Authors: Bryant Delafosse
“C-Can’t,” Cora joined her, “move a rubber tree plant.”
“Cause he’s got…”
The emergency lights flickered on in the lobby, fifty yards or so down the corridor.
“Ah, there we go, Coraline.
See, nothing to fear!”
The door beside them burst open and the two teenagers collided with a frozen theater Bot standing just behind them.
Cora screamed as the boy clawed at the face of the motionless Bot as if fighting for his very life.
The teen girl had already fled up the aisle ahead of him and the teen boy leapt off the chest of the fallen Bot and followed her, screaming her name in a high pitched voice: “Leslieee!
Don’t leave meee!”
Lara glanced at Cora, who had started to shiver uncontrollably.
“Hey now, what’s all this about?”
“Mommy, I’m scared,” Cora murmured through quivering lips, staring down at the frozen metal man at their feet.
“What happened to the Bot?”
Lara tugged her arm forward away from the fallen body and started toward the light in the lobby.
“Well, y’know, they run on electricity too and when the power went out, they went out too, I’ll bet.”
“But don’t they run on batteries?”
In the lobby, the bright arc light poured from a single ceiling fixture just behind the chandelier.
Long stark shadows cut through the lobby and tiny colored spots reflected by the crystal teardrops flittered across the walls.
Other customers staggered forth from their darkened corridors like dreamers awakened too early from their sleep.
They peered at each other and the two frozen theater Bots in confusion.
Cora cast a look back into the darkness of the green hallway they’d just left and asked, “Do you think the Bots are gonna be okay?”
“As soon as the lights come back on, I’m sure they’ll be as good as new.”
When the power went out, cries of dismay and frustrated curses went up throughout the Di-Lithium mine arcade.
All those world records lost to the ether.
There was barely ten people left inside by then and Owen had been watching a particularly riveting game of Dragon’s Lair.
The player, a twenty-year old college student from Rice, who had advised Owen during a third level animated exposition scene to “never, ever listen to anyone over thirty, little dude,” had advanced so far he had almost gotten to the final level.
Around that time Owen sensed motion out of the corner of his eye and looked up.
A Mall Bot with the distinctive yellow stripes of the east sector had just entered in a rush.
He was scanning from left to right as he stepped deeper into the arcade, stopping suddenly when he spotted Owen.
The ten-year-old stiffened as its sensors locked on him and glowed bright blue.
Feeling a burst of rage, he knew somehow that his mother was staring out at him through the eyes of that machine.
She found me, Owen thought in frustrated anger.
That was when the Di-Lithium Mine went as black as the inspiration for its name.
“No!” the player bellowed, his screen winking out.
“No way in hell!”
Owen backed a few steps away in the darkness and felt his heels strike something solid.
He slowly panned from right to left and tried to glimpse some evidence of light, but there was nothing.
If people started trying to reach the exit in the dark all at once, this might be bad.
“Lights,” someone started to chant and before long everyone had picked it up and began to repeat in like a mantra.
“Lights-Lights-Lights.”
“Shut your nerd holes,” a rugged adult voice yelled above the din.
“There’s nothing I can do until the emergency lights kick on!”
“I’m suing this place for the ten dollars in credits I just invested in this game,” someone shrieked in frustration.
“And two million for my pain and suffering!”
Since Owen had arrived, he’d spent the intervening time watching others play and periodically finding quarters on the floor dropped in a white hot moment of panic before the timer ran out on them and they were forced to start completely over from level one.
(Though most of the newer machines now took only cards, some of the classic games still took hard currency.)
He’d played Stargate and Joust and had even found a free credit on Frogger.
Once he’d even taken over an on-going game of Gauntlet that a couple of skateboard kids had left behind, but he hadn’t lasted very long on the advanced level they had left him.
Owen had intended to be back at the theater before the movie let out.
What time had it been the last time he checked his watch, he wondered.
He was never going to hear the end of it.
Not that it mattered.
Lately, she came down on him for breathing.
He hoped she was panicking now.
It would serve her right after the way she treated him.
“Hey, kid,” the college student’s voice floated to him out of the darkness.
“Yeah?”
Owen felt a hand reach out and tentatively touch him, grab a handful of his shirt, then step past him to the wall.
He heard him loudly patting the wall with the flat of his hand.
“Got it,” the other murmured.
“The exit’s got to be this direction.
C’mon.”
