Tales of Time and Space

by Allen Steele

  “Ticking” is a prime example. Back in 1992, I was a guest author at the annual Minicon science fiction convention. Minicon is held in a very large convention hotel on the outskirts of Minneapolis, and it was during that weekend when I got the brainstorm for this story. Between panels and readings, I roamed the hotel, making sketches of the layout and taking pictures with a disposable camera I bought in the gift shop—this was in the days before cell-phone cameras. I wrote the first scene in longhand Sunday afternoon at the airport while waiting for my flight home, and a few days later I transcribed it into my computer, believing that I’d complete it sometime in the next few weeks.

  The story remained unfinished for the next twenty years. Very simply, I didn’t know where to take it after that first scene; the two people in the first scene didn’t interest me enough to build a story around them, and until I had characters I wanted to write about, the story wasn’t going forward. I went at it again and again over the course of the next several months until, frustrated and impatient, I relocated the digital file to the “Unfinished Stories” folder, stuck the handwritten original in my file cabinet along with the photos and sketches, and walked away. And every now and then over the next couple of decades, I’d pull out the story, convert the text to the latest version of WordPerfect or MS Word I was using by then, and fiddle with it a little more, trying to find something to do with it. I went through several title changes, shifted from first-person to third-person, put characters in, took characters out, and even changed the locale and turned it into a screenplay that went unsold. Nothing seemed to work. I finally gave up, figuring that it would remain an uncompleted story like a half-dozen or so others moldering away in my files.

  Then I read a magazine article about a new information-processing center in Utah, and then an online piece about the patterns of global population growth over the past couple of centuries, and all at once everything seemed to come together. Suddenly, I knew what the story was missing…and no, I’m not going to tell you. Let it be a mystery that it took twenty years to solve.

  I pulled out the original handwritten manuscript, gave it a new title, and picked up where I’d left off in the airport two decades earlier. This time, the writing was effortless. I wrote the story in a couple of weeks, and wondered why it took me so long to finish the damn thing.

  Maybe because it’s a bit scary.

  TICKING

  Harold and Cindy were trying to find something to eat in the hotel kitchen when they were attacked by the cook.

  Shortly after the refugees moved into the Wyatt-Centrum Airport, they’d divvied up the jobs necessary for their continued survival. Harold and the remaining desk clerk, Merle, had drawn the assignment of locating the hotel robots. That’s all they had to do; just find them, then tell Karl and Sharon, the two Minneapolis cops who’d taken shelter at the Wyatt-Centrum when their cruiser died on the street outside. The officers had their service automatics and a pump-action .12-gauge shotgun they’d taken from their car; unlike most of their equipment, the guns weren’t rendered inoperative. And they’d already discovered that an ordinary service robot could be taken out by a well-aimed gunshot; it was the big, heavy-duty ones that were hard to kill.

  So Harold and Merle spent the second day after the blackout prowling the hotel’s ten floors. Merle knew where the robots normally operated, so they only needed to confirm their positions while avoiding being spotted, and once they’d located all the ’bots Merle remembered, they returned to the pool and told the cops. Karl and Sharon made sure the barricades were secure, at least for the time being, then went up into the hotel and, moving from floor to floor, blew away all the ’bots the civilians had found.

  This search-and-destroy mission netted ten housekeepers, five custodians, two room-service waiters, and two security guards. According to Merle, that accounted for the hotel robots; this didn’t include the huge bellhop that killed two staff members and a guest before someone picked up a chair and used it to smash the robot’s CPU. That happened on the first day; most of the guests fled after that, along with most of the remaining staff. After that sweep, everyone thought all the ’bots had been accounted for and destroyed.

  By the end of the third day, the thirty-one people hiding in the Wyatt-Centrum’s cathedral-like atrium were down to the last few cans of the junk food a couple of them had scavenged from a convenience store a few blocks down the street. Nobody wanted to venture outside, though—it had become too dangerous to leave the hotel—and the cops were reluctant to tear down the plywood boards they’d had nailed across the ground-level doors and windows. So when Cindy asked Harold if he’d mind coming along while she checked out the kitchen—“It can’t all be fresh food,” she’d said, “they must have some canned stuff, too.”—she didn’t have to twist his arm very hard.

