Bug Park

Kevin sat in his room with a deck of cards, practicing fan flourishes, false shuffles, and top- and bottom-palming. Two days had gone by since Michelle’s introduction to Bug Park. Michelle was downstairs, having come back to the house on her own to talk about patents and licensing arrangements with Vanessa, who had the most involvement with the legal and financial side of the business—Eric was at Neurodyne, anyway. She had been there for about an hour. Kevin had a video cartridge that he’d promised to copy for her, a collection of highlights from other Bug Park exploits, and had asked Harriet to make sure that Michelle didn’t leave without picking it up. It would be an excuse for him to say hi again, too.

He and Taki had agreed that Michelle had given a pretty impressive first-time performance—an unusually generous assessment to grant to an adult still in the yet-to-be-categorized category. Taki’s older sister, Nakisha, had frozen in terror at the sight of a clawed scarab beetle, and refused to have anything further to do with the enterprise since. Ohira never displayed much in the way of feelings or emotion, but Kevin had noticed that he did more observing from the home base than active exploring these days. And Vanessa thought only in terms of the scientific and industrial possibilities that had spurred the technology into existence in the first place. The thought of any involvement in public entertainment evoked the kind of attitude that she might have held toward a game arcade or a VR parlor. Kevin had overheard her describe it to one of her friends as "vulgar." Kevin wasn’t really that surprised. It was typical of the coolness that she seemed to display toward all of his and his father’s projects.

He felt sometimes that Vanessa avoided emotional closeness deliberately, which struck him as peculiar for somebody who had taken on the challenges of becoming a replacement mother. But adulthood was full of peculiar attitudes and rituals that he didn’t understand, but which he presumed—more through a primitive faith that the world he was becoming a part of was a product of people who knew what they were doing, than from any solid conviction that he could attest to—would make better sense one day.

People of his age had generally discovered what they liked to do. And then convention seemed to require that they progressively abandon those things in order to spend what should have been their most enjoyable years pursuing "success," the object of which being, as far as he could make out, to make enough money to one day retire from it to do what they had always wanted to. The circularity of it all made about as much sense to Kevin as a solar powered tanning lamp, but nobody ever wanted to talk about it when he brought the subject up.

The phone rang on the shelf above the computer—Kevin and Taki could tie up a line for a whole evening, so Eric had given him two numbers of his own. He put down the cards, reached across, and answered. "Hello?"

"Knock-knock." It was Taki’s voice.

Kevin groaned. "Who’s there?"

"Acne."

"Oh, tacky, Taki. Okay, I’ll buy it. Acne who?"

"A k-nee is a k-nob halfway up your leg. So, watcha up to?"

"Nothing much. . . . Oh, I got that motor running for the KJ-3, so we’ll be able to fly it this weekend. There was some gunk in the fuel line."

"That’s great, Kev. Hmm. But my amazing psychic powers tell me that other things have been preoccupying you more recently. I see shapes of diamonds, hearts, spades, and clubs. You’re practicing your cardsharping, unless I’m very much mistaken. So, am I right or am I right?"

Kevin frowned, taken by surprise. "Hey, what is this?"

"And that book on MEGA-DOS that I lent you is right there by your elbow. If you’re done with it, I could use it back."

Kevin moved the phone from his ear and looked suspiciously from side to side around the room, across to the window, and over his shoulder at the door. "Taki, what’s going on? What kind of stunt are you pulling here?"

The voice on the other end of the phone chuckled. "Up on your bookshelf—the bottom one. Check about a foot along from the gap where the calculator and the stapler are."

Kevin turned his head, more puzzled than ever, and looked where Taki had indicated. Even with the directions, it was several seconds before he located the mec standing in a space formed where a couple of volumes were indented between University Physics and The Guinness Book of Records: one of the older, inch-high models, metallic gray with square black eyes. It was one of several that Taki had had over at his place for a couple of months. Taki was obviously decoupled from it now, since he was using the phone. But he could have left it live and be copying its visual output to a screen.

"Okay, I see you now." Kevin was intrigued, but at the same time baffled. Taki had been talking about developing a relay device that would enable mecs to be controlled from a distance—Taki’s house was six miles away, outside the range of their regular transmitters, such as the one in Kevin’s basement. "Are you at home?" Kevin queried. The first, obvious possibility was that Taki might have driven over with Michelle and brought the mec with him, sneaked in without announcing himself, and had used one of the couplers downstairs to send the mec up to Kevin’s room as a prank. It was the kind of pointlessly silly thing that Kevin would have expected from Taki—if he didn’t think of it himself first.

