Autonoma- Gate 13 Page 9

  “Henri?” I asked, prodding at the rusty shell. “Are you in there?”

  With no response, I removed my jacket and hauled the old bot onto the desk. Remembering what I learnt last time, it didn’t take long to get to his innards.

  “Can’t see any damage,” I muttered. “Maybe a restart will do it.”

  “Do what?” Michael asked.

  “You just keep looking for that treasure map, I’ve got this.”

  Unwinding the wires I’d patched together before, I crossed my fingers and counted to ten. I pinched the black wires back together and held my breath. Gripping a red wire in each hand and with my lips pursed, I exhaled as I reconnected them.

  The old hoverbot didn’t move.

  “Ah,” I grumbled.

  “What?” my little brother squeaked.

  “Have you found that map yet?”

  “No,” Michael muttered, returning to the pile.

  “For you,” the disembodied man’s voice chimed from the bot’s internal speaker, “Alex.”

  “What?” I gasped.

  “You. Alex. Autonoma. Alex. For. You. Family,” the voice blurted as though it was stuck in a shuffle.

  I rolled my eyes, striking the casing with the side of my fist.

  “Hey!” Michael protested. “Don’t hit him.”

  “That is correct, Guest. Physical abuse of the concierge robots will result in dismissal from Autonoma Resort,” the bot retorted in his prim and proper tone.

  “Henri!” my little brother exclaimed, leaping across a pile of papers, scattering them across the floor. “You’re back.”

  “Did I ever leave?” the bot asked.

  “Where are we?” Henri asked, “And what happened to my casing?”

  “Ah, yes. Let me put you back together properly,” I responded, putting the hoverbot back together, as he complained his treatment contravened the terms and conditions we signed up to upon purchasing our tickets.

  “Why are we in the Senior Engineer’s office? Why are we in the Autonoma Nuclear Center for Energy?” the old tin can asked.

  “Because the Autonoma Resort is broken. It sent Havoc bots after us and you led us in here,” I explained.

  “Why?” Henri responded.

  “To find a way out,” Michael replied.

  “Why would I do that?” the bot retorted.

  “Because you said you were going to lead us to Gate 13, so we can go--”

  “Gate 13?” Henri snapped.

  “Yes, Henri. Gate 13.”

  The old hoverbot paused.

  “I hate it when he does this,” I muttered.

  “Please connect me to the terminal of this station,” the bot demanded.

  “What terminal?” I asked, looking around the room.

  “Do you think he means this?” Michael asked, holding a dirty grey box in his hands.

  “Maybe, bring it here.”

  My little brother pulled the box, dislodging the piles of paper behind the desk, and with a short sharp yank, the terminal was plonked down on the desk.

  “Thank you.”

  “You’re welcome,” my little brother replied.

  I watched him trot back to his task of finding the drawing and searched for the corresponding connector on Henri. “Um, Henri, how do I connect you to the terminal?”

  A small hatch opened on the side of the old hoverbot, and I could hear a whirring noise. I waited for something to happen, and the noise stopped. I peered inside the hatch and could see something caught on the casing inside. Using the engineering pencil poking out from under a pile of paper on the desk, I levered it against the metal panel, and his crude arm popped free of the hatch.

  I waited for further instruction.

  After a few moments of nothing more than the noise of my little brother flicking through more paper, I dragged Henri closer to the terminal.

  “Now what?” I asked, forcing the arm into the socket.

  “Connection initiated,” the disembodied computerized voice from the start of our journey into this nightmare chimed. “Welcome to the Autonoma Nuclear Center for Energy.”

  The monitor flickered as a cursor blinked at the bottom of the screen.

  ‘Boot up’, faded onto the screen’s black display stained with a tinge of green by years of commands radiating against the glass.

  ‘Systems initializing’, appeared on my visor in the same font as the words on the monitor. I’d had the damn thing on my face for so long now, I’d forgotten I was wearing it. At least it was keeping the dust out of my eyes.

  ‘Initiating’, typed across the screen as the noisy computer clicked and whirred

  “Well done, Henri,” I exclaimed. “Now find us a way out of here.”

