The Media Candidate

by Paul Dueweke

  Now with the immediate crisis resolved, Elliott had time to reflect on the meaning of it all. He sat back and cupped one hand over his mouth as he stared beyond the computer display before him. COPE must have either followed him to Guinda’s house or had her under surveillance. But is COPE a human or a machine? The candidate fraud he’d witnessed a few minutes ago seemed like humans deceiving other humans. But how can you tell anymore? Whoever’s behind it, COPE knows about the Halvorsen files and Guinda’s theft of those files. They know about her collaboration with Elliott. The bottom line is that Guinda is in as much danger as he, but she doesn’t realize it yet. Elliott weighed various options.

  His best option was to get to the safety of his office at the lab. There he would be able to warn Guinda undetected and retrieve the paper copy of the Halvorsen files. The security of the lab would provide him a safe haven from which to make his next move. He would probably have to get Guinda to the lab for her safety. He wondered how hard it would be to elude whoever or whatever surveillant was assigned to him today.

  Elliott crept toward a window facing the front of his house. Without moving the curtain, he carefully peeked out the window and spotted a small gray car parked about three houses down. It looked bigger than the one he evaded the day before. This one, he thought, might contain one of those eight-legged robots that could run down somebody like me with four legs tied behind its back. He pictured a giant spider stalking him. He noticed his hand on the curtain draw rope becoming clammy. “It’s just a machine,” he whispered. “Don’t think of it as a spider, just one of Sherwood’s goddamned toys. Besides, it may just be another one of those silly cars.”

  He wasn’t sure how to deal with this new spy. Was it the same kind he had easily outwitted before or a more advanced one that could handle stairs and sidewalks? Or were the robot’s instructions more malevolent than before? He knew a little about hit robots. Could COPE, or Sherwood, have such a fate in mind for him or Guinda, or both of them?

  Elliott looked again through the hazy dawn at the little gray car. He pulled one side of the drapes back about an inch, just far enough to get a glimpse. But in that brief moment, he saw the car move, just a little bit, just enough maybe for it to get a better vantage point. Maybe it had to move just the tiniest amount for one of its sensors to zoom in on that curtain to maybe see who was behind it. But with the light so dim, maybe it hadn’t even moved at all.

  The sudden, or imagined, movement, of the little car startled Elliott. He pulled away from the window, retreating behind the curtain that protected him from unseen sensors that must be continually scanning his house. Those marvelous sensors were focusing attention on him with a passionless commitment that no human could ever match. The wheeled spy was constantly on guard so not to miss even the slightest movement in his house, not a door opening, not a blind closing, not a secret glance toward it. Its vision system was superior to a man’s. It could detect the slightest change and then instantly zoom in on that tiny event to examine and record even finer-grain data. And all the while, it would maintain constant vigilance over the larger scene, looking for anomalies, searching for clues of any kind to keep ahead of its victim. And always seeming to be asleep.

  Elliott imagined that the innocuous looking car could be much more than just a spy. It might contain a wily, impersonal killer, a killer whose actions would be difficult to trace back to its human master. He thought about Halvorsen—and her killer. Maybe his turn was next; maybe Guinda had already succumbed to this evil. He peeked through a crack in the curtain. “You’re perfectly patient and perfectly in control. For now,” he growled. “But you can’t feel anxious about an approaching struggle. You can’t prime yourself to do better than you’re programmed to do or give more than a hundred percent. But I can.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  The Hunt

  He backed his car out of the garage into the street and drove away. After he had gone about a half block, the little gray robot car lurched forward in pursuit. Elliott rounded the corner as usual and then floored the accelerator. By the time the robot rounded that corner, Elliott was nearly to the end of the block. He reeled around that corner with a squeal and saw his opportunity. He screeched to a halt, opened the door, pressed the AUTO button, and dove out between two parked cars in the street, slamming the door behind him. He lay perfectly still on the street as his car sped away toward a destination he’d programmed into it. He stopped his heart as the robot car zoomed by.

  When he heard it disappear around the next corner, he raised himself onto his stiff and bleeding knees and thought, Those robots aren’t so smart after all. He limped toward home, hardly noticing his torn and bloodstained pants. He had defeated a professional hit robot, and it was easy. He proudly walked up to his front door. Within a minute, he left for the lab on his bike.

  * * *

  Elliott was not the only one making progress, however. The robot had soon determined that Elliott’s car was lacking an occupant and began a methodical backtrack. The exploration progressed slowly but exhaustively, using the robot’s visual, infrared, and chemical sensors to their fullest. The hunter worked onerously backward, searching for any trace of Elliott. It appeared to be more tracker than automobile as it scouted both sides of the street back along its path. Shuffling forward, backward, to each side, it moved like a bloodhound, systematically comparing and analyzing; intensively exploring, sniffing, scanning, until it reached the two parked cars where Elliott had taken refuge. It probed the invisible bloodstain on the pavement, noting the residual heat where Elliott had lain, interrogating the surroundings to determine the direction he had gone. It easily located the trail from Elliott’s DNA scent.

  But now the gray car needed support. The rear hatch popped up just a crack, then checked itself. Some event swelled the shadowed interior, some ritual driven not by zeal but by millions of lines of computer code, a program so complex that no human genius could decipher it in a human lifetime, yet so basic in function that it radiated an artform, a lifeform, all its own.

  The hatch then sprang open with a snap, splitting the Sunday dawn silence. Out of the inner gloom emerged a slender, black leg. Its curved shape extended, then straightened, then curled, then waved in a circular motion as it searched for footing. Once it located the ledge, it probed briefly to locate its edge, all the while the leg growing, twisting, curling sinuously like a shiny black-racer snake seeking prey. It probed further, locating the ground a few inches away.

  Having surveyed the bounds of its environment, deliberation and caution transformed into quickness and confidence as it rose from the car in an artfully choreographed and executed assemblé. Each of its eight legs danced to some unheard melody, anticipating the needs and movements of the other seven. Eight legs acted in concert as the spider scrambled in quick but fluid movements onto the ground.

  It was a spider, yet it was not a spider. It lived but was not alive. It saw and felt but had no passion or vision. It engendered vitality but propagated death. When the spider walked, its legs seemed to be dancing like a principal of the Bolshoi. When running, its legs seemed simply to disappear and then reappear in a different place, each reappearance furthering the ambitions of the brain within.

  The spider had more-highly-developed functions than the gray car. But what made it such a terrible adversary had less to do with its sensors and cunning than with its incredible mobility. Each of its jet-black, seemingly jointless, legs actually comprised over a hundred joints made of piezorestrictive materials, which allowed the legs to tie themselves into knots if desired. In spite of this amazing flexibility, a spider could arm-wrestle eight men to a draw and run down a target like a panther.

  Its body was the size, shape, and color of a pure-black house-cat, but turned sideways. It could move in any direction equally well without turning. Two camera-like eyes were attached to a pair of telescoping tubes to elevate or separate the eyes when it needed stealth or extreme stereo vision. A third lens for infrared gleamed spitefully
like the mirror of the wicked Queen Aurora and was confined to the body of the spider.

  It hunted and killed in almost total silence, the only sound coming from the tap, tap, tap of its carbon and urethane feet when it charged across a hard surface, terror writhing from it like an octet of cobras.

  Now those finely honed hunting instincts had been released. It lunged forward with electronic zeal on the trail of today’s target, Dr. Elliott T. Townsend.

  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 relie
f 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.