Flybots swarmed in a silver cloud between the two of them.
Sam pointed to the hill. The forest. Maybe they could hide there? It was worth a shot. Out here they were sitting ducks.
She took off and he followed. The air was melting hot, but running in the suits was like wading through snow. As they got to the bottom of the hill, Willard realized he'd forgotten the bag of ammo. He turned back and set course for the Jeep. It was no more than twenty yards away, but seemed like the length of a football field.
He ran back to the Jeep and around to the driver side. He hoisted the pack up over his shoulder, and as it landed there it crunched a dozen or so flybots dead. He clomped back toward the hill. Sam was about halfway up, going slowly, stopping to brush herself. The flybots were always around the neck and head — nowhere else, it seemed. He stopped and took a moment to brush a layer of flybots off. Then he resumed his sluggish run, and began a sluggish climb.
During a brief moment of rest, he picked up a rock and found it was effective for crushing and dislodging flybots. But for all the crunching, he couldn't perceive that they were diminishing in number. How long will it take them to eat through? he wondered. But he had no clue.
Near the top of the hill, they saw the obstacle: a barbed-fence wire, constructed to contain the gorillas.
The fence was tall, extending over their heads. Willard looked for a tree to climb, but the trees were set back from the fence on either side. Trying to climb the fence or worm through it could cut their suits. Sam had picked up a stick and was poking the fence, testing its strength, while he continued to bludgeon himself on the neck with a stone, crushing flybots.
He looked at the stone in his hand and hurled it at the fence without much deliberation. To his surprise, the fence billowed back behind the impact of the stone, like a bedsheet hanging in the wind. It was tall and layered, but not that strong, even when he was throwing lefty.
He and Sam began crouching for stones and hurling them at the portion of fence directly in front of them. Encumbered by the HAZMAT suit, Willard felt like a child in a snowball fight.
They threw stone after stone, pausing before some of the throws to whack the stone on themselves and impede the gnawing progress of the metal flies. Willard did not throw too well as a lefty. Each of them paused momentarily to check at the neck of the other and brush away lingering insects. The fence had buckled, but it was intact. This can't go on forever, he thought. They must be getting through the suits. Eventually they are going to make it. We can't fight like this forever. We're going to get tired.
Two stones landed on the fence simultaneously and with a scratching noise it sagged backwards into a V shape in front of them. The fence wasn't down, but with care, they'd be able to walk right over the sagging portion to the other side. They turned to each other. Willard raised his arm (with another rock in that fist), and Sam gave a hop.
They picked their way across the fence, as if crossing an unsteady footbridge. They held rocks in each hand to push away the fence as it pressed up against them under their weight.
And then they were on the other side, in the tropical forest.
They half-ran, half-fell down the hill. Willard tried to skate down on his boots, covered in the HAZMAT material. He went fast and his feet caught on a rock. The force of falling stood him up stock straight and he almost catapulted face-first down the hill.
He caught himself with his right hand on the trunk of a tree and a lightning bolt of pain went up his arm.
(BROKEN!)
He twisted in pain. Some of the bright orange fabric of the suit under his armpit caught on the branch of a tree. The silver flies buzzed around him and some collided with his convex faceplate, making tapping noises.
Sam had more luck getting down the hill. She turned sideways as she jumped down, sliding, and hopped and faced the other way, like a skier.
They met at the bottom of the hill. Sam turned him around, patting his suit as if frisking him. He did the same to her. It appeared their suits were intact. The flybots were still buzzing around them and landing on them. His right arm was throbbing.
Using what he learned on the hill, Willard picked up a rock. He half-clubbed, half-scraped Sam around the neck and shoulders. She got a rock of her own and drubbed Willard around the head and neck. Being drubbed with a rock was not a pleasant experience, and sweat covered his body inside his suit. His throat was parched. When she smacked down with a rock on the flybots, he could feel them crush on his neck and shoulders. They felt like little thumbtacks coming through his body. He could hardly believe that they weren't puncturing the suit.
Sam had another idea: she scooped up damp soil from the ground and rubbed it on his suit, after a good smack with the rock. Maybe it will thicken the suit, he thought. Give them more to chew through. He copied her, and they became exhausted with rubbing mud and beating each other with rocks.
Suddenly, the flybots were gone.
Wait, where did they go?
All that remained were dozens of carcasses on their suits.
They looked at each other, puzzled. The flybots weren't dead — they had vanished.
It was too good to be true, but finally they believed it. They collapsed to their backs on little rocks, roots, and suspiciously squishy surfaces at the bottom of the hill. Sam let her hands flop outward while Willard tucked his throbbing right arm on his belly. Willard's helmet gave a hollow thud as it landed on something.
They lay there and heaved, occasionally rolling over to look at each other and check for flies. Willard managed to roll his globular head the other way. He spied the duffle full of explosives, still safe inside the HAZMAT bag. It looked unscathed.
