Crawlers

by John Shirley

  He had sat there all night, with all but a night-light turned out. He was afraid the lights might attract the moths, and he didn’t want the moths to know where he was.

  In the morning, too upset even to eat his Froot Loops, he’d gone to scout around, looking for Mother in the streets and in the woods by the house. Down in the woods he had seen some kids, teenagers and younger kids, looking scared, hiding in the rusted shell of an abandoned, overgrown school bus.

  Vinnie managed to ask one of the boys if he’d seen Mother. After a few attempts at asking the question, in different ways, finally the boy understood. The boy shook his head—and then turned away to hide tears. Crying for his own mother.

  Vinnie had tried to tell them that the woods wasn’t very safe. There were little things in it that used to be animals. But one of the girls had said that they knew how to deal with those. She pointed to the cats prowling around the bus. They had seen the cats kill the little jumping metal things. And for some reason, the cats were immune to being taken over by them.

  So the kids had brought big bags of dry cat food and spread it around. Feral cats and wandering house cats came, and stayed— preferring it here to being around the things their owners had become. The cats were like a patrol against the little clockwork animals. Even the crawling marine stayed away. So far. But they had seen him in the distance, crouching in the bushes, watching.

  He’ll come, Vinnie thought, when they need parts enough, the cats won’t keep him away.

  Anyway, the girl told Vinnie, looking at him pointedly, his being there was scaring some of the smaller kids.

  He was used to being sent away. He went away to look for Mother somewhere else.

  Now, coming back to his own street, tired and hungry and walking along a few doors down from home, he saw a big blocky car pull up in front of his house. Mother and Mr. Roxmont from next door got out of the car, and Mr. Roxmont was carrying a big box of equipment into his garage and Mother was carrying what looked like a dish antenna.

  Then his scrawny white-haired little mother climbed up the side of the house, in some way he didn’t understand. Mother climbed right up onto the roof.

  He hid himself behind a parked truck as the car that had dropped them off went by, driven by a raggedy-looking man.

  When it was gone, Vinnie came a little closer to his house. Mother was setting up one of those machines he’d seen on lots of the roofs in town. She had a firm grip on a screwdriver and her hand was spinning on the wrist, all the way around. A questing strand of metal was poking from Mother’s mouth and seemed to be looking toward the work, as if supervising.

  Vinnie was very sure that this was no longer his mother. That his mother was dead.

  He began to shake and to cry softly to himself and to talk aloud to the trees and the brush as he slipped between two houses, over a fence, and down into the woods. There wasn’t anywhere else to go.

  The children at the abandoned bus didn’t want him there. He knew he could help them, too. He could hear things in his head, and he could warn them. But it was too hard to speak to them. That was always the problem. The tangling thing in him had always pushed people away, and now at the end it was going to push him completely off the edge of the world.

  Then he thought of someplace to go. He would go to the cemetery, on the other side of town. Mother used to take him to visit Father’s grave there. He always felt a friendly welcoming from Father and all his friends at the cemetery. It was quiet there. Yes. That’s where he’d go.

  He’d be safe among the dead.

  21

  December 14, afternoon

  Waylon’s father stopped his little rental car in the parking lot of the Quiebra Beach Recreation Area. He turned to Stanner, looking as if he was going to ask what to do next, and then Bentwaters started to wail.

  “It’s moving!” Bentwaters wailed, clawing at his neck, scratching himself so that bloody streaks showed. “They’ve activated it!”

  Stanner opened the car door, got out of the crowded backseat, instinctively pulled Bentwaters out onto the tarmac of the parking lot.

  Bentwaters broke free and thrashed on the ground, shouting at Stanner to help him—rolling like a man on fire.

  Stanner saw it then. The silvery living strand that had been around Bentwaters’s neck had broken its circle, and one end was nosing its way up onto his jawline. Worming its way purposefully toward Bentwaters’s mouth.

  Cruzon came to hunker down beside Bentwaters, an opened pocketknife in his hand. “Try to lie still, I’ll do what I can,” Cruzon said.

