Bug Park

by James P. Hogan

  Vanessa ran a startup routine and went through a couple of screens of initialization. Then she checked over the body suit and tested its connections. "It should all be okay," Payne told her. "We put it through a full run downstairs an hour ago. Phil is up in the mountains. I just talked to him on the phone."

  Vanessa nodded. She indicated a door across the room from the one through which she and Finnion had entered. "What's in there? Can I use it to change?"

  Payne pushed it open. "Just a small office. Sure, it's empty." Vanessa went through and closed the door. She took off her coat and hung it behind the door, then began changing out of her dress, into the body suit.

  In the room outside, Payne paced across the floor and back, saying nothing. Finnion went out into the corridor and lit a cigarette.

  "Ms. Lang?"

  "Yes, this is Michelle Lang speaking."

  "Oh, hi. This is Dave Kollet from Homicide Investigation calling back. Sorry it took so long. I got hit by something else just after we finished talking. A guy of eighty-five, with one leg, falls off the roof. His daughter insists it couldn't be an accident. She wants us to look into it. We get 'em all."

  "Yes, Mr. Kollet."

  "Okay, I have the case here. John Anastole, body discovered at the Ramada, March three. Now, what kind of questions did you have?"

  "Well, I was interested in establishing more of the background circumstances. For example, if the door to the room was secured on the inside. Whether there were any signs of other occupancy. Perhaps damage to anything in the room. That kind of thing."

  "Uh-huh. Can I ask you, Ms. Lang, what your interest is in this case?"

  "I think the best way to put it might be to say that the deceased's death was of some financial advantage in certain quarters. I wanted to check whether there might be grounds for any suspicion."

  "I see. Well, I'm sure you'll understand that this isn't the kind of information that we disclose over the phone to people we don't really know. Sorry for the inconvenience, but it will be necessary for you to come to the office in person if you want to pursue it further."

  "Now I almost feel as if I'm a suspect."

  "Ms. Lang, in our business, everybody is a suspect."

  Sigh. "Yes, I understand. Very well, when would be a good time? . . ."

  The teledirection program was running and would activate the VR interface as soon as the link was established.

  Vanessa settled back in one of the office chairs and positioned the helmet. Finnion steadied it while she made fine adjustments and secured the chin harness. Payne stood watching, holding a phone. "How's it feel?" Finnion asked.

  "That's fine," Vanessa said. She verified the graphics with a visual test, then executed a sequence of body and limb movements to check the motor control and feedback loops. The suit driver routines were set to high gain, meaning that slight body actions and muscle flexings would be sufficient to evoke the full range of perceived motions and tactile responses. Dramatic posturings and flailings weren't necessary. In fact, for most normal movements and gestures, with high-gain settings it was seldom obvious to observers that an operator was moving at all. Vanessa pulled down a menu of options, highlighted remote live, and selected the channel that she had pre-initiated.

  The test pattern vanished, and she was on a floor of spongy fiber matting, inside a square arena formed by walls that appeared to be about twenty feet high. There was a stack of flat slabs inside the arena, and a sloping ramp. "Okay, Martin, I'm through," she said. Through the circuit patched into the audio, she could hear Payne punch a number into the phone.

  Above the arena wall on one side was an underview of the armrest of a seat, with a protruding elbow clad in a yellow twill sleeve. Beyond that, like the vault of a cathedral interior, she could see the inside of a car roof and the top portion of one of the windows.

  A ring tone sounded on the circuit. The elbow above her extended to become an arm, which then moved high above her like the jib of a crane, carrying a telephone handset. Phil Garsten's voice said, "Hello?"

  "Phil, it's Martin. Vanessa says we're through on the link. You should be seeing some action now."

