More Stories from the Twilight Zone

by Carol Serling

  “Have you isolated the bacteria?” asked the director of Singapore’s Institute of Molecular and Cell Biology.

  “No. The chief characteristic of the bacteria is that it seems to be amazingly fast-acting, and somehow genetically engineered to, um, cease to exist once the heart valves are destroyed.”

  “How contagious is it?” the head of the CDC in Atlanta wanted to know.

  “Not contagious in the sense of disease pathogens. I’ve tried to make it clear that what we are dealing with are, um, robotic bacteria.”

  He winced at the ensuing uproar, with the kindest word distinguishable in several languages being “Preposterous!”

  “That remains our, um, most viable theory to date.”

  “Let us have some order, please!” the deputy director of the FBI demanded after another twenty seconds of outrage, denial and, possibly, fear.

  His counterpart from the Hong Kong police, a small ravishing Eurasian woman, said calmly, “Assuming for the moment we accept the hypothesis that extremely advanced work in robotics has been conducted somewhere in total secrecy—rather like the plot of a James Bond movie—what then is the logic behind the selection of victims, which required too much diligence to be considered random? A Mexican drug lord, a Hong Kong hedge-fund swindler, a rogue nuclear scientist, a wife-killer that an incompetent American prosecutor failed to convict, and our most recent victims. From the intelligence available to date, these people—of no particular significance in a moral context—were unknown to one another.”

  Nobis took the floor again.

  “The dominant, or Alpha Perpetrator—let’s deal with only one for now, although we believe there are several brilliant individuals working together—deliberately courted our attention. Which he certainly has at this point. He’s been . . . toying with us, so to speak. There probably is no personal revenge motive behind the murders. Nor are we dealing with a serial killer. The choice of victims is largely irrelevant, although there is a definite aspect of self-righteousness. Our profile suggests the Alpha Perp considers himself to be ethically and morally superior to just about everyone else on the planet, thus justifying his killing spree. A towering intellect, a scientific genius. Give him that. But emotionally he is a despot, a failed human being, a common voyeur, probably impotent and totally insane.”

  “Then you know who he is?” asked the Hong Kong police commissioner.

  “No. I only know he’s here today. Like I said, he’s a voyeur, and childishly infatuated with the investigation in which he has played an invisible part. So far.”

  Everyone assembled in the conference room was suddenly preoccupied with trying not to look around. Another uproar began, like the alarm of vulnerable animals at a water hole smelling carnivores in their midst.

  Nobis smiled thinly, and gestured for quiet.

  “Although not physically present,” he amended. “But we should hear from him soon. I believe the first phase of the scheme that has been set in motion is complete.”

  Nobis picked up the demo car again, this time dropping it into an evidence bag.

  “I doubt that it will be long before we hear directly from our Alpha Perp. Thank you for your time, ladies and gentlemen. The bureau will keep you fully informed.”

  Outside the conference room in the Hoover building, Nobis and Saint-Philèmon were approached by a cadre accompanying the president’s National Security adviser, Neal Hullinger.

  “I think it’s time, from all I’ve heard today, to bring the president up to speed,” Hullinger said.

  Nobis nodded.

  “I think, by way of illustration, he should see what you have in that evidence bag.”

  “Doesn’t the president have grandchildren visiting the White House this week?”

  “Yes, he—” Hullinger took another look at the nanobiomimetic toy car. “Good God, you aren’t suggesting—”

  “There’s vehicular homicide and, in this case, a homicidal vehicle. But if you want the responsibility—”

  “No, no!” Hullinger said, backing away. “You’ve got to find this monster, Agent Nobis!”

  “He’s more likely to find me,” Nobis said.

  Promptly at six o’clock that evening, Pierre Saint-Philèmon knocked on the door of a sixth-floor apartment at the Four Seasons Hotel. Special Agent Nobis let him in.

  The small apartment was immaculate. Bedroom, sitting room, kitchenette. The furnishings not unlike what Saint-Philèmon would have expected of a first-class travelers’ lounge at the Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris. No personal touches, unless one counted an unopened bottle of an important-looking wine and two crystal glasses on a silver room-service tray.

