“Aren’t you interested in what’s down there?” Omlion asked.
“I know pretty well how it all happens, I saw it in movies.” Soul straightened his glasses, which had slipped down. “First they will eat me, as I’m the… well…”
He hesitated, searching for the right word.
“Slowest?” Omlion couldn’t stop himself from saying this.
“The tastiest!” Soul flared. “What if your guardian is actually doing some creepy experiments down there? Then we will be the only witnesses. Oh no…” Soul’s voice trembled. Arewa was to blame, as she quickly grabbed Soul, who was about to sneak away again, by the collar.
“No way, hacker, you made this mess, and it’s up to you to sort it out. You are coming with us.”
“All right, all right, just let me go…” He snorted.
The kids descended the stairs to the basement with great caution. Omlion was walking ahead, Arewa was following him, calming down poor Soul, who refused to let go of the hem of her dress and was ready to do anything just to get out of this adventure as quickly as possible.
Flashlights on phones could barely cope with the thick darkness, highlighting fancy items of the interior. Passing by a worn-out bathroom where an ancient tube TV set rested, Omlion tried to shed some light to the depth of the basement, but the flashlight power was not enough.
“Can anyone see the switch?” Omlion enquired.
“Аah! There’s something moving here!” Soul shouted.
“It’s my leg!” the girl replied in a cold voice.
“Phew! Here, I think I’ve found some button!”
Click. The basement got filled with a quiet hum, and then a faint red light switched on and outlined the silhouette of the mechanism in the middle of the room. Corrugated pipes and various cables stretched between the boxes full of all sorts of junk. The web of wires ended where THIS began. In the middle of the basement, there was a large dark sphere with a red triangle in the center. Omlion approached it, hesitated for a while, and then put his hand on the metal surface and listened. “Guys, it’s warm… and it’s like… it’s singing!”
“I can hear it, too!” Arewa said, listening together with Omlion.
“I can’t hear anything, how about leaving this place?” Soul drawled, as he looked around.
“I think I know what this is!” Arewa exclaimed suddenly.
“No way!” Omlion turned around.
“There was a basement with the same thing at our old house. Broiler, I think… Wait, broiler is a chicken. Right, this is a water boiler!”
“Well, I’m not sure…” Soul interrupted as he walked along the cables. “Why would a water boiler need that much energy?
A bunch of wires led to a grey wall, on which someone mounted a stand with a monitor on it. There was some code running on the screen line by line. Once the boy approached it, a keyboard came out from under the monitor.
“What do you have there?” Omlion asked, while Arewa was staring at the flickering red triangle.
“There is some interface here,” the boy replied as he scanned the lines with his eyes. “According to the code, an enormous array of data is being uploaded now. And there are two options here. Either your guardian is the owner of the most advanced heating system in the world, or this is not a boiler at all.”
“А-а-а!” the girl screamed loudly. “It looked at me! It was watching!”
Jumping over a pile of boxes, Omlion ran up to her and stared at the sphere. Under the triangular glass, there was a tiny machine moving on a needle-thin hinge that glared with its ruby eye at the petrified children.
“Soul…” Omlion called, as he took Arewa’s hand and was slowly backing to the wall.
“Data uploaded! Wow!” Soul’s amazed voice came from the corner. “There are at least ten zettabytes here. The entire Internet doesn’t weigh that much!”
“This is, of course, very cool, but could you, well… switch the thing off?” Arewa shouted, trying to cover the growing hum coming from the center of the sphere.
“No problem,” the voice in the corner said. “There is even a switch here. How did I not notice it right away? It’s big and red!”
“Wait!” Omlion shouted, but it was too late.
The machine began to come to life under the gaze of the children. Once it got half a meter above the floor, it made a deafening low-frequency hum and started to draw various garbage and scrap metal. The TV flew right in front of Omlion’s face with a loud “bang” and crashed into an invisible wall in front of the sphere. In a matter of seconds, the machine dismantled it into parts and completed its rapidly growing garbage skeleton.
“Wrong switch! Wrong switch!” Soul shouted and rushed towards the stairs, but fell down midway, tripping over a piece of iron pipe lying on the floor.
“Guys, run!” Omlion shouted, but his voice was drowned by the noise of the mechanism.
An arm covered in ceramic crumbs landed right in front of the stairs and blocked their escape route.
“What is this thing?!” Arewa shouted in fear as she was helping Soul get up.
“No idea, but it’s looking right at us!” Omlion replied in a slightly trembling voice. He turned his back to the children, intending to bear the brunt. As Soul got up, he pushed the pipe, and it rolled towards Omlion’s feet. The boy picked it up quickly and stood up, ready to bring the fight to the machine.
The huge robot clumsily tried to grab Omlion, but he dodged and responded with a quick blow to the ceramic arm, crashing it into tiny pieces. As if surprised, the robot stepped back, growing a new arm, this time from a rusty bicycle.
“It won’t work that way. It is recovering!” Soul realized. “Hit the photocells, they are usually very fragile!”
“Hit what?”
“The eyes! I mean, the camera!”
“Duck!” Arewa shouted, spinning some combat bolas[2] in her hands.
She threw it with force at the robot and hit the glowing triangle. The protective glass cracked, making the mechanism stagger and lose its balance for a split second.
“This is our chance, let’s run!” Soul shouted and rushed to the stairs again. Omlion was about to follow him when he spotted the bicycle arm stretching towards Arewa.
“Watch out!” he only managed to exclaim. But the robot already gripped the girl with its rusty fingers and pulled her towards itself.
Arewa got numb with fear when the monster brought her to the broken glass. The large red eye moved back and forth, studying the prey.
“Omlion, boys… help…” Arewa squeaked.
“Soul, do something, it’s a machine!” Omlion shouted to the programmer.
He froze in his tracks, looking at the robot in horror. Swallowing the lump of fear that rose in his throat, Soul nodded and rushed back to the monitor.
“Let her go, you piece of iron!” Omlion rushed forward fearlessly.
As if expecting the attack, the machine rotated, creaking and clanging, and pressed him against the wall with its free arm in a flash of an eye. The sharp blow to the wall knocked the wind out of Omlion, his eyes darkened, and the pipe fell out of his hands. Seeing this, Arewa furiously pounded her fists on the robotic arm holding her in a death grip.
“I’ve got it, guys! Hold on!” Soul shouted, frantically running his fingers across the keyboard of the old computer. Lines of symbols were reflected in his glasses, and perspiration