“Hey Joel.”
“What?! What!? Back, back, back I say! I warn you, I’m armed and…oh, it’s you. Hello, Bernie.”
“Calm down, neighbour; you look a bit tense. What’s that thing you’re holding there, anyways?”
“What thing?”
“That thing you were waving around just now.”
“Oh… Hedge trimmer.”
“Never seen one with all those glowy bits before. Or the exposed wiring.”
“It’s second-hand. I keep meaning to repair it.”
“That so?”
“Say, what brings you over here anyways, Bernie?”
“Well, my lawn mower broke. Was wondering if you could fix it.”
“I just fixed that thing last week! What happened?”
“You could say your fixing it is the source of the issue.”
“Can’t be. A simple tune-up and a change of oil was all it needed!”
“Yes, but whatever you changed the oil for leaks. And if it touches plants, they melt.”
“Really? Into what?”
“You’ve got me there, but it’s sort of orange. And the blades go too fast.”
“I can scarcely see how that’s an issue.”
“It hovers, Joel.”
“Perfect! Reduces the physical exertion required to move it.”
“It’s hovering twenty feet in the air and it’s tangled in the power lines, Joel. If my boy hadn’t let go as fast as he did, he’d be barbequed right now.”
“Oh dear.”
“Yup.”
“I must’ve put in the wrong battery. I guess that explains why this thing is having trouble starting.”
“What thing?”
“Never mind.”
“Come on Joel, we’ve been neighbours for fifteen years. My son’s asked your daughter out on four really awkward dates. Our wives share recipes on little bitty index cards. You can tell me.”
“Promise you won’t tell anyone?”
“My lips are sealed.”
“…it’s a doomsday machine.”
“A what now?”
“Well, it’s more like a demi-doomsday machine.”
“I’m sorry?”
“I mean, it would be a bit of a job for it to destroy a single major metropolitan city, let alone any civilizations. I think calling it a whole-hog armageddon device would be a tad overconfident.”
“Joel, are you telling me that you have constructed a weapon of mass destruction inside your garage?”
“I’ll have you know that KRUMEK is an autonomic artificially-created entity capable of supporting independent and efficient evolving thought-processes, not some sort of ham-handed and dangerous piece of equipment!”
“Oh, that’s a reli–”
“I strapped those all over his external hull and wired them into his central cortex. Just most of my leftovers from my postgraduate projects, anyways.”
“How dangerous is this stuff, Joel?”
“The earlier pieces are crude and unsophisticated, so they have no safeties. The later components are mostly intellectual exercises, and I haven’t actually tested any of them yet, so they may work as planned or do something radically unexpected.”
“Like?”
“Remember that time I made waffles at your place?”
“Oh, right.”
“But with less maple syrup. I think.”
“Listen, should you really be making this sort of thing in your garage?”
“Where else?”
“Practically anywhere. I mean, don’t you have labs for this sort of thing?”
“I don’t know what you think my salary is –”
“You work for the Pentagon, Joel.”
“– but I can tell you this: it’s not nearly enough to cover a mortgage, a college fund, my wife’s knitting habits, my scrap metal and nuclear contaminants collection, and the rental of over a hundred thousand square feet of lab space in an industrial district plus all safety permits, regulation inspections, hazardous waste storage, and security systems.”
“So instead of that, you’re using your garage.”
“It already has a padlock and there’s a drain built right into the floor. Acceptable substitute.”
“Let’s try a different angle then: why do you need to build this thing at all? It’s not an official project, right?”
“Definitely not. If this were from work, hah, I’d be still trying to file reports on safety margins and possibilities of error. No, this is a true labour of love – shining, free, dancing in the sunlight, loosed under the sky and unburdened with red tape.”
“And covered in experimental and unpredictable weaponry.”
“Same old Bernie, always the cynic.”
“So, why are you building this?”
“Well, partly it was a bit of a whim. A flight of fancy. I’ve had all these bits and pieces from my job building up in my garage, a whole mountain of might-have-been projects and dreams and idle fancies, and I just said, hey, why not combine them all at once? And partly it was a bit of a money issue, because with the mortgage, and the college fund, and my wife’s knitting –”
“Yes, yes.”
“Well, and the third part was that I sort of quit work yesterday.”
“What?! Really?! Why?”