"Sure, I’m at home. Where else?" From his tone of voice, Taki was clearly enjoying himself.

Kevin frowned. "You’ve got a relay working? Are you saying you’ve cracked it?"

"Right! So what do you think? It works just fine, eh? I got it up between your bed and the wall, and from there to the shelf via the window drapes. Getting it up the stairs was a drag, though. Pronged feet are a must for getting around in houses."

That still didn’t explain everything. "So how did you get it over here to the house?" Kevin asked.

"In Michelle’s laptop. She was here showing my dad some papers before she went over to your place. It was lying open, so I hid the mec in one of the pouches inside the lid. A bit sneaky, I guess, but I wanted to see it work for real."

"I have to agree—but it’s still pretty cool. Is that where the relay is too?"

"Yes. That’s what I’m calling about. Could you get it out of there before she finds it, and hang on to it until I see you next? She’s probably not the kind of person who’d get mad about something like that if she did find it, but why risk it?"

"Okay, sure—if I get a chance. You said in a pouch in her laptop?"

"Inside the lid. There’s a row of elastic pockets for holding diskettes and stuff. The relay is in a black plastic pack with a rubber band around it—it’s a two-inch card with some chips and a couple of batteries."

"I’ll see what I can do. . . ." Kevin glanced huffily at the mec still staring at him from his bookshelf. "And we need to call a truce on this business right now, Taki. I don’t think I like the thought of being spied on like this anytime, anywhere in my own house. So let’s draw the line right here, okay?"

"Okay. You’ve got it."

There was a tap on the door, and Harriet stuck her head in. "Anyhow, I have to go," Kevin said, nodding at her and speaking into the phone. "I’ll do that thing for you if I can. You take care, okay?"

"Thanks, Kev. Talk to you later." Taki hung up. Kevin replaced the phone and looked at Harriet.

"It looks as if Vanessa and Michelle will be finished soon downstairs," she said. "And Beverley called from the office with some figures that your father said you wanted." Beverley was Eric’s secretary at Neurodyne.

"Oh, great. They must be the scaling constants."

"I haven’t the faintest idea. They’re written down in the kitchen. Oh, and speaking of kitchens, a tin of black, sticky, nasty-smelling stuff has appeared by the side of the sink. You wouldn’t know anything about it, by any chance?"

"Oh, yeah, right. That’s mine. I’ll move it."

Kevin got up to follow Harriet back down. As he turned to close the door, he looked across at the mec again. Just for a moment, he thought he caught it starting to wave at him. . . . But then again, he could have been mistaken.

He heard Vanessa talking as he and Harriet reached the bottom of the rear stairs. "Oh, Eric’s up to his eyes in something or other all the time. But there’s no need to tie him up with this. I’ll have Phil Garsten call you first thing tomorrow morning. He can give you all the details." She was coming through the door from the den. Michelle answered, following immediately behind her.

"I’m glad I stopped by. Things still get done quicker face-to-face in the long run. Is Kevin in? I wouldn’t want to rush off without saying hello."

"He should be about somewhere. . . ." Vanessa looked around as Harriet appeared through the archway from the rear hall. "Have you seen Kevin anywhere, Harriet? Ms. Lang was just—oh, there he is. Kevin, Ms. Lang is just about to leave. She wanted to pay her regards." Harriet nodded and disappeared in the direction of the kitchen.

Michelle smiled. "Hi, Kevin."

"Hi." The wheels in Kevin’s head slammed to a halt. Again, the adult knack for instantly following up with something that didn’t sound dumb eluded him.

Michelle smiled. "Well, you’ll be pleased to know that I seem to have survived it all without mishap—no midnight screams or trips to a psychiatrist." She was carrying a burgundy attaché case, Kevin saw. There was no sign of a laptop.

"That’s pretty good, I guess," he responded. Maybe they spent hours thinking things up and then waited for the right occasion. Or was it that they’d just had more time to collect material?

"Oh yes, and while I think of it—did you run me a copy of those movie clips that you told me about? They sounded fascinating."

She remembered! Kevin nodded a head of shaggy dark hair. "Yes. It’s down in the mec lab."

"Do you want to run down and fetch it?" Vanessa said.

"Sure."

"I’ll come with you and pick it up," Michelle suggested. She looked at Vanessa. "Then we won’t have to keep you standing here waiting. I can go out the back way and walk around to the car. Kevin will see me out."

Vanessa made no protest. "Very well. Thank you again for coming over. I think it was quite productive. Were there any other points?"

"No, I don’t think so."

"Goodbye, then."

"For now, anyway."