  Bentwaters, panting, eyes screwed shut, stopped rolling, lay stiffly on his back. “Hurry!” he whispered.

  “Be careful, Cruzon,” Stanner warned.

  Cruzon nodded and flicked with the knife blade at the searching tendril of metal—and it responded by snapping a segment up onto the blade, the shiny probe spiraling up toward his hand.

  “Augh!” Cruzon yelled, scrambling back. Stanner took a long, quick step back himself.

  “What happened?” Bentwaters demanded shrilly, looking around desperately.

  The knife lay next to Bentwaters, and the metallic seekers, seeming to give up on finding Cruzon, jumped like fleas back onto Bentwaters, rejoining the rest of the strand oozing onto the edge of his mouth.

  He felt them moving on him again, and he shrieked, grabbed the pocketknife from the tarmac, tried desperately to scrape them off.

  Waylon and his father and Shannon were shouting something from the car. Stanner wasn’t even sure what. He watched in sickened fascination as Bentwaters started stabbing randomly at his face around his mouth, trying to get under the thing, to tear it away with the knife, so that his blood spurted and splashed.

  “Oh, Jesus,” Cruzon muttered, drawing his pistol.

  “Don’t let it do it to me,” Bentwaters was shouting. “Don’t let it get in! Stop it from getting in!”

  Then there was a flurry of motion and the metallic strand plunged past Bentwaters’s lips, spiraled in to his screaming mouth, and vanished down his throat.

  “Oh, my God, no,” Bentwaters said softly, gurgling as blood filled his mouth. Still automatically carving at himself.

  Stanner reached down and grabbed the wrist of Bentwaters’s knife hand. “Stop it, Bentwaters, dammit, it’s gone down. It’s too late!”

  Bentwaters tore his hand free and poised the blade over his chest, his eyes shining with fear, panting. He stared at the knife. His knuckles went white.

  “Stanner, I can’t—I can’t do it myself. Shove the knife in for me. Or use a gun. But for God’s sake, kill me! Don’t let it—I don’t want to feel them take over. Please! Please kill me!”

  Cruzon stepped back and aimed the gun at Bentwaters’s head.

  The others, in the car, had fallen silent now—though Stanner could hear his daughter sobbing.

  Bentwaters shuddered. “I can feel them. They’re going into my brain, Stanner! They’re digging into my brain!”

  Cruzon cocked the gun.

  Then Bentwaters said, “Stanner, get my eyes or they’ll see where you are, from my eyes! And my wallet, in my wallet there’s a— Stanner!” This last a shriek. Bentwaters was staring into an abyss. “They’re going into—my—oh, no, don’t let them eat that, don’t let them—”

  Cruzon bent over, aimed, and fired, twice. Bentwaters’s eyes vanished, replaced with bursting red holes. Bentwaters shivered—but his body began to move, the limbs rippling.

  Stanner said hoarsely, “Everyone, out of the car. Where we’re going is nearby. We need to get rid of this car anyway. Leave the keys.”

  They got out, and Cruzon took them down the path to the beach, a little ways, as Stanner got Bentwaters’s wallet, snatching it out as quickly as he could. Afraid to be in direct physical contact with the body.

  Then he got into the rental car and drove it repeatedly onto Bentwaters’s body, back and forth, over and over, until it stopped moving completely.

  December 14, a
fternoon

  Bert didn’t want to let them in until he could think of some way to test them.

  It was hard to make a decision. He was emotionally exhausted and he hadn’t slept. He stared through the peephole in the door, saw them crowded into a fish-eye circle: Lacey’s niece Adair, a boy he recognized from the high school, three men he didn’t know, and Commander Cruzon from the Quiebra PD.

  Then he saw the Filipino loading his pistol, and that didn’t make him want to let them in, either.

  Lacey looked through the window. “It’s Adair!”

  “Lacey, we don’t know if it’s still Adair.”

  But she pushed him roughly aside and unlocked the door. Adair came in, first. She stopped just in front of Lacey and stared silently at her.

  Then she put her hands on Lacey’s face, feeling it the way blind people do. Lacey let her do it.

