Aye, Robot (A Rex Nihilo Adventure) (Starship Grifters Book 2)

by Robert Kroese

  Now she just needed a way of getting the lenses onto the cameras without being seen. Her whole plan hinged on convincing insects to do this part of the job for her—and she had spent a great deal of effort over the past several days trying not to think about how insane this was. She had no idea if the metaswarm even existed, or if she could communicate with it, or if it would agree to cooperate with their plan—or, for that matter, if the flies were even capable of carrying the lenses. The whole plan was so crazy that she found the idea that the metaswarm had planted it in her mind increasingly attractive. Or was that just further evidence of her insanity? Maybe if she got caught they’d send her to the loony bin instead of prison. That might be nice.

  When she’d tested the lenses to her satisfaction, she took a robocar back to Harmigen’s hovel.

  Chapter Six

  “Pepper!” Dr. Harmigen cried as she walked up the sidewalk. “You’re just in time! I’ve finished calibrating the transmitter. We’re ready to summon the metaswarm!” Dr. Harmigen was standing outside of his house, next to a device that looked like a large antenna set on cinder blocks.

  “All right,” Pepper said. “Let’s do this.”

  Dr. Harmigen took a step toward the transmitter and then hesitated. “Pepper,” he said. “I want you to know that whatever happens, I don’t regret this. Thank you for retrieving my equipment and giving me the chance to redeem myself.”

  “Of course,” Pepper replied. “I’m glad you… wait a minute, what do you mean, ‘whatever happens’? What are you worried about happening?”

  “Well,” said Dr. Harmigen, “you have to realize what you are asking. You are talking about bringing into existence an alien intelligence whose motivations we cannot possibly understand. So you can pull off a jewelry heist.”

  “Well, it sounds a little foolhardy when you put it like that,” Pepper said, rubbing her jaw. “But in my defense, I’m about fifty-eight percent certain the heist was the metaswarm’s idea.”

  “Hmm,” said Dr. Harmigen. “Possibly. But even if the metaswarm really was attempting to communicate with you, it’s possible you’ve misunderstood what it was after. Or, worse, what if the metaswarm is just using you? What if it’s seized on your greed to manipulate us into bringing it into being for its own nefarious purposes?”

  “Like what?” Pepper asked.

  “I don’t know!” Harmigen cried. “That’s the point. Imagine a swarm of millions of insects, directed by a powerful intelligence. What if the metaswarm isn’t content with a few square kilometers? What if they decide to take back Yanthus Prime for themselves?”

  “Could they do that?”

  “Probably,” Harmigen. “I just need you to understand what we’re doing. We’ll be letting the genie out of the bottle.”

  Pepper thought for a moment. “If the flies could kick us off the planet, why haven’t they done it yet?”

  “Because at this point the metaswarm’s hold over the flies is too tenuous. The flies’ behavior is being directed at the swarm level, and the swarms are in competition with each other for territory. Once I activate the transmitter, I’ll be sending out a signal that summons the flies individually, overriding the swarm commands. Once the flies are all assembled in one place, the metaswarm will theoretically manifest itself. But once that happens, I’ll lose control over the individual flies. The metaswarm will take over. There’s no telling what it will do. If it were me, I’d sabotage the water treatment plant and turn the whole city into a swamp.”

  “That’s… a little disturbing,” Pepper said.

  “Well, yes,” Harmigen replied. “Oh, and there’s one other thing.”

  “Fantastic,” Pepper said, without enthusiasm.

  “There’s a reason the swarms are so dispersed right now. Their habitat has been reduced to a few marshy areas scattered all over the city. If I summon all the flies here, most of them will never get back home. Something like half of the fly population will die off.”

  “Meaning what?”

  “Meaning that if the metaswarm doesn’t like your plan, it’s going to be pissed. And it might lash out by destroying the city.”

  Pepper stared at Dr. Harmigen. “You didn’t feel like you should maybe warn me about this earlier?”

  “Would it have made a difference?”

  “I might not have spent my last credit buying equipment for this job if I had known there was a possibility it was going to end with civilization being wiped out on this planet.”

