Creatures of the Storm (36 page)

Rose shrugged. She didn’t have any idea.

Lucy took a vicious bite
out of the apple. “Thinner than this skin,” she said with her mouth
full. “Think about it. Thinner than the skin
on this apple.” She swallowed with some difficulty. “We don’t
want to think about it, Rose, but we’re
tiny
.
Balanced so
precariously between two
canyons of extinction that it terrifies us to even consider it. Is
it any surprise that one little shove, one little rainstorm, can
do…
this?
” She
gestured with the half-eaten apple, sweeping it all in: the window,
the town beyond it, the creatures eating the house one bite at a
time.

“That doesn’t even begin to
explain the things
downstairs,” Rose said.
“They’re like animals—”

“They’re not animals,” Ken said abruptly, and
turned to face them.

Lucy frowned. “What?”

“What’s the old Bio 101 definition of life?”
he asked, his eyes shining. “It has to eat, it has to poop, it has
to move, it has to reproduce. Right?”

“‘Poop’?” Lucy said. “Is that a technical
term?”

“‘Falafel balls?’” he shot back.

She smirked. “Point taken.”

“Think about it,” Ken said.
“These creatures don’t pass the test. They move, that’s true. The
may eat, if they can somehow get nourishment from the water they
absorb, but even Steinberg couldn’t find any evidence of it.
And
living
things
this big, no matter how efficient, need a huge amount of biomass to
keep going, like the whales that live on krill who have to eat
constantly or starve. These things are much more active than a
whale, much more kinetic. Meanwhile, no pooping, and no babies. No
sign of either.”

“So maybe we simply haven’t –”

“—and no mention of it in
your scientist’s notes here, either,” Ken said. “Tons of
information on growth and locomotion.
Nothing
on excretion or
reproduction.”

Now it was Lucy’s turn to stop and stare.
“Huh,” she said. “Hadn’t thought of that.”

Ken allowed himself a very
small smile. “I know. I only noticed it because they’re more
similar to the things
I
build than to the things
you
study.”

He looked at her directly
for the first time, eyes still shining. “Really, Lucy. Think about
it. These things are
machines
. Highly specialized
machines.”

“Made out of iron-hard papier-mâché and
bone-stuff,” Rose said. She was agreeing with him.

“Right,” he said. “I wouldn’t even call it
organic, exactly. It’s more like crystallization or magnetic
accretion than it is cellular growth. But…yeah. Robots made from
bone.”

Lucy nodded and looked back out the window.
“That would explain why the electricity works on them. It’s
scrambling their signals, disrupting their thinking processes like
an EMP on a silicon chip.”

“Or nearly so, yes,” Ken
said. “It also explains the complete lack of a brain or nervous
system in the creatures that Steinberg dissected. If they’re not
animals, if they’re
servomechanisms,
they don’t
need
a brain. Somebody –
some
thing
– else
does the thinking for them, and tells them what to do.”

“Electromagnetism,” Lucy said. “They’d have
electromagnetic signatures of their own, even if they don’t have a
heat signature. And they’d be receiving signals from some other,
much more powerful EM source.”

Ken looked up at the ceiling. “Maggie,” he
said, “before we were interrupted, you were pulling down EM data
from the satellites.”

“The satellite link is gone, Ken,” she said
gently.

“I know
that. Did you save the data before we were cut
off?”

A long pause. The three humans looked at each
other.

“Yes,” Maggie said finally. “And I still have
access to…it.”

“Can you overlay that on a scaled map of Dos
Hermanos?” he asked, speaking slowly and carefully. “Make it one
map?”

“Don’t talk to me like I’m
an idiot, please,” Maggie said. “I’m having a bad day. Even in my
current state, I’m smarter than
you
.”

He grinned. “Sorry. Can you pull that up,
please?”

“It’ll take some processing time, but I’ll
put it on the laptop screen.”

“Thank you.”

“While you wait, I will entertain you with a
rendition of HAL 9000’s greatest hits. ‘Daayyyzzzeeee,
Dayyyzeee…”

“Thanks, that won’t be necessary.”

Maggie stopped.

“Jesus,” he said. “How could I have built a
personality as sarcastic as that?”

“I have no idea,” Rose said.

The picture built on the screen with painful
slowness, far more slowly than it should have, Rose knew. She could
see the look of nearly physical pain on her father’s face as it
appeared one line at a time.

It was a good
look in spite of his discomfort. This was her old
Dad, come back from the dead. The one who was thinking, always
thinking. Not the sorry son of a bitch who had possessed him for
the last two years, the defeated one, the broken one, the one who
spent every waking moment feeling sorry for himself and waiting for
the next blow to fall.

This
Dad was a pain in the ass. He did stupid things sometimes; he
forgot birthdays and broke promises and occasionally was
inexcusably selfish. But this was the Dad she had always loved, and
she was so glad to see him it made her want to cry.

Ken glanced away from the screen and looked
at her. He must have seen something in her eyes, in her expression.
He didn’t look away. He held her for a long moment. He touched her
hand.

Something huge and
glass
shattered
downstairs.

“There goes the chandelier,” he said.

“I hated it anyway,” Rose said. “Didn’t go
with the décor at all.”

“There you go,” Maggie said. The image on the
laptop screen was complete. They turned back to it, standing close
together now. Rose liked that.

Flares of electromagnetic discharge were
scattered like diamond chips all over the north-south ellipse that
was Dos Hermanos as seen from space. Some of the blocks and blobs
were obviously buildings, thin spiderwebs showed power lines. But
there were thick, tangled output up in the hills as well, and in
clusters near the VeriSil plant.

The two wobbly circles of The Brothers, the
two tall, narrow hills at the far southern end of the ellipse, were
on fire. White-hot with EM discharge.

