The blue clouds turned yellow. They weren’t so much clouds, he noticed now, as intricate crystalline structures, feather-light. One seemed to be drawing nearer to him…
Kevin felt his heart racing, his urge to flee suddenly unbearable. But all the while, a calm inner voice soothed him, assured him he was safe, lulled him and pulled, ever so gently, at some part of him.
[We have seen it before. We know which sequence to employ.]
The crystalline cloud had grown to fill his view, revealing all its intricate structure. Now, closer, he saw that all its tiny angular parts were moving. Some were opening out a cavity in the center of the vast structure, and Kevin suddenly realized it was this opening toward which he was being pulled.
I’m dreaming this, he thought. Like one of those nightmares you can’t wake up from even when you know it’s a dream. He tried to visualize his body, sitting there on that alien stool in what had once been the kitchen of his mobile home. He could see it, almost feel it. He slipped into the familiar trance, like when he was controlling a bot and the sensory shutdown failed and he had to get out the old-fashioned way. Concentrate. Pull back from the illusion and seek the real touch of living flesh.
[You must allow us to continue. Our operation enters a dangerous phase.]
“Who’s we? You still haven’t told me.”
[Call me Mind, Group 3. I am 1 percent of each of us.]
There, he moved his finger. Concentrate. Focus. His whole body felt numb, but he could see it, somehow, beneath him.
“Well, Mind, Group 3, I’m Kevin Mitchell Conrad, VCR Repairman. You know, I may be a little behind the times, but I’ve never seen a setup like this in my life. What’s it all run on—batteries?”
[Batteries?]
“You know, where do you guys get the juice for all this?”
He could almost feel Mind thinking. Good. Keep it occupied. Divert its attention while you… what?
[Energy is abundant on the micro level, its release to the macro a simple exercise in translation.]
“Isn’t there, like, a law against that or something? I mean, what is it? Cold fusion?”
[Nothing so primitive. Haven’t you read the POWER.TEK file?]
“Haven’t had time just yet. It’s on the top ten list, though.”
Cheap, plentiful energy. Operations that produced more energy than they consumed. Kevin knew he’d probably never understand it. He also knew that this single item, even if he got nothing else out of the deal, would make him the richest man on Earth.
[We have searched for the right conduit. Your cooperation is essential to our group’s success.]
But only if he got the upper hand. Yes, remember it’s in your mind, trying to pull you in, brainwash you, make you its puppet. Focus on physical sensation. Rough fabric beneath the fingertips. Something cold and slippery tingling over the head.
Kevin opened his eyes.
[We will gentle you. It will ease your discomfort and quiet your struggles.]
“Like hell you will,” Kevin said. With all his willpower, all his hatred for the control others always seemed to hold over him, he told his hand to reach up to his head. What felt like wet snakes writhing in his fingers were really shapeshifting nanotechnic probes. When he swatted at them, they recoiled, melting into shorter, stubbier shapes, and finally retracted into something that looked like a shower head.
“And my worst worry used to be the fucking fuse box,” Kevin grumbled. He thought he saw the shower head move, so he got up from the stool and backed toward the door.
There was a table near the center of what had once been the living room. Three metal objects sat there: a black triangle, a red and silver egg, and something that looked like a potato peeler with a row of buttons on its handle. Kevin grabbed the last of these and jammed it into the front of his pants. A plan was already forming. A plan that would make his earlier ambitions seem timid by comparison.
The door didn’t open—he just walked through it. His skin tingled all over, there was a popping sound, and then he stood on the familiar wooden deck. He turned around (the floorboards squeaked comfortingly) and looked back at the trailer. From the outside, it looked exactly the same as always. Ugly. Beautiful. Normal.
The van started on the third try.
“Does it really matter, Max?” Kevin twisted his cap to the side, winked at the girl. When she wasn’t working part-time at Rascal’s Pawn shop, Maxine was busy cultivating her contacts at the local research and development firm. Now, her elfin features taut with concentration, she looked down at the object he had given her.
“What’s it do, then? If you won’t tell me where you got it, at least tell me something. It looks like an electric potato peeler.”
Kevin smiled. He’d usually flirt when he came here to pawn one of his tools for beer money, make the standard remarks, like it got him anywhere. But today, his excitement came from a different source.
“Press the red button,” he said.
Max did.
Then she dropped it onto the counter and squealed like she’d seen a mouse. “It’s… it’s a screwdriver now.”
“Duh,” said Kevin, smiling. He searched his pockets for a stick of gum, came up empty.
Max squinted at him. “Kevin Mitchell Conrad, what the hell have you gotten into?”
Something in her tone argued caution, but to Kevin—in the microworld or the macro—caution was for wimps.
“Hey,” he said, laughing, “it’s just something I whipped up in my garage.”
“You live in a rat-hole of a trailer. There’s no garage.”
“Figure of speech. Look, Maxi, it’s kind of secret—you know, moose and squirrel stuff. You got any gum?”
“It pulls your fillings out. I’ll give you a hundred bucks.”
Now Max was playing with the gadget, turning it from a soldering iron to a laser, from a crescent wrench into a tool with a vibrating silver coil at the end. Kevin knew from his own experiments that the shape-shifting tool could become anything its user wished it to be.
But hell, the rent was overdue. And he did need beer money.
“Two hundred,” he said.
Max laughed. Damn, she had a bod. Kevin stood up a bit straighter, pulled up his tool belt so only half his butt was hanging out of his jeans.
“One fifty. Not a penny more.”
After that, he stopped at the Quickie Shack and bought a twelve-pack of longnecks. Then he stopped at Roy’s and bought everyone a drink.
Back home, buzzing, whistling, happy. Home sweet home. Up the steps to the door. OK, up the steps again. Damn, that hurt. All keys look alike in the dark. Quick snooze, leaning up against the door.
Falling through…
“Whadahell,” Kevin sputtered, rolling up onto his knees. When he reached back and pressed at the place he’d just fallen through, it felt solid and slightly warm.
He threw up.
The vomit vanished into the floor.
Quiet. Only the hum of instruments and the whirring of fans. He noticed what looked at first like houseplants in a window box running the length of the wall. When he drew nearer, he could taste the fresh, oxygenated air. The ol’ trailer had never even had AC.
His head throbbed, but the glittering lights and the crisp cool air brought him partially back to reality. He looked around slowly.
Some kind of microbots—maybe even nanites—had been at work during his absence. Some of the assemblies he’d noticed before were gone or had reconfigured themselves. As he moved around the trailer, Kevin began to feel uneasy about all this. The floor, walls and ceiling, all composed of interlocking nanites, their limbs firmly clasped together. As easily as they could become inanimate segments of the floor, they could become voracious consumers of human flesh.