door opened itself at Rogers's request, and for dinner the kitchen microwaved us three frozen plastic-packed dinners. I had a pork and a beef; Roger had a manicotti. To drink we had Scotch, tap water, or Scotch and water.
“I thought you'd be living better than this, Roger,” I said after I'd eaten my food and downed two drinks. I'd taken off my socks and crossed my legs so that I could rub some life into my feet.
“This is exactly how I
like
to live,” said Roger. “By eating frozen premade dinners I'm able to precisely calibrate my caloric intake. You know that I watch my weight.”
“What about vitamins?”
“Vitamins are just chemicals, Jerzy. For vitamins I take pills.” As if in confirmation, he brought out a tray of vitamin pill bottles and swallowed a capsule from each. One shiny capsule, a “metals supplement,” held compounds of chromium, manganese, titanium, and palladium. “Food is simply a source of the fats and carbohydrates which the body bums as fuel. Power for the computing medium. Vitamins are the processor componentsâthe nodes of computation, if you will.”
“Oh, whatever. Look, getting back to my own problems, how am I going to keep from going to jail without being on the lam for the rest of my life? Can't you step forward and admit that it was you who released the ants and made Studly kill the dog?”
“I'm not admitting anything. But I can help you get a better new identity. Those girlsâBety Byte and Vannaâthey're rank amateurs. I could set you up with the top cryp in Calcuttaâthat's where professionals get new ID. Even the CIA goes there.”
“I want my
old
identity, Roger, and I want to win my trial. I want to be able to visit with my familyâeven if I am getting divorced.” I took another drink. “If I could just get rid of all the ants, the government would like me. Roger, did you know there's a big nest of ants in cyberspace?”
“Of course I knowâthere's three nests in fact. My cyberspace ant lab has windows onto all three of them. One of the nests is what you call the Antland of Fnoorânice name, by the way. I was right there in the Antland of Fnoor that first night when Riscky Pharbeque was scaring you into working for West West.”
“Oh yeah, that's right. You were groveling and twisting on the floor.” I chuckled nastily. “All covered in your own blood and shit.”
“Well,” said Roger equably, “that's the way Riscky
made it lookâphreak humor, you know. Anyway you can't stay in a GoMotion ant nest for very long unless you're prepared to kill quite a few of them. The ants attack non a-life code.”
“I've noticed,” I said. “But you have that magic bullet for killing ants. Come on and tell me what it is!”
“I don't
want
you to kill the cyberspace ants, Jerzy. One colony is working on a third version of the ROBOT.LIB microcode. Walt and Perky Pat need that code for the new robots. The second colonyâthat's your Antland of Fnoorâis evolving better high-level code for the new robots. And the third colony is trying to find a way for the new robots to build miniature robotsâa third generation. It's all been going so smoothly that this afternoon I threw in a bunch of random mutations to see if the second- and third-generation robots couldn't be more of a surprise.”
“The robots in your factory are going to get information from the cyberspace ants?”
“Robots are always in touch with cyberspace. That chip, the Y9707 that robots use? Among other things, it emulates a cyberspace deck. A robot's vision of the world is an overlay of cyberspace. Robots use cyberspace as a kind of shared consciousness. And with the ant lion absent from the Y9707-EX chips, my new robots will be able to import external ant function pointers. We could see some truly emergent behavior.”
“Heavy,” I yawned. “I didn't sleep very well on the flight over here. What time is it?”
“It's after nine. If you like, I'll show you your room.”
There was a guest room on the end of the house closest to the factory. Rather than an actual bed, it just had a mattress on the floor, but right now that was fine with me. I squeezed my money-stuffed satchel under a corner of the mattress, told the room to turn out the lights, and
fell asleep.
Sometime during the night I woke up. With the eight-hour time change it was utterly impossible to tell how long I'd already slept, or what time it was. It took a major mental effort to find the bathroom, take a pee, and drink some water. The rain had stopped completely and it was a quiet night. Falling back into sleep, I thought I heard a tiny bell ringing in the distance, a tiny bell ringing and ringing and ringing. I couldn't think what it meant. I was more exhausted than I'd ever been in my life.
When I woke again, a pale patch of sunshine was lying across my bed. The house was cool and utterly quiet. I washed up, put on my sandals and my business sweats, and breakfasted on another microwaved meal from Roger's freezer: pigs in a blanket with warm fruit cocktail.
I asked the front door to open, and stepped outside. Just in case Roger had already gone down to Geneva, I wedged the door open with a rock so it couldn't lock me out. A cold, gusty breeze was blowing up the mountain meadow, and fresh clouds were massing. The sun had already disappeared. Roger had been wrong about the weather. This was going to be another day of rain. I was going to have to do something about finding some shoes. Borrowing shoes from Roger wasn't an attractive option, as his size was considerably smaller than mine.
The door to the factory was unlocked; I went inside. When I pushed the call button for the elevator to the second floor, nothing happened. Had it jammed? Could Roger be stuck in there? The memory of the ringing I'd thought I'd heard last night came back to me. Had Roger been in the elevator all night ringing the bell?
