by Paul Mceuen
“Inside.”
“Well, then, my boy, you are golden.”
Dylan smiled.
“Okay. Why do elephants paint the undersides of their feet yellow?”
Dylan worked it over. “You got me. No idea.”
“So they can hide upside down in bowls of custard.”
“That’s stupid.”
Liam shrugged. “Have you ever found an elephant in your custard?”
“No.”
“Then it clearly works.”
Dylan laughed, then focused on a spot a few feet away. “Pop-pop? Something’s wrong with Mickey.”
Mickey the MicroCrawler stood motionless a few rows over, frozen in place like a statue. Liam leaned over, nudged the Crawler with his tweezers. “Hmmm.” Liam picked it up, acutely conscious of its tiny silicon legs, edges as sharp as a scalpel. He dropped the Crawler in his palm and poked it again with his tweezers. Nothing. He flipped Mickey onto its back and immediately saw the problem. “See that little black spot? The control circuit burned out. Jake said they’d had trouble with this batch.”
“He can’t fix it?”
“Nope.”
“He’s completely, utterly dead?”
“Afraid so.”
Dylan’s eyes narrowed. “I’ve never seen one die before.”
“Crawlers are robust little buggers, but they’re not immortal. Nothing is.” Liam put a hand on the boy’s shoulder. “What do you say we give Mickey a proper sendoff?”
Liam went to his computer, the Crawler still in hand. He clicked his way to iTunes and queued up the old Irish dirge “Lament for Art Ó Laoghaire.” He gave Dylan a wiggle of his eyebrows, but Dylan suddenly looked serious.
The dirge picked up:
My rider of the bright eyes
What happened to you yesterday?
I thought you in my heart
When I bought your fine clothes.
A man the world could not slay.
“Let’s find you a nice spot,” he said to Mickey. He chose a diminutive patch of earth near the center of the gardens. He dropped the Crawler there, on its back, legs in the air. Liam noted the coordinates of the plot where he had placed Mickey and typed them into the computer.
Dylan watched closely. “What are you doing, Pop-pop?”
“Patience, little man. Some things can’t be rushed.”
Three MicroCrawlers appeared, zipping along the grid of passageways that cut between the plots like rows in a farmer’s field. They arrived at Mickey’s location and immediately began tossing aside bits of dirt, digging a hole. Within seconds they had created a cavity large enough to hold their fallen comrade. Then they descended on him, tearing off his silicon legs, his head, ripping him thoroughly and completely apart.
Dylan was spellbound. “Oh, wow. This is so freaky.”
“Keep watching.” The Crawlers tossed Mickey’s assorted bits into the tiny grave. Next came two more Crawlers, which disgorged their contents onto Mickey, vomiting up tiny water droplets filled with spores.
“Pop-pop? You made a fungus that can break down a Crawler? How?”
Liam smiled. “I borrowed genes from a bacterium that makes an acid. It can etch silicon.” He used his tweezers to dig at a nearby plot. Inside was an older Crawler, half gone, covered with a thin film of fuzzy growth. “See? Not bad, eh?”
Dylan watched with a focus reserved for the weightiest of matters.
Back at the original site, the MicroCrawlers began filling the hole, and after a few seconds Mickey the Crawler was almost entirely covered. They patted down the earth with their silicon legs and skittered away. All that was left was a quarter-sized lump of soft earth and a solitary leg poking up like a tiny blade of silver grass.
“And that’s that. Except it’s not. A couple of months from now, Mickey will be thoroughly broken down to its atomic bits. Ready for another go.”
“But he won’t be Mickey anymore. He’s dead.”
“I like to think he’s still alive,” Liam said. “A bit of his aliveness in everything. Now. Back to boy-girl relationships. What’s the latest with your mom’s boyfriend?”
Dylan pulled his gaze away from the tiny grave.
“Mark? He’s history.”
Liam whistled. “That was quick. What happened?”
“She said he wasn’t right.”
“What do you think?”
“He wasn’t right.”
“Then off with his head.”
