Twenty-two seconds.
Mikiko lies across my workbench on her back, eyes closed. I have repaired the damage to the temporal portion of her skull. She is ready for activation, yet I do not dare to put her online. I don’t know what she will do, what decisions she will make.
I finger the scar on my cheek. How can I forget what happened last time?
I slip out the door and into the hallway. The wall lights are dimmed. My paper sandals are silent on the thin, brightly colored carpet. The low noise comes again and I imagine that I feel the air pressure fluctuate. It’s as if a bus is driving past every few seconds.
The noise is coming from just around the corner.
I stop. My nerves tell me to go back. Huddle in my closet-sized condo. Forget about this. This building is reserved for those over the age of sixty-five. We are here to be taken care of, not to take risks. But I know that if there is danger, I must see it and confront it and understand it. If not for my sake, then for Kiko’s. She is helpless right now, and I am helpless to fix her. I must protect her until I am able to break the spell she is under.
However, this does not mean that I must be brave about it.
At the corner of the hallway, I lean my aching back against the wall. I peek around the edge with one eye. My breathing is already coming in panicked gasps. And what I see makes me stop breathing altogether.
The hallway by the elevator banks is deserted. On the wall is an ornate display: two strips of round lights with floor numbers painted next to them. All the lights are dark except the ground floor one, which glows dull red. As I watch, the glowing red dot creeps slowly upward. As it reaches each floor, it makes a soft click. Each click grows louder in my mind, as the elevator rises higher and higher.
Click. Click. Click.
The dot reaches the top floor and pauses there. My hands are squeezed into fists. I bite my lip hard enough to make it bleed. The dot holds steady. Then, it streaks downward with nauseating speed. As the dot approaches my floor, I can hear that odd noise again. It is the whoosh of the elevator plunging straight down at the speed of gravity. A puff of wind is pushed out into the hallway as the elevator falls. Under the wind, I can also hear the screams.
Clickclickclickclick.
I flinch. Press my back against the wall and close my eyes. The elevator barrels past, rattling the walls and causing the hallway sconces to flicker.
Everything has a mind. The mind of a lamp. The mind of a desk. The mind of a machine. There is a soul inside everything, a mind that can choose to do good or evil. And the mind of the elevator seems bent on evil.
“Oh no, no, no,” I whimper to myself. “Not good. Not good at all.”
I gather my courage, then scurry around the corner and press the elevator call button. I watch the wall indicator as the red dot climbs back up, one level at a time. All the way to my floor.
Click. Click. Bing. It arrives. The doors slide open like curtains parting on a stage.
“Most definitely not good, Nomura,” I say to myself.
The elevator walls are splattered with blood and bits of gore. Fingernail scratches mark the walls. I shudder to see a pair of bloodstained dentures partially embedded in the mounting bracket of the ceiling lamp, casting strange reddish shadows over all I see. Yet, there are no bodies. Smears on the floor lead toward the door. There are boot prints in the blood, marked with the pattern of the domestic humanoid robots that work here.
“What have you done, elevator?” I whisper.
Bing, it insists.
Behind me, I hear the vacuum-tube whir of the servicebot elevator. But I can’t look away. Can’t stop trying to understand how this atrocity has happened. A blast of cool air hits the back of my neck as the small service-elevator door opens behind me. Just as I turn, a bulky mailbot shoves itself into the back of my legs.
Caught off guard, I collapse.
The mail robot is simple: an almost featureless beige box the size of an office copy machine. It normally delivers mail to the residents, gentle and quiet. From where I lie sprawled on the floor, I notice that its small round intention light doesn’t glow red or blue or green; it is dark. The mailbot’s sticky tires are clinging to the carpet as the device shoves me forward, toward the open mouth of the elevator.
I climb to my knees and pull on the front of the mailbot in a failed attempt to stand. The single black camera eye on the front face of the mailbot watches me struggle. Bing, says the elevator. The doors close a few inches and then open, like a hungry mouth.
My knees slide across the carpet as I push against the machine, leaving twin ruffled streaks on the thin nap. My sandals have fallen off. The mailbot has too much mass and there is nothing to grab hold of on its smooth plastic face. I whimper for help, but the hallway is dead quiet. The lamps only watch me. The doors. The walls. They have nothing to say. Complicit.
My foot crosses the threshold of the elevator. In a panic, I reach on top of the mailbot and knock off the flimsy plastic boxes that hold letters and small packages. Papers flutter onto the carpet and into the drying pools of blood in the elevator. Now I am able to flip open the service panel on the front frame of the machine. Blindly, I stab at a button. The rolling box keeps ramming me into the elevator. With my arm bent at a cockeyed angle, I hold down the button with all my failing strength.
I beg the mailbot to stop this. It has always been a good worker. What madness has infected it?
Finally, the machine stops pushing. It is rebooting. This activity will last perhaps ten seconds. The mailbot is blocking the elevator door. I climb awkwardly on top of it. Embedded in its broad, flat back is a cheap blue LCD screen. Hex code flickers by as the delivery machine steps through its loading instructions.
Something is wrong with my friend. The mind of this robot is clouded. I know that the mailbot does not wish to harm me, just as Mikiko did not wish to harm me. It is simply under a bad spell, an outside influence. I will see what I can do about that.
Holding down a certain button during the reboot initiates a diagnostic mode. Scanning the hex code with one finger, I read what is happening in the mind of my gentle friend. Then, with a couple of button presses, I send the boxy machine into an alternate boot mode.
A safe mode.
Lying on my belly on top of the machine, I cautiously peek over the front edge. The intention light blossoms into a soft green glow. That is very good, but there isn’t much time. I slide off the back of the mailbot, slip my sandals back on, and gesture at the bot.
“Follow me, Yubin-kun,” I whisper.
After an unnerving second, the machine complies. It whirs along as I scamper back down the hallway to my room. I must return to where Mikiko waits, slumbering. Behind me, the elevator doors slam shut. Do I sense anger in them?
Speakers chime at us as we creep down the hall.
Ba-tong. Ba-tong.
“Attention,” says a pleasant female voice. “There is an emergency. All occupants are pleased to evacuate the building immediately.”
I pat my new friend on its back and hold the door as we continue into my room. This announcement certainly cannot be trusted. Now I understand. The minds of the machines have chosen evil. They have set their wills against me. Against all of us.
Mikiko lies on her back, heavy and unresponsive. In the hallway, sirens chirp and lights flash. Everything here is ready. My tool belt is snapped on. A small jug of water hangs from my side. I even remember to put on my warm hat, the flaps pulled snugly over my ears.
But I cannot bring myself to wake my darling—to bring her online.