by Paul Dueweke
* * *
Her rooftop visitor began the next stage of its mission. It opened the skylight with its myriad of tools and used its eight perfectly coordinated legs to climb into the skylight well where it was only a short drop to the floor. Attaching itself to the roof with a silken thread of carbon nanotubes, its jet-black body, about the size of a cat, lowered into Professor Halvorsen’s living room. It descended its slender thread as if it had evolved for a billion years for just this task. Eight legs flexed gracefully to a silent ballet in its brain.
Its goal, however, wasn’t centered on illuminating beauty, but on extinguishing truth. Reaching the floor, it disconnected the silken tether and examined the surroundings with both visible and infrared sensors. A single-minded goal drove each movement.
Its feline size and spindly legs did not suggest the immense power built into it or the intelligence, which allowed autonomous completion of the most complex assignments. It was a monument to the highest callings of human ingenuity and art. It was also a terrifying and vulgar machine—the progeny of the excellence and the malignancy of man.
Silently creeping toward Professor Halvorsen’s study, its arachnid movements were controlled by a brain whose evolution was integrated with that of man, not spiders. It entered the room where its target was seated facing sideways so her peripheral vision intersected the robot. Her attention, however, was focused on her own mission.
Samantha napped with her head buried in the folds of a mauve robe. The spider’s movements slowed to mimic a stalking cat as it approached its victim, a victim who was at that moment reveling in her future, a future the spider was committed to erasing.
Suddenly Samantha raised her head, her ears at first forward to sense the silence, and then lay back to the frontier of terror. The spider now had its injector fully armed, its legs tensioned for attack, its brain calculating angles, forces, trajectories, maneuvers, sequences.
Professor Halvorsen looked down at Samantha, then turned her head slowly toward the doorway. A gasp rose involuntarily from her throat, a beautiful soft throat that was now at the center of the spider’s zoom-optics field-of-view. In a fraction of an instant, the spider was wrapping its legs about her head and her shoulders in the last embrace that Professor Halvorsen would ever experience. The injector plunged deep into her throat and remained only long enough to expel its venom. The trio was now tumbling across the floor, but only Samantha got up and ran. Stalker and prey were locked together in a union that would last only a moment, only until her every muscle became limp, and a thoughtful and beautiful woman was transformed into just a body.