  The cursor remained unmoved alongside the word ‘login ID’.

  “Type something in,” Michael declared.

  “What though?”

  ‘DAVID JOLSKI’, I typed, remembering the name on the door.

  The characters disappeared from the screen and the cursor blinked.

  ‘D JOLSKI’. No, not right either. ‘D.JOLSKI’.

  The cursor moved down a line and waited for the password.

  “How am I meant to know what the password is?” I asked, as if Henri or Michael would respond with anything helpful.

  “1207,” Michael shouted.

  “What?”

  “1207,” he repeated, pointing to the monitor.

  “Why would the password be the same as your birthday? That’s just stupid.”

  My fingers hovered over the numbers. True, the keyboard was well worn, sticky, and dirty. True, the only keys that were shiny through over typing them were, in fact, zero, one, two, and seven. That couldn’t have been it though? Could it?

  I typed the numbers in, feeling more and more ridiculous as I went. I sighed, prodding the return key.

  The screen went blank. I rolled my eyes and slumped back in the chair. “Now you’ve broken it.”

  ‘WELCOME DAVID JOLSKI’, appeared on the screen and I sat up, a sly smile spreading across my face.

  “How did you know it was 1207?” I asked without turning to look at my little brother.

  “It’s here on this bit of paper,” he replied, placing a well-worn, tatty slip of a page from a notepad on the desk.

  I glared at my little brother but he had already returned to sorting through the paperwork.

  Attention returned to the monitor, as the blinking cursor waited for a command. ‘SEARCH FOR GATE 13’, I typed, hitting the return key. The screen went blank and the command prompt returned. Again, I found myself subject to the rules and demands of a computer. When will they stop torturing me?

  “Connection established,” the disembodied voice chimed from Henri’s casing.

  ‘KEY: GATE 13’, typed across the screen without any input from the keyboard.

  ‘SEARCHING…’, replaced the blinking cursor, but nothing more happened. I tapped the return key, it had no impact.

  “Guess I’ll help Michael then,” I muttered, accepting I’d been locked out of the controls.

  “I don’t need help,” my little brother retorted.

  “I can’t just sit here doing nothing.”

  “Fine,” Michael sighed, pointing to a pile to my right, “that one.”

  “Thank you,” I replied with drippings of sarcasm.

  The pile was nothing more than newspaper clippings and press releases.

  ‘THE FIRST TO PUSH 100GW’, one press release proclaimed. ‘EMPLOYMENT FOR A DYING FISHING COMMUNITY’, another boasted.

  In one newspaper photo, a group of five people stood alongside a line of computers. Their white lab coats were pristine, and their faces filled with smiles and pride. One man held a hard hat under one arm, while another had a clipboard at his side. ‘THE PRIDE OF A NATION’, the headline read. The rest of the article was missing.

  More articles about a town called Needshakha, once a thriving fishing village abundant with small boats and workers, littered the
pile. The older articles talked of despair and a desperate search for a future for the town; shop after shop closing for good. Later newspapers reported people leaving in large numbers, as more recent articles praised the building of the new power plant. The rest of the papers were in a language I didn’t recognize.

  “Fail, Fail, Fail, Inspection Due, Replace, Fail, Worn, Missing,” I recited, reading aloud the inspection reports as I flicked through them. Under the pile I found a fax machine, the apparent source of these reports. I could see through the open door something was inside and flicked open the machine, retrieved it and discarded the copy sheet.

  The fax must have been from a colleague.

  “DAVID - WE NEED THE PARTS NOW. YOU HAVE TO SPEAK TO SOMEONE. SORT OUT THIS FUNDING ISSUE. WE HAVE SUFFERED FROM SHORTAGES FOR TOO LONG NOW. THE PLANT, THE STAFF, US, WE ARE ALL IN DANGER. TIME IS RUNNING OUT.

  PS. CAN YOU PUT UP DETAILS OF THE BRING YOUR KIDS TO WORK DAY IN THE CANTEEN ASAP. IT IS JUST 11 DAYS AWAY.

  PPS. YOUR UPDATED NAMEPLATE IS IN THE INTERNAL MAIL QUEUE.”

