The Machine

Josh and the Island
Hello, my name is Josh. I live on an Island. I know now that there are many islands, some big, some small, some pretty, and some not. But this story is not about them; it is about me, and my island.
I can’t tell you how big my island is because I have been to no others, so I have nothing to compare it to. But there is this breeze that runs through it in the summer to keep it cool, and the winters always bring rain, warm rain that you can wash in. There are many villages on the island, I live in the only city... And in the city there are several schools for people of every age, education is very important here.
I have several friends here; Guy is one of them. We call him Guy because his real name is incredibly hard to pronounce, and impossible to remember. He is much darker of skin than the rest of us, and he is far taller than us as well as being stronger, but he isn’t just a big oaf, he’s pretty smart and amazingly coordinated (though you wouldn’t know it from the way he bumps into the small people that he can’t see).
Another friend I have is Andrea; the first thing you’d notice about her is her glasses. They are the small kind, maybe a third of a finger tall, and the lenses change color from time to time. I have never figured out how she does that and I’ve never caught them in mid-change. She never removes the lenses but they always change. Andrea is easily the most intelligent person in the class. Other than that she is a little on the smallish side with light colored hair.
Wondra is the last more of my friends, she is always full of energy, always has a smile on her face, and likes everyone. She is a little taller than me and has long flowing black hair.
The other person in our group is Jason. He has a couple of other friends but for the most part he is a loner who hangs with us when he wants to. Jason is tall, has dark hair, light eyes, light skin and dark intentions. He likes playing tricks on people and making them mad, then pointing out something he has arranged to make sure that person can’t get him back. He enjoys finding people who think they are invincible, and proving them wrong, then rubbing their noses in it. Jason is so smooth and blunt about this stuff that you just have to laugh.
Oh, I forgot to describe myself. Well, I’m of medium height, I have short light hair, dark eyes and I sound funny when I laugh. I am kind of smart, and most others say I have the charisma and energy that people like being my friends. I guess that’s why most of the bullies and mean people leave me alone.

The people of my island worship a great machine, it comes to the edge of the island every ten years or so. Or rather, a passageway leading to the machine comes. The front part of the passageway actually comes onto the beach, if you try to look at the out side of the passageway you will see that from the island it goes out, curves down and drops out of sight very quickly.
The machine is made of an endless set of corridors, rooms, and huge spaces in between. One of the rooms is the imagery room, there is at least one of these. It can create images inside itself, and even appear to change the laws of physics. It can appear to change size and shape as well, even though its dimensions actually stay exactly the same.
The control room is the heart of the machine and is a little towards the front. Everything is controlled and monitored from there: every room, corridor, and person (well, guard).
Some of the rooms are called “changing rooms”, these can change their insides the same way the imagery room can, except they cannot change the laws of physics or even appear to, and the changes that happen inside are real changes, not illusions.
There are also defenses. The walls of the corridors have areas that are colored differently; guards can materialize out of them, or go back into them when they are damaged. All the guards are mechanical, but no one on the island has ever seen one. That isn’t the only defense; if an invasion by some as-yet-unforeseen enemy gets out of control someone in the control room can flood an entire section with fire, or energy or whatever happens to be on hand at that moment.
The last set of rooms I will tell you about are the record rooms. These rooms are devided into two sets. Some contain all the information the machine has ever accumulated, through any means, and how the machine arrived at those conclusions. Some contain what the machine has done, simply touching the correct place on one of the rooms one can re-live a moment in time as the machine. One of these rooms is the place where my trouble started...

