Bug Park

Disagreement over the DNC interfacing had led to Eric’s decision to set up on his own. After the original micromecs were pioneered at Microbotics, where he had been head of research, a split of opinion had developed over which way to go with operator interfacing to best exploit the substantial applications potential by that time recognized to exist. Most of the senior management were for staying with the body-suit and force-feedback methods that they were familiar with—proven technology from the virtual reality industry. Eric, on the other hand, was convinced that a more fruitful future lay with perfecting the partly solved direct neural approach. When the decision went against him, he left and founded his own company, Neurodyne, to pursue his ideas independently. Now, Ohira thought that DNC would be the key to opening up a whole new market that the journal reviews and applications studies had missed completely.

The space they descended to at the back of the house was a mix of workshop and laboratory, with benches, tool racks, keyboards, screens, lumps of electronics draped in tangles of colored wire—the kind of thing that Michelle had come to expect by now. The windows along the outer wall looked out over the grassy slope leading down through trees to the inlet, where a boat dock was partly visible beyond a fringe of rocky mounds and bushes hiding the shoreline.

A large table supported an artificial geography of wooden plateaus, steps, and obstacles, which Michelle was now able to recognize as the miniature world of a mec testing ground, complete with several inhabitants. Some of them were bipedal, others more insect-like. In general, these were not as tiny as the ones she had seen earlier at Neurodyne. She remembered Eric saying that the models the boys worked with were older prototypes and test batches—precursors to the state-of-the-art models in the company’s laboratories.

She also identified DNC headsets and collars—distinctly lab-lashup variety in appearance, with connectors bolted to panels of hand-cut aluminum, and bundles of wires secured with duct tape. Three chairs decked with more gadgetry and wiring served as couplers. One was a regular lounge recliner with the footrest removed and foam rubber pads where most of the upholstery was supposed to be; the other two looked familiar in pattern, their associated electronics mounted on hinge-down trays at the back. Michelle moved some cables aside to read a half-hidden label attached to one of the seat backs: use seat cushion for flotation device. She frowned and looked at Kevin questioningly.

He shrugged and made an apologetic gesture, as if some justification were called for. "We got them from Boeing’s clearance basement. Ten dollars each."

"You can’t beat that," Michelle said.

Eric grinned at her and patted the headrest of one of the two airliner seats. "Okay, Michelle, you know the drill by now. Get yourself comfortable, and I’ll connect you up."

"I’m going for another ride?"

"Sure. That’s what you’re here for."

Michelle turned and lowered herself down into the seat. It was not as restful as the specially made model that she’d tried earlier, but she had endured hours in these on enough occasions. Kevin and Taki occupied the other two, Kevin taking the modified lounge chair. They seemed to have the connections and adjustments preset, slipping into the equipment without needing assistance.

Unlike the headsets that she had seen at Neurodyne, this one included plug earphones and a stem microphone. "We added sound to the mecs that the boys use here," Eric explained. "It’s not something that we need in the labs, as you saw. But for the kind of thing they do, it adds a whole new dimension."

There was another visual test pattern and checks of field motion correlating with imagined head movements. "Does everything look good?" Eric asked. His voice didn’t sound close by her as before, coming through the phones this time. "Can you hear me okay?"

"Everything feels just fine. . . ."

She had expected to find herself somewhere in the miniature landscape of straight lines and flat surfaces that she had seen on the tabletop. Instead, she was in some kind of large room, dark inside but with light coming through the wall facing her, made of what looked like frosted glass. A metal band that had been clamped around her waist as a restraint sprung open on release of a catch, freeing her. There was a warm, pleasant sensation in the middle of her back, roughly where her shoulder blades would be if she’d had any. She turned to investigate. After her familiarization that afternoon, adapting to being in a mechanical body again came more easily this time.

She had been standing in one of four vertical recesses in a block of whitish, waxy-looking material that formed most of the near wall and extended to the ceiling. Several rounded golden pads projected a few inches on the inside of the recess, a little below shoulder height. Another mec, with a squat, angular body and froglike, football-shaped head carrying eyes at the extremities, was inactive in an adjacent recess, secured as she had been by a metal band around the waist. It was painted yellow with black stripes, like a tiger. The remaining two recesses were empty. Oddly curving pipes snaked through the shadows to the sides of the room, down to the corners, and overhead.

The transition had been so sudden that it took Michelle a few seconds to accommodate to her situation. The "room" had to be a box of some kind—a receptacle that mecs were stored in. The pipes were wiring, she decided. And the gold pads looked like electrical contacts.