  Hunger wasn’t the only reason why he went with her, though. Truth was, he wanted to get into Cindy’s pants. Sure, she was at least twenty years younger and he was married besides, but Harold had been eyeing her for the past three days. Only that morning, he hadn’t entirely turned his back when she’d taken a bath in the atrium swimming pool. As afraid as he was of dying, he was even more afraid of dying without having sex one last time. Such are the thought processes of the condemned. Perhaps he wouldn’t get a chance to knock boots with her during this foray, but at least he’d be able to show off his machismo by escorting her through the lightness kitchen. That was the general idea, anyway…but before he got a chance to nail Cindy, that goddamn ’bot nearly nailed them instead.

  Unfortunately, when Harold visited the kitchen earlier, he and Merle had neglected to check the big walk-in refrigerator. It wasn’t entirely his fault; the two cooks they’d found attacked them the moment they pushed open the door, forcing a hasty retreat. Those were the first robots the cops had neutralized, and Merle believed they were the only ones in the kitchen. But he was wrong; a third ’bot had been trapped in the fridge when the lights went out.

  The walk-in was located in the rear of the kitchen, just a little farther than Harold had gone the first time he’d searched the room. They’d found a carton of breakfast cereal, which would be good for the kids, and Cindy was hoping to find some milk that hadn’t spoiled yet. She’d just unlatched the chrome door handle, and he was standing just behind her, when they heard the sound everyone had come to dread the last few days:

  Tick-tick…tick-tick-tick…tick…tick-tick-tick…

  “Watch out!” Harold yelled, and an instant later something huge slammed through the door. Cindy was knocked to the floor; falling down was probably the only thing that saved her from having an eight-inch ice pick shoved into her chest.

  The cook was nearly as large as the bellhop. A Lang LHC-14 may seem harmless when it’s stirring a vat of corned beef hash, but this one was hurtling toward them with a sharp metal spike clutched in its manipulator claw. And neither Harold nor Cindy was armed.

  “Get back, get back, get back!” Harold yelled, as if she really needed any encouragement. Cindy scuttled backward on hands, hips, and heels while he threw himself away from the refrigerator, losing his flashlight in his haste.

  Even if he hadn’t dropped the light, though, he would have been able to see the cook. Red and green LEDs blinked across the front of its boxlike body, the glow reflecting off the hooded stereoscopic lenses within its upper turret. As it trundled through the door on soft tandem tires, the turret swept back and forth, clicking softly as the lenses captured first Cindy, then Harold, then Cindy again. Mapping them, remembering their positions…

  “Watch out! It’s gonna charge!”

  The turret snapped toward Harold as the ’bot determined which human was closer. At that moment, his groping hands found the cold metal surface of something that moved: a dessert cart, complete with the molding remains of several cakes. Torture wagons, his wife called these things, and he was only too happy to use one in a less metaphorical way. As the cook rushed him, he dodged behind the cart, grabbed its glass handle, and
slammed it straight into the robot.

  The impact dislodged the ice pick from the cook’s claw. As it hit the tile floor, he wrenched the cart backward, then shoved it forward again, harder this time. Harold was trying to knock it over, but the ’bot had been designed for stability, bottom-heavy and with a low center of gravity. He was slowing it down, but he wasn’t stopping it.

  The situation was both dangerous and absurd. The cook would trundle forward, its arms swinging back and forth, and Harold would ram the cart into it. The ’bot would halt for a second, but as soon as he pulled the cart back, the machine would charge again, its claws missing his face by only a few inches. It might have been funny, but when Harold glanced over his shoulder, he saw in the shadowed illumination cast by the dropped flashlight that the cook was gradually backing him into a corner between a rack and a range grill. Dale was right: these things learned fast.

  “Cindy! Get this friggin’ thing off me!”

