The Media Candidate (30 page)

Elliott couldn’t afford to even look back now,
and he didn’t want to know the moment before the spider took him
down.
How will it kill me? It! I’m going to be killed by an
it
!

As he ran through the trees, an apparition of a
giant brown-recluse gripped him with imaginary legs, embracing him
breathlessly, spinning silk around his lifeless body. A simple
injection would be better than being smothered and strangled by
eight legs. The glacial faces of some anonymous civil servants at
COPE loomed before him, dispassionately reading the report of this
“loose end” being taken care of, and then throwing the report into
the burn box. That’s all the attention he’d get. Guinda probably
faced the same fate. He hadn’t meant to drag her down with his
lunacy. He at least wanted to apologize to her, to explain that it
was just an old man’s stupidity. To beg forgiveness.

Suddenly the firmness of a sidewalk under foot
jolted him to his present needs. He swung his leg over the seat
once more and started pumping pedals like he’d never pumped before,
toward a group of buildings. Only two creatures were stirring here
at this hour, one a terrified human, the other a terrible human
invention.

The spider had its prey in sight now and was
able to close the gap rapidly against this inferior target. Elliott
had to somehow lose his attacker in the buildings ahead. He didn’t
yet know how, but it was the only chance he saw. He heard the
clatter of eight frenzied feet on the sidewalk even above the
throbbing of his heart and the complaints of his bicycle.
It’s
already to the sidewalk. Damn it! Gaining too fast. Too fast! I
have to go faster … faster.
The clatter behind him grew louder.
He braced himself for the attack as he sped past the sign reading
“Heisenberg Natatorium.”

He leaped from his bike at the bottom of the
steps leading to the row of front doors. He wasn’t even aware that
he had not slowed down his bike. It continued riderless, careening
off the steps and crashing into a concrete planter. The spider knew
exactly which of the two was the high-value target. It bounded up
the five limestone steps as if they were one. Elliott heard the hop
and braced for the thing to land on his back and sink its toxic
teeth into him or wrap its legs around his throat. Just as he
reached for the first door, the spider landed after its long stride
up the steps. The briefest relief hit Elliott as he realized that
the jump he feared was not for him; it was just to clear the steps.
But this relief endured no more than a heartbeat.

The door was locked! Then the spider’s rattling
hooves went silent again. Elliott looked into the glass door and
saw it flying toward him, airborne. He yanked himself by one door
handle to the next one. This sudden action caused the trajectory of
the spider to narrowly miss his back. As the spider flew past him
crashing into the locked door, it reached out with two legs, which
caught Elliott’s left shoulder, throwing him to the ground with a
numbing blow. It, too, crashed, and much harder than the blow it
had delivered to Elliott. Missing Elliott, it smashed into the
steel post between two sets of doors. Both Elliott and the spider
sat on the concrete just a few feet apart, each of them gathering
their wits in surprisingly similar ways.

The spider was the first to its feet, its long
legs tapping in some rhythmic pattern that could be understood only
by a robotics programmer as its way of reestablishing a baseline
coordinate system and testing its sensor systems before it could
resume its attack. One of the legs tapped Elliott’s leg during this
ritual. It was a surprisingly gentle tap, but Elliott reacted in
revile and fear. He began limping down the row of doors, testing
one then the next, all the while the sharp pain of the spider
attack stabbing his shoulder. He reached the fourth door as the
spider completed all its system checks and began scanning for its
prey. It was easy to find.

Even the most professional hit-man would have
winced in sympathy for this terrified figure of an old man stooped
before an army of locked doors, a man bleeding and broken,
trembling for that last bit of strength to resist the final
onslaught. But this attacker was not a man. It had no sense of
humanity, no feelings, no history of self to arouse empathy. It
sensed only one thing—a target. It saw only an object whose
characteristics matched a set of parameters that had been input to
its memory. It knew only its instructions. It could only comply
instantly and efficiently.

