With the rising prominence of computers and artificial intelligence, Michael’s school decided it would be a good idea to introduce students to this new technological world. The teachers organised a school outing to the leading titan of the industry, Robosmus, located in the small Ahs desert not far from the capital, Jarmouth. The school rented a bus for the trip, and the students chatted amongst themselves to pass the time during the half-hour-long journey.

Michael was sitting on his own in the bus. Around him were cheerful groups of students laughing and joking, and in the absence of his own conversation, he sat there listening to theirs. Behind him was a posse of girls, gossiping about boys.

‘I think Jake is cute,’ said one of them, giggling.

‘OMG yes!’ reacted another with a blush.

‘What about Rick?’ suggested another.

‘Don’t you dare!’ shouted another, ‘Rick’s mine!’ and they all laughed.

Michael listened to the list of names attentively. Jake, Rick, Josh, Tom… he listened hopefully, awaiting his own name to be added to the list. Whenever another girl stepped in, he waited with baited breath.

‘I heard Ben broke up with Monica…’

‘… and she’s with Rob now…’

‘…she can’t stop herself, can she?’

But his name never came. With each disappointment, his mood worsened, and by the time the class arrived at the Robosmus facility, he felt like his day was ruined. He could think of nothing else but those girls and their gossiping.

‘None of them think I’m cute,’ he thought to himself sadly. He closed his eyes and tried to zone them out for the final few minutes of the trip, but his efforts were fruitless: they were just too loud, and he couldn’t shake the last hope that perhaps his name might be mentioned after all. When the bus came to a halt, the girls’ chatter stopped, and he remained unnamed.

The teachers beckoned for the students to exit the bus one by one. Michael was close to the back, so he was one of the last to leave. The moment he stepped out of the bus, he felt a wave of hot air hit him. Despite being only a small desert, the Ahs still reached high temperatures during the day; especially for a city dweller like Michael, who was not used to such extreme weather conditions. The bare sun shone dominantly in the cloudless sky, its heat bouncing off the barren sand that surrounded them on all sides.

Michael had to squint to not be blinded by the overwhelming brightness. Through his narrowed lids, he got his first glimpse of the facility before them, and for a moment, it distracted him from the thoughts of the girls on the bus.

The Robosmus facility was enormous, much larger than any building Michael had ever seen, both in real life and in any fiction. It spanned what looked like hundreds of metres in both directions, and tens of stories above them; if the school had come a couple hours later in the afternoon, it would have cast a gargantuan shadow all around them. But beyond the sheer magnitude of the building was its unusual appearance. It was not built like any of the skyscrapers Michael was used to in Jarmouth, which themselves looked like tiny houses in comparison to this behemoth. It looked like an enormous black cube—or, more accurately, a rectangular prism, like Michael had learned about in his geometry class. Its front face was almost completely flat, with the exception of odd protrusions that appeared all over its surface, erratic and unclear as to their form or function, at least to Michael. Along the protrusions there were also holes, however these Michael could infer were probably ports of some kind. He struggled to imagine what kinds of machines were connecting to ports hundreds of metres in the air, without any platforms to support them. The roof looked perfectly flat from his perspective, and the whole edifice appeared to be made of a single, uniform material, a black shiny substance, that resembled something between polished stone and refined metal. It was domineering, overwhelming and dazzling, with its irregular appearance exuding an ominous presence. Michael stood paralysed for a second, admiring its grandeur, feeling like a miniscule ant beside it. After a few moments of taking it in, his attention was recovered by a teacher, who called the students to follow her once everyone had left the bus. The whole class started moving towards the front door, and in the group they formed, Michael found himself walking behind the same group of girls that were behind him on the bus. Although he could not discern what it was they were giggling about now, it was still enough to remind him of his worries from only a moment ago, and he forgot entirely about the oddity of the massive facility, and returned to his melancholy thoughts.

The class was all led to the air-conditioned interior of the Robosmus facility lobby. Once inside, a wave of relief washed over the students as the cool air saved them from the intense outside heat, and their eyes were shielded from the overpowering light of the naked sun. It was an immediate comfort, and everyone let out an audible sigh at being provided this soothing escape from the rough elements.

The lobby itself was a reasonably-sized, comfortable waiting area. It had calming, pale blue walls with non-specific but appreciable paintings on them, and the floor was a sleek grey surface that shined from recent polish. It had premium-looking black leather couches in the corner surrounding a glass-topped coffee table with generic magazines laying on top of it, and in its corners were various tall potted plants that grew strong and well-nourished, oblivious to the harsh aridity that surrounded them just outside the building’s walls. The primary focus of the lobby was in the far right corner, where a spacious reception desk took up a considerable amount of room, housing a lone receptionist, whose head was just barely visible to Michael over the top of the short wooden wall that surrounded her working area. Her name tag read Lucy—though Michael could not see it from his position—and she smiled broadly when she saw the class walking into the lobby area.

Michael’s computronics teacher, Ms. Agatha, who alongside Mr. Davis, the science teacher, was leading the school trip, walked up to the reception desk and declared their group. Lucy needed little information from her, as no other groups were scheduled for that day, and the conversation was reduced to more of a formality. Once the whole class made it into the waiting area and the teachers made sure that no-one was missing, Ms. Agatha gave a nod to Lucy and confirmed they had everyone. The receptionist then picked up the phone at her desk, telling whoever it was that answered that the scheduled school trip for that day was ready to begin their tour. After what could be heard as an ‘okay’ from the other end of the receiver, she informed the teachers that their allotted guide would be down in only a moment, and they thanked her for the confirmation. With that, Lucy put back the phone, giving the whole group another beaming smile, before sitting back down in her office chair and leaving the visitors to wait while the promised guide made their way down to the lobby.

The students continued chatting until their attention was caught by the opening of the door behind the reception desk. From it walked out a man, tall and lean with short, combed-over black hair, who greeted Lucy with a quick smile before walking out of the reception area and out into the front of the room. He was dressed in a smart casual blue sweater and jeans, with a white shirt underneath and a black lanyard around his neck that held a keycard at its end. The keycard was white and completely blank, with no discernible text or information of any kind on either side of it, not even a name or a logo. The students continued to talk while the man made his entrance, and it took a censuring shout from Ms. Agatha to get them to quiet down. Once they all became sufficiently calm, the man gave the teachers a nod and a smile, and with a loud, clear voice, he overpowered the whispered chattering of the impatient students.