“Hold on and follow me,” he told Owen.
“We’re getting out of here.”
After several awkward minutes of bumping and excusing themselves around game consoles and video game zombies, Owen and his guide eventually made it out of the Mine.
As they spilled out into the yellow sector hallway along with a few others, they saw the silent dimly lit artificial city stretched out before them.
The first thing Owen noticed was the hush that had settled over everything.
The almost constant ambient chatter produced by the scrolling electronic banners strategically posted for maximum exposure across the Mall had ceased, their screens black.
The audaciously lit signs over each store had gone dark and muted.
He could actually hear the echo of human voices calling out in the distance.
One female in particular called out over and over for a “Graham,” with the plaintive urgency of a mother cat.
The overall effect--like stumbling into the empty street of a normally busy section of a big city—was wholly unnatural.
An unconscious shudder rolled through Owen.
A single yellow sector Bot led a small group west past the arcade.
He watched as the party split into two as they diverted around another Bot lying on its face in the center of the corridor.
Looking in the opposite direction, Owen could see another Bot in the distance, a single arm raised in mid-gesture like a monument to a forgotten historical figure.
Its eyes were as blank as the banner screen above him.
“But this is not where I’m parked,” one member of the group of customers barked at the Bot leading him.
“For your own safety, please proceed to the nearest exit, sir.”
“The chattel leading the sheep,” the man grunted and separated from the group.
Owen sidled up closer to the college student.
“What do you think happened?”
The college student looked up from the dead cellular phone in his hand,
glanced
one way, then the other and chortled.
“Wouldn’t surprise me if we were at war with the Ruskies,” he replied with a glance back at Owen.
“They’re behind all of America’s problems, y’know.”
“I thought they were our friends now.”
“What, just because President Connally
says they are?” the other snorted.
“Don’t believe anything you hear from them.
They’re paid to keep secrets from us.”
He started off to the right.
“I’m parked over on this end, so… Good luck!”
“Wait!” Owen exclaimed rushing to catch up then falling into stride with him.
“My name’s Owen.”
He thrust out his hand and the other stared down at it with amusement.
“Say, little guy, what’s your situation?
I mean what are you doing out here by yourself after midnight?”
Owen looked him straight in the eye.
“I’m homeless.”
The other studied him.
“How does a kid your age end up being homeless?”
“My father’s dead and my mother don’t care about me.
What’s your name?”
“Victor,” he said, pausing at a pay phone terminal where an overly made-up woman in her forties clutched her purse tightly to her chest and tried to dial out.
“Phones working?” he asked her in a casual tone of voice.
Her wide eyes flittered to him anxiously, tugged her purse closer,
then
looked away.
She hung up the phone then skittered up the corridor.
Victor shrugged and checked the phone himself.
With a shake of the head, he let the receiver dangle from its cord.
“This is so bizarre!”
Another group of customers marched past down the opposite side of the corridor led by a red sector Bot and a uniformed security guard.
The guard spotted Victor and stopped.
“You there!
Head for the front exit!”
Victor gave a bright smile and a wave, murmuring out of the side of his mouth.
“Rented pork.”
Owen backed toward the shadows as the guard started over.
“Did you not hear me, son?” the tall beard man asked.
“My car’s parked in lot C2.”
“We’ve been directed to evacuate everyone from the building.”
“I am evacuating,
sir
,” Victor sniffed contemptuously at the other.
“Why does it matter which way I leave?”
“Because of safety issues.”
“What safety issues?”
“The kind that could get you good and dead!
That kind of issue,” the guard said, pointing at the tail end of the large group and glaring at Victor with hard eyes.
“I would appreciate it if you could just follow the rest of the group.”
Victor took a deep breath and started toward the group.
When the guard started to turn away, Victor glanced back at Owen.
Turning back one last time, the guard spotted Owen just as he bolted in the opposite direction.
“Hey!” the guard bellowed.
“Go, little dude,” Victor screamed at the top of his lungs.
“Fight the power!”
Owen raced back down the corridor in the direction of the shuttle he’d taken from blue sector.
He considered the possibility that he might have made a mistake traveling so far from the theater.
Briefly, he thought about the second group of customers that he’d seen.
The Bot that had led them had been from red sector.
What was a red sector Bot doing leading evacuees into the yellow sector when there were plenty of closer exits on that side?
Perhaps there really was a “safety issue” as the guard had said.