  He didn’t hear anything save for the incessant ticking, high-pitched whine of the ’bot’s servos, and the loud clang of his cart ramming it again. A chocolate cake toppled off the wagon and was immediately pulverized by the cook’s wheels. He had the wild, hopeless hope that the icing would somehow screw it up, make it lose traction…

  “Cindy…!” Damn it, had she abandoned him?

  All at once, the robot’s turret did a one-eighty turn, its lenses snapping away from him as its motion detectors picked up movement from somewhere behind it. In that instant, Cindy dashed out of the darkness, something raised in both hands above her head. The robot started to swivel around, then a cast iron skillet came down on its turret and smashed its lenses.

  Nice shot. Although the robot could still hear them, it was effectively blinded. While its claw lashed back and forth, trying to connect with one of them, Cindy beat on it with the skillet while Harold continued to slam it with the dessert cart.

  “Hit it, hit it!”

  “Get the claws!”

  “Go for the top, the top!”

  So forth and so on, until one last blow from Cindy’s skillet managed to skrag the CPU just beneath the upper turret. The LEDs went dark and the cook halted. The ticking stopped.

  When Harold was sure that the cook was good and dead, he came out from behind the cart. Cindy was leaning against an island, breathing hard, skillet still clutched in her hand. She stared at him for a moment, then dropped the skillet. It hit the floor with a loud bang that echoed off the stainless steel surfaces around them.

  “Thanks.” Harold sagged against a counter. “Tough, ain’t it?”

  “Built to last.” Her cotton tank-top was damp with sweat, the nipples of her twenty-two-year-old breasts standing out. “You okay?”

  “I’m good.” Harold couldn’t stop staring at her. “You?”

  Cindy slowly nodded. She brushed back her damp hair, then looked up at him. Even in the wan glow of the dropped flashlight, she must have seen something in his eyes that she didn’t like it at all.

  “Fine. Just great.” She turned away from him. “C’mon. Let’s get out of here.”

  Harold let out his breath. Looked like he wasn’t going to get laid after all, even if it was the end of the world.

  Cindy tried to hide her irritation, but she was still quietly fuming when she and the other guy—what was his name? Harold?—returned to the atrium. She’d noticed the way he’d been watching her for the last couple of days, of course; men had been checking her out since she was fifteen, so she’d developed good radar for sexual attraction. Given the situation everyone was in, though, you’d think he’d have the common sense to put his impulses on hold. But for God’s sake, they barely escape being killed, and what’s the first thing he does? Stare at her tits.

  Enough. Cindy had heard his dejected sigh as she picked up the carton of single-serving cereal boxes she’d found and left the kitchen. She could have cared less. It was times like these when she wondered whether she wouldn’t be better off being a lesbian.

  By the time they reached the pool, though, she’d almost forgotten the incident. As soon as she and what’s-his-name walked in, the kids were all over them, jumping up and down in their excitement to see what she’d found. Cindy couldn’t help but smile as she carried the carton to the poolside terrace and put it down on a table. There were a half-dozen children among the refugees, the youngest a four-year-old boy and the oldest a twelve-year-old girl, and none of them seemed to mind that they didn’t have any milk to go with the Cheerios and Frosted Flakes she handed out. Even kids can get tired of Spam and candy bars if that’s all they’ve had to eat for three days.

  Once they’d all received a box of cereal, Cindy took the rest to the cabana room she was sharing with Officer McCoy. She’d never thought that she’d welcome having a cop as a roommate, but Sharon was pretty cool; besides, sleeping in the same room as a police officer assured that she wouldn’t be bothered by any horny middle-aged guys who’d holed up in the Wyatt-Centrum.

  Sharon was dozing on one of the twin beds when Cindy came in. She’d taken off her uniform shirt and was sleeping in her sports bra, her belt with its holstered gun, taser, and baton at her side. She opened her eyes and watched as Cindy carefully closed the door behind her, making sure that she didn’t accidentally knock aside the pillow they’d been using as a doorstop. With the power out and even the emergency generator offline, there was nothing to prevent the guest room doors from automatically locking if they closed all the way.