IN CLASS
The day my trouble started was on a school day. It actually started off rather well. A breakfast of leftovers, and in two of my classes my teachers actually gave us our work BEFORE the end of class so we could do it in class (which I didn’t). Then came my fifth and last class, study class (the one that all the stuff that the other classes don’t cover is crammed into).
“Today is a very special day, class.” Ms. Rindone was saying. “As you remember, the door to the Machine arrived last night, and every time it comes, we are allowed to take students for tours inside. We are the first class to take a field trip this visit. So I will assign partners to make sure no one gets lost.”
We got our assigned partners, boys with boys and girls with girls, I was pared up with this guy that is always really quiet and just...well...there.
“Oh, man. Guess who I got stuck with.” Jason said to me. He looked down and depressed.
“Anthony??” I guessed. I had no idea who it was that would make him this down.
“No, Sam. You know him, right?” I did, and I was trying to find a polite way to describe him to make sure we were talking about the same person when he described Sam for me. “The sniffling, whining little twerp who everybody hates.” Well, leave it to Jason to nail exactly how a person is.
You see, Sam sees himself a kind of hero against injustice. The problem being that he can never find injustice. When he can’t find injustice (always) he settles for unfairness, which he usually finds when he looses at anything. When he finds injustice (or unfairness) he tries to fight it outright, but he is bad at fighting too, so he usually goes running to his mommy, also known as the assistant principal. Sam is the only person that I know who ever succeeded at getting Jason in trouble.
“So, you wanna switch partners Josh?”
I laughed at him. “Not a chance, Diego is just fine for my partner, and I do NOT want to be stuck with Sam!!”
“That’s not what I’m talking about.” Jason said. And then a little more silently: “I ditched Sam so I could come talk to you. I have an idea, we both go up to the teacher and ask her to put Diego with Sam and have you and I be partners.”
“They have to agree to it too, Diego is pretty easy going, but even he doesn’t want to be partners with Sam.”
“He doesn’t have to know, you just ask him if you can switch partners, he won’t ask questions, he’ll just go along with it... And I’ll tell Sam in a way to make him think that you will be his new partner, he likes you so he’ll go along with it... But first we need to tell the teacher that we want to do this change, then we just bring our partners to her, they say they want to change partners, and we ditch all of them before Sam and Diego realize what happened.”
I was chuckling so hard about this on my way to find Ms. Rindone. On the way Jason explained some things to me to make sure things didn’t backfire on us. First off he said, “When we bring our partners in to see her and give their okay, you go first. If Diego sees Sam there he’ll back out then and there.” We found her and with completely straight faces explained the changing of partners and Diego and Sam’s compliance with this. Then we went our separate ways.

It went off perfectly, we timed it so Jason and I would ditch the two suckers right before we had to leave for the passageway. The whole class walked together down to the edge of the island. Now, I know that the passageway curves down rather sharply as soon as it gets off of the beach, but when we were going through it I felt as if the whole thing were perfectly straight and perfectly level.
Most of the class went into the imagery room where the Machine's operator would entertain them with illusions. But Jason argued that we could sneak in with any other group and see that any time. So instead we snuck out the door and did some exploring.
We waited until everybody was distracted by the speech the Operator was giving. Then we were gone.

MEMORY ROOMS
I picked a corridor and we ran down it for a while... Eventually we started walking because it was soo long. Eventually the corridor had rooms on either side for as far as I could see.
We stopped to take a look around. I became certain that the corridor with the rooms was longer than the city was at any point. Then I realized what this place was; it was but a small piece of the Machine’s memory. All I could think was “Good God this place is big!”
We started running down the halls to find out if there was an end to the memory rooms. Every couple rooms there was a corridor going off to either side. Jason and I thought that simply running down corridors seemed a little pointless and boring so we stopped after passing the sixth or seventh room and tried to decide what to do next.
“Lets see what this thing has been up to.” he said. He went into a room and was about to put his hand on the wall.
I grabbed Jason to keep him from touching the wall. “If those walls have memories they are probably equipped with alarms too!”
“Don’t be so paranoid.” He said. After an uncomfortable moment of silence, “Where can I lean against without making you go crazy?”
I stepped outside the room and pointed to the wall between the room we were in and the next one. “The memories are INSIDE the rooms, not outside. Places like these…” I touched the wall to show him. All at once I couldn’t see the wall anymore. I felt depressed, lonely, and I got the image of the operator, he was moving in slow motion. Then one word ran through my mind over and over again... REPLACE,REPLACE, REPLACE. I began hearing a sound, at first it was in the back of my mind, and then in the front of my mind. It sounded somewhat familiar, but I couldn’t quite place it.
THE ALARM!!! I was snapped out of my daze at once. I got my hand off the wall as Jason hit me up side the head and said “Smart one!”
We were racing down a corridor immediately. We heard steps ahead of us and took a left down another corridor. At the next intersection the machine’s operator was waiting for us, I stopped and took off in the other direction I kept running for some time, choosing turns at random to make it harder to be followed. Then before I realized it, I was outside, and Jason wasn’t with me.

THE CHOICE
Not having Jason with me was VERY disturbing. He was faster than I was so he should have at least been right behind me. Maybe he got lost; maybe he was still in there, maybe he was captured, maybe he was dead, maybe this maybe that. I was confused; my mind was racing. Then it occurred to me, the Operator, the one in charge of the machine, he had seen me. I had not been with my class when the alarm went off. As soon as Ms. Rindone and the Operator met up they would know I was the one who did it, and then they would be after me. The punishment for tampering with the machine came into my mind and a shiver ran down my spine. I would be banishment. I had time now, but I knew that the moment those two came out of the passageway they would tell everyone on the island... But they hadn’t yet, so I still had time to figure out what to do and to do it... But I don’t know what to do... Maybe Andrea does...