“Blew up my boss’s office. It’s ‘three strikes and you’re out,’ you see, and that was the third that day. And the fourth, fifth, and sixth all happened within about five seconds after that, so I knew I was past the plead-for-your-career point.”
“And this led to this because…?”
“Well, you know. Some people cut luxuries, some people go bargain hunting, some people start browsing classifieds…”
“And you decide to build a big pile of weaponry?”
“A big sentient and mobile pile of weaponry. It’s all basically the same crisis strategy operating within different paradigms of expression, you know?”
“Joel, how is this supposed to help you get money?”
“Well, it’s quite simple. See, it’s theoretically capable of holding off a small battalion and if need be, me and the entire family can fit into the panic compartment, though it’s a bit of a tight fit. Add in the emergency rations I’ve stashed in there and we can turn this baby into a temporary home-away-from-home-away for a few weeks, although I might need to install some sort of shower before that’s really viable, or at least a little sprinkler.”
“That’s wonderful, but why are you making a cold war-era bunker, giving it a brain, and then covering it with weapons?”
“I’m sorry?”
“It just seems excessive. What are you going to need to shoot at?”
“Well, those are just backup. Insurance. Just in case.”
“In case what?”
“Well, in case they take my letter of resignation the wrong way, back at work. I figured better to go that way than to be fired, right?”
“What’d it say?”
“I can’t remember, my ears were all ringing from the explosion, and I’d just taken a triple dose of my meds after forgetting them for most of the week, and I’d had a few energy drinks before work. I think the energy drinks made me a bit scatterbrained.”
“Yeah, I don’t know what’s in those things. My son drinks ‘em all the time. Can’t be good for him.”
“My girl too. I swear they’re going to give her something nasty when she hits her forties.”
“Damned shame, it is.”
“Too true.”
“Still, you might want to keep a better eye on your pills, too.”
“It couldn’t hurt. But they always give me this terrible buzzing in my head. I think much more clearly when I’m off them.”
“It’s your brain. So, you don’t remember what was in your resignation letter?”
“Not as such. I think I put in something about a trained seal. It felt very important at the time.”
“Anything else?”
“The word ‘porcupine.’ Past that? Nothing. Wait; and I signed it in blood.”
“Why?”
“All that I had, since I couldn’t find my pen. Oh damn, I bet it was in the desk drawer. At least I got a challenge out of it – lovely calligraphy, too. And I always liked writing in red. We have to use black ink on all our forms, no other colours allowed – can you believe that?”
“It’s amazing how closely they try to push you around nowadays. Just rude.”
“It is. Anyways, KRUMEK is my backup plan if they take it the wrong way. I’ve almost finished putting the last bits together, and I’ve got the radar on the lookout for anything suspicious. First sign of a blip, BOOM, in we go and off we trundle to Bermuda. Might need to hit a bank or two on the way for cash.”
“Have you considered just phoning in to work and clearing the whole matter up?”
“Can’t. Took out all the landlines and the EMP from the seventh blast fried all the electronics across the complex, so no cell or satellite phones. Pity too, my wife gave me this one a year or two ago.”
“It’s real pretty.”
“Isn’t it?”
“What’s that spiky bit?”
“Personal defence app, don’t touch. It’s got a bit of a short trigger and I’m not sure if it’s completely dead yet – look, the legs twitch now and then.”
“Well, I guess you’re a bit too busy to handle my mower then.”
“Sad to say that’s probably true, Bernie.”
“It’s no problem, I’ll just shoot it down with my twelve-gauge. Say, anything you want me to tell the feds when they interview us?”
“If you could just say I was a pretty good guy but we were kind of distant and didn’t have a lot in common, that’d be nice. I don’t want you and yours getting into any trouble on my account.”
“It’ll be fine, Joel.”
“Maybe there’s hope for you yet. Well, I’m just going to weld in a little extra plating and then I’ll see about that sprinkler. If I’m lucky, I can get in at least three and a ventilation shaft or two before the choppers get here.”
“I sure hope you can. Bermuda’s a long ways off. I’ll leave you be now.”
“Oh, before I forget, you might want to take your family down to the basement for the next few hours – just in case.”
“Good luck, Joel.”
“Take care, Bernie. Have a nice day, and sorry about the lawn.”
“Ah, it’ll wash out. See you later.”