"Bad out there, is it?" Hunter asked, as if he were challenging Code to make something out of it.

Code nodded, carefully turning the locking wheel of the solid-titanium inner door to the fully secure position. He pulled off the last layers of his protective clothing and hung it on the crude wooden pegs in the hallway, glad of the excuse to do something while he tried to calm the fear that pounded in his chest and ran around his stomach like a caged rat. He forced himself to ignore the loud bangs and rattles of the ultra-strong plastic window in the hallway and averted his gaze from the pits that formed on its surface as it was hit with small drops of hyper-corrosive acid and bright flashes of high-temperature micro-arcs.

Hunter spun his wheelchair around and headed into the small living room. Code followed him, making a mental note of the house, and trying not to show his distaste for the dust that covered everything. There were handcrafted rugs on the floor, and actual paper books in wooden bookcases. No, not the kind of house he had pictured, but then again, he thought, this was Mendit Hunter, the only man ever formally to be stripped of a Nobel Prize.

"I'm sorry to drop in on you without any warning, but there was no way to contact you," Code said to start the conversation as he accepted some lukewarm coffee in a cracked cup.

Hunter took a loud slurp of coffee. "I like it that way," he snapped. He jammed a cookie into the coffee and gummed the mushy result, his bright eyes taking in Code's sea-washed complexion and total lack of hair. "Don't get fooled by this coffee. I'm just giving you a break before you get the hell out of here and head back into that." He jerked his head toward a small porthole window where a series of rapid flashes danced across the outside surface.

Looking at those eyes and the bright intelligence behind them, Code decided to be direct. "I write for Modern Science magazine and we're doing a special edition for the start of the twenty-second century. My editors think that enough time has passed so that people aren't too full of hate to hear your side of the story." Code tried hard to keep his personal distaste for Hunter out of his voice.

Hunter gave a dry, sarcastic laugh. "That means you're here to be pleasant to me and then go away and call me the biggest monster in history since Genghis Kahn and Hitler."

"I promise you an objective article," Code replied. He put his untouched coffee down on a dusty table and took out an ePad. "A long time has passed. A lot of people have a knee-jerk reaction when they hear your name; but if you ask them, they don't know any details. This is your chance to tell them."

"Tell them what?"

"Whatever you like."

Hunter studied him for a long moment. Code waited him out. The only sounds were the bangs and rattles around the house from the storm outside.

Finally Hunter nodded. "What do you want to ask me? I can't believe there is anything that isn't in the records somewhere."

"A lot of records were lost during the relocation."

"Relocation," Hunter snorted. "Is that what they're calling it now? I always preferred 'running away with your tail between your legs' myself." His eyes dared Code to challenge him.

Don't argue with him, Code told himself, pushing down a hot surge of anger. He took a deep breath. "Perhaps we can go back to the beginning - how you got the idea."

"I wasn't the first to develop robotic insect control, you know. There were some crude attempts in the twenties."

"But your company dominated the market. You made one of the largest fortunes in history."

Hunter snorted. "They confiscated all my money. All they left me were memories - which I might add are highly overrated. I'd trade them all for being able to piss without hurting."

Code leaned forward. "I've read everything about you and your company. What I don't see anywhere is an indication of whether you anticipated any of this. We're interested in what you and your team, as scientists, were thinking at the time."

"You want to know if I said, Screw the world, and took the money. Is that it?"

"In hindsight everyone says the consequences were obvious. What did it seem like back in 2030 when you developed the Mark I?"

"It just seemed like a damned good idea." Hunter's hands shook as he turned the wheelchair to face the window. The sun outside was bright and light angled into the room, illuminating floating dust. There was an exceptionally loud bang and the window shook. Both men froze for a moment, waiting to see if it would shatter.

Code took a deep breath to steady himself. "Where do you think it all started?"

Hunter turned his chair back and his eyes locked on Code's. "We had some problems caused by careless use of atomic energy. No one ever talks about that."

"So tell me about it."

Hunter's face twisted as if he had tasted something bitter. "A total screw-up caused by mismanagement. There was a general power shortage in the early part of the century. So they turned back to atomic power - despite all the warnings."

"And there were accidents?"

"You're damn right there were accidents." Hunter's fist hit the arm of his wheelchair. " 'Incidents,' they called them. As if calling it something else changed anything. Massive radiation released into the environment."

"What did that do?"

"Blew the hell out of our agribusinesses, for a start. Insects started mutating at an incredible rate. Those mutations produced more energetic variants that bred and evolved faster than anything we'd seen before." Hunter's fists clenched as if he were fighting the battle all over again. "They developed resistance to our most powerful insecticides and biological controls stopped working. Every time we put sterile males into the ecosystem, or developed pheromone traps, they evolved ways of distinguishing them."

"So you developed the Mark I?"

Hunter's voice took on a faraway quality. "It became possible. We could get electronics weighing less than a gram that could reliably distinguish insect species. Then there were the micro-fusion generators that gave the Mark I enough power to fly at high speed and deliver enough energy to kill."

