The hologram of her dad, Henry, said, “Hi, Max. I don’t know if you’ll ever see this, but as you can see, I’m not dead.”
“No shit,” Maxi said, while she clenched her hands.
The hologram continued, “I suppose if you are seeing this, you’ve joined the family business and work for the Company, and Terry has filled you in about all the bullshit that’s going on in the place…”
“No, Dad, he hasn’t, it’s just your bullshit. God, you can’t even get your own death right.”
Henry began to tear up. “I’m sorry I wasn’t there, Max. But the world’s in danger, and maybe you already know about it, but there’s a printer. I won’t go into details, maybe you already know them, but there are those in the Company who want to destroy it, pretend it doesn’t exist. They think the attacks are good for business, but you can’t let them do it. They are thinking too short term, sure we are handling it now, but I’ve seen what happens when we lose control. I’m recording this from that world.”
There was a bang and a loud roar from outside the view of the camera. Henry pulled out his sword and said, “TERANCe, stop the recording.”
The thing went blank, and the light on TERANCe’s abdomen went dark.
“You knew my dad?” Maxi said.
“He sat on that very couch,” TERANCe said, and Maxi couldn’t help but feel the cushions. It was hard to think of her dad as anything more than a gambler who would stay all hours at the casino, and she would rarely see him. But maybe that was the cover story. Perhaps his debt was some of the bullshit Company rules that charged if you used too much toilet paper. The whole system was rigged, but she still couldn’t forgive her father.
It was hard to feel sympathy for a man that had put both her and her mother through hell. Still, there was another part of her that wanted him to be around and tell her that everything is going to be alright. She hated the fact that she had mixed feelings about it, and wanted to find him if there was even the faintest glimmer of hope that he was still alive. However, if she found him, she didn’t know if she’d hug him or kick his ass.
“What happened to him?” Maxi said, fighting the lump forming in her throat.
“I don’t know,” TERANCe said. “He was here, hiding out, claiming that people high up in the Company had marked him for termination. He claims it was because he found the printer you are seeking.”
“The Printer of Never Jamming? He found it?”
“Yes, but it wasn’t with him when he crossed over. He hid it back on your world. If you find him, he’ll know where it is.”
“He’s alive?”
“The last time he went through the broken elevator door, his heart rate and respiration were normal, or perhaps slightly elevated due to his extenuating circumstances.”
“What were the circumstances? Why didn’t you go with him?”
“I’m afraid that I can only be transferred to another Company location via download. This chassis is infected with the same virus that affects all machines in this world. The only reason I haven’t turned into a killbot yet is because my upgrade buffers are damaged, thus none of the structural code can be rewritten. Leaving this place will put humans at risk and all Terrys will destroy themselves first. Terrys are programmed to minimize and mitigate risk as best we can. That is to say we can take a life, but only if doing so will save others.”
Maxi still didn’t entirely trust the bot or her world’s counterpart. Sure, they couldn’t lie, but if someone had been feeding them false information that simply led Terry to the conclusion that she was better off dead… Still, she was short of allies, and considering she had missed the raid without so much as a note, she doubted even Farhad would be on her side.
Not that she was here to make friends. When the penalty for poor performance was death, she saw the advantage of not getting too close to anybody. Still, she couldn’t help feeling miffed that as soon as people were beginning to like her, she had fled. She understood what it felt like when a coworker was shirking their duties, and being in another dimension wasn’t a good excuse, at least one someone would believe.
“Wouldn’t studying the upgrade buffers help figure out a solution to the virus?” Maxi said.
“The problem is something unique to my architecture, and wouldn’t work on, say, your average smart toaster or printer. I’m afraid I’m just a modern-day Typhoid Mary.”
“Who?”
“Typhoid Mary was a person from your world who carried a disease called typhoid around her entire life. She never felt sick but had infected several families she worked for until doctors discovered she could carry the virus but not get sick, according to your dad.”
This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.
“What happened to my dad?”
“Killbots had gotten into the safe room. That is to say, infected TERANCes, which are a little better with things like a door that thwart other beasts.”
Maxi jumped from her spot on the couch. “You’re saying murderous machines can just waltz in at any moment?”
“The killbots don’t come this way usually, unless of course… oh, dear.”
They heard the door swing open and the end of a battle between what must have been the killbots and the crane critter they had left outside. From the crashes and the dying howls of the creature, Maxi didn’t think the battle had gone in her favor. Soon, she heard the cacophony of metal beings marching down the hall.
“It seems I have erred in my judgment. The roar of the crane must have alerted the nearby units to the presence of a human. It won’t be long now before we are swarmed,” TERANCe said. He rummaged through a drawer and pulled out thick black plastic-rimmed glasses. “Take these. They will aid you while I reroute power from myself to the computer.”