‘Hello everyone,’ he said, ‘welcome to the Ahs Robosmus facility. My name is Robert, and I will be your guide for the tour today.’

Robert proceeded to explain more about the facility, giving its history, date of construction, and relevance amid the other Robosmus facilities in the world. Michael, despite usually not being all that interested on school trips, found himself listening attentively on this particular occasion. For the most part he still dismissed the information, as he still didn’t care all that much for the year of the facility’s construction, or just how important it was to the international market for electronics. He was, however, curious about the facility’s strange appearance, and was hoping there was a reason for its design, and that Robert would address it in his summary of the building’s background. Unfortunately, the longer he went on, the more unlikely it seemed that Michael’s topic of interest would be addressed. By the time he had asked the students whether there were any questions, the topic of the facility’s appearance hadn’t come up a single time. Michael decided that it was worth asking Robert about it, but just as he prepared to raise his hand to ask the question, another student beat him to the punch.

‘Why is it in the desert?’ asked one of Michael’s classmates—William, who was notorious for always paying attention in class.

‘Excellent question,’ answered Robert, ‘this facility is actually the only Robosmus™ facility in the world not located in a city, and the fact it’s in a desert only makes it that much more unique. A hint for why the facility is located in the desert is in what makes it stand out among all the other Robosmus™ facilities: its size. You see, being over ten times larger than the next largest Robosmus™ facility, one of the necessities that Robosmus™ considered for the construction of this facility was the amount of space required for building it. You see, it’s difficult to find so much free space anywhere else, especially within a reasonable commuting distance to any residential areas, so the Ahs desert was chosen. As I’m sure you’ve seen, it can get a bit hot here during the summer, but the facility is constantly being air-conditioned and kept at a comfortable temperature, so working here is no different than working in any other Robosmus™ facility—with the addition of a little bit more sun, of course.’

William appeared satisfied with this answer, and thanked Robert for the explanation. Although this question helped explain the facility’s enormity, Michael was still more interested in understanding its overall aesthetic, so to speak: the strange, geometric shape, with its extraneous protrusions and seemingly impractical ports. He was still hoping to ask the question, but before he could manage to raise his hand, Robert was already hurrying the class along to begin the tour.

‘Come on everyone,’ he said, and his motion was supported by the teachers. Michael’s already piqued mood made it so that he wasn’t looking for any attention, and he didn’t feel like making himself known from the crowd just to ask the question. If he had been feeling up to it that day he would have simply chosen to keep it in mind and ask Robert on the next opportunity that arose, but in his depressed mental state, this tiny failure only contributed to his melancholy. He decided that asking the question was pointless, and that it was a stupid question anyway, and he didn’t actually care about the answer all that much.

Robert led the class through the only other door in the reception room, and that which neither Robert nor the class had used to enter the area. They were taken through a long, empty hallway, with pale blue walls and polished floor like the reception. Its sole furnishings were numerous striped ceiling lights that illuminated the long passageway. The hallway wasn’t particularly narrow, but as the large group they were, the students still needed to organise themselves in a file to walk through it without trouble. When they finally reached the single door at its end, the students farther to the back of the line could hear the amazed gasps of students closer to the front, who were being impressed by something that the farther students could not see. Michael, already assuming a position closer to the back, found himself among these students, and his curiosity grew with every gasp as to the source of their astonishment. As the final few students cleared out from the hallway, Michael was finally able to see what was on the other side of the door, and when he first stepped out, he too found himself in awe of the sight he beheld before him.

The class had emerged into a seemingly boundless room, with a ceiling so high it was dizzy to look at, and walls do distant they were almost hidden by mist. The room was filled with monstrous exhibits and showcases of a myriad of machines and contraptions, ranging from oil drills and tanks, to double-decker planes suspended by wires in the air. Between the larger exhibits, there were smaller, more regular-sized displays of other technologies, like automobiles, telephones and even kitchen appliances like fridges and toasters, each demonstrating the global reach of Robosmus’ grasp on the technological world. The larger machines were left as is, exposed, while the smaller ones were held in numerous glass display cases, where they could be inspected without the fear of being stolen. Each item was accompanied by a digital screen either next to it or affixed to its surface, allowing the spectator navigating the exhibit to interact and learn intricately what each machine’s place and purpose might be. It was evident, both from the sheer magnitude of the room and the appearance of the machines, that they had models ranging from the beginning of Robosmus’ inception to the modern day. The room was a comprehensive encyclopaedia of the company’s manufacturing history, with each separate product accompanied by a real-life example of the device in question.

As expressed by the students’ amazed reactions, the exhibit was breathtaking to look at, though many found the sheer magnitude of it all made them feel a bit queasy, with that amount of space confusing the eye and creating a distorting effect of scale at a distance. Michael got lost in just how deep the room went on. The ceiling of the room seemed to reach all the way to the roof of the building, made of glass to allow a view of the clear blue sky above them, though overlayed with a darkening filter to lessen the intensity of the sunshine to a more comfortable degree. The walls were all a clean white, different from those they had seen thus far, and were made of the same materials as the floor, so the clean grey shine continued seamlessly from under their feet all the way up to the distant sky. The students were in seemingly the only part of the room with any clear space to stand on as a group; the exhibits were spaced closely to one another, allowing passage for at most three people between them, not enough for their sizable group to navigate through easily.

‘Okay everyone,’ said Robert, grabbing everyone’s attention, ‘this is the first stop of the trip: the Exhibit Room. As you can see, here you will find an extensive number of products that Robosmus™ has put out over the years, ranging from the tiniest watches that go on your wrist, to the huge cargo ships that you can just barely see at the far end of the room. Because of just how many of these exhibits there are, there’s no way we could see them all today, so what we usually do is we let students walk around themselves for fifteen minutes to look at the exhibits that interest them the most, and after that we’ll all meet up back here to continue on with the tour. There’s a map of the room next to the door we used to get here, indicating some of the different sections that the exhibit is divided into. Because of the size of the room, it can be a bit difficult to maintain your orientation in here if you go too deep, so if you’re lost, there’s a big red arrow above us showing the meet-up point.’ 

The students looked up and saw that the door they came from had an unmissable red arrow pointing down to it. 

‘Try not to stray too far, though,’ Robert added, ‘because we’ll be calling you when the fifteen minutes is up to gather everybody again and keep going, so if you can’t hear us when we call you then we won’t know where you are and we’ll have to go looking for you before going on with the trip. Ok, that’s everything I have to say.’

