Today is my big sister's birthday, so this is dedicated to her! Happy B-day!
Sound and light bounced off the walls, turning from the nasal screaming of the alarm to the clanging of metal on metal as if erupted through the satellite. Electric charges shot through the shiny walls and up a long extension corded, waking Larry. Silvery bed sheets flew up as Otto leapt from the warmth of his bed and began dressing in his usual blue. Tuddrussel hit the ground behind Otto with such precision that the child didn't realized he had fallen out of bed.
Within five minutes of the alarms' first wail, all three were in the control room. The red light flashes over the screens and the noise kept up, deafening and blinding both humans in their sleepiness. Larry calculated the binary on the screen, and entered the access code it asked for. As he sent the code into the main computer, there was a pause in the noise. Then it stopped all together, and the light ceased its shining. More binary flashed across the screen, and Larry typed sent in another code to the main computer.
There was a pause as the computer gathered its data and set up the display.
Larry's vision circuits must have been malfunctioning.
The screen read;
'KNULL SPACE: 5,789,035th parsec, Western Spiral Arm of Milky Way
EARTH DATE: SEPTEMBER 27, 5,789,035 A.D.
KNULL DATE: JA-HA 67, 7,89,0078 K.L.
KNULL-PA STATION AT COORDINATES 345 LAT. BY 176 LON.
KEY PERSONS: ROBOT LAWRENCE 3000 MODEL NO. 27R9980-70, KNULL AMBASSADOR TO U.P. WHA-LA KIN RETU'
Underneath the text were images of Larry's own blueprints and an etching of a hunched creature with the head of an alligator and a long beard.
Larry felt his circuits fire off and his hands twitched.
Otto looked at the screen, but before he could read the text the etching distracted him. It was a strange creature, with three claws where a human would have hands, and beady eyes below a mass of unruly hair. It looked like a long cape or cloth of some kind had been draped around the thing, as if that were to substitute normal clothing.
Otto found himself tracing the edges of the picture with his finger, although he did not point it at the screen. He wondered for a moment if he had done this with a picture book when he had been with his biological parents.
It was Tuddrussel was the first to speak.
"Lawrence, what in the heck did you do?" Every word pierced into Larry, and for a moment he swore he felt pain. But with no nerves under his casing, he couldn't know what he felt.
Now Otto read the screen's text. His mind stopped and he reread it. And then again.
"Wha—Larr-y?" the little human couldn't help squeaking as he spoke.
The robot sat there for a minute, not answering questions because he had temporarily shut down.
He slumped in his chair, then blotted up and read the screen.
"Larry, what'cho do?!" Tuddrussel asked again.
"Nothing! Just what I was supposed to do! I negotiated peace between the Knull people and the United Planets!" Larry finished this thought, then began to calculate just whose fault this was. He came to a logical conclusion in a moment. "I know what it is, it's the Time Guards."
"Time Guards?" Otto had a sick feeling in the pit of his stomach.
"Yes Otto, remember when I told you how it is that we have to right history?"
"Yeah, you send it was like a rope coming up done," Otto put his little hands up to mimic the hologram Larry had showed him.
"Well, Time Guards are things that keep more recent history from unraveling."
"How do they do that?"
Larry paused for a moment, sifting through all the technological data on how they worked and trying to find a simple explanation.
"They remind people." Tuddrussel scratched the back of his head, this conversation was making him anxious. The whole thing had made the nerves around the tiny chip of hardware under his scalp sense the small electric pluses that reminded his brain. The pluses had him itch.
"Well, let's get this over with." He took Otto by the shoulder, and looked at Larry as if to say, 'Let's not talk about that.' The bigger human lead the boy to the teleportation pads, while Larry sent in an affirmation code to the computer.
Pulling himself up, Larry noticed a squeak coming from the metal joints in his knees. He tried to ignore this, and followed the humans. Standing in a row, all three readied for the awkward hot-cold feeling of time-traveling. In a flash of electricity, energy, light and sound, they were gone.
None of them noticed the small image of a redheaded boy at the very bottom of the screen.
Dun dun dun!