Which gave him the idea.
It would have to be right, and it would have to be now. There wouldn’t be room for any screwups. And even then there was no reason to assume it would work.
SIGNAL DEGRADED SIXTEEN PERCENT, the crimson letters blared. SIGNAL LOSS IN THIRTEEN MINUTES.
Kevin hissed. They were giving up on us. They’d tried everything and gotten no response, and now they were moving on, turning their great searchlight away from Earth and probing among other constellations. He’d had his chance and blown it. Unless…
It took Kevin only two minutes to disconnect Meekly’s VCR from the system, remove the casing, and place it on top of the computer’s CPU, the casing of which he had also removed. After that he could only sit back and watch. He stared at the exposed circuitry. Nothing moved in that gallium and silicon jungle, but Kevin knew better than to expect any outward sign. If the alien microbot possessed the intelligence he suspected, surely it would detect the problem and do something before it was too late.
TEN MINUTES TO SIGNAL LOSS.
Kevin shuddered. He’d gotten a lot, but he knew there was so much more to come. What would be lost if they broke contact before his machine could absorb the rest of the data? What if there was a final sequence that would activate all the others, without which everything he had recorded would be useless?
Nothing seemed to be happening in the CPU.
NINE MINUTES TO SIGNAL LOSS.
Kevin felt completely helpless waiting there for the alien nanoengineer to do something to save his butt. Then he spotted his repair case on the shelf by the door where he always left it. He knew at once what he had to do.
He got up from the computer and fetched the case.
Then he got small.
Inside Meekly’s VCR, roaming through ghostly circuits spun like cobwebs from the ruins of some once-great city. Solder highways stretching between component nodes, strangely devoid of traffic. Nothing moving anywhere. Kevin wished for intrusive senses—an electron scanner would be nice about now. But that stuff was years away, and he knew he’d never be able to afford it even when they did figure out how to make it small enough to fit on a bot.
“Good ol’ Model 1411-C,” he muttered, somewhere far away. It was what it was: a repair bot. Equipped with the senses and tools it needed for that job—nothing more and nothing less.
Visible light would have to do.
Kevin raced over the motherboard, watching every angle for something that wasn’t supposed to be there. He felt entirely too conscious of the seconds ticking by, of all that hung in the balance if he wasn’t fast enough.
And then he found it.
He closed in on the object quickly, risking bumpy leaps over solder speed-bumps and taking shortcuts across printed circuits that would have fried him in an instant if power had decided to pass through them while he was traveling.
There, hovering in the shadow of that transformer. Sleeping, by the looks of it, silent. Floating like a boat at its mooring. Kevin wondered if it was dreaming. Or if it had decided to commit suicide after all.
SIX MINUTES TO SIGNAL LOSS.
“Time for your wake-up call,” he heard himself say, in the big world.
He charged the alien bot.
It woke up fast.
First it leapt at least a centimeter into the air, then it circled him ten times at such dazzling speed that it almost snapped Kevin out of his remote senses. Then it hovered in front of him for five seconds and squawked at him.
Kevin blinked. The bot raced away so fast he lost sight of it in seconds. Pursuit would be pointless. It was faster than he was, and it had rebuilt the VCR into such a labyrinthine construction that Kevin would never find his way out again if he went into it. There was only one consolation, he thought as he followed his marked trail back out of the VCR.
The alien bot had been moving in the direction of his computer’s CPU.
Three minutes later, Kevin smiled. It took that long to get out of the gear, get his real-world senses back, and watch the components of the Octium-9000 PC seem to liquefy before taking on new, disturbing shapes. Connections divided, multiplying into a vast spiderweb of finely spun silver.
TWO MINUTES TO SIGNAL LOSS, the monitor shrieked.
The hard-drive was clicking like a castanet player on methamphetamine. Kevin could never know if the bot had finished its upgrade, if the reconfigured computer could absorb all the data in time. For all he knew the thing would blow up first. Then he would have lost it all. He’d be condemned to a lifetime of fixing the VCRs of an endless succession of Mr. Meeklys.
Kevin shuddered.
ONE MINUTE TO SIGNAL LOSS.
He hit the PWR button.
Then he drank a six-pack and went to sleep.
In the dream he was chasing the members of an all-female punk rock band who had promised him sex if he fixed their PA system but then reneged on the deal. Just as he caught them, they morphed into alien micro-bots and spun all around him, squawking.
He woke up with a headache.
“I need a beer,” Kevin muttered, smacking his lips and rubbing his eyes. Things were always blurry the morning after, which was every morning these days, but this time it all seemed wrong. Kevin blinked, trying to focus. The clock had been replaced by a large triangular panel of flashing lights: green, blue, amber, and red. Hell, the whole room looked different.
Kevin sprang out of bed. The floor felt softly cushioned, warm; the floorboards didn’t squeak. And the air smelled strangely… clean.
“Make that a whiskey,” Kevin whispered. He moved to the bedroom door and looked down the hallway.
Only it wasn’t the hallway anymore. It was a corridor of light leading to something that looked like the control center of a nuclear submarine.
“Radical!”
Kevin ran down the corridor to what had once been the living room, and his breath left him in one long sigh. It was all different, remade. The furniture was gone, the walls pulsed with light, the kitchen glittered sleek and shiny. There weren’t even any dirty dishes.
“Is this witchcraft, or what?”
The instruments that lined every wall gave no clue to their function, but Kevin noticed readouts at eye level, controls designed for human hands. The big screen that filled the entire northern wall had information appearing here and there for a few seconds and vanishing. It was in English. The wall cycled through three modes every few seconds. Invisible, it let him look out on the driveway where the van sat, leaking oil as usual. Then, for an instant, a wall—curving inward and ribbed. Then, again, transient blocks of text against a background he hadn’t noticed before, a pattern of colors swirling in a lazy spiral. The longer Kevin looked at the wall one way, the more it kept staying that way.
Now the spiraling colors were making his eyes do funny things, and he found himself walking toward one of the stations. Only vaguely was he aware of sitting down on the built-in stool (which just happened to be the right height), and only distantly did he notice when an octagonal opening above him started sprouting multicolored snakes that quested downward until they found his head.
“Where am I?”
Around him, swirling blue clouds of light flashed arcs of color between one another in brief bursts and in sequences that hinted at meaning. Kevin couldn’t feel his body. It wasn’t like VR—he felt disembodied, not even conscious of a virtual self. His consciousness only floated, taking in the strange living sphere of color.
[The pattern is familiar.]
Kevin shook his head. That voice seemed to come from nowhere, from everywhere, even from inside him.
“Who are you? What is this shit?”