Coop stood, for a few moments, in the kid’s wake. Then he ploughed his palm into his face with the speed of a subway train.

“Ugh,” he said, venemously, “that little pimple.”

He drew his palm down his face, pulling the skin out and stretching out his cheeks, and sighed.

“What’s he up to, now..?”

He stared up and around at the factory, then loathingly at the door the kid had directed them to.

He slumped fell into step behind Tabitha and slumped along after her.

Midian glanced over his shoulder a couple times before heading quickly into the tunnel after the rest of the group. Some long, quick strides brought the ever-silent jackal up behind Ace and Geoff, who he asked about the situation. The two seemed the most... put off of anyone present, so it made sense. (Well, there was Coop, too, but perhaps Midian thought better than to ask the questionably stable bird.)

"Okay, so I get that boy's dodgy, but what're we missing here?"

As the group proceeded down the tunnel, they would gradually become the recipients of a gentle, warm breeze, which—as they neared its source—grew stronger and stronger until it became muggy, choppy gusts of stale air.

The tunnel stopped, abruptly and with no fanfare, opening into a vast room, stretching down and away across a sheer wall to the floor below. Rails inset into the floor curved around the mouth of the tunnel and continued down the wall, as if the tunnel should have been host to some kind of mobile platform or track-mounted robot, but there was no such convenience in sight.

Around the superstructure they had wandered into, a host of the pneumobubble vacutubes snaked organically out of the walls, like feeler roots from some kudzu-like growth, from the various collector stations around the eastern branch of Gigalopolis. The tubes dropped down the fifty foot gap between the end of the tunnel and the floor, and converged, tangling and twirling in knots, on a vast, squat sorting station which sat low in the room like a bright red-and-yellow, metallic-painted toad.

The sorting station was also one of the sources of suction for the vacuum system, and it hummed and vibrated as, inside, gigantic slabs of curved metal whirled around, almost invisible from the speed they were spinning at. The huge machine was evacuating almost a hundred cubic meters of air a second from the tube system, and filling the room with the blowy, gusty tumult of luke-warm air that had greeted the group. It was obvious that any contact with the workings of the machine would be at the very least dangerous, and more probably completely fatal.

A handful of more discreet, orderly tubes stretched away from the sorter, and appeared to be separated into carrying different species to their various insertion points. In the distance, rails of almost-complete robots of all kinds were being propelled past the sorting chamber, in one side and out the other, while a host of busy mechanical arms, suckers, and weird laser dealies methodically worked in the distance, picking up bubbles, adjusting them, shrinking them, opening the robots, inserting the bubbles, connecting various nodules to the surface of each bubble, closing the robots, and sealing the hatches with some kind of gel before the robots were shuttled out the other side of the chamber.

Station after station stretched away into the distance, as lines of robots of all sorts were slowly brought through and connected to their power supply.

Coop trudged to a stop at the lip of the drop. He stared out down the length of the long chamber in front of them, and blew out through his cheeks. He shook his head and rubbed his face. He closed his eyes, he opened them again. He looked at the hundreds of little animals as they were shunted, lifted, fitted and clamped into the countless lines of robots, in the assembly line chamber which stretched away until it actually became a little foggy.

“This is ridiculous,” he said, “the man is insane. I guess we all knew that, though.”

He kicked off the ledge and glided down to the flat, featureless floor below—squaring up to the gigantic pump station as he did so.

As Midian had suspected, there were many things that had happened behind the scenes there. Thoughts of the revealing exposition in the tunnel melted away by the time they reached the utterly immense room with its enormous tangle of tubes and... everything.

Midian stopped there beside Coop and promptly looked like the mouse who had purposed himself to eat an elephant. The elephant was on a platter, served and ready. Great! Now what?

"... How do we even..."

“I bet there is if you want to get shocked so hard that you can’t feel your legs for a month,” grumbled Coop.

He stalked toward the immense machine, staring at it balefully. The input tubes to the machine spilled out of the end nearest to the ground like an eldritch, cthulian beard of clear glass and elbow-joints.

He looked around. His eyes settled on the nearest tube. He lifted one arm and with a cursory swat, shattered it. Glass and small birds spilled across the floor. Some of their containing bubbles popped, others drifted slowly across the metal surface with a sticky static glide. Coop dispersed the bubbles, sweeping his arms at the birds like a nanny shooing small children.

“Get out of here you freakin’ little... it’s dangerous,” he said, sending them peeping and scattering towards the high up and out-of-reach service exit. They fluttered away, dizzily, gaining height in little circles.

“Right,” said the eagle titan, "time to wreck some stuff.”

Coop was approaching another tube, prepared to break it open, when an immense grinding noise shuddered out of the frame of the machine.