They shook hands. "If anything further occurs to you, give me a call," Vanessa said. She stood watching with a formal smile while Michelle and Kevin crossed past the plants and the grand piano to the stairs leading down. When they had disappeared from view, she turned away and retired to another part of the house.

Michelle was wearing a pale blue, pleated skirt with white blouse and navy top. Her hair was looser this time, held by a band instead of being tied in a ponytail. Kevin pictured her as the sun-bronzed, untamed Amazon queen, riding a white horse, her hair billowing, a bow slung across her back—and, naturally, one of those loincloths that they always had in fantasy-novel cover illustrations, showing all of those incredible legs.

They came into the lab, with its wall of window facing the slope behind the house, leading down to the shore of the inlet. Kevin went over to the corner where the video equipment was and retrieved the cartridge from a drawer. Michelle stopped to look over the tabletop mec world. "So what’s new with these little guys since I was here," she asked. "Anything interesting?" That was what warmed Kevin toward her: like Eric, she found microspace fascinating in its own right and was able to lose herself in the wonder of simply experiencing it. Everything didn’t have to be a matter of bottom lines and market sizes.

Kevin made a face. "Not really. We talked about trying a speck of depleted uranium mounted on some kind of sprung joystick as a balance sensor, but nobody could figure out how to interface it. Flies use something like that."

"Why uranium?"

"You need all the mass you can get."

Michelle thought back to what Eric had talked about at the lab. "Oh, is this to do with that business about mass and size shrinking at different rates?" she said.

Kevin nodded. "Mass scales down with the cube of size—being a hundred times smaller makes you a million times lighter. So inertial systems don’t work too well when you get really small—for example, as balance regulators."

"You mean like the ones in your ear?"

"Right. It’s probably why insects have six legs. A tripod is the most naturally stable configuration you can get. So what you do is stand on one while you move the other."

Michelle put the attaché case down on the bench and picked up one of the mecs from the table. She pulled up a stool and studied the mec through one of the benchtop lenses. "Is that why you came up with those weird weapons too—jumbo chain saws and drill-tipped lances?" she asked.

Kevin didn’t normally go into technicalities with outsiders, but Michelle’s interest seemed genuine. "Nothing that depends on stored kinetic energy works," he replied. "Hammers, axes, spears, missiles—anything that you swing or throw—they all behave as if they were made of Styrofoam."

"So what do insects do? That’s right, they concentrate on things like stabbing and cutting and crushing, don’t they?"

"Right. Exactly."

"Don’t they spray chemicals around too?"

"Yes . . ." Kevin made a vague gesture in the air. "But it’s kind of messy. We haven’t really gotten into that."

Michelle leaned back from the lens. "How did this Bug Park thing start? Ohira says it was with you and Taki playing out combat games—the kind of thing you see on computers."

"That’s about how it was. Being able to stalk somebody across real terrain was just a whole lot better than things faked on screens." Kevin nodded toward the window. "Especially with the kinds of landscapes you get down there."

"But wait a minute, you can’t be serious. Those weapons of yours are totally destructive." Michelle indicated the mec that she was still holding. "These might be a bit out of date, but they’re still pieces of high-quality engineering. You’re not telling me that you hack them to pieces playing adventure games?"

Kevin shook his head. "Oh no. The real battlemecs have got buttons that you have to get at—like vital spots. If you can hit the other guy’s first it deactivates him, and he’s dead." He hesitated, wondering if a lawyer might have a problem about bugs’ rights or something. "The, er, other stuff . . ."

"Oh, say what you mean. Chain saws and spin-tipped lances?"

"Right. That came later, for protection—when we found that all kinds of other things were likely to come muscling in on the act too."

"But it was more fun, right?" Michelle winked, daring him to deny it. That was the moment when Kevin found that he felt at ease with her completely for the first time. This adult was okay, he decided. He grinned and nodded back at her in a way that said of course it was more fun.

"Why the fancy colors?" she asked.

"Birds. They think you’re something yucky and leave you alone."

Michelle sighed and nodded. "Obvious, really. Why is the obvious always the last thing we think of?"

"Probably because once you realize it’s obvious, you quit looking. Who’s going to keep on looking for an answer after they’ve found one that works?"

"Hm. I guess that’s obvious too, really."

"Anyhow, we lost a few that way—before we started painting them."

"You don’t mean the birds ate them?"

"Oh, I wouldn’t think so. Probably they just got dropped in the water or around the neighborhood."

"I suppose if we went public, the place could be enclosed with nets or something," Michelle said distantly. In her mind she seemed to be involved in the scheme already. It was refreshing.