By the time I reached Andrea’s house I was out of breath, and it was late afternoon (how long was I in the machine?). I found Andrea with Wondra in her back yard. They both greeted me with amused smiles. Wondra jokingly commented that I could use a cup of water. Andrea just looked at me through her green glasses as I nodded to Wondra’s comment and began to ask for advice.
“I have a problem…” And I began looking for the right way to put it.
“Well, are you going to tell me what it is, or just let me guess?”
“My class went to the machine today. My partner and I sunk off to go exploring…”
“Oh god,” Andrea cut me off. Wondra started shaking her head. They both wore frowns on their faces. “What did you do?” Andrea asked me.
I was about to tell her when I wondered about what I did. The walls just outside the memory rooms weren’t supposed to do anything, and what I experienced certainly didn’t seem like a memory. “The walls of the corridor just outside the memory rooms, what kinds of memories do the contain?” I finally asked.
Andrea just looked at me through yellow lenses and said in an annoyed voice, “What happened?”
“I touched one of the walls in that corridor, felt something, and the alarms went off.” Now that I had answered her question I asked mine again. “So what kinds of memories do those walls contain?”
It was Wondra who answered me, “They don’t contain memories. I did a report on the memory rooms last year; those are just regular walls. You must have done something else to trigger the alarms.”
Then Andrea began one of her I’m-smarter-than-you-and-yet-I-pretend-not-to-know-it speeches. “Actually, something that most people don’t know about the memory rooms is that the walls between them aren’t normal walls, but they still do not contain memories. They contain objectives that the machine requires complete, as well as the current status of the completion presented in the form of being too fast, too slow, or just right. The alarm you activated by initiating contact with the current objective must have been set to inform the operator of an opponent attempting to infiltrate the great machine.” She explained.
Wondra and I had blank, zombie-like looks on our faces. I had no idea what she just said and I was the one it actually happened to.
Wondra recovered first, “Okay, now, what exactly does that mean to normal people? I mean, I can kind of get the gist of it, but an English translation would be appreciated.”
Andrea sighed and said at a slower pace, “You can touch the walls in the corridor near the memory rooms to find out the things the machine needs done now, and whether or not they are happening at the right speed. The alarm you activated must have been set to tell the operator if anyone was trying to find out the Machine’s goals.”
Wondra looked thoughtfully at me. “What did it feel like?”
I told them all about the experience; the feeling of lonelyness, seeing the operator in slow motion, and hearing the word “replace”.
Wondra said what I thought, “It sounds as if the machine needs someone to replace the operator.”
There was a pause in the talking after that while we all absorbed the information. All I could think was how releaved I was. If the Operator had hurt the Machine in some way, or needed to be replaced and wasn’t openly choosing a successor now and I revealed it…
The thought ran back and fourth through my mind. If I could prove that the Operator wasn’t doing his job, not only would I not be bannished, but instead I would be rewarded as a hero.
“Has the Operator started publicly looking for a successor?” I said, breaking the silence.
“No.” Wondra answered.
Andrea started shaking her head. “I can see where you’re going with this Josh, and it won’t work. In order to prove that the Operator isn’t doing his job you need something specific. Something that the Scholars studying the Machine and the police can investigate. Simply saying ‘he’s doing a bad job’ isn’t going to be enough.”
I sighed. My hopes to get out of this situation had just been crushed.
“Then what do I do?”
At this point Wondra interrupted. “Um… sorry to change the subject but who was with you when you set off the alarms?”
“Jason.”
“Well that figures.” Andrea commented.
Wondra ignored her. “Where is he now?”
“I don’t know, we got separated after we ran into the Operator, I didn’t notice until I was already outside.”
“And you had no idea what to do, so you came here.” Andrea finished up for me.
I nodded my head yes.
Andrea thought, then said, “Well that changes things. Now that the Operator has Jason he’ll probably find out who your friends are. That means that all of your close friends are in trouble.”
“Sorry.”
“I accept your apology although it doesn’t solve our problem. What you are going to do is you are going to stay here for tonight. And in the morning Wondra and I will go with our class into the Machine and we’ll look for the memory of why the Machine needs its operator replaced.”
Wondra looked reluctant to offer her assistance, but she saw that it needed to be done. So she went along with Andrea.
Andrea continued, “I know how to find that memory so we can have a head start on them by the time the Operator knows what’s going on.”

GUY
The next day Andrea met up with Wondra before school. I stayed inside to keep myself out of sight.
The police were waiting at the school for Wondra and Andrea, at least that’s what I heard from Guy. Guy arrived at Andrea’s house a little while after school was supposed to begin. Andrea had met him on the way to school, and told him all about what had happened. She also told him that the police might be looking for my friends too, so if Wondra and her were captured by the police, the police would be after him as well. Once he saw the two girls arrested he didn’t wait around to find out if Andrea was right and the cops would come after him too, he just took off and came to find me.