Robert gestured towards the teachers to give them the opportunity to say their part, but the two of them simply nodded in agreement with what Robert had already said.

‘Okay everyone, go ahead,’ said Ms. Agatha, ‘we’ll see you in fifteen minutes.’

Once given permission, the students quickly dispersed from their tight group. Some decided to use the aforementioned map, while others immediately braved the labyrinth. Michael, whose initial awe had faded and he now felt indifferent to the whole display, chose to mindlessly wander in alone. He hoped to use this free time at the beginning to separate from everyone else and find some moments of solitude to sulk in his self-pity. 

As he ruminated over his unpleasant thoughts from before, feeling unnoticed and unloved, he found himself walking deeper and deeper into the exhibit, barely glancing at anything around him. He watched himself place one foot in front of the other, and kept on walking until the voices of all the other children had grown faint and distant, and he could not see anyone around him through the gaps between the different machines.

A sudden fear enveloped him as he realised how isolated he had made himself. His wish to be alone was trumped by the overwhelming magnitude of the room, and he realised that if he wasn’t careful, he could genuinely get lost and cut himself off from the group. He wanted to be left alone, sure, but if the whole class had to go looking for him, the spotlight that would shine on him would be the exact opposite of that, and the embarrassment would only fuel the fire of his self-loathing.

Michael turned swiftly to locate the big red arrow so that he could find his way back to the start, but just as he was about to start walking back from where he came, he heard a strange, sudden noise coming from behind him. Initially he felt startled, but after a moment he realised it sounded like a human voice, which helped relieve some of his stress at getting separated from the group. If there was another student around, then he wasn’t really as far away as he had feared, and he could feel more confident about not getting completely lost. Compelled to at least get an idea of this student’s whereabouts (he likely wouldn’t join them, he was still not in a sociable mood, but a mental note of their position next to him would give him a reference point of sorts) Michael listened attentively, hoping to catch another sound of the student’s speech.

After a couple of seconds of silence, he heard the voice again, however this time, listening more carefully, he realised the voice did not sound like any student he had heard before. The voice was much lower, more mature, sounding closer to that of Robert, or even Mr. Davis. For a moment Michael was gripped with fear: if it was Mr. Davis he’d heard, then why was he so far removed from the gathering point? Had Michael already been gone for more than fifteen minutes, and in his rumination he completely lost track of the time? Were the teachers looking for him? Had he already found himself a victim of the exact situation he had only realised was possible? 

The exact words the voice was saying were difficult to discern. It didn’t sound like they were being shouted, they were too low and close for that, and surely if the teachers had lost a student, they would both be shouting to grab their attention. This line of reasoning helped assuage Michael’s concerns, but he still didn’t know to whom the voice belonged, and so when he heard it again a few moments later—louder, closer but still not close, with words still not intelligible—he immediately identified the direction it was coming from and pursued its origin.

Taking a better look around him as he walked, Michael noticed how close he had come to the right wall of the room, which surprised him, as he had been convinced he was walking straight the whole time. However the sporadic placement of the objects in the exhibit made it difficult to keep a straight line, and especially so when one only watches their feet and not the surroundings. Following the last point of the voice for only a moment, Michael reached this wall, where he saw a lone door, identical to every other in the facility, standing against the otherwise uniform surface. The voice spoke again, and Michael confirmed that it was coming from the other side of this door. With the voice coming closer, and Michael approaching it from his end too, he reached a point where he was near enough to understand the words it was saying, though he found himself a little perplexed as to what exactly those words meant.

‘Mondays are… Mondays are Mersenne primes, yes—and Tuesdays are… no, the month is even, so Tuesdays are Mersennes and Mondays are hailstones of increasing length, which makes Wednesdays… triangle numbers?’

Before Michael could even start deciphering the possible meanings of the unusual sentence, the door swung slowly open. From behind it emerged a tall, lean man wearing a white lab coat, with ruffled brown hair and worn, exhausted eyes.

‘Nope,’ he said immediately upon walking out and taking one look at the room, ‘definitely not triangle numbers.’

The man was about to turn back around into the door, but as he took a final glance around the exhibit room, he spotted Michael, who was standing amidst a few of the most peripheral exhibits. Michael’s sudden, ghost-like presence visibly startled the man, who jumped at the sight of the innocent schoolboy. After the initial surprise, however, the man calmed down, squinting his eyes and giving Michael a finer look.

‘Hello,’ said the man once he was satisfied that the boy was indeed real, and not the product of a fatigued mind.

Michael, who was much too overtaken by the sudden presence of a complete stranger in place of what he expected to be a familiar face, stared at the man without saying a word. As the two looked at one another in awkward silence, the man was scrutinising his company. After a couple of seconds of thinking, a look of revelation appeared on the man’s face.

‘It’s not September, so Wednesdays are tour days,’ he said to himself, pleased by his deduction. ‘You must be with a school?’

‘Yes,’ answered Michael abruptly.

Relieved that the presence of an otherwise aberrant apparition was comfortably explained, the man became much more relaxed. After another moment of inference, he looked around the two of them curiously.

‘So, where’s the rest of your school?’ he asked, confirming that not a single other person was within either eye or earshot.

‘Well, we were told to look around for fifteen minutes,’ explained Michael, ‘and it’s a very big room.’

The man smiled at that.

‘Yes, it is,’ he agreed, ‘I never get to visit the Exhibit Room much. I’m usually much too busy with lab work to drop by, but it really is remarkable. Beautiful even.’

Michael looked at the man with a blank stare, and the latter realised the boy must have still been confused by his presence.

‘I work here,’ he explained, “I’m a researcher. Matthew—’ and he extended his hand in an attempt at a handshake, but after an instant of realising Michael was much too far away to shake his hand, he improvised it into an awkward wave. The strangeness of the gesture made Michael smile, and he felt a little more relaxed.

‘I’m Michael,’ he said.

With names exchanged, Matthew had another quick look around them.

‘So, Michael,’ he said, ‘you’re quite far away from the group. Did you really walk out here all on your own?’

‘Yeah,’ answered the schoolboy plainly.

‘Aren’t you scared you’ll get lost?’

Michael considered for a second the fear he had gone through a couple moments ago.

‘No,’ he said.

Without much of a parry to the direct response, Matthew accepted the simple answer. Nonetheless, Michael being so distantly removed from his whole class still felt strange to him.

‘But still, shouldn’t you at least have gone out here with someone? Like a teacher, or one of your friends? Why aren’t you with anyone from your class?’