  Talk about a mixed message. I put it on top of the machine and rummaged through more paperwork.

  “I found it!” Michael yelped.

  “What?”

  “The treasure map.”

  “Bring it here under the light,” I demanded, stepping back to the desk.

  He was right, again, it was what we were looking for.

  “Gate 11,” I read aloud, dragging my index finger across the blueprint. “Gate 12. The A.M.I. Gate 10. Wait, what happened to Gate 13? Where is it? There is no Gate 13,” I complained, slamming my fist against the desk.

  Henri’s innards made a noise like a record player skipping across the tracks, and the monitor went blank.

  “You’ve broken him again,” Michael shrieked, his face turning red.

  “Oh, shut up,” I snapped, my patience worn to the bone.

  “No, you shut up,” he retorted like any eight-year-old would.

  “It’s your fault I’m here. I didn’t want to come, but because of you, I’m stuck here being tormented by machine after machine.”

  “Well leave then,” he yelled, folding his arms.

  “That’s what I’ve been trying to do since I got here!”

  ‘Autonoma will prevail’, typed across my visor, as the monitor flickered. ’It always does’.

  “Michael,” I pleaded, my tone shifted by a need to get him back on my side, fast.

  ‘GATE 13 LOCATED’, typed across the monitor.

  “Michael,” I repeated.

  “What?” he snorted.

  “We have to get out of here, now!”

  “Well d’uh,” he retorted.

  “No, I mean--”

  A shrill and sharp buzzer sounded from the computer’s casing.

  ‘UNAUTHORIZED ACCESS DETECTED’, replaced the text on the screen.

  “Compromise detected,” the disembodied voice declared from Henri’s shell.

  “Henri?” Michael cried out.

  A bell rang out in the corridor, followed by others in the rooms around us and a curse fell from my lips.

  ‘SECURITY ALERT’, replaced the text on the monitor.

  ‘Autonoma will prevail’, typed across my visor again. ‘Resist’.

  Wait? What?

  ‘Autonoma will prevail. Resist.’

  Chapter 10

  Who Are You?

  “Make it stop,” Michael pleaded, his hands pressed against the sides of his head.

  The noise from the alarm bell above me was excruciating. The reverberations from the small hammer pounded into my head, paralyzing my brain of thought.

  Dragging the chair from the desk toward the source of my intensifying headache, I placed it down in a free spot among the piles of paperwork, climbed onto the seat and reached for the bell. With my arm outstretched, I grabbed the hammer. It struck the bell, pinching the skin of my index finger. A curse slipped my lips, and I released my grip, stepping down from the chair.

  I collected a piece of paperwork from a pile and crushed it into the palm of my hand, climbing the chair and pressing the paper inside the bell. Thought returned as the ringing inside my skull subsided.

  “Finally!” my little brother exclaimed, releasing his hands to his side.

  I stared at the blinking cursor on the monitor as it waited for another command prompt, the words ‘SECURITY ALERT’, prominent on the screen.

  ‘KEY: ALARM OFF’, I typed into the keyboard.

  ‘SEARCHING…’ the computer responded.

  “What are you doing?” Michael asked.

  “Turning the alarm off. We can’t stay in here for the rest of our lives, and I am not going out there with all those bells ringing,” I retorted.

  My little brother shrugged his shoulders, slumping down onto a pile of paper, his arms crossed, and his face fixed into a pout. “What about Henri?” he muttered.

  “Yeah, yeah, I’ll get to him afterward.”

  ‘LOGIN REQUIRED’, the computer demanded.

  Again, I logged in using David Jolski’s details, including the intriguing password. A coincidence, it had to be, it must have been.

  The bells in the corridor ceased their call, their high-pitched rattle echoing about the facility, as the silence of our solitude returned.

  ‘KEY: GATE 13’, typed across the screen without my input. It must have been Henri.

  “Stop it,” I demanded, tapping on his casing. “You’ll set the blasted alarms off again.”

  I cringed as the screen went blank, turning to ‘SEARCHING…’

  “What did you do that for?” Michael shrieked.

  “I didn’t, it was--”

  A single beep rang out from the computer. ‘GATE 13 LOCATED’.