  The girl pushed her fingers into Lacey’s mouth, opening it— peering in. She put her cheek against Lacey’s chest and seemed to listen.

  Then, Adair threw her arms around Lacey. Sobbing.

  December 14, late afternoon

  Everyone was staring at Stanner, waiting as he sipped his coffee.

  “You tell them, Stanner,” Cruzon said. “You tell them what you told me. We got to be on the same page, because we might have to split up. Be lucky if one of them didn’t see us come here and report it.”

  They were all seated around the kitchen table, waiting. Daylight slanted through the window over the sink; dust motes pirouetted in the sunbeams. They were in Bert’s beachside place, more than a quarter mile from where Bentwaters had died.

  Stanner wasn’t at all sure they were safe here. But then, maybe they’d gotten lucky. Maybe the crawlers had been distracted, didn’t know where they’d gone to ground. If they hadn’t come for them by now, maybe so.

  But sooner or later they’d find them.

  Adair hadn’t said anything, or even showed she was much aware of her surroundings, since pointing Waylon’s father here. Now she just sat across from Stanner, close beside Lacey. Lacey with her arms around her. That scrawny cat in Adair’s lap. Waylon sat beside her, close to his dad, who was drinking some of the bottle of Johnnie Walker Red; it had sat unopened on Bert’s shelf for a year.

  Cruzon was ruefully soothing his swollen temple with ice wrapped in a hand towel. He sank down on the kitchen floor, sat crosslegged with his back to a cabinet, pressing the ice to his head.

  Stanner glanced at his daughter, found Shannon looking at him balefully. Drinking Scotch herself. Looking as if she’d like to throw the glass at him.

  Stanner put off telling them, because that would involve admitting to his complicity. “What about your family, Cruzon?”

  Cruzon shrugged. “They’re okay, as far as I know. I showed my brother what was left of Breakenridge. He saw some other things. He knows. He’s got them all holed up in the basement of his house.” He glanced toward the window, as if wondering if they were really safe.

  “You’re stalling, Dad,” Shannon said.

  Stanner smiled wearily. “You’re just like your mom. I never could fool her, either. Okay.” He took a deep breath and began. “It started in the seventies. There was the idea of creating weaponry that was smart enough to do the hunting and targeting, as well as the killing. Something like smart bombs. Back then it was ordinary chip computing. But a few years ago the Facility achieved a breakthrough in nanotechnology.

  “Can I have some of that Scotch? Just pour it right in the coffee.”

  He took a long pull at his drink and began again.

  It’s funny how technology takes on a life of its own, even before it gets to the artificial intelligence stage (Stanner said). It’s like we surrender some of our own life to our technology, after a certain point in its growth. Seems we surrendered too much. Aspirin’s a good thing—but swallow a few handfuls of aspirin and you might die from it. We need water, but too much and you’ll die. So when is it too much technology?

  Shannon’s looking at me like she thinks I’m stalling again. Okay, here goes.

  It was a Pentagon research lab that had the nanotech breakthrough. They were pretty stingy with it. They didn’t want to share it with industry because it could leak out to the country’s enemies, and we’d lose our advantage.

  The advantage, though, was harder to see than anyone figured it’d be. Sure, with nanotechnology you can make microscopic components. In fact, you can make machines the size of individual molecules. Theoretically that means you can pack almost infinite computing into an inconceivably small space. You could make weapons as smart as you wanted them to be.

  But the problem was configuring the nanotech machines. To do it efficiently, make lots of them fast, you needed a nanotech machine that could make a nanotech machine—something on that level. You could use scanning-tunneling electron microscopy, lots of techniques, but it took so much time. Too much. But then a team at the Facility—the Pentagon’s most secret research program—these geniuses created a simple nanotech cell that originally had only one job, to make other nanotech cells. Each cell made the next one with more detail, greater elaboration. It was like the entire evolution of technology, one aspect leading to another, and in a way it was like biological evolution, too—but superfast and in miniature.