In an instant, Michael was reminded of the previous melancholy he had successfully escaped thinking about when bumping into the scientist, and his mood quickly soured.

‘Because they’re all stupid,’ he blurted out.

The schoolboy immediately realised that he let his thoughts slip out without the slightest sign of a filter, and he turned bright red from embarrassment. He noticed, however, that Matthew didn’t seem all that concerned with his rudeness, and that put him somewhat at ease. Instead, the scientist smiled. 

‘Yeah, I get what you mean.’

The response was not one Michael was expecting, and the complete lack of any reproach from the adult figure gave him a sense of confidence and comfort. He had grown much too used to the you-can’t-say-things-like-that rhetoric that all the adults in his life tirelessly pushed down his throat whenever he expressed his true feelings. Matthew’s open reciprocity of his honest presence gave him a unique feeling of acceptance. He was not used to that feeling, and for the first time that day, he felt happy—he felt seen.

‘Wednesdays are highly composite numbers!’ exclaimed the scientist, who himself had been momentarily caught in a pensive daze. ‘Yes, of course…’

Michael once more gave him a confused look, and it took a moment for Matthew to catch the student’s eye again and be reminded of his company.

‘Sorry,’ apologised Matthew, ‘you see, I’ve been looking for my lab for the past hour. And I know, that might seem strange, since I’ve been working here so long I ought to know where my lab is, but these Efficiency Organisers at the Robosmus HQ are insistent on always finding the most optimal ways to arrange everything in this facility. Since there’s simply so much diversity to everything that’s done here, and the rooms that this building contains are so different to one another, that no matter what order you’d pick for it all, it seems unnatural to some. Their most recent ingenuity has been to code each room based on different integer sequences, which themselves change based on the day of the week, and the month, and so on, so although I’ve just seen where my lab was yesterday, I can’t find it today. Personally, I’ve found it a bit tedious, but I haven’t actually found anyone who has objected to it so far. That being said, I haven’t actually found anyone recently at all, with all the rooms being placed so weirdly and all…’

Michael listened patiently to what Matthew was telling him but, as was apparent from his expression, was no closer to understanding what it was the scientist was complaining about, and it was only thanks to his piqued tone that Michael could infer that Matthew was complaining about anything at all.

The conversation they had fallen into reached its natural conclusion, and the two stood looking at one another for a few moments in awkward silence. As the quietness enveloped them, Matthew became more and more aware of his need to get back to work, now that he had finally figured out where it was that he needed to be going to find his lab. He would have liked to just turn around and leave, but he had developed a strange liking for the young schoolboy, and he felt bad for just leaving him there all alone. Then, if only for an instant, a crazy thought occurred to him. He would have liked to brush it away at once, but his mind had grasped it too firmly, and it had begun articulating it into an idea.

‘Would you…’ the scientist started, still unsure about whether he wanted to finish saying the proposition he just thought up. ‘Would you like to come see what I’m working on?’

Michael gave him a surprised look. ‘Uhm…’

‘It would only take a moment,’ assured Matthew. ‘I’ve remembered what the room should be now, and it’s only around the corner. You’d be back to your class in a matter of seconds, they wouldn’t even notice you were gone. I mean, only if you want to…’

They probably don’t even notice I’m gone now, thought Michael. The schoolboy tossed the idea around in his mind for a few seconds. He certainly had grown a liking for the scientist: he was a little bit disgruntled, perhaps, but he had a sense of pleasantness to him that made Michael trust him more than any old stranger. And besides, thought Michael: if he just let Matthew leave now without him, then he’d have to start making his way back to his class, back to the group of peers that had caused all his difficult thoughts—difficult thoughts which the scientist, in all his unusual happenstance, had helped distract him from. And although the schoolboy knew perfectly well that he would have to rejoin his class eventually, he still would have liked to delay that inevitability for as long as he possibly could.

‘Sure,’ he told the scientist after a long pause, ‘I’d like to see.’

A broad smile appeared on the scientist’s face.

‘Then let’s go,’ he said. ‘Like I said, it’s just around the corner…’

Michael watched Matthew turn around in a spin and walk towards the door he had come out of. It took Michael a bit of willpower—he might have decided on his course of action, but it was still not something he was sure of, and his body echoed that feeling with its own stiffness—but he managed to push himself to walk briskly after him. By the time Matthew had opened the door and walked through its doorway, Michael was only a couple metres behind him.

Upon following the scientist through the door, Micheal found that it led to a long hallway, which ran parallel to the length of the exhibit room he had come from. It shared the same colour scheme as the reception room, and along its walls were evenly spaced doors, each one ten metres or so from the last. Each one was accompanied by a small plaque indicating the room number in engraved silver. Michael attempted to look down the hallway’s length to his left, but realised that the passageway was slightly curving to the right, and that after several hundred metres it was not possible for him to see down it any farther. Looking then to his right, he encountered much the same phenomenon, though expectedly curving to the left instead of the right. The sheer depth and length of the corridor made him feel slightly dizzy again, in a similar fashion as to how he had felt when he first entered the exhibit room. He stood looking at it in awe for a second, but found himself being hurried by Matthew, who of course had come to be well used to the scale of things around the facility, and had already rushed about fifty metres down the hall from where Michael was standing. Matthew wasted no time in getting back to his lab—not even to check if his established companion was anywhere behind him—so Michael had to hasten himself to follow the scientist while he could still see him, disregarding the uneasiness that had started growing in his stomach.

He caught up with Matthew in a matter of seconds, running down the hallway after him until the scientist heard his steps and looked over his shoulder to glance at him.

‘Just over here.’

The two of them continued walking for quite some time, and Michael started getting worried about just how far away this lab was. Although Matthew had kept assuring him that it was always just around the corner, they seemed to keep walking anyway, and no change in Matthew’s behaviour suggested that the end was anywhere closer than it was a minute before. They had been walking for long enough that Michael was starting to get worried about getting back to his class on time, and for a moment he considered abandoning the scientist all together, excusing himself and explaining that he was pressed for time and needed to get back before the others started looking for him. His initial distaste at rejoining his group was washed away by his fear of getting lost in the enormous facility, with his sole company being that of a complete stranger, who, despite his constant acknowledgment of Michael’s presence, always seemed to have something different on his mind, and did not act at all worried that their retreat might have negative consequences for the schoolboy. Michael would have liked to thank him for the opportunity and excuse himself back to the door they came from, but just as he was about to raise his voice in complaint, Matthew suddenly stopped in place before him, so abruptly that the preoccupied schoolboy nearly didn’t react in time, and almost walked into him.

