by Paul Dueweke
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
Offense
The morning overcast thinned, and streaks of sun escaped through the white curtain blanketing the landscape. From his window on the third floor, Elliott could look over the lawn down the hill and past the front gate to the street beyond. He tried to formulate some plan among the thoughts that crowded in for attention.
An army of professional killers was chasing him, and even if he could evade them today, what would he do tomorrow? Even if he were to somehow climb from the well that swallowed him, there was another well just as deep beyond that. There seemed to be no solutions, only optional paths toward terminating the struggles.
“But of course,” he spoke, “those are still solutions, aren’t they. Even if I’m dead, and Guin is dead, and the whole world is bullshit. That’s a solution, isn’t it? … Yes, that’ll work, and it’s the most likely outcome.”
He was relieved that he could say it. It was refreshing for him to know that even his death at the hands of some soulless robot, would raise him out of the well. He must put up this last struggle, even though uncertain what he was struggling for. But first, he had to get to Guinda to find out whether she was dead or alive before he pushed for the final solution.
He suddenly took a step back from the window, his face pale as he confronted his enemy again. There was another gray car parked on the street just outside the gate. A chill crawled up his bones. He was probably the only one in the building looking out a window on this Sunday morning. It was therefore likely that the robot had spotted this figure of a man and may have identified it as Elliott. He imagined the optical sensors with their magnification and sensitivity cranked up to maximum, staring at him, processing images, calculating kill probabilities for various scenarios, optimizing how it could use its sensors most effectively.
“That’s it!” he shouted. “I think I have a surprise for you.” All this robotic attention focused on him gave him an idea, a way to get revenge, if revenge against an object is possible, but more important, a way to give himself an edge in the upcoming confrontation.
Elliott disappeared down the hall and came back in a few minutes with a cart full of some science-fiction looking equipment from his basement laboratory. He set up the device in front of the window and pointed it toward the little car. He set the MODE switch to CONTINUOUS and the POWER control to a very low setting. Now he was prepared to engage his enemy on more favorable terms. The enemy had blundered into a world where its diminutive target had some leverage. If Elliott understood nothing else about this strange world, he understood physics. And he was about to give an introductory lesson to his surveillant.
He began whistling the Toreador Song from Carmen as he fiddled with the cables and the controls. “This morning you were defeated by an unarmed and unprepared bullfighter. Pardon me; you might be erroneously programmed to call me a victim. The outcome of the first round undoubtedly surprised both of us. Now let’s see how the bull does against a bullfighter properly armed with this little laser.”
Elliott turned the laser on and pointed it though the window toward the little car. He centered the weak and harmless beam on the car. “Now, Señor Bull,” he said in his finest Spanish accent, “I shall give you a brief lesson in optical physics. You see, when you are looking at me,” he said as he continued to make last minute adjustments, “you are focusing the little bit of light reflecting from my body onto the most sensitive part of your sensor array. Now that I have you centered in this low power laser beam, I shall just turn it off for a few seconds to let you get used to not having that extra light in your sensitive little eyes.”
Elliott stepped in front of the window and waved at the robot to make sure it was zoomed in and focused on him. “And now, Señor Bull, take one last look at me, because it will be the last thing you ever see.” He flipped the MODE switch to SINGLE PULSE and the POWER control to MAXIMUM, placed his finger on the FIRE button, closed his eyes tightly, and pushed the button.
A brilliant green flash pierced the window, rushed over the laboratory lawn in the tiniest fraction of a second, and ripped into the video system of the robot car, burning out the sensor as if it had chanced to stare into a million suns. He repeated the flash several times. “Now, my stupid bull, you don’t even know why you just went blind, do you. You’re probably telling your spider friend in the back seat that you have just experienced a video failure and that he, or is it a she, should look up here and tell you what is going on. In that event, what’s bad for the bull is bad for the spider.” Elliott flashed the laser many more times over a couple minutes to make sure that he had burned out the visible sensors of both the car and the spider. This exercise would have little effect on infrared sensors, so he would still have to contend with those.