“After Andrea told me what happened; she told me to give this to you if she was arrested at school.” He handed me a note written in her handwriting, it said:
Josh, if you’re reading this then I have been arrested already. I don’t know why it took them so long to come after us (I was waiting last night for them to come to my house so we could sneak out the back) but they’ve come after us. If they got me they will probably search my house too, so you’ve got to go NOW. Go to the Machine and find that thing that’s wrong, for all our sakes. The last thing the police think you will do is go into the Machine so it will probably not be guarded on the outside, but the Operator will know that you need to get back in there so will probably have the internal defenses on high alert for you. So be careful! And good luck.
Andrea

After I read the note I let Guy read it while we started walking, taking a roundabout way to the beach so we could get to the Machine without anyone noticing.
“Damn it,” Guy said, shaking his head. “So what we need to do is to get in there, past the cops at the entrence…”
“But Andrea said there probably wouldn’t be police in front of the entrence.”
“Are you crazy?! Once the police hear about something this big they automatically help out with security. They uphold the law. That is how they are.”
“Oh.”
“Once we’re inside we still need to deal with internal security, find the memory rooms that are who-knows where, find the right memory out of hundreds, maybe thousands, touch the panel to get the info, and then get through all of the internal defenses back outside and find the police chief before the Operator can find us again. Is that all about right?”
“Yeah, that’s about it.”
“Do you know what the internal security consists of? Or even where the memory rooms are? You do realize that we can’t just walk in there and say ‘excuse me, but we need to get in there to look around until we find something to clear our names’ right?!”
“Of course I know that we can’t just walk in there and ask for directions!”
“And I hope that you know that I will break your nose after this is all over, right?”
“What we need is a plan. Lets stop and think for a minute.”
And so we did. We talked for a very short time. I wished that we had Andrea and Jason there because neither Guy nor myself had any idea what the internal defenses consisted of aside from the robot-guards, but Andrea probably did, and, well, Jason would have known ways of getting around the defences. But we didn’t have them, so we came up with what we could. We would both run into the machine, at this time there would be no classes in the Machine so our presents would automatically set off all of the alarms. We would both race down the corridors and take the same path that Jason and I had taken yesterday. I tried to describe the path to Guy. Once there we would both start looking frantically for the info. Then we would try to follow the same way out if possible. We had a hard time coming up with a plan for getting past the internal defenses but we decided that if we ran into guards one of us (probably Guy) would take them and the other would continue; and if we ran into something else we would just have to improvise.
With that taken care of we both started up again at a quick walk trying to conserve some energy for the task ahead.