‘This is it,’ said the scientist proudly, ‘here is my lab.’

With a determined step forward, Matthew pulled out a blank card from his pocket, identical in every way to that which Robert had around his neck, and he presented it right next to the keyhole of the lab’s door, which responded with a pronounced click. He flashed Michael a quick smile, before pushing the door and walking inside. 

As Michael watched the scientist disappear into the room, that sense of unease which he had tried to disregard up until now had grown to become too much to be brushed away any longer. It had been mounting in the back of his mind, slowly, and had laid seed to all of Michael’s concerns; but only now could the schoolboy realise the power it held on his nerves. It had grown so strong, that standing there and looking upon the entrance he was supposed to follow, he could not move a muscle, overwhelmed by fear and nausea at what could meet him if he chose to enter that room. He didn’t even know exactly what he was worried about finding there. Although the scientist wasn’t the most proficient at empathising with the schoolboy’s concerns, Michael didn’t believe he had any ill intent towards him, and he didn’t believe that he was in any danger if he chose to follow him into the lab. Why, then, was he now frozen, unable to move? He didn’t know, and he couldn’t think about it any further, and accepted that regardless of the exact reasons for his fear, all he really wanted to do was turn around and go back to his class: he had had enough adventuring for that day, and was ready to return to what was normal—what was predictable.

But just as Michael turned around and looked behind him, he realised the infinite depth of the hallway he had passed through, and a terrifying realisation took place in his mind: he had absolutely no idea what door he had come from. In all his haste to catch up to Matthew, he hadn’t taken the time to check the number next to the door that led to the exhibition room, and now he had no clue how far the two of them had come from that door and how far he needed to backtrack to return from where he came. The terror he had felt when faced with the chance to enter the lab worsened—he felt helpless, completely impotent to escape from his situation. 

‘Well?’ spoke Matthew’s voice from behind him. Michael turned around to see his head poking out from the lab, a look of confusion on his face. ‘Are you going to come in?’

An instant of consideration passed where Michael debated asking the scientist for directions to get back, but finding himself once again in a dialogue with Matthew helped assuage some of the schoolboy’s feelings of fear that gripped him so tightly. He thought, if only for a moment, that perhaps if he just went through with what this scientist was going to show him, which he believed would only take a couple seconds, he would bring him back to his class as if nothing had happened. He did feel curious, after all… but then again, he didn’t know how long he was already gone, and—

‘Come on! I don’t have all day,’ the scientist groaned.

The pressure of being hastened so much by his company shut down any chain of thought that Michael had been engaged in, and before he could get a better understanding of his actions, Michael found himself moving towards Matthew, who promptly disappeared back into the room once he saw the schoolboy was responding. After only a couple of steps, he found himself right outside of the lab, but still standing next to it, unable to see beyond the doorway and look within. 

Okay, Michael thought, I’m doing this.

And with one last deep breath of courage, the schoolboy took the final steps towards the door, and entered into the lab.

The sight that met him when the room was finally revealed was one that he had come to expect in the facility. The lab itself was huge and expansive and was littered with a multitude of machines of varied appearances and functions that stretched as far as Michael could see, and presumably even farther than that. Its ceiling was about five times Michael’s height, and on it were numerous strip lights that illuminated the whole laboratory. The room shone in a bright, dazzling paleness from each of its surfaces, all of which were covered in the same white, plastic-like material that resembled the exhibit room’s grey from earlier, but with a different hue. Its walls were covered in various parts by complex terminals that Michael assumed were connected to some if not all of the hundreds of machines that populated the lab’s interior. It was no surprise to the schoolboy that the room was so bounding in size, and had he encountered it before being exposed to the monstrous scale of everything else he had seen thus far, he would have thought the room frighteningly impressive, but he had come to be so desensitised to the building’s scale at that point that the lab felt like a sensible, normal-sized room in comparison. 

The machines inside the room were seemingly littered all over the place. Some resembled working machines, with protruding arms and other manoeuvrable apparatuses to allow scientists to construct their experiments, however some were so nebulous that they left Michael confused as to their purpose: some were like pale obelisks of metal, standing erect from the ground with smooth, uniform surfaces that didn’t seem to have even a single button to use for interaction; others, on the other hand, seemed to address the other extreme, and were littered with shining switches and glowing diodes, but looked to be disconnected from any external functionality that those switches and diodes might help manipulate. The room, in its own sense, resembled a smaller version of the exhibit room, with all its numerous machines of eclectic functionality scattered in a seemingly random fashion, but to a much smaller and more directed scale. Michael spent a couple moments just taking in all the machines in the room as a single image, which, when pasted on the infinite backdrop that the laboratory itself provided, resembled a single canvas of boundless depth, adorned with a chaotic concoction of seemingly discordant component parts, but which, when placed altogether, appeared to at least suggest the idea of an underlying harmony. As he admired the image, Michael’s eyes began losing focus on the whole picture, and instead focussed on the smaller constituent parts, which demanded much more of his consideration in all their unusual appearance and particularity.

One such example, which seemed to be a sort of centrepiece, attracted most of his attention, and he became lost in the strangeness of its suggestion. On the surface, the machine resembled something like a large glass cube, about five metres wide in every dimension and perfectly transparent on all sides. It appearaed hollow on the inside, and seemed to function like some sort of cage for a smaller interior machine that it contained. Michael was prepared to inspect the inside machine with more scrutiny, when his attention was snatched by the voice of Matthew.

‘This is what I’ve been working on,’ said the scientist. Michael, who had lost sight of him when taking in the lab, found him standing by one of the terminals on the walls, operating its control panel with the various buttons it presented to him, but momentarily distracted from it to give Michael a proud glance.  ‘This is…’

The scientist focused back in on the terminal beside him. He paused then, as if calculating precisely how he wanted to communicate what he was going to say. After a couple of seconds of consideration, he abandoned the terminal, and instead rushed over to a nearby desk with an enthusiastic haste that was entirely new to his demeanour.

From the desk, which was intractably cluttered, the scientist picked up a blank piece of A4 paper and a black permanent marker. With those two items in hand, Matthew rushed over to the schoolboy, who was patiently awaiting an explanation.

