Obelus (ONC 2020)

Chapter 10

Eli hobbled through flashing hallways, wincing as the loud, piercing alarm battered his eardrums. He'd yet to encounter a mob of red-eyed army bots, but he knew it was only a matter of time before Genesis sent his horde of mechanical children after him.

He wondered what they'd do to him if he were caught. 

If Genesis had built them with Asimov's Laws of Robotics in mind, then they wouldn't be able to harm him. Not directly. But that didn't mean they wouldn't drug him and chain him to a table for the rest of his life, especially if they thought they were protecting him by doing so.

Eli shuddered and forced himself to expel such thoughts from his mind.  He had to focus on finding Lopez right now.  He could mourn his conscious imprisonment when and if the time came.   

Luckily, he remembered the general building layout from his past escape attempts.   He knew that door numbers didn't correlate with the floor level. Instead, every hundred rooms belonged to their own branch in the facility, like a giant, deformed metal octopus.    But it was still a labyrinth, and he had a feeling the building had been designed that way on purpose.  

Just in case the lab rats escaped. 

When he reached the apparent end of the 700s, he halted at the crossroads of four corridors.  

Shit, which way is the 900s? 

Mysterious hallway one, two, or three?

To his left, a numbered door opened, and a red-eyed medic emerged with a holographic display in front of its plated face. Eli threw himself against the wall and peered around the corner, his heart kicking frantically against his ribcage.

"The East Branch of Ward 7 is clear. No sign of 801," it reported in its feminine voice, and a white section on its diagram turned clear.

They were scouting for him then, one branch at a time.   And that bot carried a map of the entire facility—an active blueprint.

Eli grinned.

As the bot approached the hallway intersection, Eli fell to a crouch and swiped his crutch outward to collide with aluminum shins. The bot tripped over the pole and crashed to the ground, and Eli lurched forward to pin the metal body to the floor. The machine tried to shove him off, but if Eli had learned anything from his bully of an older sister, it was how to wrestle an opponent to the ground and force a confession out of them.  Or an apology for using their bras in a slingshot war.  

Luckily these machines had been built to care for humans, not destroy them.  They were indoor pets, not wolves.  And that was the only reason Eli was still alive.   Had he stumbled into a reality of Terminators, he never would have made it out of the simulation room.

He gripped the bot's chin to keep its head still, ignoring its verbal iteration of Eli's position and its own incapacitation—a warning to its brethren.  

He peered down at the holographic map projected from the machine's crimson eyes and zoomed in with his free hand.  

There it was.

Room 935.

Before he released the bot, he zoomed back out and committed the layout to memory—specifically, the small square in the center of the complex.   He filed its locality away for later.

The bot beneath him clutched at the tight suit of Eli's bicep, struggling to push him off, to apprehend his apprehender, and Eli scowled down at him in annoyance.  "How do I access a simulation room?" he demanded. He'd seen the keypads on the metal doors, and he knew he stood little chance of breaking into one of those rooms without a passcode or digital signature of some kind.