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“Come on, don’t pout! You’ll walk it off,” she consoled Omlion, who was confusedly rubbing a large red spot on his forehead. “My Dad trains me, too. Let’s go get your tree tomatoes.”
In a small winter garden on the roof of the house, there were plants useful for any kitchen: thyme, basil, coriander, dill, lettuce, some vegetables, and fruit trees. While the kids were collecting everything for the smoothie, Arewa took a closer look at Omlion and found his appearance somewhat unusual. It was not repulsive, but non-standard, to put it mildly. Wide bridge of the nose, ashy tousled hair. Two small, but prominent fangs drew attention when the boy spoke or laughed. His light smoky-blue eyes looked at the girl with inexpressible horror.
“Your hand!” the boy whispered and dramatically covered his mouth with his palms.
“What? What?” Arewa got scared and looked at her hand holding a bunch of fresh herbs. “An ordinary hand, a little dirty with soil, but it seems okay…”
Having noticed some movement in the basil leaves, the girl screamed in surprise. She threw the herbs down and jumped away from the garden bed, while continuing to scream like a police siren.
“Ha, ha-ha-ha! What a coward you are!” Omlion burst into loud laughter, as he picked up the wriggling lizard’s tail from the ground.
Once Arewa realized that Omlion had outplayed her, she turned as red as a beetroot, approached the boy, took the find from him, and pretended to eat it with a loud “nom-nom”. Omlion’s whitish eyebrows furrowed in extreme disgust.
“You don’t have to…”
“Call me if you find the rest of it. I prefer to start from the head,” the girl said as she chuckled and picked up the basil she had dropped.
Having collected all the necessary ingredients, the children returned to the ground floor, joking and egging on each other. Arewa politely asked what she could do to help, but Omlion was willing to do everything by himself.
“If you really want, you can wash the vegetables. But you better wait. You are my guest, aren’t you?” he said kindly.
“Right. To be honest, I’m not a fan of cooking,” the girl admitted, as she sat down at the counter, observing the young chef pulling out knives, a blender, glasses, and straws.
“Everyone should know how to cook,” Omlion said in surprise. “Ameed told me that even Tibetan monks have to learn this. Otherwise, how will they live if they can’t cook for themselves and there is no one to ask for help? You know, monasteries are in the mountains, you can’t order pizza there.”
“I’ve never thought about this,” Arewa admitted frankly. “But I can cook. It’s just that I don’t like it.”
“I see. Everyone has their own hobby. But I enjoy it. There are so many different options to do things. And I can also juggle, look!”
Omlion grabbed the last four tamarillos, but he never got a chance to show his talents.
An awfully buzzing drone flew into the store through an open window and smashed into the wooden panel with a shabby image of a planet, leaving a big hole in it. In a minute, a head wearing glasses appeared in the kitchen window. Its owner looked as if he had gone for his first ever morning jog: his round cheeks glowed with blush, his glasses got askew, and his eyes burned with indignation.
“Have you seen my drone? It was flying in this direction!”
Surprised Omlion and Arewa exchanged glances and stared back at the boy indignantly.
“It’s here! Your gadget has destroyed my wall!” Omlion picked up the device and went to inspect the hole in the wall, clicking his tongue. He slightly bent forward, as he checked the breach, wondering if he should look inside.
“Please forgive me,” the boy looked down and smoothed his curly bangs guiltily. “Yesterday I was sitting and thinking about how to make artificial intelligence for a drone. I kept thinking the whole evening and wrote a program, but it seems that it is lacking computational power…”
“I don’t know about the drone, but you are clearly lacking something! What if one of us had been standing at this very spot?” Arewa got rightly indignant as she pointed at the broken wall that Omlion was inspecting.
“Well, in theory, the neural network was supposed to recognize a human and stop the propellers on time…” the uninvited guest reflected seriously on the question.
“In theory?!” Arewa burst out with indignation.
“Guys?” Omlion’s voice came as if from a bottle, distracting the arguing kids from the dispute. “It turns out I’ve got a basement, and it also seems that I got a little stuck here…”
It was exactly as he’d described: Omlion’s head stuck firmly in the hole, preventing him from moving in any direction. Omlion was quite agile, but he was lacking experience and understanding that he should not put his head in every hole. But his curiosity was enough and to spare.
“Are you going to hang on the window like this?” Arewa addressed the one guilty of the disaster.
There was no answer.
Arewa looked out the window. The drone pilot was trying to sneak away scampering along the path paved with white stones leading to the gate.
“Hey, you!” the girl shouted to him. “Don’t you want to go back and fix everything?”
He did not answer and began to walk faster.
“Well, then the drone is ours!”
The boy stopped, turned around, and reluctantly walked back, having realized that he was too hasty to escape.
“Come in, let’s help him get out of there,” Arewa said as she met him at the doorstep.
The kids tried to free Omlion from the wooden captivity, but this only made the poor fellow scream indignantly. They pushed the panel trying to break it.
“What if we pull instead of pushing?” Arewa suggested. “If he managed to get there, he will also manage to get out. One! Two!”
On the count of three, the remains of the decorative panel fell apart with a crunch, and disheveled and slightly shocked Omlion got released from the prickly embrace.
The boy with glasses extended his hand to him and helped him get up.
“By the way, I’m Soul.”
“Omlion, very… very nice to meet you,” the boy said, shaking pieces of wood out of his hair. “And she is Arewa, my new neighbor.”
“What a coincidence,” Soul perked up. “So, all of us are neighbors!”
“Do you also live here?” Arewa asked with disappointment.
“Not really,” Soul replied. “My parents came here for vacation and brought me along.”
“Wow, lucky you. Ameed never brings me along on his trips.” Omlion sighed.
“Ameed?” Soul repeated as he picked up the drone, assessing the severity of the damage.
“My guardian and owner of the wall that you broke. He often flies to different countries… doing spiritual practices.”
“I don’t know about practices, but your guardian clearly has secrets,” Arewa said, nodding towards the passage that formed in the wall. “How about checking what’s there?”
Stone steps were visible in the opening. The stairs led down, dissolving in the dark, enticing children with their mystery and enigma, as they promised discoveries and perhaps even adventures.
On hearing the invitation, Soul pressed the remains of the drone to his chest and jabbered, “Oh, no, no, no, I’m not coming. I will have to repair it now, do reflashing; otherwise, dust may get inside or something…”
He stopped short, as he caught the kids staring at him.
“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 - Bolas is a throwing hunting weapon that consists of a ribbon or rope with leather-wrapped round stone balls at its ends.] 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.