‘What do you see here?’ asked the scientist upon reaching his guest, presenting before him with both hands one of  the sides of the blank page. Michael inspected the white surface for a couple moments in silence, looking for the slightest sign of an irregularity that might be worth mentioning. After noticing that the boy was searching for something he knew wasn’t there, Matthew felt the need to clarify. ‘It’s not a trick question,’ he assured.

Eased by that new information, Michael relaxed his eyes, giving the page a more superficial glance.

‘It’s a blank piece of paper,’ he said.

‘Precisely,’ agreed the scientist with a smile, ‘that’s exactly what it is. And now…’

Matthew turned the sheet around towards him, opened the marker, and punched the surface once with its tip. He turned the page back around, showing the new black point he added to the white background.

‘And now?’ asked the scientist eagerly. ‘And now, what do you see?’

The boy remarked on the singular addition of the black dot, and in a similar fashion as before, he assumed the scientist wanted a literal answer.

‘It’s a black dot,’ commented Michael simply.

‘Perfect!’ exclaimed Matthew with glee. In an instant, he flipped the page again, added another dot, and showed the new picture. ‘And now?’

‘Two black dots?’ answered Michael, uncertain now. As he watched the scientist grow increasingly enthused by each banal response, he began to question the exact point of the exercise.

‘That’s exactly what it is!’ said the scientist, and yet again turned the page to make an adjustment. This time, however, he did not add another dot. Instead, Michael watched as the happy scientist dragged his marker across the sheet of paper. Upon flipping it back to him, the schoolboy saw that the addition  of the new, slightly curved line between the two dots made it look a bit like a smiley face. It made him smile.

‘It’s a cute smiley,’ said the boy, expecting this strange game to continue until Matthew presented him with a completed portrait.

Instead, however, this one response from the boy destroyed the scientist’s happy demeanour, and in a blink his expression transformed into one of twisted rage.

‘No! No, no, no!’ he screamed, crumpling the page from anger. ‘No, no, no…’

Distraught, Matthew turned away from the schoolboy, drifting slightly away from him as he processed his distress. Michael inspected him in frozen terror, perplexed as to what it was that he said that could have provoked such a response. He felt his relaxed mood evaporate in an instant, as the tension he had experienced at the lab’s entrance returned to him quickly.

The two stood facing away from each other for a moment as Matthew composed himself, processing his anger patiently. Once his breathing was eased and he could speak firmly again he turned back to the schoolboy, who himself had barely moved a muscle since first setting foot in the lab.

‘It’s an illusion,’ he said eventually, with a raised, slightly shaking voice. ‘Can’t you see that? There’s nothing there…’

Despite having started speaking, Michael noticed that the scientist’s words lacked their usual thought-out structure, and Matthew took another moment to himself to organise what he wanted to say. Eventually, he was able to calm himself down almost all the way back to his original, joyful state, though it was obvious that that initial charm was now completely gone. Once content with himself, the scientist’s words came out much more fluidly, but Michael still felt terrified at the circumstances he had wound up in.

‘Did you see what I did there?’ he asked the schoolboy. ‘I took a blank piece of paper from the table, a completely random piece of paper. We both agreed that it had nothing on it, both at first, and even when I was adding pieces to it, we both agreed that there was nothing at all remarkable about me adding one, or two, or however many dots to the surface of the page. It did not alter the emptiness of that page whatsoever; it did not change a thing. But then—then, I added that single, curved line, and it suddenly became a smile; and those two dots, they suddenly became eyes for that smile; and with so little effort, I was able to construct something that seemingly had a sympathetic, adorable, and cute air about it, with only those three additions to the page. But you see, Michael, I in fact didn’t really do anything at all.’

As he spoke, the scientist appeared to nestle himself back into the comfortable groove which resembled more truthfully the state in which Michael had first encountered him. He was much more confident now, and took the time to release his iron grip on the crumpled piece of paper, unfolding it to once again show its marked surface. With the page in both his hands again, he continued, utilising it as a prop he could point to during his explanation.

‘The first dot I added, it didn’t change anything, did it? Or this second one, here; that also didn’t change the page at all. They certainly didn’t leave the page the same, but they also didn’t change it. So why, then, is it that this final line I drew changed so much about this otherwise unchanged page? How is it that from the contribution of this incremental nothing I have suddenly managed to create a something? By the mere addition of a part that shares likeness with all those meaningless parts that came before it? There is nothing at all remarkable about a line, Michael, that a dot doesn’t share. So why, then, did this final addition make such a big impact?’

The scientist paused, as if to give the schoolboy an opportunity to come up with an answer. When it became clear after two seconds that Michael was both too confused and too terrified to process any sort of reasonable thought at that time, Matthew simply produced the inevitable smug smile he had prepared for whatever wrong answer Michael might have given.

‘The answer is, Michael, that us humans are so easy to please, that it’s possible, even with the slightest, most insignificant strokes of a shoddy black marker, to create something that will make us feel warm inside. It’s a trivial task, really, and you don’t need any sort of marker for it at all. I mean, just look…’

The scientist strode confidently back to the messy desk that he had gotten the piece of paper from and put back the paper, keeping the marker while replacing its lid, and taking a small black box with a transparent top from the pile of miscellanies that cluttered the desk. With the new item in hand, Matthew returned swiftly to the schoolboy.

‘Now watch,’ he said, opening the lid of the box and removing two googly eyes from inside. Then, with the technique of a well-versed googly eye applier, he stripped the eyes of the stickers on their back, exposing their adhesive surface, and with careful thought and consideration to the act, placed the two of them neatly next to one another on the side of the marker. Once assured that the eyes were comfortably in their place, Matthew closed the box again, and put it away into his labcoat pocket.

‘See?’ he said, presenting Michael with the new googly-eyed marker. ‘With two simple, silly eyes, I have managed to almost animate this completely, irrefutably inanimate object. And you can do that with nearly anything, too. And I have…’

Matthew hastened back to the desk, where he showed his googly-eyed ‘stapler’, then his ‘desk lamp’, and his ‘ruler’, and a host of other otherwise mundane stationary that had been adorned with adorable googly eyes. With each new item that was lifted, Michael grew in the conviction that regardless of how this day would end, he would never quite be the same young schoolboy for it.