Elliott was only four doors away when the thing
sprang. He was only four doors away when he reached that last door
handle to give one last tug, when he felt that door suddenly yield
to his tug. He swung the glass door open and fell inside. The
spider landed in front of the door, reached one tentacle through
the closing crack, and grabbed Elliott’s ankle. It was an uneven
tug of war. Elliott pulling with all his might on the crash bar
with both feet braced against the doorframe. The spider, with the
strength of a weight lifter and a mechanical blind will, pulled
Elliott’s foot relentlessly away from its hold. There could be but
one winner in this unfair match.

But as clever as this spider’s attack program
was that guided its every response to Elliott, it lacked the
defiance of Elliott’s mind. It was engaged in a situation for which
it had not been programmed. It failed to see that the key to
victory was not Elliott’s leg that it grasped so rigidly, but the
door that barred it from the rest of Elliott. With such a simple
concept, it would’ve had no trouble prying the door open with its
superior strength. But the instruction set it continually executed
denied it this simple solution. The match was not as uneven as
Elliott had feared.

Summoning his last reserve of strength, Elliott
yelled and pulled the door shut and locked. The crushed tentacle
still grasped his ankle as before, but Elliott now had a locked
door between himself and his assassin.

His back was propped against a railing and both
legs stretched out against the doorframe. For the first time he was
able to examine the menace outside, just inches away. He studied
its limb, which kinked through the crack between the distorted door
and the frame. The tentacle still held tight to his ankle. Elliott
stared at the spider, then at his leg. It was a stalemate. Each
analyzed the situation in his or its own way.

Elliott now had time to think, to fear. The fact
that this thing was not just a killer, but also a spider, now came
to the front. He looked into eyes that he’d dreaded for over a
half-century. If this was his final test, why did it have to be
against such a thing? Why not a lion, or a rattle snake? He could
deal with those. Why this thing?

“That’s it,” he said. “You’re not really a
spider, just look like a spider.” He stared into its eyes, seeing
his own minute reflection. “You’re just a goddamned machine.”

Its small size surprised him. From what he’d
heard, he expected a much larger, and more formidable looking
thing. Its size didn’t suggest its physical or intellectual power.
Up close, it was a simple-looking machine, not as heinous as he’d
conjectured. He almost expected a wicked mouth-full of jagged teeth
dripping blood. “Wait a minute,” he mumbled. “What’s that thing?”
He lowered his head to get a better view. There it was, the long,
slender stainless steel tube was just visible on the creature’s
belly. It slowly pulsed just perceptibly, in and out, in and out.
Elliott’s eyes narrowed as he realized this was the killing device,
a needle full of venom meant for him, venom that would be coursing
through his own body if it weren’t for the single sheet of glass
separating them. “You’re ready, aren’t you? You want to use that on
me. And all because my name is on some list. You don’t hate me,
don’t even know me. But you want to stick me with that thing.”

Elliott’s attention then refocused on his ankle
as he felt its grip tighten. He strained at the oppressive grasp,
but it wouldn’t budge. Its skin was smooth and cool, unlike his
own. The spider had decided it was time for action. It began
pulling with all its might on Elliott’s leg once more. It was
dragging Elliott’s leg closer and closer to the crack between the
door and the frame. As it performed this simple act of power, the
door and the frame continually stripped away material from its leg
since there simply wasn’t enough room in that crack for the
tentacle. As the spider single-mindedly persisted in this, it was
slowly destroying its leg.

After a short time, the power and control lines
in the leg began to break, and Elliott could feel its grip loosen.
He again tried prying the grasp from his leg, and this time it
worked. He heard the carbon and plastic shell splinter. He embraced
the wires snapping and delighted in the scrapes and grinds as the
spider ripped its leg free, leaving a limp piece draped over
Elliott’s leg.

It stood inches from Elliott, reconfiguring its
motor commands to accommodate just seven legs. Elliott watched this
exercise as he rubbed life back into his raw leg. He wished that
the thing could experience the kind of pain he had in his own leg.
“That’ll slow you down. But you don’t hurt, do you? You just ripped
your leg off, and all you care about is reconfiguring some
controls.”

