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 him-his 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 elevator-and 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 disk-like 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!
I leaned closer and observed Dexter and Baby Scooter’s frenetic motions. Dexter was casting circuit-filled plastic beads, and Baby Scooter was assembling the beads into- ants! The new robots were manufacturing plastic ants-the new robots had built the plastic ants that had killed Roger!
When each ant was finished, Baby Scooter would set it down on the lab floor, and the ant would scurry off along a meandering ant trail that led to the crack at the base of the closed elevator door. The new ant colony was grouping itself somewhere out of sight.
Just then the phone on Roger’s desk rang. Reflexively, I answered.
“Hello?”
“Allo. Q’est Tonio. Je voudrais Men parler avec Monsieur Coolidge.”
“Tonio!” I cried. “Yes, yes, this is Mr. Schrandt speaking. No, Mr. Coolidge cannot come to the phone.”
“Do he want me to drive him today?”
“Oh, not at all today. He’s in the middle of a very dangerous experiment with his robots.” I mustered my high school French to drum in the point. “ Les robots de Monsieur Coolidge sont tres tres dangereux.”
“So I will telephone tomorrow morning.”
“Bien. Adieu, Tonio.”
I hung up. While I’d been talking I’d noticed another trail of ants; this one led from the elevator shaft to the body of Perky Pat. Plastic ants were crawling about in Perky Pat’s dead innards. Now as I watched, I saw a passel of ants come backing out of Pat’s body, dragging something. It was Perky Pat’s Y9707-EX chip. Working together, the plastic ants had pried out Perky Pat’s processor chip. I stared unbelievingly as a seething stream of plastic ants bore the chip off into the crack at the base of the elevator door.
I stared for awhile at the dead Walt and Perky Pat robots. What had killed them? The ants? No, looking more carefully, I could see that each of them had its head smashed in, as if by a blow from a heavy bar. And yes, sure enough, lying on the floor halfway between the dead parent robots and their children were two thick metal pipes. Clubs. One of Dexter and Baby Scooter’s first sentient acts had been to kill their parents! Now the plastic ants were busying themselves at removing Walt’s Y9707-EX chip.
Things were getting worse faster than I could imagine. So what was I to do? Obviously I should stop the plastic ants. But what would work against them? Their plastic was so hard. It was the cyberspace ants making them act this way. Dexter, Baby Scooter, and the plastic ants were all under the influence of the ants that were holed up in the Antland of Fnoor and in the other two nests Roger had mentioned. Wouldn’t the best thing be to go there and try and kill off those virtual ants first?
My stomach tightened as I remembered my last experience with the cyberspace ants. They’d voodooed and dark-dreamed and stunglassed me into thinking I’d shit in the bed and strangled Gretchen. If they got control of me again, they’d likely as not get me to march down to Roger’s factory and jump into the elevator shaft-me probably thinking all the while that I was going to the kitchen for a snack.
But what about that magic bullet Roger had been talking about? The special instruction that would kill any ant. He’d insisted that I should be able to guess the instruction. But how?
I decided to try to guess the answer before rushing off into cyberspace again. But first I got up and ran around the house-the lights flicking on and off with my passage-and checked that all the doors and windows were locked tight. Back in Roger’s study, I sat down and stared out the window, thinking hard. Roger had said I could guess the magic bullet. Somewhere in the events that had happened to me there must be a clue.