  The mec was a horizontally postured design with six-legged, insect-like locomotion—the same one, in fact, that had dispatched Jack. The operator's arm sensors were coupled to the manipulator appendages, leaving each lower-body system to control a triplet of two-on-one-side, one-on-the-other legs working as a unit. Developing a steady walking rhythm required something of a knack, but there was no balancing act to worry about as with bipedal mecs, and Vanessa found it easier. She walked a slow circle in the upturned cardboard box lid on the passenger seat, pushing and pulling on each limb in turn and flexing the manipulators.

  "It looks like it's working just fine to me," Garsten's voice said. Vanessa looked up. His face, curiously distorted by perspective, was filling half the view above and peering down at her, the arm holding a phone to one ear. "Jesus, this is weird," he said. "Just watching this thing moving down here, right next to you, is enough to give anyone the creeps."

  Vanessa exercised the mec through a few more movements, then experimented with climbing the stack of calling cards and the matchbook. Everything seemed to be working fine. So, they knew the setup would work over an extended range—ninety miles, anyway, which was the distance to where Garsten was parked on a rocky shoulder by the side of a winding stretch of mountain road on the way to Barrow's Pass.

  "Can Phil drive for about a mile?" Vanessa said aloud. "I want to try it with the car moving." Payne relayed the request to Garsten over the phone.

  "Sure." High above, Garsten's face receded and turned away as he sat back in the seat. The arm transferred the phone to somewhere beyond Vanessa's field of view, then came back and turned the ignition key.

  When the tests were through, Vanessa, Payne, and Finnion could go for lunch. That would give Garsten time to get back to Seattle and turn the "special" mec over to Vanessa. And they would be set. Today was Tuesday. By Saturday it would be all over.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Kevin stood to one side with Sam and Josh, both also from his grade, watching the daily boarding mêlée around the school bus. When God had finished creating people, He found Himself with lots of legs and pimples left over, Kevin decided. So He threw them together in clumps and called the results teenagers.

  Vanessa thought that Kevin ought to attend private school. It had the right social image. Eric said that learning how to mix and get along with anybody was more important.

  "Would you get a load of that assignment," Sam grumbled. "Five pages! What do I care about the dumb English and their dumb king? They should have chopped all their heads off, like the French did."

  "When do we get to see this boat of yours, Kev?" Josh asked. "Are there any islands along the inlet? Maybe we could fix up a swimming party at one of them."

  "Let me think about it," Kevin said. "I've got a lot going on right now."

  Taki appeared, picking his way through the throng, a blue school-bag slung over one shoulder. "Ah, Kev. I was beginning to wonder if you were in today. I was looking for you at lunch time but couldn't find you."

  "Oh, there was something I needed to get finished." Actually, Kevin had spent the break in the library. He had wanted to be on his own and think.

  "Did you bring the mecs?"

  "I've got them here." The two that Kevin had put in Vanessa's car were not the flying versions that he and Taki were trying to develop.

  "And the relay too?"

  "Er, no. There's something else—"

  "Gee, darn it, Kev. You said last night that you would. I wanted to try adding something tonight."

  "Something else has come up that I needed it for. I'll tell you about it later."

  He had to talk to somebody, he had decided—about the whole situation. Somebody who could share his viewpoint as an equal without going into lecture mode. While he knew that Michelle and Doug were on his side, adults had this propensity for letting thems
elves be hemmed in by rules. Their reflex seemed always to see only the restrictions by saying, "You can't do anything because . . ." Negative. He wanted to talk to somebody who could listen and say, "Hey, we could do something if . . ." Positive. That was what being American was supposed to be all about, wasn't it?

  "See you, guys," Kevin said to Sam and Josh. He and Taki boarded the bus behind two girls talking about the clothes that you could buy in thrift stores. One of them had a happy face on the seat of her jeans, that someone had stuck there. Kevin followed Taki to the back, where he found a seat wedged next to a younger boy with freckles, nursing a cage containing a bat that he had brought in to show the class. Kevin wondered if it might be possible to equip a mec with sonar and process the echo signals so that they could be perceived as vision. Now that would be really neat, he told himself. He said to the kid that it was a weird looking bat. The kid blew a bubble of gum at him and didn't answer.