"It could actually happen, then?" Kevin said. "Dad says that Ohira is really serious."

Michelle put the mec back down on the table. "You bet he is. He could end up scraping quite a lot of investment money together to back it, too. He’s got people back home interested. You know, it could turn out to be an even bigger hit in Japan. They seem to go in for things like that—you know, novelty."

"You think so? Taki and I have been having other thoughts as well."

"Such as . . . ?" Michelle looked interested.

"We’ve got a mec over at his place that we’re trying to get to fly. The wings are flexible and vibrate like an insect’s. The trick is getting the twist right. When people tell you that old story about bees not being able to fly, what they don’t understand is that those equations were for fixed-wing. Insects fly more like helicopters." Kevin waved a hand to indicate boundless possibilities as the tide of enthusiasm swept him on. "Suppose you could actually be a submarine in an aquatic environment, able to see parameciums and amoebas?"

"Great educational potential," Michelle said, getting into the swing. "A lot more than just entertainment, maybe—the way Ohira thinks."

Kevin cast an arm around. "How many people really know what else goes on in the houses they live in? It’s a whole new world at mec scale, just like outside. It’s unbelievable. You really don’t want to know what’s down there in your carpet. And when you get a chance, take a close-up look at the solid walls that you think keep everything out. Every school should have something like this. They tell you all about how corporations are structured inside, but how many kids get a chance to climb around inside a clock?"

Michelle stared at him, intrigued. "You know, Ohira has never talked about anything like that. I don’t think possibilities like that have occurred to him. I’ll bring it up next time I see him." She glanced at her watch. "Speaking of which, Kevin, I hate to break this up because it’s absolutely fascinating, but I have to get moving. I would like to see more of Bug Park, though. When can we set up a date?"

"Well . . . any time that suits you, I guess. I don’t have too many commitments."

Michelle stood up from the stool. "I’ll look forward to that."

Kevin still had no idea where to find the relay that he had promised to retrieve for Taki. He thought frantically. "What kind of computer is that?" he blurted suddenly, nodding at the burgundy attaché case on the bench.

"That?" Michelle looked surprised. "It isn’t a computer."

Kevin knew it wasn’t, but the laptop had to be somewhere for Taki to have remote-guided the mec. He waited in the hope that Michelle might pick up on the subject, but she just came around the table and picked up the video cartridge that she had come downstairs for. "Oh, I thought it was a laptop," he said lamely. She didn’t respond. He went on desperately, "Do you use one?"

"All the time for reference material and e-mail. You can’t get away from them. It’s out in the car." She began moving to the door.

Great, Kevin thought as he followed her. What was he supposed to do now? He drew alongside her as they crossed the yard. "What kind is it?" he asked—anything to keep on the subject.

"I’m not sure. Bell, I think."

"Oh. What model?"

"Seven hundred something. Does that sound right?"

Kevin tried to look astonished. "That’s really amazing! Do you know, I was having an argument about those with somebody just the other day." He hoped it didn’t sound as stupid as he felt. "Does the internal phone come out on an ansi or International PIN configuration connector?"

"Kevin, would you believe?—I have absolutely no idea. Neither do I care."

"Could I have a look? It would only take a second."

"Well, sure . . . I guess." Michelle gave him a strange look. "If it’s really that important."

They came around to the front of the house, where the white Buick was parked in the driveway. Kevin stopped and pulled off his sweater. "Wow, it’s hot all of a sudden. Don’t you think it’s hot? Or maybe it’s just me."

Michelle unlocked the doors. "It’s down by the seat there," she said, indicating with a nod.

"Oh, right." Kevin opened the passenger door and lifted out the laptop while Michelle climbed in the far side of the car. "Now let’s see, what have we got?" He unzipped the case, slid the computer partway out, opened the lid for no reason that he could have explained if she’d asked, and made a show of flipping open covers and peering at the connector arrays inside. All the time, his fingers were searching feverishly through the pouches inside the case. He found the plastic pack containing the relay card and slipped it into the folds of the sweater draped in his other hand. "Okay, right, that’s it." He reclosed the case and put it back on the floor in front of the seat. Michelle leaned across to peer out at him.

"Did you find what you wanted?" she inquired in the kind of tone she might have used to ask if he were feeling well.

"Yes, thanks. . . . It’s what I thought." He closed the passenger door, and stooped to wave as the car pulled away, sending Michelle an inane grin before he could stop himself. Taki, you’ll pay for this, he vowed savagely. He waited until the Buick had disappeared from the driveway, then turned and trudged back to the house.

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