"Can anybody hear me?" she said.

"We’re reading," Eric’s voice answered in the phones.

"What’s this funny feeling in my back? It’s not unpleasant at all. Just . . . ‘funny.’ "

An image appeared superposed on her visual field of a dial-type gauge colored red at the left-hand end, amber farther toward the center, and the remainder of the arc green. A white pointer sat hard to the right, in the green. The caption below read Charge. Along with it were several other gauges, a thermometer symbol with its column again showing green, and more figures whose meaning was not obvious. "You’ll start feeling cold in your back as you run down," Eric’s voice said. "Neat, eh? We wanted to link it to the hunger response, which would have been even neater—but it never worked properly. You can activate the display yourself at any time." The superposed data vanished. "Wag your finger sharply to cue the system, then point it to select status from the menu."

Michelle was unsure what he meant. She extended a finger—one of three, formed from jointed, square-section metal segments actuated by rods protruding from grooves—and waved it vaguely. "Like this?"

"No, sharply. As if you’re ticking someone off."

She tried again, this time as if she were trying to shake something sticky off the end. A bar of boxes containing words, like the pull-down menus on a computer screen, superposed itself on her view this time, listing status, keyboard, map, and other options, along with associated icons. She pointed to highlight status, and then stabbed her finger in the standard manner used with VR systems. The display that she had seen previously returned. She wagged her finger once again, and it vanished.

"You’ve got the idea," Eric’s voice said. "The other functions can wait till later. In the meantime, why not try a walk outside?"

"Which way’s out?"

"Turn around."

Michelle looked down and at her arms to get a better feel of herself, and was curious to see that she was colored red and orange. She turned back to face the frosted glass wall and saw that it was opening outward and upward on an overhead hinge, like a huge garage door. Outside was a mountainside, green in the sunshine, and beyond it an ocean . . . except that it couldn’t be, of course. She thought rapidly over what she could remember seeing, trying to make sense of the situation. "Where am I?" she asked. "Somewhere down by the shore?"

"Go and find out," Eric suggested. Michelle guessed that, as before with the lab setup, he had a monitor that reproduced what she was seeing.

She walked out into the sunlight. Although the mec was several times larger than the one she had used in the lab, the power for its weight was still enormously greater than what a lifetime of everyday experiences had conditioned her to think of as normal. It gave her a feeling of moving without weighing anything at all, of limitless energy and unbounded strength. Too much so. In her exuberance she forgot that coordination required a different "feel," and pitched full-length onto the white rocky ground outside. The jolt hit her solidly in the hands and knees. Strangely, she felt herself winded and gasping—whether through some reflex association or another of Eric’s ingenious neural feedback connections she was unable to tell. Fortunately, he had not taken realism so far as to stimulate pain receptors. She turned over awkwardly, making metallic rasping noises on the rock, and sat up. There were no Great Tweezers In The Sky to put her back on her feet this time—everybody was still in the house, while the mec that she was occupying was God-knew-where, possibly hundreds of yards away. With her weight effectively nothing, getting up was more a matter of balance control than effort. What made it difficult was the light-headed and mildly nauseating feeling that came with having to rely on vision, without help from the normal internal balance sense. It was like having to consciously focus on coordinating movement after having too much alcohol, which probably accounted for the giddiness. But with some experimenting she succeeded in tottering upright again, and looked around.

The white rock looked artificial—a coarse, flat expanse stretching away on either side and ending abruptly in a straight-line edge a short distance ahead of her, like an elevated beach. Behind her and overhead, the "door" was a side of what she could see now to be a gray plastic box standing as high as a house, with molded ribs like cathedral buttresses and shiny metal screw-heads the size of garbage-can lids. Behind the box, the ground rose steeply, forming what looked like the side of a mountain: broken slopes of earth and rock interrupted by sheer cliffs, with plants the size of trees, though formed in the wrong shapes and with enormous leaves resembling pointed green sails. Beside the plastic box was a sequoia trunk without branches: a huge wooden cylinder transformed by height into a foreshortened tower rising far above her. She almost lost her balance again craning her head back to follow it, and saw a red-and-yellow pennant at its top, bright against the sky.

The "beach" that she was standing on, she realized, was concrete—a block, or a piece of block, forming a ledge in front of the gray plastic box. The box had to be a kind of movable base, at the moment placed somewhere down by the water’s edge, that Kevin and Taki operated their battlemecs from—it would protect the mecs from the weather and save having to traipse down from the house every time the boys wanted to use them. Since the box was facing the water, Michelle guessed it to be on the mounds at the bottom of the slope that she had seen from the window, facing away from the house. She turned back and moved to the edge of the concrete block to view the ground below.

