"Alright, Lynn, that should do it," said Wade as he stepped back from the truck and pressed the noisy cricket once again.

Almost at the same instant, the truck began to shift, panels and components realigning and distorting until a humanoid shape began to emerge, pushing itself up on its hands and taking to its feet.

Rufus looked down at Lynn with a mixture of sadness and pride in his eyes for a moment.

"Okay buddy, how's it feel?"

"Everything seems to be working, Wade, though thinking is like being trapped in an old version of Windows."

"We'll do what we can to clean up the interface. In theory, it should be almost completely instinctive once we're finished. Lynn, why don't you head off, this won't be particularly interesting; I'm just going to have Rufus go through all of his systems to make sure he knows how to control them all.

"Okay, Wade!" she replied cheerfully; much more cheerfully than he expected in fact, and skipped out of the maintenance bay.

"Now, she'd usually want to stand behind me and ask me complicated questions the whole time. That is odd," Wade muttered to himself, scratching his head slowly.

"I explained that you'd have to go through everything with a fine tooth comb. She understands most of the processes involved here so it was a fairly simple thing," Rufus filled in from behind him.

"That's okay, I guess," Wade said before turning back around, "Whoa, Rufus, what the hell did you do?"

"You like it?" the giant robot asked happily. Wade was stunned; how had an animal mind, albeit a smart one, figured out how to use the servo balance system to alter the shape of the robot body into something rather…other than humanoid? Wade kept staring as the bulky, rat-like body stood itself up and stretched into a more human shape.

"Rufus, that's a very complicated piece of machinery, how the hell did you do that?" Wade demanded as he gathered up his fallen jaw.

"How the hell did I get opposable thumbs as a rodent? I guess it's one of life's little mysteries."

"Riiiight."


"Did I do good?" Lynn asked in a concerned voice as she played with the heavy metal doll that she cradled in her arms.

"You did great, honey. Now, all we have to do is get the supplies I need and I'll be able to do the job I was given by the master."

"Master?"

"Ron, silly. I'm his friend and more or less his servant, voluntarily though. The last thing he told me to do was to look after you and Yoshi. I'm going to do that if it kills me."

Lynn looked at him quizzically.

"Okay, fine, the last thing he actually said to me was along the lines of, "Rufus watch out for that rack!" but this sounds much more heroic."

Lynn watched as the little robot kept working; chatting and joking with him for several hours until she got hungry and wandered off. It was nearly three days before she remembered that the little robot was still in the lab.

"Rooooofus!" she called out happily as she wandered into the lab, looking around to try to spot the robot before he found her.

Rufus was nowhere to be found. She looked high, she looked low and still she couldn't find him. Just as she was beginning to get disheartened, seemingly alone in the steel room, she heard a noise from the door. She wheeled around just in time to see Wade coming into the room.

"What're you doing in here all alone?" he asked in his baritone voice, smiling slightly as she shot across the room and slammed into his leg.

"I was looking for something I left here," she replied, not realising that she was using one of the dissembling techniques that Steve had been training into her.

"What was it? Maybe I can help you find it," Wade said, smiling.

"I don't think it's here," she replied, again truthfully.

"Okay then. Just ask before you come in here again, okay? There are some dangerous things in here."

"Okay Wade," she chorused as she disappeared out of the room like a red blur.

"Crazy kids," Wade rumbled, then remembered why he was there, "I wonder what happened to that interface unit…"


Damien was working away happily at his desk when Lynn wandered into the information suite. He didn't look up, mostly because he has interested in the book but also because he wasn't sure he wanted to encourage her to bother him.

"Damien," she said sweetly, extending her vowels to make the situation seem cuter.

Damien sighed and looked up from the crazed mess that covered the research desk.

"What is it, Lynn?" he asked with a tired sound to his voice.

"What'cha doin?" she asked in that insanely annoying way of six year olds.

"I'm trying to work out how we can alter time without it coming back to bite us."

"Wouldn't it come forward to bite you?"

Damien paused at this. He was going to reply but there was an undeniable logic to her response. He smiled.

"I guess it would. Your father seems to think that it can be done but I can't see how."

"Wouldn't it have always been like that?" Lynn asked, picking up a picture of a mid-west girl from the 1960s.

"To normal people, but not to Ron or Wade or me. We don't really fit the normal moulds of reality."

"Have you seen Rufus?" she asked him without missing a beat but shifting onto a completely different rail in the same moment.

"He's still in the hanger isn't he? I didn't think he could actually get out of there; too big for the corridors."

"No then," she pulled a face and wandered off.

Damien shrugged to himself, assuming that she'd named one of the drones or something. He went back to his reading without a further worry, managing to send himself off on completely the wrong set of assumptions.

For a brief moment, Damien paused. In films, sensitive characters feel disturbances, which is probably just a way of saying someone walked over your grave; someone nudged a toe onto his for the briefest of moments. With a slight shudder, he brushed it off and went back to what he was doing.


Rufus was seriously concerned by this point. There was an anomaly in the base's security. Little more than the motes of dust that the computer core had ridden it off as but there was something more to it, a linearity to these anomalies they would appear in certain places at certain times and the only pattern he could discern is that they occasionally returned to one of the service areas where the monitoring is thinnest. Stalking through the narrow vents like they were a habitrail, he extended the custom sensors he had devised and rested his head low.

The tremors were almost invisible over the conventional movements of the ventilation but his whiskers began to map out a continuous pattern to those. Like a visualisation from a music track, a field of flat, fluid vibration spread out before him with a huge number of tiny peaks and complicated ripples like a pond in the rain.

He felt for the undercurrents and mentally screened out the background matter. One moment, two, he waited and waited and then; the faintest pulse, but directional and traceable. He smiled and set off down the tunnel, placing his feet precisely within the wave forms of other vibrations, making him utterly silent.

Lets see you avoid me now, ghost, he thought with a determined smile.


How do they manage like this? Surely they should have been found and rooted out years ago? wondered the infiltrator as she skulked in the ventilation system. The child was precisely where the master had predicted and she was mostly unshielded, only accompanied by a small handful of little pink rodents at any given time. They were insignificant though. The girl fairly radiated power but it was unfocused. Why the master wasn't planning to use her for something was beyond comprehension.

For a moment she thought she heard something. Shifting silently and slowly, she turned to look the other way up the vent shaft but there was nothing there. Strange, her senses never played tricks on her. Returning to watching the girl, she realised that she had lost her again. How did the brat get around so swiftly?

Despite being honed to the very edge of perfection, she still failed to notice the strange, spidery metal object wedged into one of the fan apertures in above her. Slowly, it lowered itself to the base of the vent after she passed and unfolded to its full size. Rather than a spider as first impressions went, it had only four limbs and they weren't linked to a central mass, rather spread along like mammalian limbs. As its head finally unfolded to its proper position, the two photoreceptors rotated out from their normative position and focused for binocular vision. It regarded the path of the disappeared infiltrator for a moment, them a sextet of fine glass fibre cables unfolded forwards from the sides of its head.

I'm sure I know that ass from somewhere, thought Rufus in a mildly annoyed inner monologue before setting off after her.


Author's Note: Yes, I am aware how annoyingly short this chapter is but needlessly elongating it will not make it more enjoyable.