by Paul Dueweke
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
Elliott’s Nemesis
Elliott pedaled down the driveway, turned away from the direction of the approaching spider, and disappeared around the first corner just before the spider, with the little car following it, entered his street a block away. Elliott had made this trip to the Lab so many times that it was reflexive. On this early Sunday morning, though, he wasn’t challenged by speeding cars. Long shadows stretched across vacant sidewalks and streets. The sun greeted only a lone biker … and a synthetic spider.
The events of the last twenty-four hours filled Elliott’s mind so full of questions that he had no room left to think of where he was going. Fortunately, he didn’t need to be conscious of his destination to make progress toward it.
Nor did the spider need to see its prey to track it. The still, damp, morning air was perfect for chemical tracking, and the spider had a quiver of sensors to perform this wonder. It was able to track the slight trace of Elliott’s body vapors. The process was slow, but continuous. While the spider laboriously tracked Elliott’s trail, the little gray car began its own wider, less-focused search, always in communication with its partner.
Meanwhile, Elliott pedaled past the University confident that he at least didn’t have to worry about being followed. He would be to the Lab in about ten minutes, and he began prioritizing what he had to do when he got there. Since there was so little traffic, he could see, and be seen, for some distance. He didn’t give this fact much consideration until he noticed a car stop at an intersection ahead. As he approached, a knot tightened in his stomach when he saw it back up and disappear behind some parked cars.
What else could it mean, he thought. It’s waiting to ambush me. I can’t go back. All I can do is to go where it can’t. He stopped, dragged his bike up the curb, and ran it over to the low fence marking the edge of the University. He grunted his bike over the fence and then followed it with even more grunting. He hadn’t climbed a fence in thirty years, and never before with such passion. As he went over the top, his shoe caught, and he ended up lying on the ground on the other side with his foot hanging at the top of the fence. Even in this awkward position, he could see the little upside-down car speeding toward him.
“Damn these old bones!” he cursed as he yanked his foot loose with bits of flesh still clinging to the fence. “Why don’t they work for me like they used to?” The pain stabbed up his leg, but he had no time to think about that. His only chance was escape through the campus. As he mounted his bike, the little car screeched to a halt on the street just thirty feet away. He faced his adversary grimacing in pain. He tried to hate it, but he couldn’t. It was just a bunch of plastic and metal and integrated circuits. But he could hate its master. He could hate COPE and the coward that had programmed this thing to torture him. And he could fear it.
But then the little car did something that notched the fear-level up. A small turret rose from its top with an electrically powered gun that pointed at Elliott as he fled. There was no sound, no smoke, as it fired. Elliott expected to feel a bullet enter his back. He pictured himself knocked off his bike and the gun taking aim for a second shot to make sure the job was finished. He waited for the impact as he bumped over the grass toward a grove of Ponderosa pines. Then he heard it, but not what he expected. He heard the bullet ricochet from a steel pipe in the fence. The same fence that had just mangled his foot now saved his life. Once again, he thought the robot wasn’t so smart, but he’d been wrong the first time.
He’d covered about half the distance to the trees over the dewy grass, and he hoped it would take a few seconds to recharge the firing capacitors of the silent weapon. “Not enough time!” he grunted loudly. “Got to get into those trees!” He pedaled harder and harder, and the trees loomed before him, but he knew he’d be too late. He visualized the bullet flying toward him and knew this would be the end. But he had to try; he had to play it out. He reached the first tree, but it was too late.
The gun fired just as he swerved behind that first mammoth pine tree. The bullet blew him off his bike. But it was wooden shrapnel from the bullet ripping into the tree just inches behind him that made him lose control and dive headlong into the pine bark mulch. He lay there for a moment believing he’d been spared, not just for a few more seconds, but for always. Now all he had to do was to keep covered behind these trees until he had lost the robot car.
He gathered himself together to peer around the tree back toward the little car, but hope was ripped from him like a grizzly ripping the heart from its prey. For the first time, he actually saw a spider, not just read about it. And this spider was after him. Its blurred legs carried it across the empty street toward the little car and toward him. The spider would be able to follow him anywhere he went. The hopelessness of his situation suddenly gripped him. How had the stakes risen so high since the incident with the inept robot car yesterday?
Elliott wasn’t the strong biker he’d been years before, and the rigors of today had worn him down so he dreaded what must happen next. The thought of running such an uneven race added weights to his limbs. As he began running with his bike toward the far side of the grove, the spider locked its sights onto him and cleared the fence like a deer.
Elliott couldn’t afford to even look back now, and he didn’t want to know the moment before the spider took him down. How will it kill me? It! I’m going to be killed by an it!
