Fall; or, Dodge in Hell - Neal Stephenson Page 0,210

the top, which had been opened. Hissing out of it and filling the room was gas.

Gas the entire point of which was that it did not include any oxygen.

She wasn’t woozy and light-headed because of heat but because she wasn’t getting enough air. She was being asphyxiated.

The welding cart was blocking her path to the terrace doors, so she headed for the cottage’s front door instead. But she drew up short when she saw that the way out had been blocked by several heavy items of furniture that had been dragged there and piled against it.

She spun back toward the glass doors that led onto the terrace and saw again the pattern of light she had noticed earlier. This time it was moving. It moved like a human. It was the Metatron. Its nighttime running lights had come on automatically. It had been standing near the glass doors. Now it was moving toward her. Another one just like it was moving outside. No, that was just the reflection of the first one in the glass. Spatial basics like in and out, up and down, vertical and horizontal, normally so intuitive, had become unfathomably tricky. She felt pressure on her knees and realized that she was in fact kneeling. More pressure on her shoulder was probably because she was slumped against a wall. The Metatron was coming toward her. She drew in a breath of 75 percent CO2/25 percent argon (that’s what the label on the hissing cylinder said) and called out “Help” in a strangely low syrupy voice. But the hissing had been reinforced by a heavy thudding noise that drowned everything out. She thought maybe it was her heart pounding but then knew it for a helicopter.

Something hard was around her wrist, like a manacle. It was the Metatron’s hand. It began walking toward the glass doors. Since it was still gripping Sophia’s wrist this meant it was now dragging her. She had gone almost completely flaccid and couldn’t see well, but as her free hand trailed along the carpet it felt something familiar, and reflexively closed over it: the thin nylon strap of Daisy. Daisy now began dragging along in her wake. She heard glass shattering.

When she woke up it seemed much later. But it wasn’t. Her sense of time had gone out of whack. She was gulping in cold air—real air. Her legs hurt. She opened her eyes and looked up at the robot’s running lights above her against the foggy night sky as it dragged her. It was dragging her down the wooden staircase and her legs hurt because they’d been pulled through broken glass and scraped across stone and wood and were now banging down steps. The sound of the chopper was very close; they were almost to the helipad. Something was involved in the fingers of her free hand: the nylon strap of Daisy. She torqued her head around and saw, from near ground level, the aluminum feet of the Metatron, shod in black neoprene, hitting the pavement of the helipad in an even stride.

She swung her free arm around in a big arc. Daisy followed at the end of its nylon strap and wrapped all the way around the Metatron’s ankles. Its measured tread was spoiled. It teetered for a few moments as immense computations tried to compensate for this unexpected turn of events. Then it simply fell over, banging its head on the skid of the chopper hard enough to nudge the whole aircraft sideways a bit. The rotor was spinning up almost to takeoff speed, carrying most of the helicopter’s weight, the skids barely touching the pad.

Sophia got her feet under her and scrambled up as best as she could with the Metatron still clamping her wrist and the rotors’ downwash battering her. As she did, the fallen robot scraped toward her some distance and she understood that it didn’t actually weigh that much; it was very strong, but its mass was that of a child. It pulled back but couldn’t actually do much until it got its feet replanted. She knew it wanted to drag her into the helicopter’s side door.

She moved away from the side door, which meant she was going toward the tail of the chopper. A warning voice in her head reminded her of the spinning tail rotor, which would chop her to bits if she contacted it.

The Metatron had finally kicked free of Daisy’s strap. It clambered to its feet with the speed of an insect,