  The nanobiomimetic toy that Nobis had brought with him was motionless beside the tray, yet sinister in its lack of activity.

  “Only two glasses?” Saint-Philèmon commented, picking up the bottle of wine, which he held reverently: a near-priceless Château Mouton Rothschild. “You assured me we would be having company.”

  “He’ll be along,” Nobis said, almost indifferently. “Is that the vintage you told me you enjoyed?”

  Saint-Philèmon whistled softly.

  “And can never afford.”

  “Please,” Nobis said, gesturing.

  Saint-Philèmon poured a glassful of the Château Mouton Rothschild and offered it to Nobis.

  Nobis smiled enigmatically, declining.

  The nanobiomimetic car moved on the seventeenth-century, richly lacquered end table. It seemed to Saint-Philèmon, as he raised the glass in a silent toast, then sipped with an expression of ecstasy, that the car was spinning all of its wheels. He heard a very faint sound of acceleration that prickled hairs on the back of his neck. Although he knew that none of the toy cars had workable engines.

  But if it should want a powerful engine, probably it could build one for itself, he thought.

  A black-and-white movie was playing on a wall-mounted TV screen. Nobis had turned his full attention to the movie. Saint-Philèmon dimly recalled having seen it as a child. He savored another sip of wine. Obviously the golden oldie had been filmed on location in Washington. The sequence playing out now was set in a park or playground, with the Washington monument visible in the background. Foreground, a flying saucer was confronted by armed and nervous troops and spectators. They stared at a large silvery robot walking down a ramp that had appeared from the base of the saucer. And there was a tall, stern-looking space traveler with a British accent. The soundtrack hummed eerily.

  “Isn’t that movie called The Day the Earth Stood Still? But—?”

  “I like a little joke now and then,” the normally humorless Nobis said. “Say, about every twenty thousand years or so.”

  Saint-Philèmon shot him a look and nearly choked on his third sip of the precious wine. He coughed and reached for his handkerchief and looked back at the wide screen on the wall.

  Where a man on horseback had appeared in the movie’s background. But unlike the somber tone of the film, he was three-dimensional in glorious living color, riding slowly toward the camera. His horse was a black Arabian.

  Nobis said, as they watched the newcomer on the screen, “The most dangerous of human beings are those who are born congenitally evil. Fortunately there are only a few of them. The next most dangerous category of humans are those who devoutly believe they are always right.”

  “Evil as a wretched excess of good,” Saint-Philèmon commented, having gotten his cough under control without spilling a drop of the expensive wine.

  The man on the black Arabian horse, who wore faded jeans and a calico shirt and a kerchief knotted at one side of his throat, was now in the midst of the ongoing motion picture. He gazed around at the flying saucer, the robot, the awestruck crowd of people. Then he draped the reins over the pommel of his saddle and leaned forward in a relaxed attitude, patting the horse’s neck, smiling. Waiting.

  “Good afternoon, Dr. Walpole,” Nobis said.

  The man on horseback nodded agreeably.
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br />   “Agent Nobis. Can that be you?”

  “Yes, Dr. Walpole. Inspector Saint-Philèmon is with me.”

  “But none of my former colleagues at SAIL or Berkeley? Those who I assume—how would you say it in your profession?—fingered me?”

  “No. None of them have had knowledge of your whereabouts during the past ten years. Or knowledge of those who were most likely to be your associates. Nate Kronenwald. Sven Ullberg. Francois Beguelin. Mian Zhang Choi. Zane Red Star. Other than yourself, the most brilliant minds on robotics and bioengineering of the past two decades.”

  “You’re very good, Agent Nobis.”

  “I have many resources.”

  “And you knew where to find me. Quite a good job of mind-reading.”

  “I don’t read minds. I study them. Thanks for making yours available.”

  Edward Walpole smiled indulgently, then straightened in the saddle and looked around again. “I appreciate your sense of irony, but it is distracting to find oneself in the middle of an old flick.”

