Chapter 4.
Atomu was awoken at 1 AM by an incoming message. The little alert flashed annoyingly in his mind, forcing him to open his eyes with a grimace. Shutup shutup he thought, opening the file.
Ochanomizu wanted him down at the lab.
He immediately grew tense—if they had been up this late checking on that robot's CPU, something was seriously wrong. Calling him in for something as mundane as that meant they were doing it as a last ditch effort. But why?
Atomu quietly unplugged himself and stood up. Danny was still fast asleep in the bed, which his shifting limbs had quickly converted into a tangled mass of sheets. He stole out of the apartment and down the hall, taking the elevator to the bottom. A scientist was waiting for him outside the elevator.
"What's the problem?" he asked, following the briskly striding woman.
"The problem is that there is no problem," she said worriedly, "We found no faults on the CPU whatsoever."
They entered a large, warehouse-like room where the construction bot lay lit by the harsh florescent lighting. It was hooked to circular array of computers, one of which a crowd of scientists had gathered around. They stared at the screen, which displayed line after line of coding.
Ochanomizu looked up from the computer and saw the scientists stepping aside to let the boy through.
"Ah, thank you for coming," he said wearily.
"So you ran it through every program you got?" Atomu said, intently reading the monitor.
"Yeah, and this is our second time going through it manually."
He nodded. "I understand, I'll analyze it."
"God," Ochanomizu muttered, rubbing his eyes, "I can't believe that I'm hoping something is actually wrong with it. If it turns out violent tendencies can erupt from perfectly benign programming, then the public…"
"You look terrible," Atomu insisted, "You need to go get some sleep; I'll take care of it."
"But I have to—" he protested.
"You look like you're about to fall asleep on your feet! All of you, if this isn't your shift, please leave. It'll be fine. Really."
The crowd murmured belligerently but all eventually shuffled out, except for a skinny intern with thick glasses and a floppy eared cap.
"Alejo! You work late shifts now?" Atomu asked, surprised.
"Well… I do as many shifts as I can nowadays-they said they might promote me to the flight technology branch real soon if I clock enough hours," he said excitedly, wrestling a giant bundle of cables.
"What'd they call you in for?"
He put down the cables and trotted over to one of the computers, were he opened a compartment under it. "They wanted me to check the machines here to see if they had bugs," he laughed, "Course now that you're here it doesn't matter. Ah!" he pulled out a USB cord. "Here, use this to connect to the robot." He handed it to Atomu before running out.
"See you around!" Atomu shouted.
"Good night!" came the faded reply.
The room was empty now, except for the low hum of running computers. Atomu heaved a sigh and hopped up onto the steel giant He pulled the plug out of its back and all the machines in the room chimed and sent up windows reading Error:disconnection. He unzipped his jacket and opened his chest, hooking the USB cord between himself and the fallen robot.
"Workaholics, every last one of them," he murmured to himself, before closing his eyes and letting the reams and reams of programming filter through his mind.
Danny woke up, unwillingly, to Uran flashing the light on and off. "What." He grated, squinting against the blinding flashes.
"They asked for us to come down to the lab. Com'n, get up!"
"Stop."
She flipped the light on and ran out. Danny, his head pounding from the glare, slowly dragged his body of the bed. His arms felt like over-cooked noodles, his head was filled with TV static, and his mouth tasted like halitosis. Typical morning. He stood up and stretched his tired back, then looked around, blinking heavily. Atomu was gone. Huh.
He shuffled out and was confronted by Uran. "Get a move on!" she complained, taking his arm and pulling him out of the apartment with a grip like a bear trap. The pale pink light of dawn shone down into the hallway from the skylights, mercifully soft on Danny's eyes.
"Where are we going?" he moaned.
"I told you, the lab!"
"What for?" he muttered, covering his eyes with his free hand as they entered the brightly lit elevator.
"They finished examining the construction robot!"
"Why do we care?"
The elevator door had barely opened before Uran ran out, dragging Danny behind her.
"I can walk on my own, you know."
"You sure don't make a good case for it!" she snapped.
They entered the large room, where people in white lab coats were swarming around the robot. At the center of it all was Atomu, prying open joints along the arm and neck. His eyes emitted flickering beams of bluish white light every time he examined something.
"What on earth is he doing?" Danny asked incredulously.
"It looks like he's scanning it… I thought they were doing something to the CPU!" she dragged Danny over to Ochanomizu. "What's going on? Why is Atomu scanning it?"
"Oh! Hello Uran! …and Danny," he added, looking warily at the disheveled teenager at the end of her arm.
"Don't mind him. I don't think he's awake yet," She said caustically.
"Ah. Well, the CPU had no glitches, so Atomu suggested that a microbug might have been attached at some point and managed to override its normal programming. We're hoping to find it, or at least evidence it was there."
"Oh no…" Uran cried, dropping Danny's arm, "Do you think it's the anti-robot groups again?" Danny, freed from her grasp, snuck over to get a better look at the object of their interest.
The robot was just as huge as he remembered it to be. The fact that Atomu, an ant compared to this giant, had nonetheless effortlessly brought it down was kind of scary.
Suddenly, a familiar cold clutched Danny's chest, and he felt a wisp of vapor escape the corner of his mouth. His eyes widened. What? A ghost? Here?
He looked around wildly for the source. Glancing down, he spotted it… something that looked like a trickle of softly glowing green ooze phasing out of the robot's side. Apparently having a mind of its own, it snaked swiftly to the door, staying low to the ground.
Crap! He ran after it, skidding out into the vacant hallway. It was just ahead of him, writhing through the air. "Get back here you little bastard! You must have possessed that robot!" he yelled, transforming and taking off. It noticed him and started to flee, so he fired ghost rays at the escaping creature. One attack hit, and the ooze gave a guttural screech, contracting a ball and sliding to a stop.
He landed in front of it. It looked weird — there seemed to be smaller blobs suspended in it, like organelles in a cell. I could really use my thermos right now, Danny thought, frustrated, I can't really do anything with it.
Without warning, it shook off the attack and lashed out to engulf his hand. Its grip burned like acid, searing the skin on his fingers.
"Gah!" he yelled, blasting off the slime. It hissed and quickly escaped through the ceiling. "Not so fast," he growled, taking off after it. His hand hurt like hell, but he wasn't letting it get away that easy. They shot sideways through the building, flashing in and out of rooms at a dizzying pace. Danny gritted his teeth-some of the acid must have gone clear through his skin, bright green blood was starting to stain the white knuckles of his glove. They shot silently out the top of the building and into the open air. Danny fired more ghost rays from his uninjured hand, but it dodged around them all and fled to the left.
"Crap, I'm going to be chasing this thing all day!" he muttered angrily, taking off after it.
Then he saw what it was running to— a black tear suspended by nothing, exactly like what he had seen in the Ghost Zone a day before! Realizing that it might vanish at any moment, he panicked and cranked up to full speed. But as soon as the ghost zipped through the crack, they both blinked out of existence, and Danny was left tumbling through the space where they had been moments ago.
He floundered forwards a bit before regaining his balance, took a few seconds to curse incomprehensibly about his luck, then remembered the larger problem. He turned back to the Ministry of Science building.
"I have to warn them…"