‘So simple,’ said the scientist, putting back the final googly-eyed puncher into the brambling mess on the desk, ‘and I was settled in this belief for the longest time, that truly anything in the world can be trivialised with only the simplest of modifications, and although initially I had disregarded the thought for the most part, the more I thought about it, the more I realised how much that proposition vexed me. It felt so horribly wrong, so insulting to the magnificence and gravity of the human mind, to believe that it could be so deceived by superficial dots and lines. So after a long time of wrestling with those thoughts, I eventually found myself unable to confront them in good faith any longer—I was only able to find comfort in the hope that it couldn’t be true. I could no longer believe that it was the reality of every single thing in this world that it could be reduced, cutened, and diminished to a baser form, hiding away from its true nature behind the manipulative veil of two silly googly eyes. I could not believe it any more—I would not, and that was the only way my mind could be offered any possibility of respite.’

Matthew took a pause in his explanation to take a look at the giant glass cage, and the machine it contained.

‘But of course, what use is such an idea to a scientist, if he cannot prove that it is indeed the truth?’

His eyes returned to meet the schoolboy’s, which were glistening with a mixture of confusion, fear and disbelief. Michael tried to conceive of a meaning to what the scientist was telling him, but he simply could not. He had now found himself so deeply in the realm of the irrationally absurd, that he could no longer decide which thoughts of his made sense, and which didn’t. Even Michael’s fears had become so twisted and contorted by the unfettered lunacy of Matthew’s words, and how the cuteness of the little desktop objects so starkly contrasted the utter seriousness with which it was demonstrated, that he no longer believed he could even trust in his instinct to turn around and run away. He simply felt himself a victim of fate, a leaf blowing in the wind, helpless to decide on the future of the world around him; he just stood and watched as the madness around him continued to unfold.

‘And that, Michael, is precisely what I have created.’% Resume2 %

The scientist turned around and made his way back to the terminal he had earlier abandoned. Once he reached it, he proceeded to input a sequence of button presses and interactions with the terminal’s screen. As he did, Michael could hear the stirring of fans whirring from within the glass box, interrupted occasionally by mechanical clanks and metal parts sliding into place. Once Matthew had keyed in the final few inputs, the schoolboy noticed the contraption beginning to move. At first it twitched from side to side in sporadic bursts, and then in a more stable, controlled manner, as it moved what Michael identified were its legs, and the creation lifted itself up from the floor of the lab and made itself more easily visible.

The machine which resided inside the large transparent prison had the appearance almost of a metal ball, constructed from disjoint metal plates which didn’t quite constitute a spherical shape. It maintained for the most part a rounded form, but jutted out considerably and erratically at points, and created illusions of depth with its varying hues of dark silver on the unpolished metal plates. It was difficult to discern its perplexing shape accurately at a glance. Between the metal plates that composed its body were a visible multitude of wires, similarly protruding more in some parts than others, and of many different colours, ranging from dark blues to bright reds. In those parts where the plates were farther apart, the wires gave the impression of gaping mechanical wounds on the contorted body. From below, the irregular metal mass was supported by seven legs, three of which were segmented by three smooth metal joints, and the remaining four were covered in brambles of wires, similar to the rest of the body. All of the legs shared a common sharp, spear-like point at the end, which noticeably punctured the ground beneath it with each step it took. Amid the wires and metal plates of the mechanical ball was nestled a single, circular lamp, which shone a bright green hue upon the edges of the plates around it.

‘This machine is designed precisely to disrupt and displease the senses in every conceivable way. Its appearance is—well, you can see that yourself. I have attuned each of its myriad opposable joints from which its body is constructed to rattle and screech upon every movement, and beneath its mechanical surface I have placed a biomechanical component that secretes a synthetic mixture of human urine and faeces, which produces a suffocating miasma around the machine wherever it goes. And when it goes—oh, when it goes…’

Matthew interrupted his own speech momentarily to return to his terminal, where, by briskly inputting a sequence of inputs, he directed the machine inside the glass prison to begin moving to the side. Its movements appeared slow and almost laboured, and with each of the slightest adjustments to its form there resonated a dulled sound, like that of rusted parts scratching one another. The noise was so loud and prevalent that despite being noticeably tempered in volume by the glass that contained it, it still pervaded all other sound in the surrounding environment, offensively drilling into Michael’s ears. The machine lumbered its way over to a corner of the expansive cage, where it stopped and resumed its idle stance.

Michael watched its brief journey with what cradled easily on the edge of outright fear. The machine’s movements, though slow and logical, contained within them something entirely unsettling—an almost unpredictable, sporadic noise that jolted the mechanism at intervals, though only subtly; not enough to contribute to the force of motion, but sufficiently to be noticed by the onlooking eye.

The schoolboy waited curiously to see what the machine would do, but despite Matthew’s continuous interaction with the terminal, the contraption remained totally still. 

After a few moments of complete inactivity, Michael noticed a movement above the glass box. A cage no bigger than half a metre in every dimension, with metal bars for walls, was sliding across a railing mounted to the ceiling of the lab. Connected to it was a mechanical arm that suspended the cage just above the ceiling of the glass prison. Though he believed he could see something moving inside the cage, its bars were spaced too densely to make out clearly what it was, but its pale cream colour could still be discerned, and it moved in quick bursts between the walls of the metal box.

‘Because you see Michael, appearances are never truly enough to put us off from any one thing. They can be a start, certainly, but ultimately the initial shock brought about by an unseemly sight always fades, and our superficial perception acclimates to any abhorrence that we might find. No, appearances alone will not do—in our regard towards the matter of this world, it is always the actions that prevail.’

With a quick press of a button, the scientist revealed that the top of the glass box had a square piece, perhaps a metre wide, cut to be used as a detachable trapdoor. It lifted above the rest of the glass ceiling with the aid of an unseen force, and slid to the side to offer an opening to the metal cage.

‘I know that from the moment you set your eyes on it, Michael, you’ve been wondering what it is that this machine does. With its unusual shape, it does not immediately resemble any other machine you will have ever seen, and its function will be a more difficult puzzle for you to solve still. Well, to answer that question simply: this machine hunts. But what could a machine such as this one possibly hunt? Well…’

The scientist fell silent, suspensefully stopping his typing at the terminal entirely. Outside of Michael’s view, he detached something from the side of the control panel he had been using, and turned to walk slowly back towards the schoolboy. Once he had come close enough, Michael could see that he was holding a remote in his hand. Its surface had almost as many buttons as the machine it had come from.

‘It hunts cute things,’ said the scientist simply upon reaching Michael.

The schoolboy regarded Matthew with an expression of confusion and disbelief. The latter noted his guest’s anticipated uncertainty, and proceeded with his explanation.