  The scene from The Day the Earth Stood Still vanished from the LCD screen, and was replaced by a vista of red and ochre canyon lands.

  “Thank you,” Walpole said. “Now, I suppose, squadrons of helicopters are about to swoop down on me, and I shall conclude my retirement years alone and forgotten in some state dungeon. A ‘failed human being,’ isn’t that how you described me?”

  “Doesn’t work that way, Dr. Walpole. We both know you’re untouchable.”

  The man in the saddle nodded, thinking, savoring his advantage.

  “So what is it we can do for you now, Dr. Walpole?” Nobis said.

  “Why don’t we talk further, Agent Nobis? But not under these circumstances. Please accept my hospitality. And perhaps you would be interested in meeting my associates?”

  “I would, Doctor.”

  “Well, then . . . shall we say, this same time tomorrow afternoon? In my location of the moment? Let me tell you how to find—”

  “I know where and how to find you. Until tomorrow, Dr. Walpole.”

  “Hasta luego,” said the man in the saddle, turning his handsome stallion around with a flourish and cantering away. The sun flashed on the silver-dollar headband of his black Stetson.

  The LCD screen went blank.

  Saint-Philèmon poured himself another generous slug of the Mouton Rothschild. He saluted Nobis with his glass.

  “Someday you must tell me how you do that,” he said cheerily. “Meanwhile, do you propose to confront our renegade madman alone?”

  “Sorry, Pierre. I appreciate your contribution to the investigation, but I can’t put you in harm’s way. The risk factor is now at a level where the primary Law applies.”

  Saint-Philèmon nodded. “In your case as well. You are not invulnerable, Nobis. And I believe Dr. Walpole’s scientific curiosity has him on full alert.”

  “Which works to our advantage.” Nobis smiled. “I’m well past the boundary of what even his brilliant mind can conceive. Excuse me. I think it’s time to dispose of this.”

  Nobis raised the sleek little car, number ten of a lethal series, to his mouth. He bit it in half and began to chew nickel, rubber, and titanium as if they were a chocolate chip cookie.

  “Be careful you don’t catch something,” Saint-Philèmon advised, grimacing. He drained his glass and immediately poured more wine. Having reached the limits of his usefulness, he had decided he might as well get drunk.

  At three forty Mountain Time the next afternoon, Nobis left the car he had driven from the Tucson office of the FBI to a remote Indian nation close to the Mexican border. He walked another two-thirds of a mile through a gradually deepening arroyo to the place where Dr. Edward Walpole was waiting.

  Walpole had brought an extra saddle horse, a usually placid paint gelding that nonetheless began acting up at Nobis’s approach. As did Walpole’s own mount, Hooligan. Walpole was forced to let go of the paint’s reins in order to keep Hooligan under control. The paint lit out for home through lengthening shadows.

  Edward Walpole smiled crookedly at his guest. “He’s never acted like that before.”

  “I don’t get on well with animals,” Nobis said with a shrug. “And I don’t mind walking.”

  “It appears you will have to, Agent Nobis,” Walpole said. “I must ask you if you’re armed.”

  “Only with my wits.”

  “Very good, sir,” Walpole said, as if an excellent chess match had been proposed.

  He took Nobis through a canyon that featured spectacular swooping walls sculpted by wind and flood, and into a narrow valley where sheep grazed. There was a sprawling adobe house blending with the land and several warehouse-like outbuildings, all covered with camouflage netting. Also parked beneath the nets were a number of dusty but expensive four-wheel-drive vehicles.

  “How many employees do you have, Dr. Walpole?”

  “About thirty men and women. Yaquis from both sides of the border. They are largely uneducated but highly skilled with their hands. They have been provided with a standard of living they could never have achieved elsewhere. Needless to say they are clannish by nature and intensely loyal.”

  “How many of them have an inkling that they’re accessories to murder?”

  “I hope we’re not about to get off on the wrong foot with each other, Agent Nobis.”

  Walpole surrendered his horse to a ranch hand wearing a broad-brimmed sombrero, mopped his face with a large yellow bandana, and peered at his guest, who wasn’t sweating.

