Butcher Block Green

by Eric Kramer

  Survival 101: NEVER have your gun out of immediate reach. Come on, Sam.

  It remained motionless, its multifaceted eyes fixed on them. Time stood still as they regarded each other like gunfighters in a duel. To his left, Tes began to stand up, positioning herself to make a run for his rifle. She was close, only a couple feet, but it still wasn’t close enough…

  Tes, no…

  She moved with superhuman speed, as her military-grade body was designed to do. Drive legs moving in a blur, she flew past the gun. Tes scooped it up as she went by, creating distance between her and the insect even as she twisted her body around, cocking the gun and bringing it to bear.

  The ant was faster, on top of her before Sam had reached down to grasp the combat knife in his boot. Sam heard a sharp crack and a hiss of expanding gas as the gun was bitten in half. The ant tossed its head, ripping the broken gun out of Tes’s manipulator arms. It crashed on the wall with violent force, but Sam’s eyes were glued to where the creature stood with one armored claw pressing Tes flat, right over her neural core.

  Tes, transfer to the consciousness module. Come on, girl.

  The AI twitched under the ant’s pressure, and the armored leg pressed harder onto the robotic body. The insect’s head remained fixed on Sam, its alien eyes unreadable.

  Under the ant, Tes went limp.

  Good girl.

  He wracked his brain, trying to come up with a plan for something he’d never anticipated. Silence permeated the room—no alarms had been triggered … how on Earth had the ant made it in? The plan for a breach, such as it was, involved releasing the ethylene oxide after he was safely sealed in the bedroom/panic room. No chance of it now.

  The ant stayed motionless, as before, watching Sam. A full minute passed—an eternity. Sam’s mind was spinning, tractionless … stuck in the mud, going nowhere. He cleared his throat.

  “So, what now?”

  The ant remained immobile, watching. He cleared his throat again, trying to pitch his voice in as soft and non-threatening manner as possible.

  “All right, ant … I’m going to stand up, okay? I’m just…”

  The ant lifted its foot from Tes, but without aggression this time. Appearing completely unconcerned, it turned its back to Sam and moved back over to the bookshelf.

  It knows it has us. The thought that the ant might be intelligent enough to understand that sent chills down Sam’s spine.

  Studying the armored form, Sam stood up, making no sudden movements, and edged towards the backpack, inside which lay the decade-old grenade. The ant had stopped and was doing something in between the shelves. Sam edged closer. Tes twitched, and then rose. She’d transferred back—if she’d ever left at all.

  The ant turned, and Sam froze, tempted to run to the backpack, but knowing what the result would be. Something was in the ant’s jaws. Sam paused and blinked, stunned.

  It moved towards him, in that same nonaggressive way, and placed a box labeled “Dutch Chocolate” at Sam’s feet.

  Sam was dumbfounded.

  A moment passed; Sam continued to stare at the box. He couldn’t believe what he was seeing.

  “Open it, Samuel.”

  At the sound of Tes’s voice, the ant’s head whipped towards her, but it stayed put, standing over the box.

  Sam crouched down, eyes never leaving the ant. The insect, appearing satisfied that Tes wasn’t going to do anything, swung her enormous head back to Sam.

  Sam sliced down the center of the box with his boot knife and opened a flap. Stacks of pristine chocolate bars—a hundred of them, if the number on the box was to be believed—lay stacked as though they’d been packed yesterday.

  Years of eating and drinking only what he could scavenge from ants evoked an uncontrollable Pavlovian response. Before Sam could stop himself, he was ripping off the glistening wrapper of the bar, and sinking his teeth into the dark candy.

  The world dimmed as the long-forgotten flavor exploded into his mouth.

  Oh, wow…

  The chocolate wiped away the near escape with the post-human. The ant, only a foot away from him, was gone. Pure joy, overwhelming ecstasy washed over him, as memories of better times came tumbling, unbidden. An abstract part of him was aware of tears streaming down his face, but he didn’t care.

