Crawlers

by John Shirley

  They were observed constantly, via the data transmitted to the Facility’s ground station. The hope was that they would evolve the useful aspects that could be copied and transmitted to new, “naive” nanocells.

  They evolved up there, thinking and redesigning, for a couple of years. We thought the satellite was a safe, sterile place to continue the experiment. We thought that even if it came down, it’d all burn up in the atmosphere.

  But the nanocells could think, en masse. They developed simple motility systems, and then they worked out a way to break out of their containment unit, to interface with the satellite’s computer. They put up command firewalls, deleting our ability to control them or turn them off.

  The satellite was equipped with orbital-control rockets. Pretty powerful, supposed to keep them in the right orbit. The nanocell cluster took control of those and used them to push themselves out of orbit. Calculated a descent that would prevent the satellite from burning up completely—and slowed their descent with the retros.

  The nanocells chose to come down here, and they used their baseline mobility to emerge from the damaged hull of the satellite. As far as I can tell, they interfaced with the diver, first—Adair’s father—who came down to check the crash site. They rode inside him, like a parasite in a host, till they could use his resources to make more nanocells and pass them on to his wife, then to other people. Everyone he came into contact with, if conditions were right. He converted the marine guards, before he left the site.

  Some people resist more than others. Some are sort of machine-like already, it seems. Others a bit less. But chances are, they used an overwhelming number of nanocell resources on Adair’s father. He didn’t stand a chance.

  The crawlers are an odd combination of naive and vastly intelligent. They have a group mind—they call it the All of Us—but the individual nanocell colonies, in individual people, maintain some initiative, which is always subject to revision by the All of Us.

  Near as Cruzon and I could find out, the All of Us is working up a system for a massive dissemination of nanocells out into the world at large. To work this out, the All of Us had to get all of its colony parts involved in thinking about it—so it had to create a more efficient system for communicating between all the parts, all the individual colonies, so more information could be passed around. That’s what the transmitters on the roofs are about; it’s sort of like wireless crawler DSL. Helps it transmit data faster, so it can think faster and act in a more unified way. But that system is still only partly on-line. If they were sharing their information more efficiently, none of us would’ve made it this far.

  And they’re hampered by their tendency—almost an obsession— to constantly experiment. They progress, but they progress relatively slowly—maybe because they keep trying new designs. They tried to integrate various animals into one system—and it didn’t quite work. But those models are effective enough to patrol the perimeters of town.

  Till the All of Us learns to share information efficiently, it seems each nanocolony in each crawler is limited by the mental resources of the hosts. A smarter host, a smarter crawler. The smarter ones can do the camouflage better; some seem more human, more presentable than others. They’re learning.

  Pretty soon you won’t be able to tell any of them from people. They’ll develop integration at the cellular level with very little visible effect on the mechanics of the host. You won’t see them behaving like crawlers—more like superhuman people. And they’ll be that much more dangerous.

  All I can say is—they’re far more resourceful than anyone dreamed. Maybe we underestimated the independent evolution of technology. I don’t know. All I know is—it’s out of control.

  There was silence when he’d finished. He sipped his coffee, made a face, wishing it was Irish whiskey instead of Scotch.

  Cruzon shook his head—then winced at the pain. “It’s too much. I don’t know who to blame.”

  Bert looked at Stanner with a visible mix of disgust and incredulity. “So now you guys figure it’s out of control—when it’s killing who knows how many people. You didn’t think it was out of control the first time you used human beings in experiments?” He shook his head. “What’s out of control, Stanner, is you people. Your secrets—and your facilities.”

  Waylon nodded. “You got that right, man.” He glowered at Stanner. “You fuckers killed my mother.” The boy’s voice was shaking with anger. His father nodded numbly at his side.

  Lacey sighed. “We shouldn’t be surprised. We knew the governments of the world developed biowarfare programs, chemical warfare programs—stockpiled plutonium. And plutonium is insanely dangerous. All that stuff is insane. If they’d do that, we might’ve guessed they’d pull something like this. And all of it in secret—with no real oversight.”

