"Jack Elk is a lurker around the edges of the animal rights movement. He's a member of the Audubon Society and several other middle-of-the-road animal and conservation groups... pretty much like me. When he was young he went to a few protest marches and such, he was offered the chance to help 'liberate' some minks from a fur farm and declined—which was a good decision, because most of them got arrested and one had a finger bitten off. He's not a joiner and not an activist, at heart."
She lifted the amazingly realistic flap of one of Fuxxy Mark Two's ears and found a slot there to insert the card. When it was in you couldn't even see the slot.
"He is anticircus and antifur and antizoo and a vegetarian, but he's never done much about it, and we were very lucky to find him, because if he'd joined any of the more radical groups he'd never have got past the security checks here. Now hang on a minute here, I only saw this demonstrated once, and I don't want us to get trampled by a mechanical mammoth."
She concentrated on the controller. A green light came on. She punched a few buttons... and Fuxxy Mark Two began to breathe.
I swear it, if it wasn't too late already I'd run to my car and not stop driving until I got to the Nevada state line.
But it was far too late. On screen 1 he could see Susan and Matt and that goddamn contraption coming down the hall. He had to stick it out. Half an hour, just half an hour, that's how long she said it would take.
He got up from his chair, idly walked along the back gallery, stretched his arms and cracked his neck as he did a dozen times every shift... and casually glanced down at Ed Crane's console where, if things were not working, two people and a mechanical mammoth would come around a corner in about five seconds. Not that Ed was likely to notice it, staring glassy-eyed into space. But Darryl certainly would, and soon. Nothing happened on the screen, and he went and sat back down. On his own screen he could see Susan and Matt and Fuxxy. He said a silent prayer of thanks to the Unknown Hacker. Piece of cake, my ass.
All his life—or since the age of eighteen, anyway, when he had been horrified by the pictures and stories he had seen at a booth at a career fair at his high school—he had hated the exploitation of animals. It had been like a born-again moment for a Baptist; from that day his outlook on life had changed.
His outlook... but not his actions. He was basically lazy, didn't interact well with people, and had found the perfect niche for himself in a job that allowed him to sit down all day and spy on people he didn't have to talk to. He figured in another ten years his ass would be a yard wide and he'd have a hard time walking from the car to the front door, but he didn't particularly care. It was the life that suited him.
But he spent his spare time—where else?—sitting at his home computer connecting with some pretty radical groups, following their exploits, cheering them on from his comfortable safe seat in the grandstands of life.
Then one day the word had gone out that an operational group—what the straight media would call "terrorists"—was looking for someone with skills that could have been culled perfectly from a reading of his resume. From some dark well of guilt in his soul, carefully kept covered for the last decade since that almost-debacle with the minks, he felt the sudden urge to stand up and be counted, to put his ass on the line, to do something about the terrible evils he read about every day. Cautiously, he sent out a feeler, and, cautiously, an approach was made. One thing led to another...
And here he was, participating in what would probably become known as the heist of the century.
"HE'S on what they call 'come-along' mode," Susan said. "He'll follow the controller wherever it goes, never get closer than five feet."
Five feet felt entirely too close for Matt, who kept looking back over his shoulder to see if the damn thing was still back there, and was never quite sure if he was happy or not to see that it was, at a steady, dependable five feet, lumbering along as naturally as any actual living beast he had ever seen.
"So it's for use in the... what do they call that part of the park? With all the mechanical critters?"
"No, he's for the center ring... maybe."
"You can't be serious. Howard plans to palm off a mechanical substitute for the real thing?" "I said maybe. There's still a lot of bugs to be worked out. Can't have 'Fuzzy' falling over during the show and just lying there, trying to walk. So they figure they're about a year away from being able to chance it, not with this one, but with Mark Three or Four, which you saw back there being put together."
"It's partly my fault. Howard and I have been head-to-head over this thing practically from day one. He wanted three shows a day, I wanted one; we settled on two. I wanted two days off per week, we settled on one. Howard had power over me, because he's sure it would take a lot to make me quit here. Fuzzy is... like a child to me. It would be very hard to leave him. But I've got some power over him, too."
"What's that?"
Susan grinned.
"Fuzzy won't work for anybody but me."
Matt laughed out loud, then looked nervously at the camera they were just passing. (Not far away, Jack wondered what the hell the idiot found so funny.)
"You're kidding."
"He imprinted on me that night, or he loves me, or he's just ornery, look at it any way you want to. He lost his mother, and never attached to any of the wet nurses we provided for him. In fact, he didn't seem to like elephant milk much. He preferred to suck the stuff that I mixed up from a bottle. He has other handlers who groom him and can lead him around from place to place if they don't get in the way of what he really wants to do, but he only fully cooperates with me. Howard didn't find that out until the first time he fired me, three years ago, and he was apoplectic."
"Fired you 'the first time'?"
"Oh, he's fired me several times since then, but it lasts about an hour or two. Actually, a while after Andrea came along, he stopped firing me. She's been a good influence on him."
"He could use one."
"Sometimes he seems almost human. Anyway, this robot was supposed to take some of the burden off the real Fuzzy. Do the early show, sub three or four times a week, something like that. But it's one thing to make a titanothere that can walk around a predetermined track with a human operator inside, and something else to make a robot that can do tricks and really fool the eye under bright lights. The project is way behind schedule. I'm sure they'll get it right one day soon... and by then I really, really hope they'll need it badly... because here we are, and this is the last chance to turn back."
JACK watched them on his screen as they opened the gate to Fuzzy's enclosure and Susan entered, alone. Fuzzy had heard her or smelled her, and he turned from his manger and greeted her with his trunk. She patted his big flanks, gentling him, offering him a treat which he snarfed up. Fuxxy had come to a halt when Susan turned off the follow-me button on her controller. Now she turned it on again, and the imposter lumbered through the open gate and into the enclosure, stopping faithfully just behind her.
He explored the newcomer with his trunk. Jack wondered what the beast was thinking. Surely Fuxxy didn't smell like a mammoth, but he sure looked like one. But when Susan touched his side gently with the ankus, Fuzzy turned and went with her outside the stall, and when she touched him again and spoke to him he stood beside Matt, apparently incurious about this new guy. And why not? Fuzzy met a hundred new people every day, and was friendly to them all. Fuzzy was everybody's friend, but only took orders from Susan.