As he ran through the trees, an apparition of a giant brown-recluse gripped him with imaginary legs, embracing him breathlessly, spinning silk around his lifeless body. A simple injection would be better than being smothered and strangled by eight legs. The glacial faces of some anonymous civil servants at COPE loomed before him, dispassionately reading the report of this “loose end” being taken care of, and then throwing the report into the burn box. That’s all the attention he’d get. Guinda probably faced the same fate. He hadn’t meant to drag her down with his lunacy. He at least wanted to apologize to her, to explain that it was just an old man’s stupidity. To beg forgiveness.
Suddenly the firmness of a sidewalk under foot jolted him to his present needs. He swung his leg over the seat once more and started pumping pedals like he’d never pumped before, toward a group of buildings. Only two creatures were stirring here at this hour, one a terrified human, the other a terrible human invention.
The spider had its prey in sight now and was able to close the gap rapidly against this inferior target. Elliott had to somehow lose his attacker in the buildings ahead. He didn’t yet know how, but it was the only chance he saw. He heard the clatter of eight frenzied feet on the sidewalk even above the throbbing of his heart and the complaints of his bicycle. It’s already to the sidewalk. Damn it! Gaining too fast. Too fast! I have to go faster … faster. The clatter behind him grew louder. He braced himself for the attack as he sped past the sign reading “Heisenberg Natatorium.”
He leaped from his bike at the bottom of the steps leading to the row of front doors. He wasn’t even aware that he had not slowed down his bike. It continued riderless, careening off the steps and crashing into a concrete planter. The spider knew exactly which of the two was the high-value target. It bounded up the five limestone steps as if they were one. Elliott heard the hop and braced for the thing to land on his back and sink its toxic teeth into him or wrap its legs around his throat. Just as he reached for the first door, the spider landed after its long stride up the steps. The briefest relief hit Elliott as he realized that the jump he feared was not for him; it was just to clear the steps. But this relief endured no more than a heartbeat.
The door was locked! Then the spider’s rattling hooves went silent again. Elliott looked into the glass door and saw it flying toward him, airborne. He yanked himself by one door handle to the next one. This sudden action caused the trajectory of the spider to narrowly miss his back. As the spider flew past him crashing into the locked door, it reached out with
two legs, which caught Elliott’s left shoulder, throwing him to the ground with a numbing blow. It, too, crashed, and much harder than the blow it had delivered to Elliott. Missing Elliott, it smashed into the steel post between two sets of doors. Both Elliott and the spider sat on the concrete just a few feet apart, each of them gathering their wits in surprisingly similar ways.
The spider was the first to its feet, its long legs tapping in some rhythmic pattern that could be understood only by a robotics programmer as its way of reestablishing a baseline coordinate system and testing its sensor systems before it could resume its attack. One of the legs tapped Elliott’s leg during this ritual. It was a surprisingly gentle tap, but Elliott reacted in revile and fear. He began limping down the row of doors, testing one then the next, all the while the sharp pain of the spider attack stabbing his shoulder. He reached the fourth door as the spider completed all its system checks and began scanning for its prey. It was easy to find.
Even the most professional hit-man would have winced in sympathy for this terrified figure of an old man stooped before an army of locked doors, a man bleeding and broken, trembling for that last bit of strength to resist the final onslaught. But this attacker was not a man. It had no sense of humanity, no feelings, no history of self to arouse empathy. It sensed only one thing—a target. It saw only an object whose characteristics matched a set of parameters that had been input to its memory. It knew only its instructions. It could only comply instantly and efficiently.
Elliott was only four doors away when the thing sprang. He was only four doors away when he reached that last door handle to give one last tug, when he felt that door suddenly yield to his tug. He swung the glass door open and fell inside. The spider landed in front of the door, reached one tentacle through the closing crack, and grabbed Elliott’s ankle. It was an uneven tug of war. Elliott pulling with all his might on the crash bar with both feet braced against the doorframe. The spider, with the strength of a weight lifter and a mechanical blind will, pulled Elliott’s foot relentlessly away from its hold. There could be but one winner in this unfair match.
But as clever as this spider’s attack program was that guided its every response to Elliott, it lacked the defiance of Elliott’s mind. It was engaged in a situation for which it had not been programmed. It failed to see that the key to victory was not Elliott’s leg that it grasped so rigidly, but the door that barred it from the rest of Elliott. With such a simple concept, it would’ve had no trouble prying the door open with its superior strength. But the instruction set it continually executed denied it this simple solution. The match was not as uneven as Elliott had feared.
Summoning his last reserve of strength, Elliott yelled and pulled the door shut and locked. The crushed tentacle still grasped his ankle as before, but Elliott now had a locked door between himself and his assassin.
His back was propped against a railing and both legs stretched out against the doorframe. For the first time he was able to examine the menace outside, just inches away. He studied its limb, which kinked through the crack between the distorted door and the frame. The tentacle still held tight to his ankle. Elliott stared at the spider, then at his leg. It was a stalemate. Each analyzed the situation in his or its own way.