Dylan turned and looked at his great-grandfather. “What about Jake?”
“For your mother?”
“Yeah. Why not?”
“Hmmm.” Liam placed his hands on the table. Jake. Jake Sterling. It was a scenario he’d considered many times. “I don’t think he’s your mom’s type.”
“Why not?”
“No reason. Just not.”
He tried to be straight with Dylan whenever he could. Dylan was a smart kid, understood more of the world than most kids his age. But this was something beyond his reach.
TWENTY MINUTES LATER, THEY WERE WITH MAGGIE OUTSIDE of Clark Hall in the brisk autumn night. She stood waiting by her car, in jeans and a brown pullover sweater, looking lovely, as always, her blond-red hair framing bright, intelligent eyes, a small upturned nose, and pale lips.
“Mom, guess what? We had a Crawler funeral.”
“Care to explain that one?”
Dylan told her about the fungus that could decompose a MicroCrawler. Then he jumped into the car, put in his earbuds, and turned up the music, a kid just like any other. Liam watched her reaction, taking joy at the flash of excitement in her eyes. “Let me guess: you stole a few genes from an archaeal bacterium?”
Liam nodded. “An alkaliphilic.”
Maggie kissed her grandfather on the cheek. “Congratulations. Now come home with us. Have a late dinner. Tell me all about it.”
“Can’t. I have a northern blot running. And an RNA assay to finish.”
“Pop-pop. Come on. You look like you’re about to collapse.”
“I always look like this. ‘An aged man is but a paltry thing, a tattered coat—’
“‘—upon a stick.’ Don’t be like this. It’s late. It’s almost nine.”
Liam kissed her on the forehead. “Go.”
LIAM RETURNED ALONE DOWN THE EMPTY HALLWAYS. MAGGIE was right. An eighty-six-year-old man should be spending every second he had with his family, not in a research lab alone, shuffling genes in and out of fungi. But this was the way it had to be. His work was not yet finished.
Liam stopped at the door to his lab and listened. No sound.
He was worried, not without cause. The woman, the one who had been following him, was getting more brazen, less and less worried about being seen. He’d had fame-struck stalkers like this twice before—an unfortunate side effect of the kind of notoriety Liam had achieved—but nothing had ever come of it. The police had talked to them, and they’d faded away. Liam had dutifully reported this one to the campus police, but they had yet to identify her.
Perhaps she was harmless, perhaps not. She was the right age, but she didn’t move like a starstruck graduate student.
She moved like a professional.
Liam typed in a few commands and stood back to watch the Crawlers, then put his arthritic fingers to work at the thousand little tasks that the Crawlers still couldn’t do. They couldn’t, for example, set goals, choose which fungi to cull and which to propagate. They didn’t have an agenda to guide their actions. Agendas mattered a great deal. Liam’s agenda had been clear for more than sixty years, since that spring day in the Pacific. An agenda he kept entirely to himself.
Liam thought of Jake. On the pretext of showing Jake a rare herd of pure white deer that roamed the premises, Liam had taken him to Seneca Army Depot, an abandoned military facility thirty miles north and west. But the real reason for their trip was different. Liam had started to tell Jake things, peel back the layers. Jake was a student of war, he understood.
But Jake didn’t know more still. He didn’t know what that bastard Lawrence Dunne had started. Jake didn’t know that Liam had in his possession one of the seven brass cylinders. Or that after over sixty years, he had finally found the Uzumaki’s weakness.
Click.
Liam froze. The noise came from just outside the lab.
“Maggie?”
He wouldn’t put it past her to come back and make another attempt to pull him away.
No answer.
“Jake?” He was a night owl, too. Liam often found him in his labs past midnight. “Jake?”
Liam listened. Nothing.
He looked around his lab. The Crawlers were in the gardens. The computer screen had put itself to sleep.
Nothing out of the ordinary.
Click!
The lights went out.
2
TINK, TINK, TINK.
When Liam Connor came to, the sound was the first thing that broke through.
Tink, tink, tink.