There was an emergency box on the wall next to the elevator with German instructions that I couldn't read. But on breaking the glass of the box, I found a metal
crank, or key, that fit into a hole in the elevator doors. I shoved the crank in and began turning it. Turn by turn, the elevator doors edged open, revealing the empty elevator shaft below, and a piece of the elevator cabin above.
Only about a foot and a half of the elevator cabin was visible below the top of the door; it was too high for me to see in.
“Roger?” I called. “Roger, are you in there?” There was no sound in response. I called again, cocked my head, and listened. There were irregular movements in the robot lab upstairs, but not a sound came from the elevator cabin.
Finally, I'd cranked the door wide enough so that a person could fit in. I hauled a bunch of Roger's
Household Goods
boxes over and built myself an unsteady mound. I got up on the mound, very nervous that I might tumble into the empty shaft. Balancing and craning forward, I could see into the elevator cabin and yes, Roger was in there. He was lying motionless on the floor facedown.
“Roger!”
No answer came. I have a terror of elevator shafts, and it was very hard to get myself to take the next step. What if the elevator should suddenly start up and guillotine me? But the stillness of Roger's form was even more terrifying. I had to find out what had happened to him.
I braced my left hand against the floor of the elevator cabin and began tugging on Roger's leg. He was stiff and heavy. I jerked him around so that his legs were sticking out of the cranked-open door. I wanted a good look at him, but no way was I going to climb up into the death cabin. I took one of his feet in either hand and pulled hard. Just then one of the boxes underfoot gave way, making the mound collapse. Some of the boxes shot out
into the empty shaft and I fell backward, with nothing to hold on to but Roger's feet.
Roger came sliding out of the elevator like a carrot coming out of the ground; I fell on my back and he landed on top of me, his butt on my lap. My legs were sticking out into the empty elevator shaft and so were Roger's. I put my arms around his waist and started to scoot us back when all of a sudden something sharp dug into my wrist. For a second I thought it was just a random scratch, but the sharp pain redoubled and grew purposeful. There was a distinct
sawing
sensation. Something was trying to slit my wrist!
I cried out and pushed Roger's body away from me. He teetered forward and fell into the shaft, twisting as he fell. I got a brief glimpse of himâhis throat had a bloody hole in it, and there were big ants clinging to his face. The elevator cables jangled, and Roger's body thudded on the concrete floor at the bottom of the shaft.
I felt another sharp pain in my wrist. An inch-long plastic ant was crouched down tight against my forearm with its mandibles working away at my skin! The ant's head was wet and red with my blood. I screamed wildly and slapped at the ant till it fell away. On the floor, the ant quickly oriented itself and raced toward the elevator shaft. I brought the heel of my sandal down hard on its gaster, but the tough plastic bead didn't give way. Instead, the ant twisted itself up and reached toward my heel, snapping its sharp little jaws. Its legs looked as if they were made of springs and metal, titanium-nickel memory-metal at a guess. For another moment I kept the ant pinned in place, but then it let out a shrill chirp that was answered by a chorus of chirps from down in the shaft. I snapped my foot forward to kick the ant away from me, and then I ran out of the factory, slamming the door behind me.
Fat raindrops were splattering all around. I kept thinking the splashes were ants. I was still screaming. I ran back into the house and let the door lock behind me. What to do?
First of all I went into Roger's bathroom and washed out the cut on my wrist. The plastic ant hadn't managed to sever any veins, thank God. I put on some antiseptic and bandaged the cut. My sandaled feet felt so vulnerable and exposed.
I looked in Roger's closet and found a pair of rubber galoshes that I was able to stretch over my sandaled feet. Just like Roger to have galoshes. Poor Roger. Last night the ants or the robots must have jammed the elevatorâand then the ants had finished Roger off at their leisure. But where had the ants come from?
I thought to go into Roger's study and look at his monitor. Sure enough, it was tuned to the robot lab. It took me a minute to sort out what I was seeing. The monitor was grayscale instead of color, and the camera was a primitive fixed-view fisheye lens that stared dumbly down from the middle of the robot lab's ceiling. I was shocked at the crudeness of the engineering. Either the camera should have been telerobotically controllable from the monitor, or the monitor should have been smart enough to build up an undistorted image and to let the user pan across and zoom into the image. But this system was just some Swiss security professional's quick analog hack. The good news was that this Swiss camera/monitor system had an
extremely
high resolution image, right up there in the terapixel range. With this level of image clarity, I could pick out tiny details simply by leaning close to the screen and squinting.
The fisheye showed me a gray-edged circular disk set into a field of white, the white being the ceiling, and the gray being the walls. Most of the details were at the
edges of the diskâlike in an M. C. Escher engraving of the hyperbolic plane.
Off to the left I saw two motionless robots lying on their sides. Panels were missing from these robots' chests, and their wiring seemed to be in an incomplete state. At first I thought these were the unfinished Dexter and Baby Scooter robots, and didn't pay them close attention.
Rapid, repetitive motions were taking place toward the top of the disk. Peering closer I could see two active robots tending the plastics machines. In addition to the two wheeled legs that they rode on, these robots had four arms each: two pincers, a tentacle, and a humanoid hand. Their body cases were slim and long; with their six limbs they looked a bit like giant mechanical ants.
These
robots were Dexter and Baby Scooter, and the dead robots were Walt and Perky Pat!