No doubt the effect was a result of the graphics, but the colors had a radiant quality that made the scene even more surreal. She was looking across a valley full of monstrous plants with impossibly exaggerated verticality, rising on the far side into a tortured, alien landscape of quarried rock bluffs and boulder-strewn ravines. Beyond was a green coastal plain, fringed by a distant sandy shoreline. Another mast rose from the far side of the mountain opposite, flying a pennant of white and blue.

At an intellectual level, Michelle knew that the mountains were just mounds, and the shore a matter of mere yards away from her; but the knowledge was overwhelmed by the torrent of raw, irresistible sensory perceptions flooding her awareness. The chasm of crags and gorges between the mound that she was on and another to her left had the impact of flying through a Rocky Mountain vista in a small plane. Trying to take in the gigantic tangles below was like gazing over the canopy of an entire Amazon of mutants. Stems of grass sprouting from below brushed the ledge that she was standing on, tubular, scaly trunks looking like leaning palm trees. She turned slowly to look in the other direction. And that was when she saw a real tree.

It was growing near the ledge from behind some heaped rocks below that looked like a part of Yosemite—probably no more than a foot or two away, but it seemed a city block. Its girth was as great as a football stadium’s, an immense, vertical panoramic assault on the senses, of rust-red ridges and jagged black canyons flowing upward in a column that defied comprehension; soaring away, shrinking, paralyzing the mind—an Interstate highway stood on end; then it exploded out into a green galaxy filling half the sky. Michelle stood, unable to thread one thought after another into a coherent string. Miles above, a bird detached itself from a branch, emitted a cry that reached her from a different universe, and disappeared beyond the periphery of her vision.

"Impressed?" Eric said in her phones. "Getting the idea now, eh?"

In a way, she was sorry that he chose that moment to speak. She had just begun to get the feel of losing herself in the experience totally. Until now, having the earphones had helped. By cutting out local sounds inside the house they suppressed her awareness of the room and the others in her vicinity, and made it easier to create the illusion of really being the mec. She imagined that there was probably a way to switch out the voice channel; but to ask about it just at this moment didn’t seem very gracious.

"It’s . . . stupefying," she replied instead. "I know you told me. But it’s unlike anything I could have dreamed."

There was a whine, sounding louder suddenly, and something whizzed by erratically overhead in a blur of wings. It was too fast to leave an image but seemed alarmingly big. Michelle changed her mind about wanting to be left to absorb her reveries in solitude. Suddenly she appreciated the anchor to reality that the sound channel gave her.

Ohira’s voice came in. "Do you understand better now what I’ve been telling you? This could be a sensation, worth millions. And it’s all thanks to Taki and Mister Kevin. They’re great kids, those two."

Michelle had been so enraptured that she had forgotten about the boys. "Where are Kevin and Taki?" she said. "I don’t see them anywhere. I thought they were in the other couplers. Shouldn’t they have mecs out here too?"

"They’re on their way over," Eric answered. "They’ve got several mec boxes scattered around down there. Explore around while you’re waiting. They’ll find you."

Ah, Michelle thought to herself. So that was what the sticks and flags were for.

To her left, the concrete ledge ended at a slope of earth and rubble leading down. She began heading in that direction. The surface was not as flat as it had seemed, but pitted and lumpy, like rocks set in a swamp of frozen oatmeal. She moved carefully, placing her steps, and crossed a dark area discolored by what looked like scattered pieces of coal. Past it, she climbed gingerly over a finger of grainy, coagulated mud, and reached the slope.

It was not steep, and opened into a broader fall of convoluted sand gullies choked with pine needles the size of telephone poles, and rocky screes that slid and shifted beneath her feet. Water had sculpted the sides into crazy formations that reminded her of hydraulic mining sites she’d seen once in California.

She was still descending, when a beetle-shaped body the size of an armchair emerged from a fold in the ground a short distance away. It was encased in shiny black plates that could have been forged by a medieval armorer, and rode on thick, jointed legs feathered with barbs and ugly bristles. Michelle froze involuntarily, but before she could register anything more, the creature had scurried away and disappeared again among the boulders.

If she had thought about such things, there would have been no reason for her to be shocked or surprised. But that was the problem: She hadn’t wanted to think about the obvious reason why Kevin and Taki called their adventure ground "Bug Park." Instead, she had pushed it to the back of her mind in the illogical way that people do inconvenient truths, as if that might somehow change them.