With his destructive mission completed, the levity that surrounded the skirmish vanished. Elliott looked out the window at the little car and whispered with a hatred that surprised him, “Try and stop me now, you blind son-of-a-bitch.”
He was soon behind the wheel of one of the lab’s pickup trucks and rolling down the long driveway. A short distance from the guardhouse, he stopped where he could clearly see the car. He kept the windows rolled up so the infrared imager in the car would not be able to see inside the truck. He let the truck roll a few feet down the driveway, and to his shock, the little car responded by moving a few feet toward the driveway.
Elliott’s jaw dropped as he jerked to a stop. The only sensor it could have left to see me would be the infrared imager unless I didn’t blind the video after all or unless the spider’s eyes survived. Maybe I just blinded the center of its video arrays and it’s smart enough to now limp along with its peripheral vision. Or maybe it’s just using its IR imager and betting that I’m the one in this truck. He drove down nearly to the guardhouse and halted. The car moved a few feet closer.
It seemed to be getting into position just as the little car this morning had done before firing at him. He remembered the tree bark shattering inches from his head. He heard the clatter of eight feet behind him and the crash of the spider monster into the glass door.
Then a vision of Guinda’s body lying silently in her bed with a single puncture wound in her throat engulfed him. They’d gone so far together in such a short time. Now he must see it to the end. He stared at the obstacle in his path and knew there would probably be others ahead; but he had to conquer his fear, because fear could cause him to make a mistake, to misjudge, to miss the obvious.
His heart beat wildly as his foot made the decision to go. Now Elliott was operating on instinct. He was no longer calculating the probability that he had somehow not blinded his adversary, nor determining what the capability of his foe might be if it were operating only with its IR imager. The pickup shot down the hill under the command of Elliott’s foot.
Near the end of the driveway, Elliott saw the turret on top of the little car. Now his hands joined the team as they whipped the steering wheel viciously to the left causing the pickup to rip through a median filled with bushy geraniums, bounce over a curb, tear through a newly planted lawn, continually changing course and accelerating toward their joint victim, which sat motionless, only its turret tracking the pickup’s trajectory. A bullet shattered the windshield, but Elliott was aware of only one thing now. In that last second before the impact, the inside of the pickup was filled with the cry of the attacker, “Señor Bull, meet Elliott Townsend!”
There was the briefest of silences before the crash of the large pickup into the side of the little car. The car caved in and careened across the street, rolling over twice, and coming to rest on its side against an oak tree. The pickup ricocheted out of control, spinning around, slamming against the opposite curb blowing one tire, and coming to rest in the parking lot of a computer distributor. Its front end was severely damaged and the windshield was mostly gone, however the electric drive train was operational.
Elliott sat dazed and motionless for some
time with a collapsed airbag in his lap. He seemed unaware of the emergence of a pair of legs from the partially open rear hatch of the little car. A spider-like creature proceeded to creep out through the narrow aperture, not as a Chinese acrobat gracefully negotiates a tiny opening between a pair of teammates, but as a red-nosed clown stumbles through the window of a Volkswagen. It stood, unsure of itself, testing its environment in every direction with exploratory taps. It walked slowly in the direction of the pickup, stopping frequently to test the ground before it with an extended leg—tap, tap, tap. Then more steps and more taps. It stopped as if confused about its environment and the description of its victim. It stood there, tapping in every direction with its perfect tentacles as if trying to restore some order to this puzzle.
Elliott watched unresponsively. His mind was only slowly returning to the moment. Finally he understood the scene. He watched with pleasure as the spider, only about a hundred feet away, struggled with its blindness. A smile overtook him, but he quickly reminded himself that this spider, this thing, was incapable of suffering. Elliott wished he had the power to breath into it a soul. If only he could be God for just a minute, he would create in that spider a creature of extreme sensitivity, a creature that would be devastated by its disability, a creature that would agonize over its loss.
In lieu of such a reality, he fantasized it, the fantasy giving it meaning. He pointed the truck at the spider and accelerated toward it in uneven thumps. The spider reached out with one tentacle toward its attacker just before the truck crushed it against the remains of the little car. The one tentacle remained on the hood of the pickup and slowly curled inward until it became motionless. The fantasy was complete.
