Bug Park by James P. Hogan

“I see. Well, I’m sure you’ll understand that this isn’t the kind of information that we disclose over the phone to people we don’t really know. Sorry for the inconvenience, but it will be necessary for you to come to the office in person if you want to pursue it further.”

“Now I almost feel as if I’m a suspect.”

“Ms. Lang, in our business, everybody is a suspect.”

Sigh. “Yes, I understand. Very well, when would be a good time? . . .”

The teledirection program was running and would activate the VR interface as soon as the link was established.

Vanessa settled back in one of the office chairs and positioned the helmet. Finnion steadied it while she made fine adjustments and secured the chin harness. Payne stood watching, holding a phone. “How’s it feel?” Finnion asked.

“That’s fine,” Vanessa said. She verified the graphics with a visual test, then executed a sequence of body and limb movements to check the motor control and feedback loops. The suit driver routines were set to high gain, meaning that slight body actions and muscle flexings would be sufficient to evoke the full range of perceived motions and tactile responses. Dramatic posturings and flailings weren’t necessary. In fact, for most normal movements and gestures, with high-gain settings it was seldom obvious to observers that an operator was moving at all. Vanessa pulled down a menu of options, highlighted remote live, and selected the channel that she had pre-initiated.

The test pattern vanished, and she was on a floor of spongy fiber matting, inside a square arena formed by walls that appeared to be about twenty feet high. There was a stack of flat slabs inside the arena, and a sloping ramp. “Okay, Martin, I’m through,” she said. Through the circuit patched into the audio, she could hear Payne punch a number into the phone.

Above the arena wall on one side was an underview of the armrest of a seat, with a protruding elbow clad in a yellow twill sleeve. Beyond that, like the vault of a cathedral interior, she could see the inside of a car roof and the top portion of one of the windows.

A ring tone sounded on the circuit. The elbow above her extended to become an arm, which then moved high above her like the jib of a crane, carrying a telephone handset. Phil Garsten’s voice said, “Hello?”

“Phil, it’s Martin. Vanessa says we’re through on the link. You should be seeing some action now.”

The mec was a horizontally postured design with six-legged, insect-like locomotion—the same one, in fact, that had dispatched Jack. The operator’s arm sensors were coupled to the manipulator appendages, leaving each lower-body system to control a triplet of two-on-one-side, one-on-the-other legs working as a unit. Developing a steady walking rhythm required something of a knack, but there was no balancing act to worry about as with bipedal mecs, and Vanessa found it easier. She walked a slow circle in the upturned cardboard box lid on the passenger seat, pushing and pulling on each limb in turn and flexing the manipulators.

“It looks like it’s working just fine to me,” Garsten’s voice said. Vanessa looked up. His face, curiously distorted by perspective, was filling half the view above and peering down at her, the arm holding a phone to one ear. “Jesus, this is weird,” he said. “Just watching this thing moving down here, right next to you, is enough to give anyone the creeps.”

Vanessa exercised the mec through a few more movements, then experimented with climbing the stack of calling cards and the matchbook. Everything seemed to be working fine. So, they knew the setup would work over an extended range—ninety miles, anyway, which was the distance to where Garsten was parked on a rocky shoulder by the side of a winding stretch of mountain road on the way to Barrow’s Pass.

“Can Phil drive for about a mile?” Vanessa said aloud. “I want to try it with the car moving.” Payne relayed the request to Garsten over the phone.

“Sure.” High above, Garsten’s face receded and turned away as he sat back in the seat. The arm transferred the phone to somewhere beyond Vanessa’s field of view, then came back and turned the ignition key.

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