He lurched away from the pipe as if he’d been shot. A grating klaxon siren revved up somewhere in the ceiling with the penetrating, ear-bleeding scream that only two plates of metal being smashed together three-hundred times a second could make.

AWOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

The turbines powering the vacuum ground to a halt, and then, with an angry hum and a power draw that made the lights in the facility flicker, began turning the other way. Hundreds of small forest creatures were evacuated back through the pneumatic system, up to the surface.

OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

With a lurch, all the glass tubes around the body of the sorting station disconnected. Ceramic collars that connected the tubes to the larger station spun out, forcing the dangling pneumatic pipes away from the body, where they bounced and wobbled, dangerously unsupported.

OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

Gusts of vapour were expelled from cracks in the floor surrounding the sorting station, and a penetrating hydraulic whine filled the air. The entire sorting station began to lift.

OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

As it lifted higher and higher above the surface of the chamber it was in, the floor around it began to recede, tile after tile dropping down and pulling away from the center, where the sorting station lifted, and turned, and revealed a gigantic, bland, staring robotic face.

Huge compound eyes—webbed and bristling photoelectric sensors covered in a bubble of plexiglass each, tuuurrrrned to observe the group. The gigantic, barely-expressive brow of fused metal sheets, and the short, mouthless jaw gave the robot a bemused, concerned look as it regarded them.

OOOOOOOGAAaaaaaaaa....

The noise of the klaxon died away.

A gigantic metal doughnut covered in jointed, pivoting nozzles rose from the pit—sliding up the torso-neck of the robotic abomination until it settled over the once-assumed-to-be-mechanical sorting station head. The metal torus sealed off all of the intake and output tubes, apparently funnelling all air through the regularly placed nozzles that covered the surface of the thing.

In the distance, the robotic arms stopped their task of assembling robots and began ripping them apart with cannibalistic fury, seizing and tossing robot parts indiscriminately down their supply lines, which...

had begun to flow backwards.

Several gigantic connector pipes had risen out of the bit, and were now swallowing every chunk of metal the disassembly line was throwing their way.

The deep thrumming that the gigantic robot had made rose to a fever pitch.


Coop failed to be happy about any of this.

If Tabitha was still in the same spot by the time Ace shouted his warning, she wouldn't be much longer. Midian heave-shoved her with all the urgency of a Black Friday shopper and took off running, lips pulled back, teeth gritted, and shoes pounding the floor.

He wasn't sure where he was running to or what was about to happen. All he knew was that it if he had to be a target, he wanted to be the jittery crack-duck, not a still-sitting dead duck.

As Ace predicted, and as anyone unwise enough to just stand there like a lump on a log, the proverbial bad stuff was in fact in transit. The toroidal ring around the gigantic mechanization whirred and rotated just so, the nozzles adjusted their elevation in slight degrees, and...

P'CHOO-P'CHOO-P'CHOO-P'CHOO-P'CHOO-P'CHOO-P'CHOO-P'CHOO

Metal. Everywhere. Chunks of partially-built robot, as well as some jagged, torn-apart shreds, erupted from each nozzle in a spew like langrage out of an age-of-sail naval cannon, but rapid-fire, high-velocity, and literally going everywhere. Hanging tubes shattered, adding falling glass to the mixture, as the robot's ring rotated and p'choo'd its way around, firing a continuous, destructive barrage in directions that, at first glance, may have seemed random, but were in fact targeted. It was only the unpredictability of the individual, scattering shot projectiles that made it seem unintentional, when actually, each target was being tracked and pursued with his or her own lovely barrage.

After a few rounds of this, it would have to pause to build up another round of artillery in its makeshift magazine of junk. The flow of scrap-part ammo could only come so fast, after all, but in another fifteen seconds, it'd be the same thing all over again.

In the gap between volleys, though, there came yet more trouble! The group would surely recall the harvester robots from before when they saw an entire squad of them rise up out of the now-exposed ports at the big, cylindrical boss-robot's base, ready to chase down and nab anyone who succumbed to the assault.

The first casualty to the cyclone of robot parts was Geoff. A heavy steel ring that might have once been the collar for a ball bearing joint caught the hedgehog broad-side on the arm. Cloaked as the hedgehog was in a heavy shroud of crystals, the sub-sonic discus didn’t do any intense physical damage, but the force of the blow spun the hedgehog around on his axis, sending him straight to the ground in a splash of broken crystal shards.

Stunned, the hedgehog lay there and stared dizzily at the ceiling, which swam distantly overhead.

As he fought to regain his bearings, the barrel-shaped collector robots noticed his stillness, and began to close in on his prone form.