  After a few moments, Sam managed to pull himself together, opening his eyes. The holographic wrappers of five chocolate bars were scattered around him. Tes stood like a protective guard dog between him and the ant, who was still staring at him placidly.

  Sam reached out with trembling hands, shocked and embarrassed by his response, and laid them on the box.

  “Thank you. I don’t know if you understand me, but thank you.”

  The insect remained a statue.

  “So … what now? What does this mean? Why did you come here?”

  The ant opened its mouth, pincers spread wide. Sam flinched, even though he sensed no hostility. A small hiss escaped the ant’s mouth, like faint static, and she snapped her pincers shut. It regarded Sam for a second and then turned around, heading back to the bookshelves, disappearing between them. Sam hesitated, unsure of what to do. Seconds passed.

  Tes decided for him, scuttling between the tall shelves.

  Sam lurched upright, feeling a strange detachment from his body and followed her.

  “Over here, Samuel.”

  Sam followed the sound of her voice to the far back left corner of the Alamo. There he found her, standing over a hole about six feet wide. A thick, gooey mucous blocked the entire opening. Tes extended a leg, tapping it. Appearing to gain confidence, she eased herself onto the cover, which was hardening and thickening. A small sensor extended from her abdomen, inching down until it touched the substance.

  “What is it, Tes?”

  “One second. I am getting acoustics.” A thin filament extended, pressing and twisting into the gel before Tes jerked free.

  “This is an organic compound. Appears to be an ultra-dense crystalline matrix impregnated with a liposomally encapsulated acid. It’s a seal, and anything that tries to break in will be eaten alive by the acid.”

  “Okay, what about the echo results?”

  “Get your vision goggles and see for yourself. I’ll keep pulsing to refine the image. The low-resolution feedback I’m getting is pretty incredible,” Tes said.

  Sam scrambled back to the chair and found the goggles lying on the floor. He put them on, reattaching the goggles to the batteries in his vest. The screen blinked on, revealing the blue-green three-dimensional diagram of an echographic image. Sam could see the tunnel the ant had made, winding through the office building, ignoring walls, passing through his barriers, and—seeing it made chills go down his spine—weaving around his proximity mines and booby traps. The sonography showed the mucous plug in his floor was about three feet thick, with what looked like another plug at the entrance of the tunnel, which originated in the foundations of the building. From there, the image lost resolution, but it was enough.

  “They came from under the street, Tes. I say ‘they’ because there’s no way a singular ant did this. This was purposeful. Intentional. They wanted to penetrate the Alamo, but why? Deliver me chocolate? That ant could have, should have killed me. I mean, I’ve been killing her colony mates for a decade! Tell me you’ve figured it out.”

  “No idea, Samuel. Insufficient data. What we do know is that the ant was not hostile. It knew what kind of food humans eat and brought some. It understood more than that, though, because it brought high-quality, well-preserved food. This intimates a level of intelligence we haven’t previously observed or suspected. Intentional intelligence.”

  “Okay, fine. So they’re not going to kill us. What about the tunnel? We should fill it … blow it in.” Sam said.

  “I disagree. Take another look. Those echographically bright blips every five yards? Those are our directional proximity mines. They moved them into the tunnel, and I suspect, if we were to go down there, we would
find them aimed away from us, towards the street. They are protecting us, Samuel.”

  Sam sighed and pulled off the goggles.

  “Okay, you win. There’s nothing we can do anyways. They cut through our defenses like they weren’t there. Filling the hole won’t stop them. I can’t think anymore. I’m hitting the sack.”

  “Great idea, Samuel. I’ll review data logs. I’ll wake you at eleven a.m.”

  “Why so late?”

  “It is almost three in the morning. You know the rules. Eight hours of sleep for optimal performance and health.”

  “Oh, right. Okay. Good night.”

  Sam ducked into his bedroom, pulling the door behind him and locking it.