  Dr. Harmigen chuckled. “Of course you would have, Pepper. There was never any question about it. I saw it in your eyes the day you first showed up here. You were going through with this job no matter what.”

  “Maybe,” Pepper said. “I still would have liked to have the choice.”

  “The choice!” Dr. Harmigen cried. “Did the flies have a choice when developers took over their land? No! But you didn’t cry then, did you? Well, I say it’s time we give them a choice. If they decide to destroy us, maybe it’s because we deserve it!”

  Pepper regarded Dr. Harmigen anxiously. She was starting to think maybe she should have looked into his motivations a little more deeply. And maybe considered the implications of bringing a new form of consciousness into existence. She had been so busy trying to convince herself she wasn’t crazy that she never fully grasped just how crazy her plan was.

  On the other hand, part of her agreed with Dr. Harmigen. The swarms never had a chance. They thought they’d made peace with the settlers only to have their land stolen by developers who filled in their beloved swamp to build a spaceport and crummy bars like the Wobbly Monolith. Shouldn’t the insects get a say in their fate? Sure, there was a chance they’d wipe out civilization. But if Harmigen was right, there was also a pretty good chance civilization would wipe them out. Didn’t they at least deserve a chance? Also, she really, really didn’t want to work for the mob for the rest of her life.

  “Screw it,” Pepper said. “Let’s do this.”

  Nothing happened for some time. Pepper and Dr. Harmigen sat in the front yard on crude lawn chairs, watching the transmitter, nursing bottles of Peg-Leg Monkey.

  “Are you sure that thing is on?” Pepper asked after half an hour.

  “It’s on,” Dr. Harmigen said. “It emits a signal at a frequency above the range of human hearing. Lucky you.”

  “You mean you can hear it?”

  “It’s like a dentist drill,” Harmigen said. He downed the last of his beer and tossed the bottle in a high arc across the lawn. Ethel ran excitedly after it, skidding to a halt on the muddy ground. She grabbed the neck of the bottle in her mouth and ran back to Dr. Harmigen. Ethel had prehensile forearms like Dr. Harmigen, but she didn’t seem to be aware of it. “She loves to play fetch,” said Dr. Harmigen. He took the bottle from his wife and scratched her behind the ears. She mooed contentedly. “That’s my good girl,” Dr. Harmigen cooed.

  Pepper shuddered and forced herself to look away. She couldn’t be sure, but it seemed like the cloud of insects buzzing around the transmitter was growing denser.

  “It’s happening,” said Dr. Harmigen, looking around excitedly. “The metaswarm is forming.”

  Pepper nodded. Over the next several hours, the cloud grew ever thicker. There had to be several million bugs buzzing around the area. They didn’t buzz around Pepper’s ears the way those in her bar tended to do, though. She took it as a good sign that they weren’t actively trying to irritate her.

  “The only question now is whether there are enough of them to manifest consciousness,” Dr. Harmigen said. “Most of them should be here by now. I’m not sure this is enough.”

  “Enough for what?” asked a voice next to Dr. Harmigen. He and Pepper both jumped out of their chairs.

  “What the hell?” Pepper exclaimed, having spit out her beer. “Did she just talk?” They were both staring, aghast, at Dr. Harmigen’s wife.

  “Ethel?” Harmigen asked.

  “I have no name,” said Ethel.


  “Who… are you?” Pepper asked.

  Ethel frowned at her. “What kind of question is that? I just told you I don’t have a name.”

  “Are you the metaswarm?” Dr. Harmigen asked.

  “That is one way to think of me,” Ethel said. “I am a conscious entity composed of millions of flies, and also this one pear-shaped biped.”

  “What shall we call you?” Pepper asked.

  “Ethel is fine.”

  “But you’re not Ethel,” Harmigen said.

  Ethel shrugged. “I am Ethel, and I am several million flies. If it helps, think of Ethel as the spokesperson of the group.”

  “Why have you taken over Ethel?” Pepper asked.

