He swiped his finger from top to bottom of the screen, to see if anything above the current display could be pulled down to put it in context.
He was blinded by the white.
60
Whoosh.
Amity gasped—“Daddy!”—and turned toward the sound.
A large stranger in a suit and tie stumbled toward her, almost fell, regained his balance, halted, and looked at her as he might have looked at a goat with two heads. His face was whiter than the flashlight beam, and he was holding the key to everything.
Amity wanted to know what had happened to her father, whether this humongous creature was friend or foe, but instead she said, “Gimme that,” and so surprised him by her boldness that she was able to snatch Harkenbach’s cursed device out of his hand.
That was when the robot slammed the far side of the connecting-room door a second time, splitting it all the way up the middle.
“Here,” she said, passing the flashlight to the stranger, so she could have her hands free to operate the key, which had gone dark.
He trained the beam on the broken door as it bulged toward them. Two steel-fingered appendages, each twice the size of a man’s hand, pried through the gap between halves of the door and began to tear them away from the hinges on the left and the deadbolt on the right.
After touching the home circle at the base of the screen, Amity began counting off four seconds. If Apple had designed the freaking thing, it would light up immediately.
Metal shrieked, wood cracked, the halves of the door fell into the room, and the bug-form robot filled the doorway. In fact it was bigger than the doorway, but that didn’t matter, because its body was segmented and flexible, allowing it to contort itself through an opening half that size.
Gray light filled the screen.
She forgot how many seconds were required for the buttons to appear. She strained to remember, because it seemed if she couldn’t recall how many seconds, then the buttons would never be offered to her, as if this wasn’t a technological marvel but a magical device. The tension was making her a little screwy.
Gunfire.
Amity snapped her head up in surprise as the bullet ricocheted off the invader.
The stranger was holding the butt of the flashlight in his mouth, gripping it with his teeth, spotting the robot, the pistol in a two-handed grip. She told him that this was pointless because the thing was made of steel or titanium or some such, or maybe she only thought she told him. Anyway, he didn’t listen, and he knew what he was doing, squeezing off a second shot that blew out one of the thing’s eyes, and then a third round that took out the other. He was great, this big guy, but it didn’t matter. He’d done what damage he could. The robot surely had other sensory apparatus in addition to its eyes. It knew where they were. Besides, the room was small, and the machine was big, and more just like it would be coming.
As the robot rose up on its four back legs, its arms reaching, its fingers pincering, Amity looked down at the screen and saw the three buttons. Her father had jumped back to Prime, so she had to assume that this stranger had come from there, that it was okay to press Return, but then she realized it would be best to press Home, because that for sure would be Earth Prime.
A sound like swords being drawn from metal sheaths caused Amity to look up in time to see the robot’s large fingers morphing into razor-sharp blades with which it would have no difficulty slicing their flesh from their bones and decapitating them.
She pushed Home.
The little spinning wheel appeared. Searching.
“This way, come with me!” she shouted as the stranger realized the futility and the danger of adding the risk of ricochets to the situation.
The humongous stainless-steel cockroach knocked its way through furniture as it came after them, but they made it to the bathroom, and Amity slammed the door. The lock proved to be a flimsy push-button privacy model. The door wouldn’t stand for more than a few seconds. Maybe that would be long enough.
The farthest they could get from the entrance to the bathroom was the shower stall. They crowded into it, and the stranger closed the smeary glass door, as though that would foil a couple thousand pounds of futuristic war machinery operated by a homicidal AI that had already murdered a world of people. In his defense, maybe he didn’t have a totally firm grasp on where he was and what all this meant. He looked shell-shocked.
Amity grabbed his hand, and he gently squeezed hers, no doubt thinking that she was scared, seeking his reassurance. She was scared, flat-out terrified, on the brink of sphincter failure, but he could do nothing to reassure her. Whoever he was, she couldn’t leave him here, because just by showing up, he had maybe saved her life—maybe, maybe—so she meant to hold on to him.
> She expected the robot to smash down the door or carve it apart in a flurry of glittering blades. But with some other weapon in its arsenal, the machine blew out the door and jamb along with some of the wall in which the jamb was set, the bristling mass slamming across the room, shattering the mirror above the sink, plaster dust billowing.
The massive mechanical bug form surged into the bathroom, reared up, standing on just the back two of its six legs, and turned its burst and lightless eyes toward the shower stall.
On the screen, the searching symbol stopped rotating, and a blinding blizzard swept them across seventy-seven universes.
61
In a world not yet undone by artificial intelligence, in Room 414, Jeffy Coltrane stood in a state of terror. Every second of horrified expectation worried an hour off his life.