THE PLAN AND THE ENTRANCE
Andrea was wrong, Guy was right, there were guards outside. They were two police and they saw us. I turned and was about to run when I felt a pressure on my chest. I looked down to see Guy’s hand keeping me from running. Confused, I looked at him. He had a smile on his face and said to me, “play along.”
Immediately the smile dropped from his face. He turned to the coming officers and with an expression of intense anxiety he said, “We’ve come to turn ourselves in.”
I didn’t understand, but I did it anyway. “Yeah.” I said with the same worn expression.
Once they got close they both got out their cuffs and the one on the left said, “Okay, anything funny and we’ll have to ‘interrogate’ you right here.”
“No funny business.” said Guy as he put out his hands. I, on the right of him, did the same and the two came to put the cuffs on us. WHAM!! The cop on the left went down, blood squirted from his nose and one of his legs was twisted at a funny angle. The other one (the one that was going to get me) looked over just as Guy grabbed him around the neck with one hand and expertly moved the man in such a way that Guy ended up behind him with one of the cop’s arms twisted behind his back and with one hand strangling the officer.
There he was with that man and I was staring open-mouthed at him. He was always big, but now he looked like a giant with an enormous hand around the officer’s neck. What struck me even more than his size or strength was how mastered that movement was and how practiced it looked. It was so fast I couldn’t even see exactly what happened. He just stood there with an expression of concentration, as if he was counting in his head. Then the man’s eyes closed and he stopped struggling. Guy waited a second…two, and then he dropped him. When he saw the expression on my face he seemed to understand what it meant. “Punishment for fooling with the Machine is life-long isolation. It can’t get much worse than that.” We proceeded into the Machine.
INSIDE
Well Andrea was right about one thing, the alarms did go off as soon as we entered. We started running, but not too fast in case we ran into something unexpected. There were footsteps behind us, but we were to the first turn and took an immediate left. One right and then a stretch and we reached the door to the Imagery Room and turned left, too fast for the footsteps behind us.
We were almost half way to the memory rooms when we saw him. He came out of this space in the wall that was colored differently than the rest of the wall. He looked very muscular, carried a very oddly shaped spear, and instead of a head he had what looked like a cone that was cut off half way up. But the most striking thing about him was that he was silver all over, even his spear was, as if he was made totally out of metal. He looked like he was bigger than Guy (though we found out later that he actually wasn’t) and started coming towards us.
Guy charged at him and changed it to a jump-kick at the last moment. All that force would have thrown me back through the air quite a ways. The metal man barely flinched. He pointed his spear directly at Guy; I pulled Guy away at the last minute, just as a click gave way to a burst of lightning into the metal floor. The two of us ran (he hobbled because that kick had hurt his foot) down the first corridor we came to and stopped short.
The Operator was there, and so were the police chief, two officers, and the girls Wondra and Andrea. The girls had their hands cuffed in front of them. The Operator said “There they are!” And the cops, except for the chief, raised their weapons at us.
Just then Andrea and Wondra acted. Andrea kicked one of the cops in the back of the knee and made him fall down, he fired; that projectile missed and went somewhere down the corridor. Wondra at the same time reached up to the other one and tickled him. Within and instant he laughed, moved his arm, but didn’t fire, pushed her down, and raised his arm again to fire. But the shot never came, I heard a click behind me, and dove to my left. A burst of lightning came and missed me but hit the armed officer; a short scream was followed by a thud as he hit the floor. I went to tackle the police chief before he could reach his weapon, but he punched me in the face and I went into the wall. Guy hit the other cop so as to knock him out. And I heard someone scream “No!”
It was Wondra. I saw the metal man leveling his spear at me again and Wondra trying to move it. She was pushing as hard as she could but couldn’t quite do it. Click, and Wondra lit up bright white. Her glow was a brilliant, almost omnipotent glow that seemed to have a light behind and above her. In that instant, for this didn’t last more than a second, she turned around and had a serene, healing look on her face. Then she dropped to the ground towards us and the metal man dropped to the ground in the opposite direction. (We later found out that her foot was touching him and the energy went through her and into him).
Guy started fighting with the police chief and the Operator so I grabbed Andrea and went down the hall at full speed. We had to get to the memory rooms.
Why did it have to come to this? Wondra DEAD, by the end of this Guy will probably be pretty hurt, and who-knows-what happened to Jason. Looking back I saw the Operator breaking away from the fight and coming after us. We turned a corner to the right and took a left at the next opportunity.
THE OPERATOR!!! How did he get in front of us? He was there and with two metal men identical to the one that got Wondra. We saw a room to the left and dove into it. The room had a door on the other side, but we couldn’t get it to open. Looking around for something to break the door or fight with we saw Jason. Or I did and pointed him out to Andrea. He was imbedded into the wall and looked asleep.
“Hey what’s he doing in here?” I asked nobody in particular. I went up to him and tried to wake him. Andrea went to something next to him on the wall that looked like a control panel and was fooling around with it. But nothing happened.
“What is this place?” she asked. And she was answered from the doorway.
“This is the interrogation room.” Answered the Operator. And we both spun around and stared at him.
“You hurt the Machine!!” Was all I could think to say to him. He scowled at me and defiantly said, “It hurt its own damn self!” He took a few steps towards me and Andrea attacked him from the side, he picked her up using her own momentum and threw her against the opposite wall. She would have grabbed his hand but her hands were still cuffed. I went at him and attacked with a punch, but he grabbed my wrist mid-flight and with his other hand he hit my throat and came forward at the same time knocking me to the ground.
“The Machine hurt its own DAMNED SELF!!” I couldn’t breath. “I tried to fix it but nooo. It wouldn’t let me.” I was gasping, trying to get breath. “And THEN, it wanted to replace me. Well I will not be replaced!! Not by someone from that miserable little island out there, AND CERTAINLY NOT BY YOU!!” My vision was getting blurry.
“Hold it right there, Operator.”
He stopped and his grip loosened. He growled at me and said next to my ear, “I’ll finish with you later.” He let go and got up. My vision was coming back and I looked up to see the chief of police in the doorway.
Though I couldn’t see his face, I sensed that the Operator smiled as he said: “Why Benjamin my old friend, how good of you to come. I see you have met my guards already.”
The cop got a questioning look on his face and turned around. There he saw the two metal men that we had seen with the Operator a minute ago. They had their spears leveled at him and drove him to the other side of the room (where I was). At the same time the Operator grabbed Andrea and said, “come my dear” as he brought her over to me and put her beside me. She groaned as she came to. The chief said hi to her, and looking at the situation she grasped what was going on and what had happened.
The metal men now had their spears pointed at us and the Operator was more towards us but out of the way. The metal men were next to the indent in the wall where Jason…wait a minute. Where was he? He wasn’t in the wall anymore and I saw a faint movement back near the goorway just before part of the wall exploded straight out and demolished both of the metal men. The Operator turned as Jason charged out of the smoke, grabbed one of the broken spears, and whacked the Operator across the head with it. He fell to the ground and dissolved into some dots of light until there was nothing left.

