Bug Park

by James P. Hogan

  The space they descended to at the back of the house was a mix of workshop and laboratory, with benches, tool racks, keyboards, screens, lumps of electronics draped in tangles of colored wire—the kind of thing that Michelle had come to expect by now. The windows along the outer wall looked out over the grassy slope leading down through trees to the inlet, where a boat dock was partly visible beyond a fringe of rocky mounds and bushes hiding the shoreline.

  A large table supported an artificial geography of wooden plateaus, steps, and obstacles, which Michelle was now able to recognize as the miniature world of a mec testing ground, complete with several inhabitants. Some of them were bipedal, others more insect-like. In general, these were not as tiny as the ones she had seen earlier at Neurodyne. She remembered Eric saying that the models the boys worked with were older prototypes and test batches—precursors to the state-of-the-art models in the company's laboratories.

  She also identified DNC headsets and collars—distinctly lab-lashup variety in appearance, with connectors bolted to panels of hand-cut aluminum, and bundles of wires secured with duct tape. Three chairs decked with more gadgetry and wiring served as couplers. One was a regular lounge recliner with the footrest removed and foam rubber pads where most of the upholstery was supposed to be; the other two looked familiar in pattern, their associated electronics mounted on hinge-down trays at the back. Michelle moved some cables aside to read a half-hidden label attached to one of the seat backs: use seat cushion for flotation device. She frowned and looked at Kevin questioningly.

  He shrugged and made an apologetic gesture, as if some justification were called for. "We got them from Boeing's clearance basement. Ten dollars each."

  "You can't beat that," Michelle said.

  Eric grinned at her and patted the headrest of one of the two airliner seats. "Okay, Michelle, you know the drill by now. Get yourself comfortable, and I'll connect you up."

  "I'm going for another ride?"

  "Sure. That's what you're here for."

  Michelle turned and lowered herself down into the seat. It was not as restful as the specially made model that she'd tried earlier, but she had endured hours in these on enough occasions. Kevin and Taki occupied the other two, Kevin taking the modified lounge chair. They seemed to have the connections and adjustments preset, slipping into the equipment without needing assistance.

  Unlike the headsets that she had seen at Neurodyne, this one included plug earphones and a stem microphone. "We added sound to the mecs that the boys use here," Eric explained. "It's not something that we need in the labs, as you saw. But for the kind of thing they do, it adds a whole new dimension."

  There was another visual test pattern and checks of field motion correlating with imagined head movements. "Does everything look good?" Eric asked. His voice didn't sound close by her as before, coming through the phones this time. "Can you hear me okay?"

  "Everything feels just fine. . . ."

  She had expected to find herself somewhere in the miniature landscape of straight lines and flat surfaces that she had seen on the tabletop. Instead, she was in some kind of large room, dark inside but with light coming through the wall facing her, made of what looked like frosted glass. A metal band that had been clamped around her waist as a restraint sprung open on release of a catch, freeing her. There was a warm, pleasant sensation in the middle of her back, roughly where her shoulder blades would be if she'd had any. She turned to investigate. After her familiarization that afternoon, adapting to being in a mechanical body again came more easily this time.

  She had been standing in one of four vertical recesses in a block of whitish, waxy-looking material that formed most of the near wall and extended to the ceiling. Several rounded golden pads projected a few inches on the inside of the recess, a little below shoulder height. Another mec, with a squat, angular body and froglike, football-shaped head carrying eyes at the extremities, was inactive in an adjacent recess, secured as she had been by a metal band around the waist. It was painted yellow with black stripes, like a tiger. The remaining two recesses were empty. Oddly curving pipes snaked through the shadows to the sides of the room, down to the corners, and overhead.

  The transition had been so sudden that it took Michelle a few seconds to accommodate to her situation. The "room" had to be a box of some kind—a receptacle that mecs were stored in. The pipes were wiring, she decided. And the gold pads looked like electrical contacts.

  "Can anybody hear me?" she said.

  "We're reading," Eric's voice answered in the phones.

  "What's this funny feeling in my back? It's not unpleasant at all. Just . . . 'funny.' "

  An image appeared superposed on her visual field of a dial-type gauge colored red at the left-hand end, amber farther toward the center, and the remainder of the arc green. A white pointer sat hard to the right, in the green. The caption below read Charge. Along with it were several other gauges, a thermometer symbol with its column again showing green, and more figures whose meaning was not obvious. "You'll start feeling cold in your back as you run down," Eric's voice said. "Neat, eh? We wanted to link it to the hunger response, which would have been even neater—but it never worked properly. You can activate the display yourself at any time." The superposed data vanished. "Wag your finger sharply to cue the system, then point it to select status from the menu."

  Michelle was unsure what he meant. She extended a finger—one of three, formed from jointed, square-section metal segments actuated by rods protruding from grooves—and waved it vaguely. "Like this?"

  "No, sharply. As if you're ticking someone off."

  She tried again, this time as if she were trying to shake something sticky off the end. A bar of boxes containing words, like the pull-down menus on a computer screen, superposed itself on her view this time, listing status, keyboard, map, and other options, along with associated icons. She pointed to highlight status, and then stabbed her finger in the standard manner used with VR systems. The display that she had seen previously returned. She wagged her finger once again, and it vanished.

