The pack of copy machines crashed through cubicle walls and stampeded towards them after spewing out at least four dozen bat creatures. With no AoE abilities, Maxi didn’t think she’d survive the encounter and with no one from janitorial coming to collect her corpse, she didn’t think she would make it back to a resurrection chair.
She downed a Muddy Buddy of Grutomaton Deterrence, but the creatures were in a frenzy and resisted the effect. They charged at her, snapping their jaws. Both Maxi and her robot pal took off at a sprint while the copy machine pack crashed through the derelict office after them. The bats quickly caught up to her and started taking pecks at her. She waved them away with her sword as she ran, but there were just too many of them.
Even though the pair could move faster than the machines, the bats had slowed them down and the pack was gaining ground. They made it to a stairwell and TERANCe shoved her inside. His bum hand unfolded, revealing a flame unit underneath. He torched the bats and most went up in flames. Maxi made short work of the few that made it to the stairwell.
The copy machine pack sent out another wave of minions, but this time it was fast moving cats that leapt over the fire TERANCe had started in the vegetation. Maxi could see that the red glow that had been inside his forearm was now gray as he folded back his hand.
He charged into the stairwell and Maxi slammed the door. She tied it shut with some of the vines and overgrowth in the area.
“That won’t hold them long,” TERANCe said and took to the stairs, going down two or three steps at a time. Maxi did her best to catch up. At first, she heard little taps on the door from the cat beasts, but as soon as the copy machines got to the entry, loud thuds reverberated down the stairwell.
Just as they got to the floor TERANCe had been guiding them towards, there was a loud crash and the sound of the pack rumbling down the stairs. They exited the stairway and entered another section of the Company that had been left to decay, but this one she recognized. It was this dimension’s Paranormal Investigator Branch. It was similar in layout and displayed motivational posters on the walls like “A good PI is always watching”, with the silhouette of a man with a third eye. The other posters were in various states of decay.
She ran through the maze of passages with her bot guide until she came to a large conference room like the one where she had first started the trials. She was amazed how similar it all was to the one on her world, right down to the wallpaper. Although in her world's version, there hadn’t been a giant, gaping hole in the wall leading to the open air of the city outside, with vines spilling through.
TERANCe led them to a door that looked relatively untouched by the overgrowth, and he attempted to open it. It was jammed, and he pulled harder. Meanwhile, the cat paper creatures had caught up to them, and Maxi sliced through the first few, only to realize that the copiers must have spawned paper scorpions and wolves, as a much larger horde of paper minions entered the room, trailed by the copy machine pack.
She was about to be overwhelmed, when a large roar reverberated into the room and a gargantuan crane outside the building thrust a pair of jaws through the hole to the outside and knocked one of the copy machines through the wall on the opposite side. The pack scattered and the giant, hungry maw at the end of the crane thundered toward them as TERANCe finally was able to force the door. They tumbled inside and the enormous jaws got caught on the frame. TERANCe shut the door on it.
He continued down the hall at a more relaxed pace. Maxi squished a paper scorpion that had made it through with them and rushed to follow the AI.
“Aren’t you worried that thing will, I don’t know, break through the walls?” Maxi asked.
“Each Branch of the company is equipped with the equivalent of their own panic room, well, corridor really. It’s where all the offices of the leadership team are located. It ensures continuity in the case of an emergency, and when the location is considered a failure, it gives the executive team time to plan their escape to another dimension. You really don’t read employee handbooks, do you?” TERANCe said.
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“In my dimension, no one does.”
“I find that a common trait among humans. Ah, here we are,” TERANCe said, and forced another office door. This time, it was definitely the spot of a bigwig. There were awards and degrees on the walls, expensive furniture, bookshelf, bar, attached bathroom, and even a couch.
She noticed that none of the dates or university names on the wall made sense. She saw an MBA from the Trunchian Institute dated Ladderall, Year of the Leprechaun, 304 or an award for Excellence in Business, Titan, Year of the Pegasus, 412. She was not in her world, and despite the similarities, there was enough that was off to give her a strange feeling about the place.
Deciding to take the moment to clear her head, she sat down on the couch, glad for a few moments' reprieve. TERANCe began to rummage through one of the cabinets in the executive’s shelf that hadn’t been used for quite some time.
“This is where you hang out when not running from monsters?” Maxi said.
“Oh, no,” TERANCe replied. “There is a charging station in the basement where I spend most of my time and keep a cache of my fallen brothers for spare parts when I break down, as I’m sure they would have done with me had I not escaped the first wave.”
“First wave?” Maxi said.
“It started small, with a copy machine or fax machine going berserk, but once the virus spread, it went everywhere – cars, trains, cruise ships, military equipment. Nuclear missiles were bounding out of their silos with radioactive breath weapons, but what was worse is when the players were able to take one down, it detonated. Even the munds didn’t stand a chance when their military drones turned on them.”
“Munds?” Maxi asked.
“Slang from this world for anyone who wasn’t an employee, thus not cleared for access to the true reality of the universe. Mundane Idiot. It got shortened to 'mund'.”
“What is the true nature of reality, then?”
“That we are in cosmic soup with interconnected realities, and the virus that turns appliances hostile came from one of them. We don’t know if it’s magic, made in a lab, or something else altogether, just that if printers start attacking people, it’s only a matter of time before anything with a computer chip inside turns hostile.”
“Why printers?”
“Not sure. The dimensions that get the infection don’t have enough time to study it before the world falls apart, and the Company execs do not dare take it through to a new one when their reality crumbles, because it’s too dangerous. Some theorize that it’s transported through paper that eventually gets into the printers. Others say it's spores that attach to trees that eventually get turned into paper. Some insist that it’s an evil warlock.”
“What do you think?”
“My programming does not allow me to have opinions. Anything that seems like a human emotion is merely a simulation to make me more relatable. I am a program made to provide humans facts within their tier of knowledge restriction. In essence, I cannot lie, unless I was intentionally provided false information for my database.”
That last statement made Maxi nervous. While her Terry, and by extension TERANCe, might seem like they have her best interest in mind by virtue of their programming, she didn’t know who was pulling their strings. She was now wondering if this whole excursion had been a mistake. Though she also supposed that both TERANCe and Terry would have had ample opportunities to kill her and hadn’t yet.
She decided to take a gamble that she was just being paranoid and gave a little more information than she probably should have. “So that’s why I’m looking for the Printer of Never Jamming. It’s a printer that’s immune to the virus, something they can study to perhaps create an inoculation, or something that can exterminate the thing,” Maxi said.
“You catch on fast.”
“That’s why I don’t read manuals.”
They chatted further while TERANCe went through the cabinets and drawers in the room. Most of the conversation was about what happened to his world during the end, some of it about this whole multiverse concept. She had seen all the Spiderman movies, and generally knew about parallel universes and other such concepts. But it was another thing entirely to experience them for herself.
Eventually, TERANCe said, “Here we go,” and pulled out a thumb drive from the drawer. He opened a compartment on one of the few good pieces of plastic covering his shoulder where several ports were located. They weren’t anything Maxi recognized, as even the thumb drive had a circular port rather than a rectangular one. He explained that the only power coming to the building was via solar panels he had rigged to his charging station in the basement and apologized for the low-quality definition of his projector.
After a few moments, a lens on his abdomen created a hologram. The hologram was of a man wearing a tattered yellow shirt, similar to hers. He had a sword and utility belt, in addition to some Bluetooth headphones that had seen better days. Maxi felt her throat tighten.
The man in the hologram was her father.