  The bus pulled away and began threading its way through the suburbs: white oblongs, regularly spaced; each surrounded by its patch of green with flowers; no people. Eric always said they looked like graveyards.

  Hiroyuki's house had what had once been a basement family room, which Taki had taken over bit by bit like an encroaching plague and transformed into his private workshop. It included a mec control setup, with a coupler in the form of a barber's chair that one of the innumerable relatives had acquired as part of a job lot at an auction and had no use for. Taki sat hunched in it, legs crossed and arms wrapped around his knees, the mec-control headset and collar set aside on the cubicle adjacent. One of the winged mecs lay on the bench beside him. Above the bench was a shelf with parts, drawer units containing components, and an assortment of mecs, including several of the larger, earlier models. Kevin sprawled on the bar stool in front of a console. Both of them had managed to keep the winged mec aloft semicontrollably—more or less—for periods of up to several seconds, which was an encouraging step forward, but that had been earlier. For the best part of an hour now it had been inactive and eventually forgotten as Kevin divulged the full meaning of the events that Taki had witnessed the previous Friday and recounted the further developments that had taken place since.

  Taki's initial astonishment changed to disbelief, and then was replaced by a temporary numbness that echoed Kevin's own before the full shock of what he was hearing sank in. His features still betrayed a hint of part of him trying to reject it when Kevin concluded, ". . . I figured there might be more chances like on the boat last Friday—to find out more about what's going on. Or at least, if they happened, we ought to be ready for them. So I fixed a box with Toad and Tigger inside in the trunk of her car this morning—it's right up at the back; you won't see it unless you go looking. And that's why I don't have the relay. I put that in with them too."

  Taki's features, which had communicated nothing for the past several minutes, expressed skepticism. "Isn't that a long shot, Kev? Who's going to sit there in the car and shout about all their plans, just to oblige you?"

  "No, I know. We'll still have to send them with her, or maybe someone else, when she goes places—like on the boat. But at least they'll be there."

  Taki nodded distantly.

  Kevin shrugged. "And who knows? There's always the chance that we might pick something useful up in the car."

  Taki didn't seem hopeful. "It's still passive though. It still means sitting and having to wait for some kind of lucky break that may not even happen. The odds aren't something that I'd want to bet money on."

  Kevin sighed and showed both his hands imploringly. "Hell, Taki, what else do you want in the course of one whole day? It might not be much, but it's more than anyone else has been able to come up with. Give me a break, for heaven's sakes. It'll get better. We'll work on it." The tension that had been building in him vented itself in his voice. The strain he felt showed on his face. It didn't matter that what he had done was grab wildly at a straw, with chances of achieving anything useful probably as near zero as made no difference. He had done something. Taki understood, nodded, and didn't press the point.

  "I just don't believe it can be that much of a problem," Taki said. "I mean, what about the police? Isn't that what they're there for? What's the use if all they can do is show up to draw chalk marks around dead bodies? Aren't they supposed to stop people being turned into dead bodies in the first place?"

  "You'd think so. I said more or less the same thing to Michelle and Doug, but she says it isn't so simple." Kevin massaged his brow with a hand. "When did grown-ups ever come up with anything simple? Half of them would lose their jobs."

  "But it's right there on the tape," Taki insisted. "They're gonna change your dad's will to cut you out, and he won't be around to argue about it. What else could it mean?"

  "That's what I said too. But when you really listen to it, it doesn't actually say a hell of a lot. Most of what you think you hear is in your head. It doesn't mention any names except 'Phil,' which could mean anything. And even assuming it is Garsten—which it is, obviously, although how do you prove it?—we don't have anything he's actually done that we could show as evidence—no document or something. It's all guesses."

  Taki shook his head. "And Michelle won't even go talk to the police? I still can't believe it."

  "Well, that could be on account of her job somehow, too, I guess."

  "What about Doug, then? Won't he even try? He always struck me as the kind of guy who doesn't mess around—who'd go right in and tell it like it is if he thought there was a chance it might do any good."