  "You've got the idea," Eric's voice said. "The other functions can wait till later. In the meantime, why not try a walk outside?"

  "Which way's out?"

  "Turn around."

  Michelle looked down and at her arms to get a better feel of herself, and was curious to see that she was colored red and orange. She turned back to face the frosted glass wall and saw that it was opening outward and upward on an overhead hinge, like a huge garage door. Outside was a mountainside, green in the sunshine, and beyond it an ocean . . . except that it couldn't be, of course. She thought rapidly over what she could remember seeing, trying to make sense of the situation. "Where am I?" she asked. "Somewhere down by the shore?"

  "Go and find out," Eric suggested. Michelle guessed that, as before with the lab setup, he had a monitor that reproduced what she was seeing.

  She walked out into the sunlight. Although the mec was several times larger than the one she had used in the lab, the power for its weight was still enormously greater than what a lifetime of everyday experiences had conditioned her to think of as normal. It gave her a feeling of moving without weighing anything at all, of limitless energy and unbounded strength. Too much so. In her exuberance she forgot that coordination required a different "feel," and pitched full-length onto the white rocky ground outside. The jolt hit her solidly in the hands and knees. Strangely, she felt herself winded and gasping—whether through some reflex association or another of Eric's ingenious neural feedback connections she was unable to tell. Fortunately, he had not taken realism so far as to stimulate pain receptors. She turned over awkwardly, making metallic rasping noises on the rock, and sat up. There were no Great Tweezers In The Sky to put her back on her feet this time—everybody was still in the house, while the mec that she was occupying was God-knew-where, possibly hundreds of yards away. With her weight effectively nothing, getting up was more a matter of balance control than effort. What made it dif
ficult was the light-headed and mildly nauseating feeling that came with having to rely on vision, without help from the normal internal balance sense. It was like having to consciously focus on coordinating movement after having too much alcohol, which probably accounted for the giddiness. But with some experimenting she succeeded in tottering upright again, and looked around.

  The white rock looked artificial—a coarse, flat expanse stretching away on either side and ending abruptly in a straight-line edge a short distance ahead of her, like an elevated beach. Behind her and overhead, the "door" was a side of what she could see now to be a gray plastic box standing as high as a house, with molded ribs like cathedral buttresses and shiny metal screw-heads the size of garbage-can lids. Behind the box, the ground rose steeply, forming what looked like the side of a mountain: broken slopes of earth and rock interrupted by sheer cliffs, with plants the size of trees, though formed in the wrong shapes and with enormous leaves resembling pointed green sails. Beside the plastic box was a sequoia trunk without branches: a huge wooden cylinder transformed by height into a foreshortened tower rising far above her. She almost lost her balance again craning her head back to follow it, and saw a red-and-yellow pennant at its top, bright against the sky.

  The "beach" that she was standing on, she realized, was concrete—a block, or a piece of block, forming a ledge in front of the gray plastic box. The box had to be a kind of movable base, at the moment placed somewhere down by the water's edge, that Kevin and Taki operated their battlemecs from—it would protect the mecs from the weather and save having to traipse down from the house every time the boys wanted to use them. Since the box was facing the water, Michelle guessed it to be on the mounds at the bottom of the slope that she had seen from the window, facing away from the house. She turned back and moved to the edge of the concrete block to view the ground below.

  No doubt the effect was a result of the graphics, but the colors had a radiant quality that made the scene even more surreal. She was looking across a valley full of monstrous plants with impossibly exaggerated verticality, rising on the far side into a tortured, alien landscape of quarried rock bluffs and boulder-strewn ravines. Beyond was a green coastal plain, fringed by a distant sandy shoreline. Another mast rose from the far side of the mountain opposite, flying a pennant of white and blue.

  At an intellectual level, Michelle knew that the mountains were just mounds, and the shore a matter of mere yards away from her; but the knowledge was overwhelmed by the torrent of raw, irresistible sensory perceptions flooding her awareness. The chasm of crags and gorges between the mound that she was on and another to her left had the impact of flying through a Rocky Mountain vista in a small plane. Trying to take in the gigantic tangles below was like gazing over the canopy of an entire Amazon of mutants. Stems of grass sprouting from below brushed the ledge that she was standing on, tubular, scaly trunks looking like leaning palm trees. She turned slowly to look in the other direction. And that was when she saw a real tree.

  It was growing near the ledge from behind some heaped rocks below that looked like a part of Yosemite—probably no more than a foot or two away, but it seemed a city block. Its girth was as great as a football stadium's, an immense, vertical panoramic assault on the senses, of rust-red ridges and jagged black canyons flowing upward in a column that defied comprehension; soaring away, shrinking, paralyzing the mind—an Interstate highway stood on end; then it exploded out into a green galaxy filling half the sky. Michelle stood, unable to thread one thought after another into a coherent string. Miles above, a bird detached itself from a branch, emitted a cry that reached her from a different universe, and disappeared beyond the periphery of her vision.