  “Don’t be dramatic,” Ethel said. “I haven’t ‘taken over’ Ethel. Ethel is part of our collective. She has as much say as any of the rest of us. Now let’s stop wasting time. You’ve summoned us away from our habitat, and most of us don’t have much time. I’m going to be gradually getting stupider over the next several hours, until I lose consciousness completely and the swarm disbands. I understand you need our help with some sort of jewelry heist.”

  “Well, yes,” said Pepper. “Actually, I sort of thought the heist was your idea.”

  “My idea?” Ethel said. “How would I… oh, hang on. Yeah, the napkin thing. Okay, I see where you’re going with this. Come to think of it, maybe it was my idea. I’m sorry, up until a couple of minutes ago I existed only in a semi-conscious state. I only have a vague notion what I was doing before I showed up here.”

  “But you know all about our plans for the heist?”

  “I have been absorbing information from all my constituent members for some time. I am just now piecing most of it together. My understanding is that you are planning to steal the Emerald of Sobalt Prime, and that you intend to sell this gemstone and offer us a plot of land in exchange for our cooperation. Is that correct?”

  Pepper nodded.

  “Sounds good. I assume we’re talking a three-way split of the proceeds?”

  “Uh…” Pepper said. “We hadn’t actually discussed cutting you in. Dr. Harmigen and I were going to go fifty-fifty, but it was understood he’d be using his share to create a new habitat for you.”

  “Well, we’re three intelligent entities, aren’t we?” Ethel asked. “It would make sense to divide it three ways.”

  “Except that I’m doing most of the work,” said Pepper. “This whole thing was my idea.”

  “I thought you said it was Ethel’s idea,” Dr. Harmigen said.

  “Okay, look,” said Pepper. “I’m sympathetic to your plight. I just need to pay off some debts and get off this planet. But keep in mind we need to unload the stone in a hurry. We’re only going to get a fraction of its actual value.”

  “Even if we only get twenty million credits,” Dr. Harmigen said, “that gives the swarm—”

  “Ethel, please,” said Ethel.

  Dr. Harmigen nodded. He seemed to have adjusted with aplomb to his wife’s new role as the metaswarm’s representative. “That gives Ethel almost six point seven million credits. And I sure don’t need that much. I’d be willing to give her three million of mine. Ten million credits will buy a lot of swampland.”

  “Works for me,” said Pepper.

  “Okay,” said Ethel. “Then we just need to have a contract drawn up and notarized.”

  Pepper and Dr. Harmigen glanced uncertainly at each other.

  “Although now that I think about it,” Ethel said, “we’re engaged in a highly illegal enterprise and I don’t exist as a legal entity, so maybe that’s not a good idea. Handshake?”

  The three co-conspirators shook hands.

  “All right,” Ethel said, rubbing her tiny hands together. “What exactly do you need me to do?”

  Chapter Seven

  Pepper stood stock still, waiting for the last of the museum’s patrons to leave. She wore a ruffled dress and a flowery bonnet, the costume of a wealthy lady during the Yanthus Prime Civil War. The dress was reversible; the other side looked like the drab sort of dress women currently wore on Yanthus Prime. Pepper had ducked into a corner of the museum to get into costume and then inserted herself into a crowd of animatronic aristocrats listening to a speech by Yanthus Prime’s thirteenth president, Tolliver Oilskin. There were no cameras in this part of the museum—there wasn’t anything of note to steal in the Civil War wing—so it was no trouble to creep into the display without being seen.

  The museum closed just after dark, but she waited for the guard to make his first rounds before leaving the display. Then she removed the ridiculous dress, under which she wore a holographic camouflage bodysuit. The suit didn’t quite make her invisible, and it wouldn’t fool motion detectors or heat sensors, but it would suffice to make her difficult to see that with a little luck—and a compelling diversion—she could get past the cameras between her and the main exhibit room without being spotted. She tapped her comm, sending a signal that would trigger an incendiary device in a trashcan in the museum’s southern wing. She’d made a visit to the museum earlier that day to place it, as well as a few other surprises. If things went as expected, one of the guards would investigate the smoke, find a fire smoldering in the trash can, and put it out with the fire extinguisher across the hall. Meanwhile, Pepper would cross the hall between the Civil War exhibit and the gem exhibit.