Still keeping motionless, she directed her gaze slowly over the nearer surroundings. Other things were moving in dark caves of hanging roots; among sinuous growths looming all about her like thickets of twisted vines; watching from spaces underneath rocks and behind logs. She became acutely conscious suddenly of round, ominous-looking burrows that hadn’t been made by rabbits.

Wait; calm down; get a grip. This wasn’t really "real," she reminded herself. At the same time, she found herself wondering what kind of nerve it would take to carry on if it were real. A genuine pang of doubt assailed her that she would have been up to it. Now she was beginning to grasp what Ohira had been getting at. Seeing it was the only way. No amount of talk could have rivaled this. She felt herself suck in a long breath, even though the mec had no mouth or lungs, sensed the others watching the screen but saying nothing, and resumed moving.

The slope became more open. Descending required no exertion, but loose particle-rocks dislodged under her feet caused her to slide and stumble. She tried picking up what she took to be a thorn to use as a staff. It looked impossibly heavy and unwieldy, but she remembered Bel lifting beams in the tiny house in Neurodyne’s Training Lab, and sure enough found that she could handle it easily. The thorn worked well, and soon the concrete block was high above her, looking, with its red-and-yellow flag, like a fortress built into a mountain face in a scene from a science fiction movie.

She came to an unearthly forest, where purple cables writhed among scaly trunks and leaning spires of grass. Then the forest was dwarfed in turn by an overhanging shoulder of some distant, leafy Everest. The ground became spongy, with white spears and curled pink tendrils thrusting up through a mat of fuzzy gravel poured over tangled, spring-like fibers. She entered shadow as leaves of a drooping plant blotted out the sun, hanging over her like rounded, lot-size lawns upended in some titanic earthquake. Each leaf carried its own tree of trunk and branching veins on its underside. The spaces between were thick with curved spines, which in reality must have been barely visible hairs, and pitted by circular depressions surrounding openings leading to the interior. In some places the holes exuded rust-colored growths—she guessed, some kind of parasite, spreading and joining into patches like seaweed on a beach.

Ahead of her now was a slope covered in shredded logs, suggesting the remains of a blasted forest. It rose to the base of a turreted castle of shattered wood, defended by pale crenelations of fungus looking like huge, fantastic corals beneath a fairytale sea. In places, the mound of earth and logs was moving. Michelle stopped and backed away warily.

Then a tearing, crunching sound made her look up. One of the leaves up over her head was missing a saw-edged piece the size of a door. As she looked, another portion of the leaf disappeared, and suddenly the face of a caterpillar—if the obscene globular shape that was virtually all mouth, with just points for eyes could be called a face—was staring down from the front end of an undulating green mass the length of a railroad car, studded with spikes and portholes. Michelle retreated farther, instinctively restraining herself from moving too suddenly, but at the same time unable to prevent her steps from quickening. She knew that she was seeing through a remote sensor, and she guessed that the monster was probably harmless in any case. . . . But her capacity for reasoned control was reaching its limit. Reflexes were taking over now. Finally she allowed herself to turn, and hastened in a new direction.

It brought her onto a house-size rock with a domed top. An impassable wall of dead leaves and pine needles lay to the left, while on her other side a ramp of sand scree and pebble-boulders led down. Scuffling and clicking noises came from ahead, growing louder as she moved forward. She crossed cautiously over the steepening slope of the dome until she could see down the far side of it . . . and found herself looking at an ant freeway.

There were hundreds of them, streaming in a two-way column: pinch-waisted bodies the size of hogs, jostling and swerving, occasionally bumping to exchange pieces of substances that some carried in their mandibles. Others bore triumphantly aloft pieces of leaf and other trophies. The flowing patterns of bustle and movement were hypnotic, and even in her agitated state Michelle was unable to pull herself away. She had heard that a colony was in reality, somehow, a single, extended organism, its cells freely mobile as individuals, yet at the same time totally subordinated functional parts of the whole. She had never really understood what that meant; but here, watching them, she could feel it, chilling and unnerving, as if she were watching an entire race that had become zombies; individually mindless, yet collectively with a sinister single-mindedness of purpose evident in the endless, mechanical, marching lines.

There was movement at the edge of her field of view. A scout on the flank of the column had detected her and was coming up the ramp by the side of the dome to investigate. And it was coming fast.