  The nanocells themselves—well, they’re robotic cells, computer-integrated cells. One of them can carry a certain amount of information in its quantum-computing format. A group of them share information and innovate based on the sum total of shared data.

  Okay, so the only way to create nanocells with enough detailed elaboration was to establish a pattern of self-replication and relative independence. This tendency to seek out redesign was built into these automata on a cellular level. They were able to set up hypotheses and carry out experiments. Using enzymes and other molecular tools, they can change their cell shape for greater efficiency.

  But they weren’t supposed to be totally independent. Instructions would be transmitted to a group of these microscopic automata. That’s where Kyu Kim entered the picture. A Korean researcher at the Facility. It was his idea, see, that since this was happening on a level of sheer smallness that was equivalent to the microbiological, the nanocells could be made to take advantage of biological matter at the cellular level. And since there’s lots of biology around to utilize, it could accelerate their development hugely. He transmitted that direction to them, and they carried it out, with something almost like enthusiasm.

  Initially he gave them building resources and the nervous system components of a dog, a cat, and material from primates. They were able to alter their configurations so they could integrate with some of the animal nervous systems. Cats were always a problem; they seem almost to possess an independence gene, or some component of blood chemistry that makes them resist nanocells. Primates— including people—are more various than most of us realize. We have lots in common, but also a great deal of genetic variation and body chemistry variation, more to do with family bloodlines than races.

  It appears some people are prone to interfacing with these nanocells, without much trouble. Others aren’t. Some researchers thought it had to do with genetic predisposition—but Dr. Kim believed it was all about states of mind, and the distinctive body chemistry that resulted from those states. Young primates were less likely to integrate; they had a chemistry, almost an electricity in their nervous system, that had a quality of heightened awareness or “awake-ness” about it. Older primates had less of this quality and usually were more easily absorbed into the system.

  Then experiments were done on human volunteers, soldiers dying of cancer in V.A. hospitals, who thought this biological-technological system integration—what amounted to man fused with machine— might give them another chance at life. But once the integration took place, the nanocells used the body’s resources to make more and more of themselves, and took over completely. Absorbed physical matter provided raw materials and energy. They destroyed the old pers
onality—taking some information from it first—and they redesigned the body based on theoretical hypotheses for improvement. The volunteers became ramshackle cyborgs, with the automata altering normal human cells to control bleeding and immune system responses where they built in extensions and enhancements. They created a “systems enhancement factory” within the body to add new mechanical and electronic parts. Turning people into—the slang terms were crawlers or breakouts.

  Pretty soon the whole system died—I mean, the experimental subject died. Or went berserk and . . . well, they had to be put down. The Facility decided to limit the integration to masses of cells taken from lower apes, slices of brain tissue, that kind of thing.

  But the various discrete nanocell experiments had been communicating with one another, over a distance. Sharing ideas, gradually accumulating something that added up to consciousness and the will to act independently. The nanocells apparently decided they wanted to run their own growth experiments. They waited—near as we can figure out, that’s the case—they waited for their chance. And they developed a kind of launch system, to transfer nanocells to a human host who got close enough.

  Kyu Kim wasn’t cautious enough. He opened the development box without protection and they—essentially they jumped him. They took him over. They used him to attack some of his assistants, transferred more nanocell substance to others in Lab 23. They established communication, one crawler to the next. They were a lot more sophisticated, independent, and savvy than we’d realized. They accessed information from the brains of the old experimental subjects, for starts. Some bodies they redesigned from the inside; others they took apart and used in other ways.

  Lab 23 had to be destroyed. Only a handful of nanocells was saved. But those cells retained everything the destroyed cells had learned, as quantum-computing format files.

  The Facility decided that the experiment could continue but only somewhere safer—somewhere they couldn’t come into contact with human beings at all. So they set up a remote-controlled nanocell lab inside an old spy satellite, pushed it back into orbit from a shuttle. The nanocells were allowed to use onboard resources to reproduce there and to reorganize. They couldn’t go anywhere; they were safely contained. The vacuum of space would destroy them; they need air or blood pressure in order to maintain their configurations.