After a few more minutes they helped each other up and celebrated their victory with a weary high five.
“What happened?” Sam's tinny voice asked in his helmet. “Are they coming back?”
“Who knows,” he said. “Do you think he can see us? When they aren't here?”
Sam thought of the tape Raymond showed them. Somehow the researchers on Fort Tortuga had filmed that attack. “They have some video capabilities in here,” she said. “I don't know how extensive it is. Maybe he can look through the island's cameras.”
They looked around them in a futile search for video cameras. It was dark. Some light shined down on them from the hill, up by the fence. But they were at the edge of a patch of rainforest that was darkened by tree cover.
Sam reached up to his shoulder and brushed some crushed flybots off. She, too, had them stuck into the thick orange fabric around her neck.
He picked one from her neck. It fell through his fingers, which were made clumsy by the thick HAZMAT suit. He picked another bot off her suit: it was mashed beyond recognition. The third specimen was in good shape. He managed to get it in the orange-gloved palm of his hand. He and Sam bumped helmets as they leaned over his palm to look at the bot.
It looked like a silver mosquito, but it was about twice as big as the little mosquitoes he was used to back home. It had six metal legs. Its wings looked like quartz.
“Those are solar panels,” Sam explained.
They could see that it also had the little piercing sucker under its head, the proboscis.
The flybot moved its wings. Willard and Sam jumped back reflexively, then laughed at their own fear. Sam's laugh came through as a quiet, tinny sound over the speakers inside his helmet. She's not so bad, he thought. He was glad he wasn't alone on that crazy foray in the woods.
They leaned back over it. “Is it alive?” Sam asked.
“I don't know,” he shrugged. “Do they count as alive?”
It was flapping its wings again, feebly. One of its wings was damaged, so it couldn't get airborne. It was like any bug that he had picked apart as a kid, Willard reflected. Its similarity to a real insect was eerie. He wouldn't have expected them to build it that way. He tossed it aside.
Willard had never been in a tropical forest before. He half-expected to see snakes, birds,
monkeys, and animals everywhere. But he didn't see a single animal. He listened. He couldn't hear anything inside his bubble. He stomped his foot on a branch and couldn't hear it crack. Between the restricted movements in his suit, and the darkness under the trees, he couldn't see much either.
“Well, this is awkward,” he said.
He looked over at Sam and saw something. “Hold on a second,” he said, holding her arm and turning her slightly.
Her bubbly head turned with a snap. “Flybots?”
“Nah, just some wormy things.” The back of her suit was covered with little white worms, or larvae. He started brushing them off.
They got moving, trudging between the trees. There was tropical shrubbery and grass, but they were able to hike through it quickly. They often slipped. A lot of the surfaces were wet; some of them looked slimy, like rotting leaves.
They did not stray far from the big hill. They walked parallel to it, so they figured they must be heading about parallel to the road. Willard carried the explosives on his back. They hoped to make it in an hour.
As they trudged in silence, something about wearing orange suits in the jungle made it seem like they were exploring another planet. A hot planet. A very different planet, for all they knew about that habitat. As they walked, Willard started to notice spiders, spiders of all sizes, all dazzlingly colorful. At least some of them had to be poisonous. The spiders made him feel a little better about wearing the stifling HAZMAT suit.
They began discussing their plan of attack. “There are three buildings in the Laboratory Complex,” Sam explained. “One is residential. Then there's a computer building and the lab building itself.” She explained that the computers in the computer building were controlled remotely from the lab building. Staff entered the computer building only to maintain the machines and the cooling system designed to offset the heat generated by the rows and rows of CPUs.
“Sounds like we might want to take out the computer building,” he said. “Or maybe the line between the buildings.”
“We'll have to see what points of access the building gives us,” Sam judged. “Do you know how to cut the line?”
They walked in silence. Oh, yeah, I've been cutting power lines for the military since I was a toddler, he thought. He had almost forgotten the ridiculousness of his position.
Maybe it was time to tell the truth. That morning, he'd killed a guy, a super special agent. It seemed like so long ago. But it was not so long for the people who were bound to be looking for him soon. This is hopeless, he thought. The island was under attack by robots. Misleading Sam could put them both in danger.
“I have to tell you something,” he said. “I'm sorry to say it, but I'm not actually a special agent guy. I don't work for the government or anything. It's a mixup.” This sounds so ridiculous, he thought. “I'm just a courier.”
“A courier?”
“Yup. I deliver stuff.”
“Then what were you doing with a huge bag of guns and explosives?” she asked. Of the roughly one hundred questions she could have asked, that one was as good as any.
“I deliver that kind of stuff sometimes.”
He watched as it dawned on her that Willard was not only something of an impostor, but also a felon.
