weeeeeeeeeeeeeee-bleep!

[nottheotherguy]

I hadn't been around when the robot rats came out of the walls, a fact which I couldn't really say I regretted. But just knowing it had happened was enough, sometimes, to make me a little wary when I heard noises I couldn't place the origin of. Of course, being that this was a pretty big place, and pretty old to boot, there were a lot of noises I couldn't place the origin of.

Mostly I'd trained myself to ignore them, but every now and then I was just bored enough or feeling just adventurous enough to follow the sound and see where it was coming from. Today happened to be just such a day-- lucky me-- when I walked past the door leading to one of the classrooms and heard a motorized whirr coming from behind it, along with a little high-pitched muttering that sounded like two kids talking through vocoders at each other.

The door opened when I stepped closer, and I froze immediately at the sight of two tiny vaguely cube-shaped robots on wheels rolling around the room, chittering to each other as they went.

They stopped as soon as they saw me, and we spent a second just staring at each other. Then, almost at the same time, they emitted a startled bleep and zoomed away toward the far wall, where a panel slid aside to let them through. "Hey!" I yelled, almost involuntary, the urge to somehow stop them and make them come back so I could figure out what they were for and why they'd been-- what had they been doing, anyway? Vacuuming? It was a mystery, and one I suddenly really wanted to solve.

I was on my knees inspecting the panel that had opened to let the robots through when I heard footsteps behind me, and half-turned to see who had stumbled upon me acting like I'd completely lost my marbles.

[tag one, tag all! no one but bruce will see the tiny robots, but anyone's welcome to tell him he's imagining things. :)]

Comments

[nottheotherguy]

"Yeah," I said slowly, thinking. "And I guess that means these passages go all over." Which wasn't really a thought I was ecstatic about-- looking in, I could see the duct was too small for a person, but there were a lot of things smaller than a person that I still wouldn't want running around inside my walls.

I pulled back and turned to give Steve a speculative grin. "What do you think-- wanna go pull apart some more walls and see if we can tell where this leads?"

[theycallmecap]

The grin Steve gave Bruce then could only be described as boyish, and he moved back in to peek inside the tunnel. "Okay, let me see..." After a quick estimation, he moved down the wall and pried open another panel, and then one behind it - and only then found the bend in the tunnel.

"There's a crossroads up there," he told Bruce, moving back for him to have a look for himself. "And I think tunnels up and down." There was probably a maze of these tunnels inside the station.

[nottheotherguy]

I looked inside and did a few mental calculations.

"Okay," I said, pulling my head back out and getting to my feet. "If we go into the next classroom, we should be able to see straight down the cross-tunnel." Now that we'd begun, I was really getting into this. It was sad, really, that this was the closest thing to a scientific experiment I'd gotten to do since coming here.

[theycallmecap]

It might be sad, but as far as Steve was concerned, it was also some definite kind of fun. Not as 'fun' as kicking Nazi ass, but close enough, and you took what you could get when you were stuck on a space station.

"Then let's go," he concluded, as he got back to his feet and led the way.