  “Find some food?” Sharon asked.

  “A little. Ready for dinner?”

  Sharon sat up to peer into the carton put down beside her. “That all? Couldn’t you find something else?”

  “Sorry. Didn’t have a chance to look.” Cindy told her about the cook. Sharon’s expression didn’t change, but Cindy figured that cops were usually poker-faced when it came to that sort of thing. And she left out the part about what’s-his-name. No point in complaining about that; they had worse things to worry about.

  “Well…anyway, I’m glad you made it back alive.” Sharon selected a box of Cheerios, but didn’t immediately open it. One of the hand-held radios the cops had borrowed from the hotel lay on the desk; their own cell radios no longer worked, forcing them to use the older kind. Sharon picked it up and thumbed the Talk button. “Charlie Baker Two, Charlie Baker One. How’s everything looking?”

  A couple of seconds went by, then Officer Overby’s voice came over. “Charlie Baker Two. 10-24, all clear.”

  “Ten-four. Will relieve you in fifteen minutes. Out.” Sharon put down the radio, then nodded to the smartphone that lay on the dresser. “What’s happening there? Any change?”

  Cindy picked up her phone, ran her finger down its screen. The phone would become silent once the charge ran down, but there was still a little bit of red on the battery icon. She pressed the volume control, and once again they heard the only sound it made:

  Tick…tick-tick…tick-tick-tick-tick…tick…tick-tick…

  Like a cheap stopwatch that skipped seconds. That wasn’t what she immediately noticed, though, but instead the mysterious number that appeared on its screen: 4,576,036,057, a figure that decreased by one with each tick.

  For the last three days, Cindy’s phone had done nothing else but tick irregularly and display a ten-digit number that changed every second or so. What these things signified, she had no clue, but everyone else’s phones, pads, and laptops had been doing the same thing ever since the blackout.

  It started the moment she was standing on the curb outside the airport, flagging down a cab while at the same time calling her friend in St. Paul to tell her that she’d arrived. That was when the phone suddenly went dead. Thinking that her call had been dropped, she’d pulled the phone from her ear, glanced at the screen…and heard the first weird ticks coming from it.

  She was still staring at the numbers which had appeared on the LCD display when the cab that was about pull up to the curb slammed into the back of a shuttle bus. A few
seconds later, the pavement shook beneath her feet and she heard the rolling thunder of an incoming airliner crashing on the runway and exploding. That was how it all began…

  Cindy glanced at her watch. Nearly 6 P.M. Perhaps the atrium would cool down a little once the mid-summer sun was no longer resting on the skylight windows. Unfortunately, the coming night would also mean that the robots would have an easier time tracking anyone still outside; their infrared vision worked better than their normal eyes, someone had explained to her. Probably Dale. He seemed to know a lot about such things.

  Almost as if she’d read her mind, Sharon looked up from strapping on her belt. “Oh, by the way…Dale asked me to tell you that he’d like to see you.”

  Cindy was halfway to the bathroom; its door was closed against the stench of an unflushed toilet. She stopped and turned around. “Dale? Did he say why?”

  “You said you’re carrying a satphone, didn’t you? He’d like to borrow it.”

  “Yeah, why not?” Cindy shrugged. “We won’t get anyone with it. I’ve already tried to call my folks in Boston.”

  “I told him that, but…” Sharon finished buttoning her shirt. “C’mon. I’d like to see what he’s got in mind.”

  Dale’s cabana was on the other side of the pool. Like Cindy, he was rooming with a cop: Karl Overby, Sharon’s partner. In his case, though, it was a matter of insistence. Cindy didn’t know much about him other than that he worked for some federal agency, he knew a lot about computers, and his job was important enough that he requested—demanded, really—that he stay with a police officer. Dale was pleasant enough—he faintly resembled Cindy’s old high school math teacher, whom she’d liked—but he’d been keeping a certain distance from everyone else in the hotel.