  “Lock the door, Samuel.”

  “Locked. G’night, Tes.”

  I’ll never be able to sleep after…

  Sam was out before his head hit the pillow.

  Morning came early or, rather, the abrasive strains of the New Philadelphia city anthem. Sam sat bolt upright, disoriented, until bit by bit the prior day’s events came back to him, like scraps of a halfway remembered nightmare.

  “Tes, what’s up? What time is it?”

  “Eleven a.m. The ants are back.”

  Sam scrambled in the darkness, bumping his head on a shelf in his haste to find the door.

  “What?! Why didn’t you wake me! I’m coming out! Is it safe to come out?”

  “It is safe. You needed your eight hours of sleep, and I felt you were safer in the panic room until I ascertained their intentions.”

  Sam found the lock and threw the door open, squinting past the sunlight spilling in. Three ants stood in the middle of the room. The middle one appeared to be the same bull ant that had visited them before. On the floor in front of them lay three large sealed bags. Right away Sam recognized them: military-grade food rations. Each bag was a month of high-quality human food. The Pavlovian response rose again, and he fought to control himself.

  “I think that they are saying this food is from an underground research center about eight miles away from here. Geographic locations are the easiest to understand. I am obtaining a lot of this from the food’s data tags. The food is in perfect condition. I think something happened at the research center … a biologic mutagen failsafe mechanism was triggered or something. If they were following standard protocol, that would mean the air was sucked out of the complex, which was then sealed. I do not know. It is hard to parse her syntax and language structure. I am developing an algorithm to assemble it into a Western-human format.”

  “What?? You can understand them?”

  “Yes. I only have twenty percent comprehension, though. Their language structure is quite intricate, fractal based. I am developing a second response algorithm, but my understanding of their language follows a logarithmic curve that gets exponentially more complex the closer to one hundred percent I get.”

  “I am so confused right now. How are you communicating?”

  “Binary, a high compression ratio, delivered in bursts. Judging from the delivery format, I believe she somehow intercepted computer mainframe exchanges—perhaps wireless—and assumed it was the human language. Or at least, a version of human language she could mimic. Quite remarkable, actually. I have been combing my databases … never seen anything like it.”

  The news forced the food’s origins out of Sam’s mind. He stared at the ants, wrestling with his incredulity. The constant surprises were fraying his nerves.

  “She? Only one can talk?”

  “No. She is the intelligence. The ants have a hive mind. Or at least, I believe they do, based on transmission patterns. She is the metamind, the intelligence that is using the ants to reach out to us.”

  One of the ants, the one who came the day before, opened its pincers and exhaled a brief static sound. She clicked her jaws shut and, in unison, all three ants turned around and filed into the bookshelves. Sam watched them go, struggling to process it all.

  “Right before they left … that hiss you heard. That was them … her … telling us they will be back here tomorrow, except the word for ‘here’ is an organic version of GPS, with this specific location,” Tes said.

  “So … what do they want?”

  “They did not say. Or perhaps they did, and I did not understand. As we speak, I am reviewing the interaction and trying to fill blank spots. It is almost like cracking data encryption … a lot of brute force processing that is going to take hours.”

  Sam moved over to the bags the ants had left and crouched down to inspect them. The bags’ holographic displays, still crisp, detailed the contents of each bag and a short, silent video on how to prepare its contents. Sam shook his head, touching them in disbelief. Once again, the ants had delivered food that looked like it had been made yesterday.

  Sam accessed a bag’s display, selected an option, and the bag unsealed. Sam pulled out a meal cube, inspecting it before taking a bite. The flavors of the food flooded into his mouth, causing his vision to blur from the sheer sensation of tasting food.

  “We’d better ration this. Can you run an inventory and calculate a good balance between caloric consumption and making these last?” Sam’s words were muffled through the mouthful of food.

  “I can.”

  “Also, Tes. I think we should bury the hemolymph we took. Like, give it a proper burial. It’s the least we can do.”

