Micro

Eric drove the truck inside an unfinished building, just the frame of a warehouse and some concrete block walls, which sat next to Nanigen. He parked behind a wall, out of sight. He shut off the engine and got out, and listened for a few moments, and looked around. Time to move on Nanigen.

He put on the squirt radio headset, and spoke into the voice pickup. “Launch your planes and follow me.”

Karen and Rick climbed into their planes and took off. Eric could hear the props whining near his ears as he crossed the lot, heading for Nanigen. He realized they were flying directly behind his head, to keep out of the wind.

“You okay?” he said on the radio.

“Fine,” Karen answered. She didn’t feel fine, she felt terrible, like a bad case of flu coming on. Every joint in her body ached. Rick probably felt worse, she thought, since he’d had loads of toxins in his bloodstream. That would accelerate the bends in him, probably.

The front door was locked. Eric opened it with a key. He held it open for a moment to let Karen and Rick fly through. Then he closed the door behind him.

He moved along the main corridor at a slow walk, hearing the mosquito-like buzzing behind his head. He glanced back and saw the two micro-planes, their propellers whirring, floating along under the ceiling tiles, bobbing in air currents generated by the building’s air-handling system. His head created turbulence, and they bounced around in his wake as he walked. “Don’t get sucked into a vent,” he warned them.

“Couldn’t we land on your shoulder? You could carry us-” Karen said to Eric.

“You’re better off in the air. You might need to get away fast-if I run into…trouble.” Eric glanced back at the planes, to make sure they were still behind him, and stopped at a corner, and peered around it. He was looking down a long corridor past windows covered with black shades. There was nobody in sight. He crossed this corridor and continued down a side hallway to a door, and opened it, and went in, the planes following him. “My office,” he said on the squirt.

Eric’s office had been ransacked. Papers were strewn about, and his computer was gone. Eric pulled open a drawer in his desk, rummaged through it, and said, “Whew. It’s still here.” He took out a device that resembled a game controller. “It’s my bot controller. It should disarm the bots,” he explained to Rick and Karen.

Then he led them back to the main corridor, and they flew along behind him past the darkened windows. Eric stopped before the door marked TENSOR CORE. He pushed the door.

It wouldn’t open. There was no security pad, just a plain lock, he explained. “Shit,” he said. “This door has been locked from the inside. That means…”

“Somebody’s in there?” Rick asked.

“Could be. But there’s another way into the generator room. We can get in there through the Omicron zone.”

The bots in the Omicron zone might be programmed to kill an intruder. There was no way to know without entering the zone and seeing what the bots did. Eric just hoped his bot controller would work. He led the flyers around a corner, turned right, and stopped by a nondescript door. The door had on it only a small, unfamiliar symbol, with a single word: MICROHAZARD.

Rick flew past the symbol, a few inches from it, and said on the squirt radio, “What does this mean?”

“It means there are bots on the other side of the door that are capable of causing death or serious injury-if they’re programmed that way. It could be nasty in there.” Eric held up the controller where the flyers could see it clearly. “Let’s hope this controls them.” Then Eric tried the doorknob; it wasn’t locked. But he didn’t open it. Instead, he punched in a series of digits on the controller’s keypad. “You see, Drake thinks I’m dead,” he said on the squirt radio to the flyers. “I’m assuming Drake didn’t bother to delete my PIN number from my bot controller, since he figured I’d never be using it again.” He shrugged. “We’ll see.” He paused for a moment, pondering the danger on the other side of the door, and then thrust open the door and walked in. He stopped, holding the door open so that the micro-planes could follow him through.

They had entered the main lab room of the Omicron Project. The lights in the room were turned low, and the room was mostly dark. It was not a large space; it could have been a normal engineering lab. It contained some desks, some workstations, some lab benches with magnifying lenses mounted on them. Steel shelves held a myriad of small parts. A window made of thick glass looked into the tensor core; a door stood next to the window, an entry door that led straight from Project Omicron into the core.