Michelle finally lost the control that she had been striving to maintain. She didn’t care about this being an illusion, didn’t stop to reason or intellectualize. She couldn’t have if she’d tried. The flurry of clacking, Erector-Set legs and the sight of the tapered head with its huge eyes, antennas switching like whips, crushing mandibles extended, triggered her most basic, animal survival responses. The next she knew, she was plunging back through shoots and vines, moving faster than she’d thought possible, not sure if she had shouted out her terror. All that mattered was to get away.

A whine like a diving jet fighter came from overhead. She looked up to see a winged school bus coming out of the sky, straight at her. She certainly screamed then, but it streaked over her and came down among the overhanging leaves. One of the shoots sagged to reveal the green caterpillar that she had seen before, caged among the wasp’s legs. It convulsed and squirmed, causing the whole frond of leaves to shake. Michelle saw the wasp’s body arch, watched the sting drive into the quivering bulk. . . .

Get away, anywhere! . . .

She was back at the wood-chip mountain, scrambling frantically, causing logs and boulders to slide. The hillside burst open as the centipede emerged—amber and brown, armed with huge claws converging like pincers, and two trunklike antennas—a monstrous, loathsome, segmented train with waves of legs undulating in place of wheels. The avalanche of wood tumbled down around Michelle, bowling her over. A gigantic head studded with eyes loomed over her, ghastly beyond her worst nightmares, its sideways-gaping mouth open to expose slavering fangs. The horror overcame her. She had no voice, no will, was incapable of reacting.

Then another whine, higher-pitched than the wasp’s, came from close by; there was a quick rasping sound, and the centipede recoiled as one of its antennas flew away. Something long and deadly flashed above where Michelle was lying, and the monstrosity wheeled away, rearing to meet a different threat. Michelle rolled clear with brief impressions of a bright yellow, upright creature dodging in an amazing leap, then lunging. The centipede grappled with its claws and tried to bite, reeling back as two of its legs came off.

It was another mec! Michelle pushed herself up, staring disbelievingly. The assailant was another mec, with black and yellow stripes again, like the other one in the box back on the ledge. It was brandishing something that looked like a chain-saw ten feet long.

Again, they closed. The mec evaded the snapping claws and sprung in nimbly to hack off another leg, causing the front part of the beast to lose support and lurch over. As it did, another mec, bright red this time, raced in from the opposite side, leveling a whirring lance even longer than the saw, and drove it into the base of the centipede’s head. Coordinating perfectly, the striped mec swung the saw down at the back of its neck. The head dropped, almost severed. The remaining antenna flailed violently a few times, and then the rest of the body collapsed in a wave of shuddering legs that rippled down its length like a line of toppling dominoes. Some of the legs twitched spasmodically; then it was still.

Michelle hauled herself slowly to her feet. Somehow a shaking from her own body managed to communicate itself to her mechanical one. "Guys?" She found that she could only croak. Her mouth had dried up.

"Acme Pest and Dragon Control, at your service," Kevin’s voice said in her phones. The tiger-striped mec saluted with its saw. "Hi. It’s Kevin. Or in this outfit, better known as Tigger. What do you think?"

Its red companion withdrew the lance, revealing a rotary cutting end that bored like a drill. "No job too small. Saving pretty damsels a specialty," Taki said. "Meet the Red Lobster."

Just at that moment Michelle had never wanted to hug two people more in her life.

Eric’s voice cut in. "I think that might be enough excitement for now. Michelle’s showing a cold sweat here. Can you two guys get Carroty Chop back up to the box if we decouple her?"

"Sure," Kevin said. Michelle wasn’t going to argue with that. . . .

And seconds later she was back in the chair at the house. Her breathing was coming in quick, panting gasps, and she could feel her pulse hammering. But she was her own size once again. She wouldn’t have believed that something so basic could feel so wonderful. A few seconds more, and the helmet and phones were lifted away. Eric was grinning at her.

"Are you okay?" he asked, unfastening the collar. She nodded mutely but didn’t feel it. He shook his head wonderingly. "Well, you sure believe in going for the spectacular, I’ll give you that."

"So what do you think?" Ohira asked her. "What would people pay to visit a safari park like that? A big difference from looking at stupid giraffes and zebras, yes? You think these two kids might be onto something good here?"

Michelle’s recent experiences didn’t appear to have aroused much in the way of concern; but she’d worked for Ohira long enough not to be too surprised. She sighed inwardly and told herself not to worry about it. It was all part of the job. She was being paid for it.

Eric passed her a can of soda. She sipped it gratefully and nodded. "Yes, I think they could all be onto something big," she said, at last finding her voice. "Really big."

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