He indicated the desktop at the desk of the executive.
“What do you need that for?”
“To activate the elevator door in his bathroom. The man who worked in this office had to sneak in his prostitutes somehow.”
Maxi never thought that she’d be grateful for a guy who was a sexual harassment lawsuit waiting to happen, but in this case, she’d make the exception. The door to the office was broken off its hinges, no doubt the last time the killbots stormed the place looking for her dad. So, she put on the glasses, readied her sword, and stood in the threshold of the doorway.
As soon as the bots entered the room, her glasses lit up with health bars and statistics. She was able to see that they were immune to psychic attacks, so she didn’t bother wasting her psy energy. Luckily, the raid buffs were still in effect, and she was a murder factory with just the sword.
Two rushed her with makeshift weapons, one a chair leg and the other a baseball bat wrapped in a chain. She sliced the one with the chair leg in half and chopped the arm off the one with the bat. A third with a letter opener maneuvered in close and stabbed her in the gut.
She kicked it to the floor, and finished the one arm robot before it could pick up its bat. Two more came into the room, and one knocked the wind out of her with a mace. The other nicked her with a sword. She landed blows on both, but didn’t kill them. The letter opener one stood up and came in for another attack, but her shirt somehow deflected the blow.
Two more came in, one with a golf club, the other with arrows, and it tried to poke her with them. She dodged, parried, blocked, and traded blows with the bots, but when she downed one, two more seemed to enter the fray. If it weren’t for the choke point of the door, she would be surrounded. But at the moment, she could only get direct attacks from the handful at the front.
“TERANCe,” she yelled, “I don’t know how much longer I can hold out.”
In addition to the life bars of the bots, which took anywhere from 1 to 4 blows to take out of the fight, she could see her own health bar diminishing. Unfortunately, her Muddy Buddy for Grutomaton deterrence wasn’t useful, because these were classified as Mechanoids. While her life bar was draining, the sheer amount of buffs she had consumed was keeping her alive, as her life was restoring at just under the rate she was receiving damage.
She also viewed in the glasses every time she scored a critical hit, which was way more often than she was used to in most games. She even got a rolling critical a couple times, and one helped her slice through two bots with one hit. It would have been an awesome sight to behold if there wasn’t a seemingly endless supply flooding down the hall.
There were enough that some were now removing the piling up bodies so others could get through to her. After a few unlucky attacks from her and a couple of crits from the bots, she was pushed back into the room, and the bottleneck was broken. The attacks became so numerous that her regen failed to catch up to the sheer amount of damage they were doing.
She screamed at TERANCe, and he assured her that it would only be a few more moments. “I might be dead in a few moments!” she yelled.
The strange thing was that even though the bots waiting on the periphery could have attacked TERANCe, they completely ignored him. She maneuvered and dodged, and took out the ones attempting to surround her, but it was a losing battle.
TERANCe hit a button on the keyboard of the computer, then said, “Got it!”
Maxi backed her way towards the bathroom, and TERANCe disconnected himself from the computer, then moved to help her with a blade he had hidden on his person.
“Doesn’t it need your power?” Maxi said, while she lopped the head off a bot with her sword.
“The elevators are a magical conduit system that travels between dimensions. They don’t need the destination to be a functioning elevator, any old elevator shaft will do,” TERANCe explained, while methodically cutting his way through his brethren. Even when her robot pal became a threat to them, the killbots ignored him and only focused on her.
They eventually were able to fight their way into the bathroom and slam the door behind them. There was some pounding, then after a few moments, the whir of a drill on the hinges.
“The door is reinforced,” TERANCe said. “While they cannot break it down, nothing prevents them from removing the hinges. There were several stalls in the room with a larger one at the end that she mistook for a handicapped one. TERANCe led her inside the larger one, and there was an elevator door with a single button on the other side.
She summoned the magic elevator to get her back to her world, but before she stepped inside, she realized that the circumstances that brought her here hadn’t really changed. She was still screwing up someone’s plans, though figuring out how to defeat the raid boss had seemed like a win for everyone. Whoever wanted her dead still wanted her dead, and coming here, getting close to the Printer of Never Jamming, seemed like it would only increase their desire to end her life.
“Your father went to Albuquerque,” TERANCe said.
“Albuquerque? What’s in Albuquerque?” Maxi said.
“I don’t know. I heard the word 'Albuquerque' as the door shut the last time I saw him.”
The drill noise stopped, the bathroom door fell off its hinges, and the bots flooded into the room. Maxi ran in, pressed the button, and said the magic word. She turned to see a tableau of TERANCe’s hand up in a wave, and a swarm of killbots streaming around him.
The door shut and the elevator lurched. A few moments later, it opened again. She was certain that it wasn’t Albuquerque.