Bug Park by James P. Hogan

The new Japanese release playing on the big screen in the game room of Hiroyuki’s house had both. The big, green, natural, organic monsters had been awakened from dormancy on the ocean bed by nuclear-weapons testing in the Pacific, and “smart” battle machines were taking them on—apparently through some instinctual loyalty to their creators that none of the scientists depicted in the movie could explain, but which the scriptwriters evidently considered to be of deep, mystical significance. The heroines were now liberated, of course, and waded in wielding M-16s and Uzis with the best of the guys, thus doggedly emulating what their admirers had been denouncing as the worst of male traits for years. The screaming role had passed to Taki’s younger sister, Reiko, and a half dozen other small members of the innumerable relatives watching in total immersion from the couch, the floor, and other seats around the room. Nakisha, in one of the armchairs, stared unblinking, but managed a restrained silence becoming to her sixteen years that showed she was above that kind of thing.

“Hey, look at all the arms on that guy. It’s like a mechanical spider.”

“It’s like some of those miniature robots of Taki’s. Is that what it was like, Nakisha? Did it feel like being one of those?”

“Did Taki really put you down next to a slug?”

“Ooooh, yuck! . . .”

“Shut up. It was horrible. I don’t want to talk about it.”

Kevin sat on a chair by the wall near the glass-paned doors behind them, half watching while he idly practiced materializing a playing card in one hand, then vanishing it again. Doug Corfe had gone for a drive into Seattle to reconnoiter Garsten’s office from the outside. Taki had been called away for the moment to give his mother a hand with something. Ohira was on a stool at the back of the room, arms akimbo, hands planted solidly on his knees, watching the movie with a raptness that was unusual. It seemed to have triggered some distant line of thought.

Kevin rather took to the monsters, he decided. It wasn’t their fault if they blundered around sinking ships and knocking gaps in city skylines, any more than foxes could help being partial to chickens. It was just the way they were made. He identified with them, he supposed, as another form of life that was misunderstood and looked down on—in the monsters’ case, metaphorically—by grownups. There were days when he was sure that he too could find it a great reliever of stresses and tensions to go on a rampage of pulverizing a few downtown high-rises or picking up automobiles filled with the irritating kinds of people who played bullhorn radios in parks and left trash everywhere, and throw them into the harbor. Maybe grownups went out and dropped bombs on each others’ cities for the same kind of reason. If that were true, it didn’t seem fair that kids should have to be in them too.

Then the thought struck him that perhaps they could build miniature cities for stressed-out adults to crash around in and flatten, using monster-mec bodies designed specially for the purpose. They could even have other people—perhaps kids who liked being scared by monsters—in smaller mecs to run around and provide crowds of panicking inhabitants, making it all the more realistic, and presumably more satisfying. Then, perhaps, there wouldn’t be any need for wars.

He was still musing over the thought as surely a touch of genius when Ohira got up from the stool and came over, at the same time making a sign to catch Kevin’s attention. Kevin looked up. Ohira motioned with his head to indicate the doors. “I have been thinking. There is something I would like you and Taki to do for me,” he said. Kevin held out the card deck that he was still holding in one hand and fanned it in an unspoken invitation. Ohira selected a card and returned it. Kevin shuffled it into the deck, gave the deck to Ohira, and then plucked the card he had chosen out of the air. He made it disappear again, showed his hand to be empty, and produced the card from the other one. “Very good,” Ohira complimented. “It seems that everything young people do these days has to have screens and be connected to a nuclear power plant. You don’t even need batteries.” He waved again toward the door. Kevin got up and followed him out of the room.

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