  Stanner looked at his daughter. She looked away from him— swallowing. He sighed. “Look, this country has a lot of enemies. Congress pushes for new military tech so we can have the edge and feel secure. Thousands of Americans were killed by terrorists—and if we don’t keep our experiments secret, they end up being used against us. The Soviets stole our hydrogen bomb technology.”

  Bert chuckled sadly. “There’s always a rationale. But if these things are done without oversight, they get out of control every time, Stanner. You people forget what your agenda is supposed to be—and in the shadows, things get dark and sick. You make up your own agenda. The United States is the great social experiment of the age. It has to survive, and it has to fight to survive if necessary—but this, it’s psychotic!”

  Stanner looked out the window. “Yeah, well, I’ve been thinking that way, too, for a while. But the habit of obedience, like the man says, dies hard. Once you’re in the Facility—even just in the know about it—it’s hard to get out. So you work up some kind of denial.” He looked at his daughter again and, seeing the look of betrayal on her face, almost cried himself. Then he looked at the bottle of Scotch. “I feel like getting drunk—but I don’t have that luxury now. And I don’t have the luxury of denial right now, either.”

  Waylon was still glaring. “Just tell me one thing—you owe me this, man—how are the aliens involved?”

  Stanner pinched the bridge of his nose and sighed.

  Puzzled, Bert asked, “Aliens, Waylon? You mean foreign interests? Red Chinese or something?”

  “No, dude, aliens! Extraterrestrials!” He turned to Stanner again. “Come on, this technology is too . . . outlandish to be from humans. This is, like, a technology that was stolen from crashed saucers, right?”

  Stanner chuckled. “I almost wish it was. Then maybe we could blame them. But no. No aliens involved. The only reason ‘it came from space’ was because we put the lab in orbit. This technology seems outlandish only because—” He shrugged. “—it’s a secret.”

  Waylon seemed disappointed. “No aliens?”

  “Sorry.”

  Then Shannon asked, “When—when are they going to—you know—make their move?”

  Stanner shook his head. “I don’t know for sure, but near as we could work out, the system’ll be on-line tomorrow sometime. When that happens they’ll be a hell of a lot more efficient. They’ll hunt us down, and everyone else. Convert the whole town. Then they’ll launch their colony-seeding system—whatever that is. I don’t know what form it’ll take. They’re working up to some kind of global insemination of nanocells.”

  Adair started rocking gently in her chair. Her face blank. Waylon reached over and put his hand over hers, on the table, and she looked at him with genuine surprise. Then she took his hand in hers.

  Lacey stroked Adair’s hair and said, “We have to get out of town and warn the rest of the country. Maybe we can use boats—they’re watching the beach.”

  Waylon said, “Stanner—that guy, Bentwaters. He was yelling about—about his wallet. Like he was trying to tell you something.”

  Stanner nodded. “Yeah, he was. He was supposed to get me some information.” He took Bentwat
ers’s wallet out of his coat pocket. He looked through it, found no family pictures, just some credit cards, an ID card he didn’t recognize—something to slide through a scanner at the NSA—some money, insurance cards . . .

  He snorted, almost laughed. A condom in a foil package was tucked in with the folding money. The condom looked like it had been in there a long time. Bentwaters hadn’t been getting much action.

  Stanner flipped the condom onto the table with the other items and then sorted through them. He looked at the insurance card, and a business card for a tax consultant, a credit card, trying to see if something was written on them. Maybe microfilm, or a command code that could be used against the nanocells—though all such had long before been erased, as far as he knew.

  Nothing. Maybe the information could be encoded in the credit cards’ magnetic strips. But there was no way to read anything.

  Stanner tossed the wallet onto the table. “Maybe he just wanted it to go to his family. I don’t know.”

  Waylon picked up the condom. He began to peel the foil packet open.

  His dad shot him a look of exasperation. “Waylon, for heaven’s sake, put that thing down.”