He wished it pain, not to make it less
effective, but to make it suffer. “God damn you! Why can’t you
suffer? You just lost a leg!” As he examined it and hated it, he
noticed another injury, one that might have prevented it from
catching him as he fled through the door. The spider’s right eye
was smashed. “So you’re half-blind, lost your depth perception. Too
bad, you son-of-a-bitch. If I could get your other eye, I’d yank it
out with my bare hands.”

Elliott tried to stand up, but every part of him
ached at once, and he slumped back to the floor. “Got to get up,”
he said through short bursts of breath. “Got to get up,” he said
again as he used the railing to try to pull himself up. He fell
back to the floor with a grunt. “Well, you half-blind, lame
bastard, now what—” A pain shot up his side before he could finish
the question.

As if in response, the spider began walking from
door to door, testing each one. Since there were a dozen doors
across the entrance, and Elliott had found one of the four he tried
to be ajar, there was no way to tell if any others might be open.
He watched with exhaustion and hatred as it moved down the
line.

The spider grasped the handle of the second last
door and pulled. Tight. It walked to the last door. Elliott
squinted as one of the spider’s legs reached for the door handle.
It shook the door, and it creaked, but it was locked. The spider
returned to where Elliott and its leg lay on the floor.

“Can’t figure out what to do, can you? I’m right
here, and you’re right there.” Every muscle in Elliott’s body
ached. Both legs were bloodied and his left shoulder throbbed. He
didn’t want to move.

He slowly became entombed in a scene he’d
suppressed for over fifty years, a scene he’d claimed he couldn’t
remember, a scene of a teenage boy in a far away garage. He was
blond and freckled and not enthusiastic about his task. He climbed
a stepladder and pulled a tire down, and a cloud of dirt fell onto
him. He spat it out and rubbed his eyes. When he tugged on the
second tire, another cloud fell onto his head, but this dirt was
alive and crawled over him with a thousand legs. He screamed and
began flailing at the sea of life as venomous jaws sought
retribution, their red-hot needles piercing his skin. The pain and
the terror had continued for half a century.

Elliott opened his eyes. He’d denied that vision
for a lifetime, yet it lurked beneath his consciousness every day.
Now, just a short spider jump from him, stood the Godzilla of
spiders—with only a thin sheet of glass between them. He faced his
ancient foe magnified a million times.

A simple action of the spider brought Elliott
abruptly back to the present. It began with an exploratory tapping
of one leg on the glass of the door between them. Elliott forced
his eyes to the spot.

The tapping increased in intensity and was soon
joined by two other legs. The door shuddered, but held, under the
blows. Elliott’s concern escalated to fear as the glass cracked.
Then another crack appeared … and another. The sound of the strikes
also changed, from a sharp report on hard glass to the dull thud of
something softer. The safety glass was being beaten into a putty of
cracked pieces held together by tough plastic films. Elliott winced
with each blow, understanding the meaning but unable to convince
his body to take action. The cracks were now too many to count, and
each blow caused the fractured glass plate to leap inward toward
him. Elliott watched; then he crawled to the door and placed both
hands on the rebounding glass. “No! No! Stay out!”

A leg poked through the glass next to one hand
and cut him. Elliott braced himself for each strike, hardly aware
of the pain. Another leg poked through and cut his other hand.

Elliott pulled back from the door, which was
being demolished before his eyes. The hole in the center was
quickly growing. A human attacker with such single-minded
viciousness would now have glared menacingly at Elliott through the
hole. But this attacker had no capacity for theatrics, it knew
where it was going, and it proceeded efficiently and
relentlessly.

The hole was now nearly large enough for the
spider to crawl through. There would be no trial entries to test
the hole size. When the hole was exactly large enough for it to
enter and no larger, it would precisely execute an entry it had
been taught by its human masters. It monitored the hole size with
each additional blow. It would know when the time was right.