SOME TRULY STRANGE THINGS
I smiled because I was glad to see that Jason was all right. “We thought you were asleep.” I said.
He smiled weakly and said, “I was. But I was awakened by Wondra.” Wondra stepped into view, I was speechless. She smiled a big smile.
“At first I thought I was dead, then after a while I just opened my eyes and got up. Guy was handcuffed to the two police officers so I thought I would just come and find you. I picked a hallway that looked like a shortcut and went down it. And, well, here I am.”
Jason’s smile dropped. “While I was in there,” he gestured to the remnants of the wall, “I learned a few things. Like how to make the wall blow.”
“Really,” said the police chief. He was taking the handcuffs off of the girls.
“Yes, really. The Operator isn’t dead, he’s just run away to heal, and he still controls the inner defenses. So we should go, NOW.”

We were out the door in a flash just as the un-open-able door opened and a metal man came through it. We took the way back that Wondra had taken to get here because it seemed to have been much shorter than the way Andrea and I had taken. We saw Guy trying to drag the two unconscious cops in our general direction. He had a cut on his lip and several bruises on his face.
I said in rapid fire, “The-chief-is-on-our-side-now-Chief-unlock-those-cuffs-lets-get-these-officers-on-their-feet.” I made sure it was loud so everyone could hear me but I was still surprised to find that they all understood me. The girls and I started trying to rouse the two officers and we succeeded. The one that was shocked looked a bit crispy, but at least he was alive. By the time they were on their feet the Chief had taken off the cuffs. The Chief told them that the Operator had been bad to the Machine and now wanted to kill us.
Some marching metal men blocked the corridor in the direction of the exit. Jason looked around and said, “Okay now listen. If we get out and tell people what the Operator has been doing he is finished and he knows this. So the exit is probably guarded already. What we need to do is to get to the control room and shut the defenses off. Then we can apprehend him and get out safely.” He paused here to think of what he wanted to say next.
“Here, this way,” he finally said, “While I was in there I memorized the route we must take, the control room is spherical shaped and I will take you to it.” After a while he added, “I don’t know how to turn the defenses off though.”

We ran for a while in silence (the burnt officer, Andrea, and Guy lagged a bit). We didn’t run into any metal men, I was surprised, I had expected to see them around every corner, maybe they were behind us trying to box us in. (As it turned out later that is exactly what they were doing). Guy, the burnt officer and Andrea started lagging further and further, eventually I didn’t see them at all and went back for them. I went around a corner and saw that some of the metal men were holding them, Jason grabbed me and yelled, “There is nothing we can do for them from here. We need to get to the control room. It’s just up this corridor.”
I got up and ran down the corridor at top speed. There was a door with a metal man guarding it. Jason ordered, “Get his legs and lift up. I’ll hit him in the chest and try to knock him over.” The chief and the unburnt officer ran at his legs I came up the middle, Jason and Wondra were right behind me. The guard ignored the two in front and concentrated on me. I waited until I almost hit his spear and then I dived and slid between his legs just as he fired. Jason pushed Wondra one side and he moved to the other as the lightning bolt came roaring passed. Then he charged straight at the man. I didn’t see what happened after that because I got to the door, it opened, I went in, and it closed and locked.

THE CONTROL ROOM
I did it; I was in the control room. Now to the controls, I went to the controls at one end of the room and started fiddling around with them. Some truly strange things that I did not understand happened, but nothing helpful. I touched this panel and that one, but nothing happened. Then I happened to brush a small red panel with my hand and a bolt of electricity shot up my arm.
Suddenly I saw the panels not as pieces to a wall but as buttons that do things, and I knew just exactly what each of them did. I touched one and saw the confusion outside. Jason and the others had not succeeded in knocking the metal man over and were now fleeing from him. Elsewhere I saw Guy; his shirt looked torn and he was also running from the guards. He looked as if he had received some wounds in his escape. I saw the burnt officer and Andrea in the custody of some of the guards. Andrea’s glasses changed from red to gold, HA, I had finally caught them in mid-change. Finally, I saw the Operator, excuse me, the former Operator with two guards waiting near the exit. I silently told the guards with him to pretend to obey him. Next I pushed another button and the guard chasing Jason’s group stopped in his tracks. Then the guard chasing Guy and the ones holding Andrea and the cop froze where they were. I got the guards to release Andrea and the burnt man, and over some sort of intercom I told them all that I was now in control and that I would like everyone to stay where they were. To Jason’s group I said, “I have an idea.”

