Micro

Chapter 51

The Pit 1 November, 5:55 a.m.

In 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.”