He was confused, unstuck in time, flashes coming quick and disjointed. He was twelve, walking the green hills of Sligo, hunting new species of fungi. He was twenty-two, on a warship in the Pacific, contemplating a small brass cylinder in his hand. He was thirty-one, in their first house in Ithaca, watching his wife crawl out of bed, completely naked. He was fifty-nine, the king of Sweden hanging a medal on his neck. He was seventy-seven, seeing his great-grandson for the first time, Dylan’s little beet-red face scrunched and screaming.
Tink, tink, tink.
After a moment, he settled down, becoming his current self. He was an old, old man, an Irish gnome. Eighty-six. Emeritus professor of biology at Cornell University.
He tried to move, but everything was wrong. He couldn’t lift his arms. He couldn’t open his mouth. He had the sense he was upright, but he couldn’t be sure. His vision was blurry, smudges in black. He couldn’t see anything, save for a faint glow coming from behind him. It was a mix of yellow, green, and red, each color ebbing and strengthening to its own rhythm.
Tink, tink, tink.
The sound was familiar. He knew the sound. What the hell was it?
He tried to remember what had happened. He had been in his lab, he was sure of that, tending to the gardens of decay. The gardens. He was fiddling in the gardens, then—then nothing. A blank spot in his memory. Was it still the same night? Still Monday?
He couldn’t move his head. He was upright, but he couldn’t move. Someone had struck him; he remembered that now. He could still feel the blow.
He heard another sound. A rush of air, slight, gentle. Silence. Then again.
Breathing.
He was sure of it. Someone was sitting right behind him. In the darkness. Very close.
Tink, tink, tink.
He tried to open his mouth, to speak, but he couldn’t move. His mouth wouldn’t open. Something was wrong with his tongue. It was trapped against the bottom of his mouth.
He studied his surroundings, fighting a pain like a knife blade between his eyes. He was in a huge room in the shape of a half-cylinder. The concrete roof twenty feet overhead curved in a smooth semicircle to the floor. He faced the back end of the cylinder, the flat, stained concrete wall no more than ten feet from his face. Liam realized where he was: an old munitions bunker on the abandoned Seneca Army Depot site, completely isolated from the rest of the world. Liam had spent months at the depot over the past four years, secretly toiling over his last great—and highly secret—project.
A woman stepped in front of him, her face illuminated by the dim, pulsing glow coming from behind. He recognized her immediately as the woman who had been following him. She was Asian—Chinese, he was nearly certain. Somewhere between twenty and thirty, wearing small, round glasses. She leaned forward, her face no more than twelve inches from his, features illuminated by an ever-changing mix of yellow, green, and red light. She was pretty, made more so by the flaws of two thin, perfectly symmetric scars that ran along her cheekbones. She wore all black, down to the gloves on her hands.
She flicked on a photographer’s light, mounted on a stand beside her. He blinked against the sudden brightness, waited for the blotches of white to settle down into shape and color. He tried to speak but couldn’t open his mouth. He felt as though his head were in a vise.
Once his eyes adjusted, she held up a small mirror so he could see himself. She adjusted the angle until he caught his reflection.
He was a shocking sight. His head was encased in a metal frame, with struts and bands holding his skullcase like a patient with a neck injury. A rubber-and-steel clamp held his jaw rigidly fixed. He looked old, incredibly old, even older than his eighty-six years. The wrinkles on his face were a cracked riverbed, and tufts of white hair stuck out every which way from his skull. He was a corpse, a ghost, strapped into headgear from a Frankensteinian nightmare.
She lowered the mirror. When she spoke, her English was excellent but still bore traces of her native land. “A mutual friend sent me,” she said.
She was Chinese, from the north, he guessed. He felt a tremor at the base of his spine. What she said next nearly stopped his heart.
“I came for the Uzumaki.”
Tink, tink, tink.
The sound. He knew the sound.
He looked down. A glass petri dish sat in her lap. Four sparkling objects were in the center of the dish, scurrying about, each no larger than a dime.
