Analog SFF, March 2012 Read Online Free PDF Page A

called up and tapped at a virtual keyboard. In a few seconds I had what I needed.
    "Do it. Then close the door to the device."
    She did it. Her robot stopped moving, failing to emulate the small motions of her head in the VR suit. Then, after a moment, my view went black.
    "Can you hear me?” I called out loudly.
    "No need to shout,” she said. Now I heard her voice only through the muffled sound that penetrated my helmet, not over radio.
    "Count to ten, then open the door. Then get back into your robot."
    She did a countdown aloud. After “Zero!” my vision sputtered back as contact with the robots resumed.
    "What did that accomplish?” Daltry asked.
    "These bots have internal clocks.” I looked at the display. I'd synchronized and set side by side displays of the robot's clock and my suit's clock. “Twelve seconds lost."
    Daltry said in a rush, “Oh my god we have to find that thing."
    "What thing?” Karen asked.
    "Daltry's right. There's some kind of stasis field, some kind of time-stopping-field, in this thing. That's how it lasted so long. When you shut the door, time stopped, or really slowed, in here."
    "Or,” Daltry said, “this thing slowed the atomic motion that your robot's clock uses to measure time."
    I nodded, making my robot's head bob. “It might just be, Karen, that you're right. That this thing is more than five hundred million years old."
    We all just breathed a moment.
    "I'm scared,” I said.
    "Why?” Karen asked.
    "This thing can stop time, or entropy. I can't imagine how that works but I'd bet it takes a lot of energy. And all that's in here too. This thing is dangerous. We should call in the government—"
    "No way,” Daltry said.
    "Okay, something, someone with more resources than us. MIT."
    "Let's get in a team of choice people,” Daltry said. “People we know and trust. Get them to give us some real-time feedback."
    "You're crazy,” Karen said.
    "Better than bringing in some schmucks from MIT,” Daltry said.
    "You're both crazy,” she said. “This is my show. We go on. Alone."
    I took a breath. We could have this argument later. “Okay. A few more centimeters in. Then we stop, reconsider, and discuss next steps."
    Daltry's robot stepped forward. Before us the lights formed what looked almost like a boulevard, with two lanes divided in their center by a narrow trench. I walked over to this trench and reached down inside. It had an inverted T shape.
    "Maybe we shouldn't go any farther in,” I said, but it was too late: Daltry and Karen were separating, wandering ahead.
    We searched the space. Relative to our scale, it was like an airplane hanger. The floor, the walls, the ceiling were covered with fine lines through which lights shot and flickered. The shapes, which I couldn't help but think of now as buildings, were all geometric solids. We followed the track or trench in the floor to its end at the far wall. The track went into the wall, which was covered with a pattern of geometric shapes and dots.
    "It seems almost like a puzzle,” Daltry said. He reached out.
    "Don't touch it!” I told him. But he had already pressed a rhombus shape, and a portion of the wall slipped aside.
    "Something's coming!” Karen shouted. A glint of gold showed in the dark space beyond the gap. Sound at our tiny scale was strange: although amplification tried to respect the scale, sounds still came as somehow thin, tiny. Something rattled noisily toward us. We backed up quickly. That was an awkward motion, one that made clear how differently the robot walked compared to human walking—the feet gripped strongly and the robots scurried back quickly, causing a disorienting visual.
    Through the new opening, a blur of motion came. It was over in a second. Before us, a long row of things like boxes lined up in a neat row along the track in the center of the space. They were probably a centimeter on a side, with a centimeter separating them. It looked, I suddenly realized, like a train. A train of cubes