  Tes remained silent, and for a moment Sam thought she was going to disagree with him, until she flexed her manipulators—her way of nodding in agreement.

  “I will see if I can get the borer up and running. What time tonight do you want to head out?”

  “Let’s do it now. I don’t think the ants are a threat anymore. I’ll start moving the sacks back down to the street. There’s a spot about a hundred yards southwest of here that has a patch of bare earth we can dig into.”

  The rest of the day passed without incident, filled with hard labor that didn’t allow much room for wild thinking. Afternoon turned into evening before they’d put earth over the last of the hemolymph sacks and made a simple memorial over it.

  Sam was grateful to climb into the panic room that night and fell asleep before he could tell himself he was going to have a hard time falling asleep.

  The next day, Sam awoke with a start, realizing he didn’t hear Tes’s patriotic alarm. Checking his watch, he saw it was eight in the morning. An hour before his official wake time. Sam eased himself over to the door and pressed his ear against it, straining to hear anything on the other side.

  Seconds passed and then he heard a telltale hiss. After a pause, a second hiss.

  He unlocked the door and stepped out. The same three ants were back, with more boxes of food in front of them but, this time, all their attention focused on Tes. The AI sat on top of the boxes, emitting a similar hiss.

  “So, you can talk back?”

  “No, not yet. Last night I realized that it is not only the binary content, but the delivery speed and compression ratio that communicates information. I am at twenty-eight percent comprehension right now, which is way better than I was projecting yesterday.”

  The ant in the middle, whom Sam was beginning to think of as the leader, hissed again, turned, and headed back to the floor exit behind the library, followed by the other ants.

  “Get any of that?”

  “From that exchange, only the words ‘follow,’ and ‘die,’ which they express as a genocide-level event. That’s what makes this challenging. There’s no consistency in their vocabulary. The same sounds can have different meanings if certain factors I am not aware of are modified. However, if I am understanding the context right, they told me they have been looking for you.”

  “So … when they said to follow, was it directed at us, or was the ant talking to another ant?”

  “It is difficult to say, but given that the ant was speaking in the binary compression, I would say it was directed at us. If it was among themselves, I doubt they would communicate like that.”
>
  “Okay. So what happens if we do that, if they come back tomorrow? See where they are getting this food from? I thought about this a lot yesterday. The Alamo isn’t safe anymore, Tes. They’ve proved they can compromise it at will. If they want us to follow them, maybe we should. They could have done it by force at any time.”

  “I am not sure that is wise, Samuel. This area is way more than just security. We can account for these new flaws. Restructure.”

  “No, I was thinking about this last night, too. If they come back, I want to go. Go into the tunnel with them. I want you to come in the droid. We need to see where they’re getting that food. Whatever is protecting the food can also protect us.”

  “I still believe it is unwise to—”

  “We’re going, Tes. If nothing else, to see the size of this food cache. Have you looked at the air rifle? Is it fixable?”

  “It is repairable.” By design, artificial intelligences did not utilize emotions like anger or resentment, but sometimes Sam wondered.

  “Okay, let’s get to work then. Plan on a two-week expedition. I’m going to try to get the exoskeleton working—I don’t think I’ll be able to keep up with the ants without it, and you’ll need to attach to something to not fry your body. May need to pull the fusion battery from the sensor pods.”

  “Fine.” Her tone was flat.

  Tes turned and moved over to the workshop, where he could see she was already working on repairing the air rifle. Once again, Sam got the feeling she was upset with him.

  “Thanks, Tes…”

  The AI pulled herself up onto workbench stool and settled down, her spider’s legs gripping the lip of the seat. Selecting a tool hanging on the wall, she began to work, the only sound being the soft whine of her aging servos.

  Sam decided to leave her alone, give her space. He went over to the storage bay and pulled the door open. After rummaging through containers and shelves, he found what he was looking for: a dark green jumpsuit made of a thick, almost muscular fabric.