Kevin whistled into the shadows. It felt… wrong in here somehow. Like the time he’d surprised that burglar. Kevin touched his leg, where you could still see the scar of the bullet hole. He backed slowly toward the door.
Something was there, deep in the shadows in what had once been the spare bedroom but now more closely resembled a giant spider’s den. Something big, some trace of movement…
Kevin turned and bolted through the door. Someone punched him in the nose, and he was on his back before he realized the door hadn’t let him through. He stood up and put his hand against it. Solid. Quivering slightly with the aftershock of his impact.
“OK,” he said, lowering his head. “You got me.”
“We got you,” said someone with a really strange voice.
Kevin looked up.
“Well feed me kitty litter and call me puss.”
It was cylindrical, silvery with a widening near the top, big enough to fill a quarter of the room. It was hovering about a foot off the floor.
“You…” Kevin hissed. His mind snapped back into clear, sober focus. Yes, it was the same as the microbot he’d encountered in Mr. Meekly’s VCR.
Only this was its big brother.
“Well, I’ve met Mind. I guess you’re Body.’ ” Kevin was terrified, but it seemed important not to let the mac-robot know that.
“I am Appendage 2.”
“Pleased to meet you. I’m Kevin.”
The bot dipped lower. “Kevin,” it said, “please view.”
A hologram leapt into the air in front of him. Kevin watched as he, his very own self, picked up the potato peeler from the table and stuck it in his pants.
The hologram vanished.
“Yeah, well, I can ex—”
The macrobot darted forward with surprising speed and zapped Kevin with something that felt like a hundred cattle prods.
“Hey! You son of a bitch!”
“Son of a bitch!”
“Who you calling a son of a bitch?” Kevin glared at the bot. Appendage 2 had a row of eyes around the top, like multicolored glowing crystal balls, and it rotated slowly around its vertical axis. He tried to hold its gaze while he slipped a hand toward the table, where there now rested another device, one that looked like a spherical TV remote control.
“Unacceptable!” Appendage 2 blared, shocking him again. As Kevin recoiled, he saw the remote control gizmo start to shimmer and then just vanish, absorbed into the material of the table.
“Message received,” Kevin grumbled. His fingers were numb.
“Communicate,” said the big bad bot.
Kevin watched as it drew nearer, looming over him, pushing him into the control center, back toward that station he dreaded, back onto that stool that was just the right height. Back with things squirming down from the ceiling and into his head.
Immersion in the Mind of the machine. “Is this VR?” asked a voice, perhaps his own.
[You are within us. You are linked to the collective Mind of us all.]
Images cascaded across his awareness: great armadas, whole star systems digested and rebuilt into gleaming metal and crystalline constructions. A civilization spreading across the stars, probing ever outward along its expanding perimeter.
[We have found only four others,] someone said in this mind.
“Four…”
[We work in better harmony if adjustments are made. You were selected for a reason.]
“What reason?” he heard a voice just like his own say, somewhere very far away.
[Unimportant. We erred. We should not have chosen you.]
“Get off.”
[Nevertheless, we see in you potential.]
Kevin felt things moving in his head, the tingle of nanotechnic fingers stroking his neurons. Pressures released. Primitive instincts decreased in force. The usual appetites faded.
“Will I stay like this?” he asked, now fully aware of his body at the station, of his brain physically linked to the great nanomind from the stars.
[If we choose.]
Kevin was about to ask just who the hell they thought they were when he noticed flashing lights through the now-transparent front wall. Several cars had pulled into the yard, blocking the van and the street. He heard car doors slamming.
[We feared this.]
Again, the recorded image of his theft, only now it included the sale to Maxine.
“You were watching me even then?”
[You carried an appendage inside you. Obviously, your kind cannot be trusted.]
Heavy knocks on the door. Through the wall, Kevin saw men in black coveralls taking up positions all around the trailer. A couple were searching the van. Most of them carried handguns; a few carried rifles.
“What is this?”
[You have attracted attention. We hope you will learn from this encounter.]
“Learn? What’s to learn? We’re dead.”
[We never die.]
And then, abruptly, the nanofingers withdrew from his head. Kevin blinked at the new clarity of everything.
Pounding, now, from both the front door and the back. He could see one of the men talking into a megaphone, but absolutely no sound penetrated the wall. (It was vibrating on that side, just a little.)
“I wish I could hear what—”
“OPEN UP IN THE NAME OF THE LAW!”
Kevin’s heart started thumping, but then something overcame him, a calm assurance he had never felt before. His forehead tingled. He walked to the door.
Reached for the knob.
Turned it.
“Can I help you?” he asked, stepping quickly out onto the deck and closing the door. He noticed the knob felt warm in his fingers.
“Are you Kevin Mitchell Conrad?” asked a black-uniformed man with wraparound sunglasses and an automatic weapon.
“Yeah,” he said, raising his hands. “And I’m unarmed. Guys, you’re making me nervous.”
The cop, if that was what he was, didn’t move. Kevin noticed the halfmoon insignia on the man’s sleeve. That wasn’t like any law enforcement uniform he’d ever seen, and he’d seen most of them.
Then the man behind him moved, and Kevin saw a hand come up. There was a click, a swish of air, and something missed his head by an inch. Kevin leapt right through the door and back into the trailer. When he looked up, expecting to see the feds coming through behind him, he saw them walk into the wall and bounce off instead.
But the feds weren’t giving up so easily. They tried shooting at the lock. The trailer absorbed the bullets, making their stuff its own. They tried ramming the door with one of their cars. The wall vibrated, ringing the trailer like a bell, but Kevin felt only the mildest tremor beneath his feet. Then one of the consoles beeped and the fed’s car stalled.
He was already daydreaming of his own secret island resort—daydreaming more specifically about the scantily clad maidens who would grace the beaches of his own secret island resort—when two things happened.
A detector in the wall started flashing red and screaming approximately the same color.
And Kevin saw, through the transparent wall, two of the black coverall guys depositing something against the front door.
The something exploded.
Kevin screamed, tumbling to the floor. The wall had gone opaque, the whole trailer undulating as every surface shimmered and reformed before his eyes, losing focus, then gradually returning to solidity. The wall slowly cleared until it was again transparent.
The men were bringing another something to the door.
“We gotta get out of here!”
Kevin’s eyes lit on the Mind station. Hesitantly, he approached. Another explosion knocked him to his knees. A globe hanging from the ceiling started warning about all kinds of impending catastrophes.
Kevin sat on the stool and let the snakes into his head.
[Understood,] came the instant response. [We know what must be done.]