Anthony, for I found out this was the former Operator’s name, was waiting at the end of a hallway with two guards. He had positioned guards such that the “intruders” would be flushed to him. He saw three of them running, looking tired, and going slow. They were coming straight for him. He told the guards to go around the corner so they were out of sight and he too did the same thing. He told them to jump out right behind him when he did and to apprehend the people if they got past him. He heard the footsteps getting closer, closer, closer… NOW! He jumped out at them and they grabbed him and took him down with great ease. How did they know? It was almost as if they had been told of the trap. Which they had been. Why didn’t the guards do something? It was almost as if someone had ordered them to stand there and do nothing. Which someone had.
Anthony had arranged it so that Jason’s group had to take a very long path to get to him, which meant that Wondra (taking a shorter path and walking with Andrea and the burnt police officer) arrived there just a few minutes later. I was amused to hear and see the crispy cop both crying and laughing at the same time. Through the sob-laughs I heard him promising her that he would meditate twice a day, burn incense in an offering to someone named Marley Bob, and if he ever ran into any dragons he was to give them lots of yogurt because yogurt doesn’t last long in caves and so it is considered a delicacy. Wondra just has that effect on people.



THE MACHINE
The three cops escorted Anthony out of the Machine and Jason was about to follow them out when the door closed right in his face.

“What do you mean ‘the door closed’?” I asked.
“Well, just what I said. I was going to go out and it just closed right in my face.” Bringing up the area in the control room I could see that he was right. The others were now there with him and Guy was banging experimentally on the door. But it wouldn’t budge, it just wouldn’t. Wondra walked up to the door and asked it politely to open, it didn’t. They all turned around and started walking to come to me when the whole Machine, all of the corridors, turned gold, and a humming sound ensued.
I said, “guys, you’d better get up here and do it now. I don’t like what’s going on.” They started running towards the control room but they were a great distance away. The walls and floor in one small section suddenly lit up with a bright white light. It came for them, it got them and carried them. I tried to get the metal men to help my friends, but they were nowhere to be found. Where had they gone to? Frantically I began pushing buttons here and there, electricity started to come out of the buttons every time I pushed them. And then I began to sink into it. I was sinking into the wall of the Machine! Electricity was streaming everywhere, I was gone.