“Sorry to break the news,” he said. “I thought you should know.”
“Yeah.” There wasn't much else to be done at that point. She wondered what Flannigan would do with him, assuming they all made it out of this situation okay.
“So,” he continued, “no: I don't know how to cut the line when we find it.”
They walked on. It all made Willard feel like a loser. He didn't care what anyone thought, least of all a military drone like Sam, but he felt bad anyway. He hated people. Take all the people off this island and the labs and you had something great: some forest, a beach, sun, maybe a few gorillas. People made everything worse.
“Have you ever killed anyone?” he asked. He was wondering which of them would kill the kid, if it came to that.
“No,” she replied, “I've been close a couple times... How about you?”
For a second he didn't even think about that morning. An old delivery job still bothered him. “Once I had to deliver some explosives. Same stuff as we got here, actually. When I delivered it, there was a problem. The pickup guy wasn't there. So I got on the phone with them and they offered me a lot of extra money if I'd finish the job for them.” He sighed. He'd never told anyone this story. He was feeling philosophical, like he was walking off to his death. “So I had to blow this building. They gave me instructions. It was nighttime and they promised me there was no one in the building.”
“Uh-huh,” she said.
“I needed the money. And they promised me there was no one in there. So I set everything up and got away from the building. And then I hit the button. And after I hit the button, right before it blew, a light went on in the building. And then it blew.”
“I see,” she said.
“I shouldn't have listened to them,” Willard said. “They were crooks. I'll never make that mistake again.” But at that moment he realized he had made the same mistake again — that morning. They told him no one would come bother him while he watched the kid. But if that was true, he realized, why were they paying him so much to do it? I'm such an idiot, he thought. He couldn't resist a big gamble. And the more he lost them, the more he needed to take them. Off the grid, he thought. The second he could get to Ecuador or whatever was close by, he would disappear for good.
He stopped by a tree. “Look at this.” It was far and away the biggest tree trunk he had ever seen. If they had got on either side of it and outstretched their arms they wouldn't have been able to grasp hands.
“I wonder how old that is.”
“Gotta be two hundred years.”
He looked up the tree. Smaller trees infringed on his view and he could not quite see the top. He recalled that rainforests sometimes had more than one layer of tree cover. Maybe animals were hiding on an upper layer.
“Don't move,” Sam's voice hissed in his helmet.
Trying not to turn his helmet, he looked over at her. She pointed with an inchworm-like motion of her finger.
A gorilla, stopped in some vegetation. Closer than the distance from a baseball home plate to first base. It had noticed them.
Neither the gorilla nor the humans moved for a minute, each looking at the other.
KENNY'S DESTINY
Fort Tortuga, Laboratory Complex, West Wing
4 hr 45 min to Birth
Kenny had been moving about the laboratory, seeing what Nemo would let him do. And it wasn't much. Kenny couldn't leave the room.
“There is no real beginning or end to a body,” Nemo remarked, as Kenny half-listened. “The atmosphere around you reaches into the pores of your skin and the orifices of your body, like waves lapping at a shore. You draw energy from the environment around you through processes that are perfectly continuous, with no identifiable point to identify where your body begins and ends.”
Kenny sat down at the computer. He was sitting in front of Nemo, in a way. But this computer wasn't Nemo. It was a body Nemo could pass through, inhabit, then leave, like a spirit.
“The idea of a body,” Nemo continued, “or the word body, is useful for our thinking and communication. But the concept is not accurate. You and I are just knots on the same rope. The rope is the energy and the matter of the universe, while you and I are the knots, merely spaces through which the energy is connected.”
Kenny couldn't get a response from the computer monitor or the keyboard. It was like the computer was dead. Only he saw the ON light of the speakers. That was like Nemo's heartbeat, or an unblinking eye. It was like the eye of Hal, from that Stanley Kubrick movie.
“The false nature of our word body is about to become more obvious,” Nemo asserted. “My existence and development will force us to realize that life is not something that is contained in bodies. It flows through bodies. Not in
the mere sense of a virus, or a cold. With your help, I will extend my body, and you will do the same.”
Kenny reached out and turned off the speakers. They gave out a bumping noise as he jerked them down, and then they were mute. Nemo was mute, at least for the moment. He didn't want to talk to Nemo. He refused to negotiate. Negotiation would lead to one thing: helping Nemo. And he didn't want to be the one. He didn't consider it an honor. He didn't want it.
He stared at the dead speakers. Could I unplug the computer? he thought. It was the only computer in the room. It must be controlling the flybots in here, somehow, he figured. It controlled machinery inside the glass chamber. Unplugging wouldn't hurt Nemo much. The Internet would go on. It would be like removing a skin cell from him. But, as far as Kenny could see, unplugging that computer would stop him from building his handbot — on Fort Tortuga, at least.
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