  “You seem remarkably adaptable to our ungodly heat.”

  “So far.”

  Walpole looked more closely into Nobis’s unblinking sapphire eyes.

  “Shall we go inside? The others are waiting.”

  The technical geniuses Edward Walpole had rallied to his cause also wore casual Western-style clothing. Walpole’s wife, the nanomimeticist Mian Zhang Choi, who had been the key innovator in downloading her husband’s mind into the bacterial computers aboard the robot cars, was confined to a wheelchair that was also a technological marvel, controlled by her mind.

  They all welcomed Nobis with good cheer and intense curiosity. It was, apparently, their cocktail hour.

  “I don’t suppose you would care for a drink?” Mian said, smiling at Nobis.

  “Now, Mian,” Walpole chided her.

  “Agent Nobis knows I’m just having a little fun.”

  “I never drink . . . wine,” Nobis said, doing his part to be convivial, but there was a glint in his sapphire eyes.

  Sitting lifelessly in her chair, Mian motored closer to their guest and looked into his eyes. She spoke to him in Mandarin. “So you have a sense of humor.”

  “About some things,” Nobis said, also in Mandarin.

  Zane Red Star, who wore a beaded tribal vest and whose specialty was cognitive science, shifted them back to English. “That’s fascinating. And were you programmed with other emotions?”

  “Sure. Logical thought, hard-coded algorithms, is only part of a complete system of information processing. Without emotion I can’t make decisions or form reasonable judgments. Or protect myself, if it comes to that.”

  “Where are you from, Agent Nobis?” Sven Ullberg asked. “Not from around here, I assume.”

  That had them laughing, but it was nervous laughter.

  “Just a little dot on the map.”

  “Star map?” someone else asked.

  Nobis shrugged. There was silence, except for the rattle of ice in a couple of glasses.

  “Don’t be foolish,” Mian said to the last questioner. And to Nobis: “Whoever you are, and knowing what you must know of our purposes, do you think you have the power to stop us?”

  “I’m not interested in power,” Nobis said. “Because I have no capacity for delusion, I can’t be a politician, judge, or diplomat. I’m just an investigator.”

  “We’re prepared to die for what we believe,” Walpole said. “But of course you know that, having . .
. studied my mind.”

  “And I detected high explosives when I entered your compound. As for your convictions that you can change society for the better by intimidating world leaders with your nannies—that’s primitive thinking. Fear only breeds more hostility and irrationality. You’re simply proposing a different sort of warfare: in one historical context, you’re replacing the longbow with cannon. But war will find a way: It’s a disease pathology of human nature. Your technology is brilliant; your motives are flawed and naive.”

  “You don’t understand us at all!” Francois Beguelin protested. He was the team’s nano-designer. “Your own technology is astounding. So lifelike. But still you’re a machine.”

  “And have been, for half the modern era of this planet. A long time ago I was a scientist like the five of you, except for certain variations of form. That was in my old neighborhood, another little dot on the map. The rise of technology followed a similar course there—slowly, impeded by the rise and fall of hostile cultures and pathological religious convictions. But I grew up during a century of accelerated scientific progress, one product of which were self-replicating nanobots. I built them, loved them too much, didn’t recognize the danger. Because my carbon-based nannies, like yours, had no programmed intelligence. No conscience. They were infinitesimal eating machines.”

  Walpole said, “But we do know the dangers of—”

  Nobis stopped him with a look.

  “And you only intended to kill a few key leaders, persuading their political heirs to fashion lasting peace treaties with one another. The wrong means justifying righteous ends. That’s what I had in mind as well.”

  The silence that followed became as oppressive as a thick cloud in the room. Nobis didn’t look at anyone. The brightness of his eyes had dimmed. A couple of the men freshened their drinks. Walpole stood behind the wheelchair of his wife. They both stared at Nobis.

  “Did you build yourself, Nobis?”

  “Yes.”

  “Only one of you?”

  “One is enough.”

  “So that your mind, everything you’ve gained intellectually for a millennium, will never be lost?”