Elliott now had time to think, to fear. The fact that this thing was not just a killer, but also a spider, now came to the front. He looked into eyes that he’d dreaded for over a half-century. If this was his final test, why did it have to be against such a thing? Why not a lion, or a rattle snake? He could deal with those. Why this thing?
“That’s it,” he said. “You’re not really a spider, just look like a spider.” He stared into its eyes, seeing his own minute reflection. “You’re just a goddamned machine.”
Its small size surprised him. From what he’d heard, he expected a much larger, and more formidable looking thing. Its size didn’t suggest its physical or intellectual power. Up close, it was a simple-looking machine, not as heinous as he’d conjectured. He almost expected a wicked mouth-full of jagged teeth dripping blood. “Wait a minute,” he mumbled. “What’s that thing?” He lowered his head to get a better view. There it was, the long, slender stainless steel tube was just visible on the creature’s belly. It slowly pulsed just perceptibly, in and out, in and out. Elliott’s eyes narrowed as he realized this was the killing device, a needle full of venom meant for him, venom that would be coursing through his own body if it weren’t for the single sheet of glass separating them. “You’re ready, aren’t you? You want to use that on me. And all because my name is on some list. You don’t hate me, don’t even know me. But you want to stick me with that thing.”
Elliott’s attention then refocused on his ankle as he felt its grip tighten. He strained at the oppressive grasp, but it wouldn’t budge. Its skin was smooth and cool, unlike his own. The spider had decided it was time for action. It began pulling with all its might on Elliott’s leg once more. It was dragging Elliott’s leg closer and closer to the crack between the door and the frame. As it performed this simple act of power, the door and the frame continually stripped away material from its leg since there simply wasn’t enough room in that crack for the tentacle. As the spider single-mindedly persisted in this, it was slowly destroying its leg.
After a short time, the power and control lines in the leg began to break, and Elliott could feel its grip loosen. He again tried prying the grasp from his leg, and this time it worked. He heard the carbon and plastic shell splinter. He embraced the wires snapping and delighted in the scrapes and grinds as the spider ripped its leg free, leaving a limp piece draped over Elliott’s leg.
It stood inches from Elliott, reconfiguring its motor commands to accommodate just seven legs. Elliott watched this exercise as he rubbed life back into his raw leg. He wished that the thing could experience the kind of pain he had in his own leg. “That’ll slow you down. But you don’t hurt, do you? You just ripped your leg off, and all you care about is reconfiguring some controls.”
He wished it pain, not to make it less effective, but to make it suffer. “God damn you! Why can’t you suffer? You just lost a leg!” As he examined it and hated it, he noticed another injury, one that might have prevented it from catching him as he fled through the door. The spider’s right eye was smashed. “So you’re half-blind, lost your depth perception. Too bad, you son-of-a-bitch. If I could get your other eye, I’d yank it out with my bare hands.”
Elliott tried to stand up, but every part of him ached at once, and he slumped back to the floor. “Got to get up,” he said through short bursts of breath. “Got to get up,” he said again as he used the railing to try to pull himself up. He fell back to the floor with a grunt. “Well, you half-blind, lame bastard, now what—” A pain shot up his side before he could finish the question.
As if in response, the spider began walking from door to door, testing each one. Since there were a dozen doors across the entrance, and Elliott had found one of the four he tried to be ajar, there was no way to tell if any others might be open. He watched with exhaustion and hatred as it moved down the line.
The spider grasped the handle of the second last door and pulled. Tight. It walked to the last door. Elliott squinted as one of the spider’s legs reached for the door handle. It shook the door, and it creaked, but it was locked. The spider returned to where Elliott and its leg lay on the floor.
“Can’t figure out what to do, can you? I’m right here, and you’re right there.” Every muscle in Elliott’s body ached. Both legs were bloodied and his left shoulder throbbed. He didn’t want to move.
He slowly became entombed in a scene he’d suppressed for over fifty years, a scene he’d claimed he couldn’t remember, a scene of a teenage boy in a far away garage. He was blond and freckled and not enthusiastic about his task. He climbed a stepladder and pulled a tire down, and a cloud of dirt fell onto him. He spat it out and rubbed his eyes.
When he tugged on the second tire, another cloud fell onto his head, but this dirt was alive and crawled over him with a thousand legs. He screamed and began flailing at the sea of life as venomous jaws sought retribution, their red-hot needles piercing his skin. The pain and the terror had continued for half a century.
Elliott opened his eyes. He’d denied that vision for a lifetime, yet it lurked beneath his consciousness every day. Now, just a short spider jump from him, stood the Godzilla of spiders—with only a thin sheet of glass between them. He faced his ancient foe magnified a million times.