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 . . .”