  "Hm." Kevin rotated the stool he was sitting on through a half circle toward the far wall, then back to face Taki again. "I think he might want to do more than that," he said in a serious voice.

  "What do you mean?"

  "Well, from some of the things he said this morning when he ran me into school, he doesn't seem to think that involving the police solves much, anyway—it would just put everyone on their guard, and they'd just lie low for a while. The risk would still always be there. It wouldn't have gone away."

  "What does he want, then?"

  Kevin shrugged. "An answer that'll be more permanent, I guess."

  Taki stared, clearly trying hard not to show the alarm that he just as clearly felt at the way this was starting to sound. "Like what?"

  "He doesn't know."

  A silence fell while they mulled over what had been said, both looking for a constructive continuation and not finding one. Taki unfolded his legs, reached out to pick the mec up off the bench, and turned it over between his fingers, regarding it thoughtfully. "What do you think we should call it?" he asked, looking up. "Now we're getting it close to working, it ought to get a name to celebrate."

  "I dunno. Any ideas?"

  "How about, maybe, Icarus or Orville?"

  "I vote for Icarus. It's got wings."

  "Okay, Icarus it is. Hi, Icarus. Now we have to get the colors right. What colors did Icarus have?"

  "I'm not sure. White sheet-things and ballet tunics? You know, Greek kinda stuff."

  The phone rang on the console behind Kevin. "Oh, flip it to speaker mode," Taki said. "I can't be bothered to get up." Kevin turned and pressed a button. "Hello?" Taki said.

  The voice of Taki's older sister, Nakisha, came through, giggling. "It's your girlfriends in Tacoma."

  "Hey, wait a minute. No. We're—"

  Click. "Hello? Is this Taki?"

  "Oh . . . hi, Janna."

  "Hi. Avril's here with me. She's helping me paint my room. We just thought we'd give you a call to say what a terrific time we had with you guys over at Kevin's on Sunday. Those little mecs are absolutely incredible! We haven't been able to stop talking about them. The things you could do with them are just endless. Your uncle's got the right idea. They'd be an absolute sensation. There's no question about it."

  "Well, I'm glad you enjoyed yourselves. . . . It was fun."

  "You sound as if you're on speaker."

  "That's right."<
br />
  "Your sister said Kevin was there too. Hi, Kev. Are you there? Can you hear me?"

  Kevin sent Taki a resigned look. "Hello, Janna. I'm here. Yes, just fine."

  "Wanna say hello to Avril?" Before Kevin could say anything, the voice changed.

  "Kevin? Hi, this is Avril."

  "Hi again. Got your balance back yet?"

  "Wow! I was beginning to think I'd never walk straight again . . . but it might have been more the boat. Do you know, we had such a good time. And you guys get into such really interesting stuff."

  "Part of the service. We try to please."

  "What do we have to do to borrow a couple of mecs? We could be a real sensation showing something like those around."

  Kevin glanced at Taki and rolled his eyes upward. "I wish it were that easy. You'd need to have the gear to control them, for a start."

  "Okay, I know, I know. Just kidding. Janna wants us to enroll in an electronics basics class next semester. What do you think?"

  "Sure, why not? I think it's a great idea."

  "Would we be up to it?"

  "There's no other way to find out, is there? Go for it. You'd be surprised what you can do. Think positive."

  "Did you do any more yet with those mecs you said you were trying to get to fly?"

  "That's what we're working on right now."

  "Hey! Can we get to try those too?"

  "Well, give us a chance to get it working right first." Kevin directed what was meant to be an exasperated look at Taki, but Taki was staring fixedly at the shelf where the mecs were and seemed to have floated away on thoughts of his own.

  "We're with this club here that's having a hike up in the mountains next Saturday," Avril went on. "And we thought you and Taki might want to come along. I asked the guy who's organizing it, and he said it would be okay. Do you think you might be able to make it? Do you like going on hikes? We'd really love to have you along."