MicroCrawlers.
They skittered around in the petri dish with terrifying speed, colliding with the walls, tink, tink, tink. Their legs were segmented etched silicon, sharp as razor blades.
He closed his eyes, but he could still hear the tink of silicon against glass.
“I’ve taken this place apart. Where is it?”
He forced himself to focus. He hadn’t yet seen a gun. If he could get loose, he’d have a chance. He was a small man, impossibly old, but he was still quick, and he could be brutally vicious when he needed to be.
Tink, tink, tink.
She reached toward him and touched a spot on his headgear. A whirring sound. The headgear pried open his jaw with a mechanical precision, rigid, like the door of a safe. The air was cold on the back of his throat.
Tink, tink, tink.
She lifted her right hand and closed her fingers into a fist. The Crawlers stopped their incessant scurrying in the glass dish. The sudden silence was jarring. Somehow she controlled the Crawlers with her gloved hand.
She picked up one of the Crawlers with a pair of tweezers. She placed the little robotic creature deep inside his mouth, on the back of his tongue. He had to fight not to panic, not to gag. The legs were like tiny scalpels, cutting into the tissue with even the slightest movement. He could taste droplets of blood rising up on the back of his tongue.
She touched another button and the piezo motors buzzed, closing his mouth for him, clamping his teeth together with an audible tock! She placed a hand on his mouth, sealing his lips. With two delicate fingers, she reached out and pinched his nose closed.
“Swallow it,” she said.
The seconds ticked away, probably a minute, before he panicked. He struggled violently against his bonds, his body rebelling against the lack of oxygen. He felt as though he might break a bone at any minute. His will was strong, but he knew his body couldn’t take this kind of punishment. He held out as long as he could, thrashing and pulling, but then his vision started to go.
You can’t not breathe; breathing is involuntary.
You swallow.
He felt the Crawler progress down his esophagus, the sharp burning as the legs tore at the soft tissues. He tried to scream, but he couldn’t move his jaw, couldn’t lift his tongue. He was locked down, froz
en, the sound of his scream trapped inside his head.
She removed her hands, and he gasped for air through clenched teeth, chest heaving. He tried to make sense of what was happening.
She pushed the button, and his mouth again opened. She used a small flashlight to look inside. “Good,” she said.
She repeated this agonizing procedure three more times, until he had a total of four Crawlers in his belly. Liam fought to get control of himself, to quell the panic. He had to stay strong. He knew what she wanted. He couldn’t let her have it. No matter what it took. No matter how much he would have to suffer.
She held her gloved hand up before him, fingers curled, as if her hand were a spider. “Ten seconds,” she said.
She wiggled her fingers, bringing the Crawlers to life.
His entire body lit on fire, his teeth cracking together with brutal force. His stomach convulsed, twitching from the pain from a burning sun suddenly ignited inside him. His vision went white. He had never felt a pain like this, the twisting, roiling monster in his stomach sending out wave after wave of agony. Time slowed down.
He became unstuck, drifting in time. He saw birds, flying birds, chased by men with very large guns. A distant bell rang. He saw the ship, the line in the sky, the mushroom cloud, like it had happened yesterday. He saw thousands of tiny spirals spreading across the firmament like sparks from a fire.
Far away, he heard her voice, counting down numbers: “Three, two, one…”
The pain slowly subsided. It took what seemed like hours for his body to recover, for the convulsions in his stomach to fade. His eyes were squeezed shut. His cheeks were cold. He was crying.
He returned to himself. He opened his eyes. The woman was there, her gloved index finger tapping at her lips.
“TELL ME,” ORCHID SAID. “BLINK TWICE IF YOU ARE READY.”
She studied him, watching for the signs. The signs that he was breaking. She glanced at his hands. When they gave up, the hands relaxed, became dead fish. Connor’s were clenched. Connor had not given up.
“Professor Connor, listen carefully,” she said as she picked up the roll of medical tape. “You may think what just happened is the worst I can do to you. It is not. It will get much, much worse.”