Incredible - he's still proud of this, thought Code. This is going to make a great story. Just keep him talking. "It was a popular technology?" he prompted.

"It just took off. It was cheap, and you could program for particular insect species so that there was less environmental impact. You didn't kill honeybees, for example." Hunter leaned forward and tapped Code on the knee, his eyes shining with relived excitement. "And best of all, with an on-board GPS you could set them to cover an exact area, like a field."

Code scribbled furiously with his stylus. "And they killed the bugs nonchemically?"

"They were programmed to lock on, hunt down, and kill. The Mark I used an electric spark; later models used a laser beam."

"When did you have the first sign of trouble?"

"For ten years they were used everywhere, and for other pests besides insects. It wasn't just me who thought we had the problem solved, everyone did." His mouth twisted into a bitter, toothless smile. "They gave me a Nobel Prize."

"But you made a mistake?"

Hunter stared at Code and his thin body tensed as if he would leap across and strike him. "You little turd. That's easy to say in hindsight."

Don't excite him, Code thought. He forced his voice to be calm and reasonable. "Okay, what would you do differently if you could do it over?"

Hunter didn't hesitate. Code realized that the old man had been thinking about this for years. "I'd change the hunting strategy," Hunter replied, his bald, freckled head nodding emphatically.

"Strategy?"

"The Mark I was programmed to kill inside its three-dimensional patrol space. If a member of a target species entered, it was hunted. But if the target exited the space, we terminated the hunt to save energy."

Code paused with his writing. His heart was beating a bit faster. This was all new to him. Hunter had been there, and had made the decisions. "Why was that a mistake?"

"They taught you about selection and evolution, didn't they?"

Code ignored the condescension. "Of course. Although we deal more with marine species these days."

Hunter shook his head in disgust. "You hairless freaks cower in those underwater domes of yours and don't even think about what's happening on land."

Code was about to snap back, but he caught himself. He's an old man, he thought. Let him talk. "Tell me about what was wrong with your strategies."

"We should have worked harder on the hunt-and-kill strategy and made sure we killed all intruders."

Puzzled, Code stopped writing with the stylus. "I'm not sure I understand."

Hunter grimaced and shook his head, a man resigned to a lifetime of tolerating fools. "Look, species evolve by mutation. Each favorable mutation is a small step that confers a minute advantage in survival. But if a predator is so efficient that when it starts a hunt it kills a hundred percent of the time, then those evolutionary paths die stillborn."

"So what kind of mutations did you see?"

"With those high levels of radiation from atomic spills there was an incredible variety of mutations. Camouflage was one of the first. Given an effective predator, mutations that lower the probability of detection will confer higher survival rates."

"What kind of camouflage?"

"The usual blending with the background, plus some new wrinkles like transparent bodies and low-radar cross sections."

"But you combated that?"

"We used Doppler-shift motion detectors, high-resolution multispectral imaging, and chemical sensors. When we combined all of them, detection was almost a hundred percent. In retrospect that was probably a mistake."

"How so?"

Hunter sighed and Code knew for sure that Hunter had thought about this many times as he sat by himself in this little house on the deserted land. "We suppressed those mutations and hence selected for other mutations, less . . . less controllable ones."

Code let out his breath slowly. They were coming to it. "Go on," he said.

"There were three other survival strategies that mutations could exploit: armoring, avoidance, or attack."

"And you saw these as well?"

Hunter took a long slurp of coffee and nodded. "Armoring wasn't a particularly good approach. The robot's laser weapons were able to project a destructive energy that was far in excess of any armor an insect could evolve. Sure, there were mutations with mirror-quality reflective coatings, but we were able to solve that with a spray of black ink droplets to increase energy absorption."

"So that left avoidance and attack."

"Avoidance required speed and maneuverability; attack required something that could damage high-impact plastics and in some cases steel jacketing. Given the speed and weapons of our robots, both strategies required an energy budget that just wasn't available from metabolic processes."

"You felt they just couldn't get fast enough or dangerous enough?"

Hunter's face screwed up in anger. "Damn governments and their secrecy. We just didn't realize the extent of the radiation damage and how little food supply there was outside the patrolled areas."

A wave of disgust seized Code. He doesn't want to take responsibility, he thought. After all that's happened, he's still blaming others. "How did that make a difference?"

"A huge majority of the food supply was inside the patrolled areas. There was a massive survival benefit conferred on any insect that was able to access that food supply."

"If you had known all the facts, would it have made a difference?"

Hunter stared at Code with angry eyes. He opened his mouth as if he were going to make an angry retort, but then closed it with a snap. He thought for a moment before responding. "We should have created an outer kill zone that would have made it easy for the robots to track down and kill any insect that had penetrated the inner space."

"But you didn't?"

"Some insects started penetrating a few meters, grabbing food, and escaping. The robots couldn't react fast enough and so the insects escaped to reproduce. The faster they became, the deeper they could penetrate."