I awoke slowly; I couldn’t feel or see my body. I was in the middle of a giant sphere of electricity. It was huge. Suddenly the sphere closed in on me and hit me from all sides, I was fully awake. Now I understood, I wasn’t anywhere inside the Machine, I was the Machine. I had bonded with it somehow. I could feel the others too. Guy, Wondra, Jason, and Andrea; they were sleeping, and being healed, replenished. I would wake them, but later, not now. For now, I felt I had some exploring to do.
I glided up and down the different corridors with my consciousness; I looked at just some of the information stored in the memory rooms. That was when I found out about the changing rooms; the rooms that could change into any type of room imaginable. I used the Imagery Room a bit, and found out about the different types of defenses. Lastly I found out what the Machine needed us for, why it “captured” us, so to speak.
You see, the machine was getting too big and complex for one person alone to work it. Only, Anthony had refused to share control of the Machine with anyone. He, working by himself, wasn’t enough to carry out all the tasks that were needed, so the Machine decided that it would need an Operator that was willing to share power. I immediately saw that we were to be the new Operators. I looked at the jobs required and assigned them to us. The Machine normally exists in another world entirely and has many external parts that require skill to move efficiently. That job would go to Guy. Second, there were many problems that it would need to solve. Andrea is the smart one; I’d better put her in charge of that. Third, many of the problems required strange solutions and could not be solved by Andrea. That job had better go to Wondra. Also, there were many other Machines in that world that this one would need to interact with. For this job I picked Jason, because he, better than the rest of us, had a keen grasp of the nature of people; and there would be people inside these other Machines. And the last job is the only one that I can do; I can take over the other jobs, but not to anywhere near the ability of the others. The last job is to keep the others in line and keep the whole process running smoothly.
Once I had assigned us all our jobs I was ready to wake the others up. To acquaint them with this new environment I thought it would be best to have them in their normal bodies. So I had us all materialize in a corridor, I chose it completely at random and they found themselves totally awake, on their feet, and their wounds totally healed.
“Well, this is new.” Said Jason, a little dumbfounded.
I didn’t waste any time and put it to them bluntly, “The Machine has chosen us to be the new Operators.”
They all looked at me in surprise and wonder. My people worship the Machine; this is the greatest honor that could have ever been bestowed upon us. To work the Machine, what a wonder it would be. I was especially happy (and scared) because to do my job I was essentially the head honcho, I was the one in charge.
“Feel around inside yourselves,” I told them, “we are all connected to the Machine in our minds. So we can feel it all over.” They did and they discovered that they could. I then thought of something and took them to a nearby changing room.
“These rooms can change into any type of room you can imagine.” I said.
Wondra stepped up to it and said, “Really now? Well I guess I’ll just test out that theory.” She closed her eyes and a bed appeared against the opposite wall. The wall that the bed was against changed color to a swirling silver and black. The ceiling was covered by a giant picture of a dragon; and instead of the light coming from everywhere (like it did in the entire Machine) the light started only coming from the four corners. In one corner there was a statue of a winged cat, no more than a hand tall and sitting on a circular platform about one third of the way up the hall. In the other three corners were similar statues, a gargoyle, a dragon, and a fairy. Wondra said, “This is my room.”
We all stared in wonder as it kept changing. On the other walls were pictures of fairies, dragons, vampires, castles, wizards, and stuff. Then she thought for a minute and said, “Come, there is something I want to show you.” We all followed her to the Imagery room and we went inside and then she stopped. She kind of stared and was looking around just by moving her eyes, she concentrated. Then there were swirling spots of light on the ceiling and floor. They moved up and down ,depending on where they started from, to where they were about chest level. Once there they came together in a great burst of light and became a person. He was tall, younger than any of us, was tanned, and wore normal cloths. Wondra explained to us, “This is a program that I found in here when I was here in my class. He knows more about the Machine than anyone.”
We all stared at the boy. Wondra decided to demonstrate, “Why was the old Operator expelled from the Machine?” Wondra asked. “What did he do wrong?”
“You may have noticed that the Machine was due to come to the island eight years ago. Well, the Machine was getting so big and complex that one person could no longer handle it. Anthony didn’t want to bring anyone else in here because he would have had to share power with them. He knew that if he went back to the island the Machine would choose someone to help him, so instead he decided to not go back. It took eight years, but eventually the Machine caught him off guard and before he could stop it the doorway was on the island’s beach.”
Guy asked, “If he can sense the Machine like I can, why didn’t he know Josh was in the control room?”
The image turned to him and replied, “The Machine was helping you. Anthony didn’t request specifically if Josh was in the control room, so the Machine didn’t tell him.”
Andrea took her turn, “Aren’t the defenses a little light? If we could get into the control room than anyone could. I mean, if the shots don’t incapacitate the intruders for very long and the guards can’t run, and the guards are more susceptible to their shots than we are. Isn’t that kind of weak?”
Smiling at her he waited a minute and then spoke. “The shots are lethal, the guards can run, and the armor they wear is far more protection than anything you have ever seen.”
That baffled us and Wondra now asked the question that was on all of our minds. “Then why didn’t the shot kill that police officer? Why did the guards only walk? And why did that shot go through me and disable that guard yet not hurt me?”
“The Machine was helping you. It set the guards’ weapons to a level less than kill, and made them temporarily unable to run.”
“But you didn’t answer her last question.” Jason said. “If the guards have such great armor, why wasn’t Wondra killed, or even hurt for that matter, when there was enough energy to disable a guard?”
At this the smile went off the image’s face and he said in a very serious tone, “No one knows truly what the Machine is capable of, or how or why it works, not even I. But I imagine that it was helping you there too.” We asked him a few more questions after that, “Why didn’t the former Operator come out of the Machine at early evening and send the cops after me then” and other such things. He answered them with the same answer he gave for Wondra’s question. After a while we got bored, turned him off, and went on to explore the rest of the Machine.

Andrea went through all the memory rooms and looked at the data that looked important. She then told us everything that was relevant and we listened to it. The Machine’s age, what it was equipped with, what it could be equipped with, other Machines, etc. We used our time to explore the farthest reaches of the Machine and the closest, inner parts of it. It was amazingly huge and still growing. Then we sensed that it became time to bring the Machine into full operational mode, fully active.
We were sitting in the control room. The chairs had materialized for us, and the walls now curved outwards slightly as if they had controls on them that could only be used efficiently in a semi-vertical position. This first time we wanted to start the Machine when we were still in our bodies, not as part of the Machine itself.
“Loading up data,” said Andrea as she input information into the Machine that would be needed for the next day. I had told them all the say what they were doing so none of us were caught by surprise about what another was doing, and so if something went wrong we would immediately know what we did to cause it.
“The external sensors are coming online.” Said Guy. “And so are the mechanical parts and the optical sensors.”
“Why can’t we see anything outside then?” I asked.
“Because I haven’t removed the protective covering from it yet.” Replied Guy.
“Well remove it then,” I said.
“Hang on a minute.”

And the corridors became nerves. The vast internal machinery became muscles and bone; the external devices became arms, hands, feet, and legs; the external hull became skin; and the optical sensors became eyes, which opened onto a new world. And Brian Baker woke up. He got up and started getting dressed. WOW, he felt like a new person now and didn’t know why. Everything seemed new: new outlook on life, new ability to think, more coordinated, new imagination; new everything. Maybe it was because this was the second-to-last Monday, and after this Middle School would finally be over. Little did he know that his Operators were only on their first day.


THE END