He stared at the bot, wishing he could reply to the message. His own bot, unfortunately, was entirely incapable of manipulating structures that small. He could write larger, of course. But what would he say?
Two red lights were flashing in his goggles now. He had barely enough power to make it out of the VCR. One final glance at the bot. It was looking at him, but somehow Kevin thought its mind was occupied with something else. It seemed impatient.
“Sorry, pal,” he whispered. “Gotta run.” He pivoted his bot back toward the VCR’s air vent. Pausing, he added in his thoughts: But I’ll be back.
“You want to what?”
Mr. Meekly didn’t seem too happy that the game was already underway and his VCR wasn’t taping.
“Sorry,” Kevin said, his goggles now hanging limply around his neck as he chomped on his gum and tried to look casual. “It’s fried in there. Total burn-out. It’d cost you more to rebuild it than to buy a new one. But like I said, I will buy it off you for twenty bucks. I can use the casing, and one or two components look like they might be salvageable.”
Meekly’s red complexion didn’t look like it was doing much for his blood pressure.
“But your advertisement says…”
Kevin shrugged, started packing his away his gear. “Whatever. Look, I gotta couple more calls to make, and it’s getting late.”
“Wait.”
Sucker.
“Twenty dollars?”
“Yep. That’s the offer.”
Meekly hesitated. “Well, it’s nothing but junk to me now. All right.” He started disconnecting the VCR, and Kevin dug into the pocket of his jeans until he found a ten, a five, and five ones.
“What about the game?” Meekly asked as Kevin stood in the doorway.
Kevin smiled. “Tell your friends there’s always radio.”
On the way back to the trailer, the old white van bogging down as usual (he’d have to change that fuel filter one of these days), Kevin worked the whole thing out in his mind.
An alien race wanted to make contact with Earth. They’d been picking up our signals for decades, but every time they sent a signal our way, bomp, it vanished. No reply. So they figured we weren’t listening, or if we were, we were looking the wrong way with the wrong equipment tuned to the wrong frequency.
Now these aliens were a little more advanced than us. Maybe a lot more. They’d honed nanotechnology to a fine art. It’d be easy for them to get a probe up to relativistic velocities if it was tinier than a grain of sand. And it was so smart, wherever it landed, it would find a way to let us know we were being bombarded by extraterrestrial signals every second and were just too dumb to tune into them.
(The van shimmied through a curve. Have to get those shocks fixed, Kevin thought.)
So. Mr. Meekly s VCR. Good a place as any, though it seemed kinda lucky the probe landed there, with the satellite dish and everything, when most of the world was cable-ready and the airwaves weren’t used that much anymore. Still, these were smart ETs. Maybe the probe had some way of homing in on a likely spot like that. Maybe they were self-replicating and there were thousands—millions—of them. But then everyone would be turning up with omniscient toaster-ovens and blenders with bad attitudes. It didn’t make sense. Could he really be the only one?
The van squealed to a stop in the driveway. Have to get those brakes ad-justed, Kevin thought. But if this worked out half as good as he hoped it might, hell, he’d ditch the van and buy something really nice. Like maybe a private jet.
“Uh-huh. There. And that should do it.”
The setup wasn’t as pretty as Meekly’s, but Kevin thought it would do the job. On the input side: an old dish antenna he’d accepted as payment once and promptly plopped in back of the trailer, where its main function was to give the poison ivy something to grow over. On the output: his IBM-clone PC, wired in with a splice-up job even he wasn’t sure how he’d rigged. And there, in the middle of it all, the heart of the system: Mr. Meekly’s VCR.
“OK, baby. Show me what you’ve got.”
He turned on the PC first, then the VCR. Nothing happened. The monitor said SYSTEM ON-LINE, but there was no data coming in. Maybe the little UMO had failed in its mission. Maybe the VCR hadn’t contained the components it needed. Maybe—
“Aha!”
The numbers didn’t mean much at first, until Kevin realized that one set was in degrees and minutes and the other was a measure of time. Then he knew, and it took only a few minutes to align the satellite dish to the celestial coordinates.
“Bingo.”
It began. Menus first. Then submenus. Information started scrolling by so fast he could barely read it. It was in English, though, which settled a concern he’d had ever since the plan dawned on him. And some of the file names intrigued him greatly: POWER.TEK,CURES.DNA, PEACE. WPS, HITECH.DBS. They were giving it all to him! And there was so much of it. Once the hard drive was full, he went to floppies. Then more floppies.
“I don’t believe this!”
More files, thick with data: C+TEK, TIME.WPS, GENTEK.DNA, MMORT. DNA. The human race was in for some changes, and he, Kevin Mitchell Conrad, was the key. He had the data. He could save the world. And only he could do it.
The answer had been hiding in one of the README files. It seemed the aliens had sent out self-replicators and there were millions of them. Only they’d been programmed to scan any contactee—probably a repair person—and only continue the contact process to completion if they found certain qualities in the contactee. Otherwise, they were to shut down—to commit suicide.
It didn’t say anywhere what those certain qualities were.
Kevin didn’t worry about it. Yes, he would save the world. For a price.
“That’s right,” Kevin said as he popped the top on a cold one and let the computer soak up whatever the ETs sent. “They’ll pay for it—but not all at once. I’ll give it to them one bit at a time. Maybe the stardrive this year, maybe the cancer cure next. Payment on delivery.”
He laughed. He drank another beer. This was his ticket out of the rat race. No more VCR repairman. He would be somebody. And if the rest of the world didn’t like the way he did business, screw them. Screw them all.
Something beeped at the computer station. Kevin looked up just in time to see the scrolling alien data freeze, hesitate, and then start running again. He leaned forward, not too concerned. Until the screen flickered and the scrolling alien data was replaced by a fractal screen-saver with the message WHEN ELECTRICIANS DO IT, WATCH OUT FOR THE SPARKS!!! Then the message broke up into tiny colored pyramids before, with a last flicker, the screen returned to the scrolling data.
“No,” Kevin whispered. He opened a side window to run a diagnostic, but the system reported that it was overtaxed and could no longer perform multitasking.
“Shit!” Kevin hissed. He checked the diskette drive and found it nearing capacity. He checked the diskette supply and found it exhausted.
“Fuck,” Kevin sighed.
Then, like that wasn’t enough, the scrolling data was interrupted again, this time by a message in flashing crimson letters.
TRANSMISSION ANGLE SHIFTING. COMMUNICATIONS LOCK THREATENED.
Kevin repeated his last three utterances, three times in rapid succession, and then he picked up the keyboard and thumped it against his forehead. The ESC key hit him in the right eye, and when he dropped the keyboard to clutch at his face, he heard it clatter down with some force atop Mr. Meekly’s VCR.