West of Nothing

19. That Nineties Sitcom

Major Zeus glanced at his watch. "I'm late for a staff meeting. I'll leave you experts to work this out."

"Christ, what a cluster fuck," Corny said the moment the doors closed behind him. "Whose idea was this?"

Doogie slumped lower in his mesh chair. Still clutching the Xbox controller, he looked like a video gamer who'd just gotten PK'd.

"We need to focus on the problem," Skunkworks went into engineering mode. "There's no telling how long that seal will hold. I saw some Plexiglass panels in the Storeroom we could use to construct a larger containment chamber around the bell."

Wouldn't that restrict access and make it difficult to run experiments? argued Gabby.

"It's the safest option," Skunkworks asserted. "Our foremost priority is containment. Full stop."

"I'm with Gabs on this one," Corny said. "If we box it up, we might as well pack up and go home."

"And if it gets loose, we're all going home the hard way," Skunkworks pointed out. "Just as soon as we get through explaining to General Dixon how we let a Chinese minibot get the jump on America's best and brightest. That's not a footnote I want added to my service record."

"Screw our service records," Corny shot back. "This sort of breakthrough only comes along once in a lifetime."

"At this rate, it's shaping up to be a real once-in-a-lifetime snafu!"

The engineer and the biomimeticist locked stares.

"All right, we have our fall back plan." HotDamn stepped in. "Who has another idea?"

"I can tune the resonator to—" Shouter began.

"No chance," Skunkworks cut him off. "There's too much for it to grip up there. Besides, the pterodactyl is hanging on by a single bolt. Any more shaking might knock it loose."

"Tase its ass with electricity!" said Shouter.

"Are you crazy?" Doogie came to life. "You could fry the pterodactyl's electronics."

"Worse, you could fry the X-Bot," Corny said. "We don't know what its electrical tolerances are. The last thing we want to do is hit it with a supercharged bug zapper."

"Isn't there some way of luring it down?" HotDamn suggested.

Skunkworks bristled. "If you make one more goddamn joke about—"

"No sexy pinups. But there must be something it wants. It has drives and goals, does it not?"

"Even if we knew what it wanted, we can't put anything into the bell without removing the lid which we can't do because it's stuck to it like a barnacle. It's a catch-22."

"Who says we have to put something inside the bell? The bell is made of glass, after all."

You're right! Gabby said. Maybe we've been thinking of stimulus too narrowly. I bet the X-Bot is programmed to seek out novel images and input. It wouldn't do its makers any good for it to sit and stare at the same patch of wall all day.

HotDamn latched onto the idea. "That's it! We can use flashy video as bait."

"Ah, hell, it's worth a shot," Skunkworks capitulated. "But if this doesn't work, it's full quarantine lock-down, agreed?"

The entrepreneur gave a one-handed thumbs up; the other hand was still pressing down his phone. "Tell me you get Netflix in here?"

A monitor was placed next to the bell and tilted back at a steep angle so it would be visible from the top. After a lengthy exchange with FN IT Security, they had Netflix up and running.

There was heated debate over what program would be most likely to trigger the X-Bot's novelty algorithms. Something cartoony, action-packed, social, outdoorsy or urban? Mason's suggestion of anime was overruled on less than scientific grounds. In the end, they left it up to the Netflix recommendation algorithm, which offered up the nineties sitcom Friends.

"Please tell me we're not logged in to Major Zeus's profile," Corny said.

Finally, the show was set to play. The X-Bot, which had only been poking its head out occasionally, now settled into a fixed viewing position.

"That's enough of a teaser," HotDamn said.

The screen was tilted far forward so it could only be viewed from the bottom. The X-Bot's only reaction was to crane its body farther back.

That's strange, Gabby said. Its eye is still tracking something.

HotDamn let out with a boisterous laugh. "Why the clever son of a bitch. It's watching the reflection in the glass. Well, we can't have that." HotDamn fiddled with a couple of the cylinder lamps mounted on the gantry until they washed out the bottom of the bell. "That should do it. If you want your MTV, you're going to have to come down off your perch."

The X-Bot scanned around the bell but, finding nothing else of interest, turned its gaze outward upon the Bridge where it passed briefly over each team member, lingering longest on Mason. Then, as if having come to a decision, it broke eye contact and crawled down the length of the pterodactyl. It paused at the tip of a beak-prong, which was now suspended over three feet in the air. Once it let go, it wouldn't be able to get back up again. It dangled by two legs then dropped the rest of the way. It walked over and positioned itself beneath the monitor, the shifting colors of the LCD screen playing over its body.

"All right," HotDamn said. "Let's get the pterodactyl back to its nest."