"What about the attack mutations?"

"Some insects could fly in and ram the robot, temporarily destabilizing it, and some sprayed sticky proteins to blind the sensors. If they were close enough to the edge, they could grab some food and escape."

Code thought about it. "So if your robots had followed them and killed them, they wouldn't have reproduced and been able to build on those mutations over time?"

Hunter nodded. Code could see he was back in the past. "At the same time we should have allowed a sufficient percentage to avoid detection. In that way we would have been selecting for camouflage strategies, which we could have kept on top of."

Hunter closed his eyes. I'm tiring him out, Code thought. He gave a shiver at the thought of Hunter falling asleep and forcing him to stay here overnight to get the story. "But you didn't do that?" he said in a loud voice, allowing some of his contempt to come through.

Hunter's eyes snapped open, and his old, ravished face twisted into a bitter mask. "We didn't want to reduce biodiversity outside agricultural lands. So we only destroyed insects when they were inside the patrol spaces." He shook his head angrily. "As I said before, we didn't realize how much the atomic accidents had reduced the natural food supply."

Code kept his voice loud and let out some of his anger. "Surely you must have known that?"

Hunter pointed a long bony finger at Code. "What do you know? Damn governments were distorting a lot of statistics so they didn't have to admit to the full extent of the damage." His clawlike hands were white as he gripped the arm of his chair. A line of spit escaped from the side of his mouth.

Don't get him too angry, Code thought. "How did cold fusion result?" he asked softly.

Hunter coughed and spat into a dirty handkerchief. "Somewhere in the fifties or sixties. No one really knows. We humans had tried many times and failed." His eyes blazed and Code could see that, amazingly, he actually felt he had suffered injustice. "Now people say it's obvious that countless billions of insects mutating rapidly and having many generations a year would stumble onto that weird chemistry, but it was just science fiction then."

"So they solved their energy budget problem?"

"We first saw it when we picked up Mark V's with holes burned through them. We just couldn't understand it. Until we started to see the first human casualties and the autopsies showed the presence of tritium in the wounds."

"Tritium?"

"It's a by-product of a fusion reaction."

"Killer insects," Code whispered, and he felt icy fingers grab his gut as he remembered the pictures in school and the stories that older people told.

"We tried to get the upper hand with the Mark VI through Mark X, but ..." Hunter shrugged and fell silent.

Code felt a wave of lifelong anger that made his head throb and his ears ring. His voice rose to a near-scream. "And you didn't foresee the impact of insects with so much available energy and a need for metals ... the impact on power lines, communication cables, and anything mechanical?"

Hunter's voice was harsh. "The human race shouldn't have given up."

Code felt everything boil to the surface. He couldn't keep the raw outrage from spilling into his words. "Just what do you think we should have done?"

Hunter stared back defiantly. "I'm not sure, but to just accept that kind of death toll and retreat into underwater domes ..." Hunter shook his head in disgust. "We should have stayed and fought."

Code snapped his ePad shut. "What about you personally? How long do you think you can last out here on land?" Somehow he wanted the old man to admit to the fear they all felt.

Hunter stared at him with angry eyes, but didn't reply.

Code persisted. "They're still evolving out there. Competing with each other by evolving more efficient energy, more powerful stings, and faster speeds." He pointed at the wall. "How long will that armor keep them out?"

Hunter spat long and noisily into his handkerchief. "I'm a hundred years old. What do I care? If one of those things gets me, it will make a good story in your magazine." He looked up at Code with a twisted smile. "That's what you're hoping for, isn't it?"

Code flushed. He had to give the old man credit - he was no fool. There were some people at the magazine who wanted exactly that. "I'm not," he said.

Hunter gave a laugh that turned into a rasping cough. "I'm old but I'm not stupid. They want to see a picture of me with one of those three-foot dragonflies burning my eyes out with an electric arc. They want to run the picture with the caption: 'Poetic justice.'"

This is it, Code thought. Either ask now or forget it. "I want to know if ... after all these years ... if you regret it." He paused, and then he couldn't stop himself, it burst out of him like vomit: "I mean, for God's sake, billions dead, all the land areas uninhabitable - aren't you sorry?"

Hunter stared at him with those hating eyes. "Get out of my house."

Hunter watched as Code donned the layers of armored clothing. Without saying a word, he turned and wheeled back into the living room. Code picked up his power gun and walked to the space between the two security doors. He took one more look at the old, twisted body in the wheelchair and closed the armored inside door behind him.

Code made sure the inner door was sealed tight before he turned to the outer door. The instinctual fear grabbed at his stomach and he felt too weak to walk. Only the thought of the calm sanctuary of the underwater domes allowed him to open the outer door and walk into the bright sunshine. He staggered as the insects smacked into his armor, burning holes in the woven graphite fibers. A burst from the power weapon scattered them briefly. Then fear grabbed him and he ran headlong through the insect storm, back to the waiting submarine.