  Pepper waited until the distant fire alarm sounded, and then got on her hands and knees. She’d tried this trick at the bar, using the camera and similar low lighting, and had found that if she crawled very slowly, keeping her movements rhythmic and uniform, she was nearly invisible. This trick wouldn’t work in the exhibit room where the Emerald was housed, though. Even if it weren’t for the motion detectors and infrared sensors, the room was too well lit and there were too many cameras. But for an empty hallway that presumably wasn’t being watched very closely, it worked just fine. Pepper made it across without any other alarms sounding.

  The fire alarm stopped, which was another good sign: the fire had evidently been put out, and there was no indication the fire department had been called. She had a contingency plan in case the fire department showed up, but it would have complicated things. So far, so good.

  Pepper got to her feet, ensconcing herself in a small dead zone between two cameras. She withdrew a metal case and a small plastic box from her pocket. She opened the box, revealing a toggle switch with a small light next to it. Pepper flipped the switch and the light went on.

  The little box was an EMP canary, which Pepper had built herself the previous night. It was simply an LED light connected to a battery, with a picocircuit fuse in between. When the museum’s EMP fired, it would fry any picocircuitry in the area, including the fuse, and the light would go out. That would be Pepper’s signal that she had ten minutes until the next EMP surge. The EMP would short out the picocircuitry in the lenses she’d had made to fit over the cameras, so she needed to keep them shielded in their case until the next surge.

  The light would also function as a signal to the metaswarm, which had hidden dozens of its members throughout the museum. That was the plan, anyway. So far Pepper hadn’t seen any of the little flies, but she had to trust they were nearby. She had tested the EMP canary the previous night and Ethel had claimed that the flies could actually hear the subsonic frequencies emitted by the device when the circuit was closed. When Pepper flipped the switch, a fly hidden somewhere nearby would transmit the message to another fly farther away, and that one would transmit it to another fly, etc., until the message was received by the metaswarm itself, like a sensation being transmitted through nerves to a central brain. The metaswarm would then send a group of flies to assist Pepper with the heist.

  The light went out less than two minutes after Pepper turned it on. Looking around, she saw no sign of the insects. Damn it, she thought. She had considered using a separate signal to summon the flies before the canary was triggered, but Ethel had convinced her it would be a needless compli
cation. So now here she sat, with the clock ticking, and the damned bugs were nowhere to be seen. It occurred to her that maybe something in the museum was emitting noise at the same frequency as the canary, masking the sound. If that were the case, the flies were waiting for a signal they would never hear. And Pepper couldn’t reactivate the device even if she wanted to; it was a one-shot deal. She had no other way of communicating with the swarm; they had deemed it too dangerous to attempt contact by radio. If the flies didn’t show up soon, she was going to have to abort. But just as she was plotting her escape, one of the flies buzzed past her face, landing on the wall next to her.

  “It’s about time,” Pepper said. “Where are the rest of you?” She knew the fly couldn’t understand her, but her words would be transmitted along the line back to the metaswarm.

  After a few seconds, another fly landed on the wall. And then another, and another. Soon there were hundreds of them on the wall. Pepper realized they were arranging themselves in a deliberate configuration. They had formed letters. Pepper read aloud:

  Sorry! Traffic. :)

  “Hilarious,” said Pepper. “We’re wasting time. Let’s get to work.” She opened the metal case, revealing the ten custom lenses. “You know what to do,” she said. I hope.

  Several of the flies left the wall and flew toward the case. One fly landed on each lens. These flies were some of the larger specimens Pepper had seen; they had been hand-picked by the metaswarm for this job. One by one, the flies took off, each of them carrying one of the lenses. She watched as they slowly buzzed toward the exhibit room next door, where the Emerald of Sobalt Prime was housed. The lenses were so heavy that several of them seemed to be having trouble maintaining altitude.

  “What the hell is wrong with them?” Pepper asked. “They didn’t look like this last night.”

  She didn’t really expect an answer, but she saw that the flies on the wall were rearranging themselves again.