“There,” Ken said, pointing to the Brothers.
“There’s your brain.”

Lucy was standing close behind them. She had
been waiting at the window, watching the march of lightning from
north to south as the storm grew ever more severe, dipped even
lower.

“Well,
good,
” she said. “Because if that’s
the real monster we’re after, I have a way to kill it.”

There was a shuddering BOOM! downstairs. The
staircase had collapsed.

The destruction of the
hacienda
had become a nearly
continuous roar under their feet.

“Okay,” Lucy said, her voice rough with fear.
“Enough dicking around. We gotta get the fuck out of here.” For no
apparent reason, she bent over at the waist and snatched at an
extension cord that was plugged into the wall at her feet. “You
have a pen knife?” As she straightened up she gave Rose the eye.
“You. You must have a switchblade, right?”

Rose started to say something filthy but her
father got between them. He held up a red and silver device as big
as a small banana. “Will this do?” he said. Rose recognized it, a
super-deluxe Swiss Army knife, exactly the kind of nerdy multi-tool
her Dad always carried. She remembered how much her mother hated
it; it was always ruining the line of his pants.

Lucy nodded with grim satisfaction and took
it from him. “I'm going—”

The noise from below and
outside was so loud that Rose barely heard the chorus to Kanye
West’s
Golddigger.

Her cell phone was ringing.

She didn’t even look to see who was calling.
It had to be her mother. There was no one else she could
imagine.

She turned away from the two adults and
welded the phone to her ear, almost hissing into the phone.
“Mom!”

“Rose?” said a soft, cultured female voice.
She had to strain to hear it over the rip-tear-crackle coming up
through the floor, out of the walls. “Rose, it’s Maggie.”

She was stunned. She
glanced at her dad and Lucy, but they were muttering to each other,
completely ignoring her. One of the tablets had video of a security
cam running; it showed a raft covered with construction material,
bobbing in the current. Another showed the Two Brothers, even
farther to the south, their steep side bare of any vegetation at
all, glittering with rivulets that cut through the shallow topsoil
like bursting veins. Dad kept glancing at the videos as he drew
some kind of crude diagram on the back of printout. Lucy was
scraping plastic insulation off the long, unplugged extension cord
as she listened to him.
What is that all
about?
Rose wondered in spite of
herself.

“I wanted to talk to you in private for a
minute,” Maggie said in her ear.

Rose frowned. “Okay...”

“You’re going to be leaving soon. I wanted to
tell you how good it was to meet you.”

Rose blinked at that. “All right,” she said.
She really didn’t know how to answer.

“I have two things I’d like you to take with
you, if you don’t mind,” Maggie said.

Rose frowned. “What—”

She had been standing next
to her father’s desk with its jumbled collection of paper and tech.
A white box barely larger than a pack of cigarettes twittered. A
small inset green light on the short side of the box flickered at
her. “I've written my core coding to this exterior hard drive,
Rose. It's all that Ken wrote and the changes that have been added
since by the parallel processors. I have no idea if this can all be
stored, if that’s
me
on there, or a twin of me, or nothing more than busted code,
but…I’d like you to take it with you. Just in case.”

The chill got deeper, and Rose glanced over
her shoulder to make sure Lucy and her Dad weren't watching. They
weren't; Lucy had acquired a second extension cord somewhere and
was stripping the insulation off that as well, wrapping the
gleaming bare wire around her arm like an electrical contractor.
She wasn't even glancing in Rose's direction.

Rose quietly unplugged the drive. “I’ve got
it,” she said, and tucked it into one of the pockets of her khaki
jacket. She buttoned it firmly shut.

As she did, the laser printer on the other
side of the desk began to hum.

“One more thing? Please?” Maggie said.

“Look, I—”

“One sheet. Already done. You don’t even have
to read it. Just put it away in another pocket. It’s for Ken.”

“For…?”

“Later,” Maggie said. “Please.”

There was something in that
voice, something entirely
un
mechanical,
un
synthesized. Without another word,
Rose took the sheet of paper, folded it in quarters, and buttoned
it into her left breast pocket.

“Thank you,” Maggie said when she was
finished. “Good luck. I truly hope to speak with you again.”

Rose hunched forward.
“Look,” she said, “this is
totally
weird, but…but I want to thank you,” she said,
astounded at the words coming out of her own mouth.

There was a long pause. For
a moment Rose thought she had offended Maggie somehow, then she
realized what a truly bizarre idea that was…and then remembered how
long the pauses were getting.
Processing
speed
, she reminded herself.
She’s getting stupider by the minute.

“Thank me for what?” Maggie finally said.

“My dad was a basket case
when he came here,” she said softly, head down. “He had no friends,
no direction,
nothing
. Just money. And now…now he’s
different
. I think the car accident
had something to do with it, but that’s not all. There’s something
more that helped him come back. I’m thinking maybe it was your, um,
friendship. He needed somebody and you were there, and even if you
started out as nothing more than lines of Linux or something, I can
tell, something
happened
. You’re special, and you
helped him.”

The response was a little too prompt. “That’s
very kind, thank you.”

Rose frowned. “You didn’t quite understand
what I said, did you?”

Another pause. Even longer.
“No,” Maggie admitted. “The material I gave you took a long time
for me to put together, and I did most of it…
before
. When I hadn’t lost so much.
Now…I will think about what you said, Rose. For as long as I
can.”

Rose smiled sadly. “And remember the ‘thank
you’ part, okay? You can forget the rest.”

“I will think about it.”

“I know.”

The light in front of her shifted. She turned
to see her father standing over her, frowning in puzzlement.

“That’s not working, is it?” he said. “The
wind knocked down all the towers.”