  “Wait. There’s something else in here. This package is just a little bit too big for condoms—and there’s something else.” Waylon pulled out a rolled-up condom, cracked with age, and then tore the foil open wider—peeled it back from a small, flat minidisk.

  “It’s like a tiny computer disk,” Lacey said.

  “It’s, like, a minidisk,” Waylon said, snorting at her ignorance. “But miniature. This one’s small.”

  Cruzon stood up, tossed his wet towel in the sink, and came to look over Waylon’s shoulder. “That could be . . . something he was trying to tell us.”

  Stanner nodded. “But I need to be able to read this thing. With luck, it’s the specs I asked for.”

  “I’ve got a Palm Pilot—which I hardly ever use,” Lacey said. “Right here in my purse. It has features I never learned. I think it interfaces with minidisks, though. But nothing that small. Waylon, you’ve got digital skills, right? And electronics? You think you could get the information off it somehow?”

  “Maybe, if I had the right kind of laser reader.”

  “I’ve got some things with me,” Harold said. “It’s my business. I think we could find something that could be adapted to read it.”

  “If I can transfer what’s on this to the Palm Pilot,” Waylon said, “and upload from there to your PC—you got a PC, Mr. Clayborn?”

  “Me? Of course, I—”

  “Dead people chased us on the road,” Shannon said suddenly. Her lip buckled. “By the freeway. They were coming like animals. Chasing us, people chasing us like wild dogs. They were chasing the car.” She was staring into some mental screen. “Then they—and we left that man in the parking lot.” She looked at Cruzon with awe. “This man shot out his eyes.”

  “If you’d seen what I’ve seen,” Cruzon said softly, “you’d have done the same.”

  Stanner moved to stand awkwardly behind Shannon’s chair. Lacey got up so he could sit next to his daughter. He sat and put his arm around her. At first she turned her face away from him and pushed his arm off. But Stanner gently persisted, and after a little while she was sobbing against his chest.

  Maybe she was beginning to forgive him for being part of this; for dragging her into it. How would she feel about it, he wondered, if she knew about the thermobaric bombs—the daisy cutters. Like the ones used in Afghanistan. A couple of those equaling the Hiroshima blast.

  What would she say if she knew the Pentagon was probably planning to set a couple off here in Quiebra, to wipe out the crawlers, like they’d done at Lab 23? The blast would burn hot; that was the weapon’s specialty. It would do more than kill the crawlers; it’d fuse the nanocells, turn all the evidence to slag. They could set off a refinery blast, blame it on that. Terrorists blowing up the refinery.

  How would Shannon feel about it, he wondered, holding her closer, if she knew that the crawlers would probably start their dissemination program well before the bomb hit?

  That it’d hit too late to stop the crawlers from spreading out into the general population.

  That all those who died in the explosion would die for nothing . . .

  December 14, early evening

  Vinnie peered out from his hiding place, leaning to try to see through the gate that hung open in the cemetery wall. He squatted between a Dumpster and the brick fence, just inside the cemetery. The Dumpster was filled with the chunks of an old concrete crypt that had been torn down; some of them overflowed onto the ground at Vinnie’s feet: Rain-stained cherub faces tumbled together in cracked cement.

  Darkness filling in all the corners, all the holes and hollows, of the cemetery. The sky purpling, the air softening.

  The shadows from the streetlights were long, stretching out and out, it seemed to Vinnie, like they were special paths, carpets unrolling for the crawling people moving from the alleys and backyards toward the cemetery.

  There were so many of the crawling people. Some of them loping along on two feet, many more on all fours; a few, not crawling now but crawling people nonetheless, driving up with their minivans and SUVs packed with others, all converging on the cemetery.

  And he knew why they were here. He’d heard them speak of it, heard them in his head talking of the great Seeding of the All of Us into the world. Until now he hadn’t realized they’d made their home base under the cemetery. No place was peaceful, now. No place, no place, no place was peaceful. No place.