  "Impressed?" Eric said in her phones. "Getting the idea now, eh?"

  In a way, she was sorry that he chose that moment to speak. She had just begun to get the feel of losing herself in the experience totally. Until now, having the earphones had helped. By cutting out local sounds inside the house they suppressed her awareness of the room and the others in her vicinity, and made it easier to create the illusion of really being the mec. She imagined that there was probably a way to switch out the voice channel; but to ask about it just at this moment didn't seem very gracious.

  "It's . . . stupefying," she replied instead. "I know you told me. But it's unlike anything I could have dreamed."

  There was a whine, sounding louder suddenly, and something whizzed by erratically overhead in a blur of wings. It was too fast to leave an image but seemed alarmingly big. Michelle changed her mind about wanting to be left to absorb her reveries in solitude. Suddenly she appreciated the anchor to reality that the sound channel gave her.

  Ohira's voice came in. "Do you understand better now what I've been telling you? This could be a sensation, worth millions. And it's all thanks to Taki and Mister Kevin. They're great kids, those two."

  Michelle had been so enraptured that she had forgotten about the boys. "Where are Kevin and Taki?" she said. "I don't see them anywhere. I thought they were in the other couplers. Shouldn't they have mecs out here too?"

  "They're on their way over," Eric answered. "They've got several mec boxes scattered around down there. Explore around while you're waiting. They'll find you."

  Ah, Michelle thought to herself. So that was what the sticks and flags were for.

  To her left, the concrete ledge ended at a slope of earth and rubble leading down. She began heading in that direction. The surface was not as flat as it had seemed, but pitted and lumpy, like rocks set in a swamp of frozen oatmeal. She moved carefully, placing her steps, and crossed a dark area discolored by what looked like scattered pieces of coal. Past it, she climbed gingerly over a finger of grainy, coagulated mud, and reached the slope.

  It was not steep, and opened into a broader fall of convoluted sand gullies choked with pine needles the size of telephone poles, and rocky screes that slid and shifted beneath her feet. Water had sculpted the sides into crazy formations that reminded her of hydraulic mining sites she'd seen once in California.

  She was still descending, when a beetle-shaped body the size of an armchair emerged from a fold in the ground a short distance away. It was encased in shiny black plates that could have been forged by a medieval armorer, and rode on thick, jointed legs feathered with barbs and ugly bristles. Michelle froze involuntarily, but before she could register anything more, the creature had scurried away and disappeared again among the boulders.

  If she had thought about such things, there would have been no reason for her to be shocked or surprised. But that was the problem: She hadn't wanted to think about the obvious reason why Kevin and Taki called their adventure ground "Bug Park." Instead, she had pushed it to the back of her mind in the illogical way that people do inconvenient truths, as if that might somehow change them.

  Still keeping motionless, she directed her gaze slowly over the nearer surroundings. Other things were moving in dark caves of hanging roots; among sinuous growths looming all about her like thickets of twisted vines; watching from spaces underneath rocks and behind logs. She became acutely conscious suddenly of round, ominous-looking burrows that hadn't been made by rabbits.

  Wait; calm down; get a grip. This wasn't really "real," she reminded herself. At the same time, she found herself wondering what kind of nerve it would take to carry on if it were real. A genuine pang of doubt assailed her that she would have been up to it. Now she was beginning to grasp what Ohira had been getting at. Seeing it was the only way. No amount of talk could have rivaled this. She felt herself suck in a long breath, even though the mec had no mouth or lungs, sensed the others watching the screen but saying nothing, and resumed moving.

  The slope became more open. Descending required no exertion, but loose particle-rocks dislodged under her feet caused her to slide and stumble. She tried picking up what she took to be a thorn to use as a staff. It looked impossibly heavy and unwieldy, but she remembered Bel lifting beams in the tiny house in Neurodyne's Training Lab, and sure enou
gh found that she could handle it easily. The thorn worked well, and soon the concrete block was high above her, looking, with its red-and-yellow flag, like a fortress built into a mountain face in a scene from a science fiction movie.

  She came to an unearthly forest, where purple cables writhed among scaly trunks and leaning spires of grass. Then the forest was dwarfed in turn by an overhanging shoulder of some distant, leafy Everest. The ground became spongy, with white spears and curled pink tendrils thrusting up through a mat of fuzzy gravel poured over tangled, spring-like fibers. She entered shadow as leaves of a drooping plant blotted out the sun, hanging over her like rounded, lot-size lawns upended in some titanic earthquake. Each leaf carried its own tree of trunk and branching veins on its underside. The spaces between were thick with curved spines, which in reality must have been barely visible hairs, and pitted by circular depressions surrounding openings leading to the interior. In some places the holes exuded rust-colored growths—she guessed, some kind of parasite, spreading and joining into patches like seaweed on a beach.

  Ahead of her now was a slope covered in shredded logs, suggesting the remains of a blasted forest. It rose to the base of a turreted castle of shattered wood, defended by pale crenelations of fungus looking like huge, fantastic corals beneath a fairytale sea. In places, the mound of earth and logs was moving. Michelle stopped and backed away warily.