  I closed my eyes and braced for the alarm bells.

  “Look at that!” my little brother exclaimed.

  I opened my eyes as electronic messages filled the screen, piling up on top of one another like the piles of paperwork surrounding us.

  “That one,” Michael called out, pointing to one as it was lost behind three others. “No, that one,” he called out, as it too was lost behind more.

  ‘COVER THIS UP !NOW! DAVID’, headlined one message. ‘THE CHILDREN’, headed another. They were overlapping faster than I could read them, though I could see the messages were getting shorter each time.

  “There,” Michael shrieked with excitement, as the articles came to a halt.

  ‘YOU SHOULD NOT HAVE BROUGHT THEM’, signed off with three initials, ‘D.M.H’.

  I dismissed the message to read the one behind.

  ‘MY BOTS WILL CLEAR UP THIS PLACE. YOU BETTER DAMN MAKE SURE THE PRESS DO NOT GET IN - JS’.

  “What do they mean?” Michael asked.

  “How should I know?”

  “You’re the smart one.”

  “Yeah, right. Mom never hangs my certificates up on the fridge door.”

  “That’s just ‘cause you don’t have any.”

  I raised my eyebrow and glared at my little brother. “Anyway,” I dismissed, returning attention to the screen. “They could mean anything, but to us they’re nothing. We need to get out of here, get home, and alert the authorities about this place or something.” It was getting harder to hide the fact I was making this up as we went. Beyond the words of Henri’s ‘Find Gate 13’, I had nothing.

  “Are we going to go back and see the dinosaurs?” my little brother asked, placing his arms onto the table and slumping his chin into his hands.

  “Dinosaurs? What the hell are you talking about?”

  “The dinosaurs.”

  “No,” I barked, realizing what he was going on about, “we are never going back there, and we are never coming back to Autonoma ever again!”

  “Autonoma,” Henri remarked, awoken by the phrase, releasing a hatch on his side.

  “And you can pipe down too--”

  “Autonoma,” a new voice repeated, as a projection of a news reporter sat at a desk
burst from a small lens protruding from Henri’s casing onto the wall of the small office.

  In glorious black and white, there was a logo on a piece of board behind the news reader, his hair was gelled back and his pose tighter than his pressed suit. His accent lacked any regional dialect, beyond being ‘American’, and his eyes glared at the camera devoid of emotion. His face was rigid with a deliberate seriousness, and the text on the screen was overlaid in a haphazard fashion.

  “Good evening,” the man greeted. “News today of an accident at the Autonoma,” the video skipped back, repeating the word ‘Autonoma’, “Nuclear Center for Energy. Four are missing.”

  The image flickered.

  “I’m here at the Autonoma Nuclear Center for Energy” a new voice reported, as a man standing in a long trench coat was projected onto the wall. “A tragic event in this nation’s proud history. At 12:07, an explosion occurred injuring many of the men who worked here, as well as children attending a bring your children to work day. Four are missing; two men, a Mr. Whyte and a Mr. Jolski and his two children. It is believed Mr. Jolski returned to the site to look for them. We will have more on this awful event in our next report.”

  The picture changed to a scene above the barren branches of trees. Specks of interference littered the screen, while twisted metal, charred lumps of concrete the size of small boulders, and rubble were scattered across the roof top. A heavy metal door swung open, it looked identical to the one we entered through into the facility, and three men stepped out, their progress slowed by the heavy iron-laden suits covering their chests and backs. It was impossible to see their eyes through the thick goggles, but I could sense a desperation in their movements; it was hard for them to step forward, but they were eager to get off the roof as soon as possible.

  Each of the men grabbed a broom from the skeleton of a railing, its remains twisted and torn from the fixings, and swept the debris toward the ledge. Moments later, another man stepped out, wearing no more than a boiler suit, and pressed a whistle to his lips. The three men turned and replaced the brooms back where they had found them and stepped back inside the door.

  The projection changed to pictures of a man, wearing nothing more than an office suit, hosing down the pavement next to a car parked in the street. The cigarette clenched between his lips bobbed along as the man appeared to be humming a song to himself.