Love, Death and Robots. Volumes 2 & 3

“As I said, man has become the greatest force of evolution. We are forcing intelligence on the animal kingdom. It is–”

Mason raised his hand before the Traptech rep could move into full bullshit mode. “Okay. What have you got for me?”

The suit smiled like a shark and pulled a thick catalogue from his briefcase. Mason felt a sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach – one he normally associated with the sight of little brown envelopes with windows in them. The suit opened the catalogue on the table next to the thawing rat and showed Mason a picture of something that looked like a security camera.

“This is the TT6, which we introduced only last year. It is a guided pulse laser with dual heat and movement sensors. Four of these in each of your two barns should solve your problem. Smith was most satisfied with them.”

“How much?” asked Mason tiredly, then frowned at the answer. The new harvester retreated even further into the future.

* * *

The men from Traptech installed the TT6s in a day. Mason noted that they wore helmets, visors and overalls with micromesh ring mail stitched in, and that one of them stood guard with a pump-action shotgun. The rats remained hidden though. From the TT6s, the men ran an armoured cable into his house to the farm computer. When all the work was completed, the suit arrived to demonstrate the system.

“This is the control package,” said the suit after loading two discs and plugging the cable into the computer’s unused security circuit. “Now you can call up diagnostics on each TT6, find out if there have been any hits, and even get a view through each unit.”

The computer screen flickered on and showed: HIT ON TT6 G1/3.

“Ah, marvellous,” said the suit, and demonstrated how the view could be called up on that unit. The screen flickered again and showed the greenish infrared view of the inside of G1. Lying before one of the grain piles, smoke wisping from the laser punctures in its body, lay Mason’s remaining cat.

“Ah. ... It would be advisable to keep other animals out of the barns. The sensors are set to pick up on animals within certain size parameters. Obviously, they will miss humans but–”

“I will expect some sort of reduction for this,” interrupted Mason, his teeth clenched.

* * *

On the first day the diagnostic program reported a malfunction and Mason could get no picture through that particular unit. It never occurred to him to be surprised. With his shotgun hooked under his arm he went to G1. On the floor before the TT6 one of the rats lay in a smoking heap. The TT6 was smoking as well though, two crossbow bolts impaling it. In the night two more were scrapped. In the morning Mason called up the suit.

“Ah,” said the suit, inspecting the crossbow bolt shortly after he arrived, “this sometimes happens. Your best move now would be to get a mobile defence.” He opened up the dread catalogue and pointed out something that looked like a foot-long chrome scorpion. “This is the TT15.”

“Those TT6s are still under guarantee.”

“I can give you a very reasonable exchange price with service contract and deferred payment, and though they are expensive, you will only need one TT15.”

The TT15 arrived the next day. Just taking it out of its box gave Mason the creeps. After turning off the TT6s he took it into the barns, and turned it on. Immediately it scuttled into the shadows. Mason found himself fearing it more than he feared the rats, and he quickly went outside. Its homing beacon he placed by the compost heap. After half an hour the TT15 came out with a dead rat in it mandibles and dumped it by the beacon. Next to the tractor on which he was working, Mason shuddered and turned back to his task. Later, as he sat on one of the tractor’s tyres and rolled himself a cigarette, he saw three rats run out of G1 with the chrome scorpion in pursuit.

He found himself hoping the rats would escape but before they reached the polythene-wrapped straw bales, it had the slowest of them, caught it, crunched it, then like some horrible gun dog took it to the compost heap. However unpleasant the thing might look, Mason decided, it was damned efficient.

* * *

The men from Traptech came the following day to take down the TT6s. When they had finished, their foreman came to see Mason.

“Says here you had eight TT6s, mate.”

“That’s right. The rats scrapped four of them though.”

“We know about that. We’ve got those four. Just that one of the good one’s gone missin’. I’ll have to report it, mate.”

* * *

For the rest of the day, while he baled straw in the fields, Mason wondered confusedly where the missing TT6 could have gone. By evening he had figured it out and in a strange way was quite glad. As soon as he got back to the farmyard, he fetched his shotgun and went with it into the barns.