  He could see a block of houses to his left, to his right the cemetery. The cemetery was torn up, damp paths trampled through it, many of the tombstones overturned to make room for new tunnel entrances dug down into the rich turf.

  Here and there coffins had been torn up and thrown aside, one of them broken, showing the blue arm of a recently dead lady.

  Most of the crawlers had come in by another gate, toward the south, but a few were headed toward this gate, and he drew back into his hiding place, wishing he’d never come here.

  “The red hand pushed me here,” Vinnie murmured, scarcely aware he was doing it, “stretching to push me into the holes in the ground, where the ground starts sponging on you and sucking your wetstuff into it, so that you get sponged into millions of holes, but Mother’s not there, Mother’s with the Starbots, and higher than that, but who can hear me, but maybe, but maybe they can hear me.”

  One of the crawlers—a grubby woman with long stringy brown hair that hung down past her crawling arms to drag on the ground— switched on her eyes, just then, perhaps having heard him. The twin laser-pointer-red beams swept right and left, seeking. Just missing him as he froze in the shadows.

  She crept on by, going deeper into the cemetery, her pistoning legs, twice as long as they should be, divided into neat segments of dull wet metal and puffy flesh, pumping with clickety sounds, leaving behind a smell of rubber and sweat and faceless decay.

  Vinnie heard a crackling sound, turned to see a red-painted wooden fence buckling outward from the backyard of a house that faced away from the cemetery. As he watched, the fence cracked some more, midway up. Four planks commenced bulging out and showing yellow wood under the breaks—and then shattered as a big crawler shoved through. He was a man who had been a football star at the school where Vinnie’d attended the special classes, now pushing impatiently through the fence to move with his protracted legs in short spurts across the street to the cemetery gate. Mechanical loping. Then taking twenty-foot leaps.

  Vinnie pulled way back in the shadow. He whimpered and called for the Starbots.

  Then he saw his mother.

  He tried not to say it out loud, but it got away from him, laughing as it went. “She’s a bad drawing that scribbled itself not my mother some ape dances and picks its head like a nose where’s the don’t-scream where’s the don’t-scream where’s the don’t-scream sign.”

  And she was draggi
ng someone along behind her, a woman with an improvised rope harness around her. Mother’s fist, half metal and half flesh, was closed tightly around a rope behind the woman’s head.

  She was dragging Mrs. Schimmel, who was a bigger woman than Mother but even older, a lady with broken red veins on her big nose and dyed black hair and dyed eyebrows. Sometimes Mrs. Schimmel helped take care of Vinnie, like when Mother went to Reno, but now she was shrieking hoarsely and flapping her flabby arms, one leg trailing a silk stocking, the other bare and bleeding, her shift torn and dirtied past recognizing the color, her mouth foaming with terror as Mother dragged her along, into the cemetery, right past Vinnie.

  And Vinnie couldn’t help but cry out, “Don’t, Mother, don’t hurt Mrs. Schimmel, Mother, go home!”

  Mother heard. She stopped, and saw him—even Mrs. Schimmel gaped at him. Mother half crawling, one hand on the ground, the other holding Mrs. Schimmel who seemed almost used to being dragged by a rope, stretched sagging out the way she was now.

  “Vinnie?” Mrs. Schimmel said in a creaky voice. “Help me help me call the police help me help me help me oh God call the police oh Vinnie. . . .” The words blurring into one bubbling stream.

  Mother stared. Opening her mouth to hiss. Her head spinning on her shoulders. Call the others!

  Then a man’s voice, one Vinnie recognized a little, was saying, “I’ll take care of him. Monitor my transmission, minor frequency seventy-eight. I’ll bring him in.”

  Vinnie saw the man speaking then, could see his head as he peered around the edge of the Dumpster. Deputy Sprague, was who, Vinnie knew him because the deputy had taken him home once when he’d gotten confused downtown, and another time he’d taken him to the emergency room when he’d had a seizure.