‘It does so in certain stages,’ he said. ‘First, the machine must identify a cute thing, guided by the conventional understanding applied by humans, as best as I could replicate it in code, of course. Currently it is in its idle state, but if I were to initiate its usual protocol, you would see it walking around and searching its environment, scanning every available nook and cranny for something cute. It will do so tirelessly, as that is its sole purpose—and it is incredibly efficient with its energy so it rarely can get tired. If it finds a choice between two cute things, one inorganic—like a googly-eyed stapler—and one organic, it will prioritise the organic, because that is how it sources its energy. Once it does find and identify a cute thing, that light in the middle of its body will light up bright red, and it will be clear that it has found its target.’

As he listened to the scientist speak, Michael’s eyes were fixed on the machine inside the cube, which hadn’t moved an inch since it was commanded into stillness. Once Matthew paused, the schoolboy saw from the corner of his vision that he was pointing the remote in the direction of the cage, and when Michael turned to look at him, he watched as the scientist pressed one of the buttons on its cluttered surface. The schoolboy quickly turned back to look at the machine, watching to see how it would react to the input, but the machine did not seem to respond at all. Instead, the bottom panel of the metal container above the glass cube dropped open, swinging on a hinge that prevented it from falling to the ground, and its sole content swiftly plummeted to the floor of the glass cage. 

The schoolboy’s eyes darted to see what it was. When he followed it down, he saw that the cage had contained a small, cream-coloured bunny rabbit, and it struck the ground with an audible thump, which even Michael could hear outside the glass walls.

The little critter stumbled for a second, momentarily stunned by the impact of the fall, but it quickly found its way back onto its feet. It assessed its strange surroundings as best it could, before scurrying quickly to the corner of the cage, farthest from the machine that made its only cellmate.

‘And you see, it’s remarkable too in its pursuit,’ commented Matthew, who himself was regarding the scene almost in admiration—‘From the moment it chooses its target, it will hunt it to its end. There is no way, apart from complete destruction, to interrupt its goal. It will hunt and track, and on the minimal chance that it loses its target beyond pursuit, it will never forget—but that is unlikely, to say the least. Until its target is annihilated, it will not surrender its hunt. And it is hard-coded, with no fail-safe, so nobody—not even I—can stop it.’

Matthew pointed the remote in the direction of the cage once again and pressed another button. This time, however, his interaction elicited an immediate response in the machine, which let out a cacophonous whirr as it kicked back into action.

The machine staggered as it began to move again, clunkily elevating itself so slightly from the idle position. Once it reached its peak, the main body spun rapidly in place, completing a full revolution in the blink of an eye. From there, it snapped just that bit farther in rotation, directing its glowing eye right at the rabbit nestled in the corner. The pace of its movements had increased so rapidly from its prior lumbering that this new exhibition of potential sent paralysing shivers down Michael’s spine. He knew exactly what was coming, but he could not move—he could not look away.

As soon as the machine had found the bunny, its eye instantaneously turned red, as foretold by Matthew. The rest transpired in at best a blur. Michael’s eyes were moistened with disbelief, and the mechanical beast refused the confines of matter and space.

One could not see the machine moving from its position to the corner where the rabbit sat, as there was simply no stream of motion—one instant the machine remained completely still, the next it was at the other end of the cage, towering over the miniature critter, its tiny paws barely visible beneath the dominating form. The animal did not have an opportunity to react—the machine had conquered it before it had even moved. It lowered its caricatured torso down in a jolt, suppressing the creature underneath its weight, but not enough to cause it any harm; it was merely holding the bunny firmly in place, unable to move.

‘And I haven’t even explained the mutilation mechanism yet,’ said Matthew, as if that had been his cue, and the machine, which no doubt teemed with capability, awaited his exposition. ‘Now of course, as you’ve seen—or maybe haven’t, it all happened so fast’—the scientist chuckled quietly to himself—‘but anyways, the mechanism clearly has no trouble reaching its prey. But the final step—this is not a killing mechanism Michael; that is not its purpose.’ He turned to the schoolboy, whose muscles disallowed him to mirror the gesture. ‘We have already discussed its purpose, and a swift death, though easily deliverable, would not maximise this creation’s potential. No, instead’—his eyes wandered back to the machine—‘on the underbelly of the main body, this machine has razorblades placed in the form of a rotor, with which it may slowly, procedurally and meticulously erode its prey. The target is in the meantime weighed down by the form’s enormous mass—and in cases when the prey is too large, the spiked legs help to pin it down—large things can be cute too, you know.’

The machine, as if becoming restless, let out a single sound, like a metallic piece slipping from its hold, and twitched the entire body down a further inch onto the rabbit.

‘Yes,’ added Michael, with a finalising tone, his eyes spilling from their sockets, eager to see the spectacle, ‘the prey can only sit and watch, as its body gets sliced away.’

Michael’s heart stopped for a moment. He jumped in shock, but he did not feel his body move. Partly it was the rending terror of all the machine’s parts exploding into action, dimmed slightly by the glass wall, and partly, like an assault, it was the spurts of blood that injured the transparent surface before him with splashes of fresh crimson. It was slow, certainly, but the moment was eternal. Though it was made of countless images of suffering, the scene appeared to transpire in a single frame, one increasingly growing red before him, with a choir of agony to suit. For that eternity, Michael felt himself within that glass cage; trapped, with no way out. By the time he had noticed it was all over, the machine had already returned to its prior position, and its faint green light was barely visible behind blotches of coagulated red. The bunny’s body was missing from the cage entirely. The creature was nowhere to be seen.

The machine’s whirring eased momentarily, and the lab fell into a distant silence.

‘Try putting some googly eyes on that!’ exclaimed Matthew from the height of his engagement. His expression, though he no doubt attempted to help it, formed into one of the purest joy. 

Michael’s gaze was frozen on the machine, which, entirely incidentally, had settled looking perfectly at him. The schoolboy thought of running away, turning around and bolting from all the madness, running back to the safety of his normal school trip. How long had he been gone? They had to be looking for him by now. All previous animosity had been dispelled from the idea. He just wanted to return to the land of the known and the mundane. He could rejoin them himself, he would find the door to the exhibition room—it was only a little down the hallway… door number…

As the schoolboy’s eyes widened in helplessness they perfectly reflected the rotundity of the mechanical abhorrence that faced him. Between insectile appendages and abrasive wires, its glowing eye changed from green to red.

22·VIII·2023