Vell Harlan and the Doomsday Dorms

Kim put another piece into the puzzle, and assembled a complete doughnut. Only about thirty more of those to go until she was done. Ten-thousand piece puzzles were a good way to kill time at night, along with streaming an entire TV series and doing some homework all within the confines of her own head. Being sleepless meant coming up with a lot of ways to pass time.

As part of her time-killing methods, Kim had also stopped tracking time in her head. It came as a relief when the first text messages from Hawke started pinging in her head, confirming that the humans were waking up and starting to go about their days. She set aside the puzzles pieces and joined the other loopers for breakfast. Or at breakfast, at least. She sat back and watched while the rest of them ate. She had no need for food either.

“So, Kim, how’s that giant puzzle treating you?” Hawke said between bites. He and Vell were the only ones who consistently remembered she didn’t eat, and so they made sure to keep the conversation going, to give her something to do while everyone else ate.

“I think I’m already about a fifth or so done,” Kim said. “I try to turn off the analysis part of my brain when I do them, otherwise I end up scanning every piece and autosorting them. Kind of kills the point if you can do them in thirty minutes.”

“You’re still going pretty fast,” Vell said.

“Well, it was eight hours of doing nothing else. And it was mostly the edge pieces.”

“Oh, yeah, edge pieces,” Hawke said. “That’ll do it.”

“The puzzle should last me a while,” Kim said. “I’ll have to send your mom a thank you card or something.”

“You could always thank her in person,” Hawke said.

“Maybe next summer,” Kim said. “I want to spend this one trying to clear out all the basements on campus. If we’re going to be in charge of this shit next year, I want to try and eliminate as much nonsense as possible.”

“You realize even if you clear out all the basement nonsense, you’re just going to get different nonsense,” Vell said. “It’ll just be classmate nonsense, or alien invasion nonsense, or- portal just opened in the quad nonsense.”

“Yeah, but- that last one wasn’t an example, was it?”

“Nope, eyes up,” Vell said. He abandoned his breakfast and led the way towards a spiraling flurry of energy in the center of the quad. It was small now, but getting bigger every second. Vell stopped about twenty feet away and watched the dinner-plate sized portal expand to about the size of a car tire.

“Oh, why’s it getting bigger,” Hawke whined. “Small portals mean small things.”

“Small things can be worse,” Alex said. “You remember those little shrimp aliens that-”

“Don’t remind me,” Hawke snapped.

“Sorry.”

“Alex, how are you feeling on magic?” Vell asked. “Any way to tell where this portal comes from?”

“Only one way to find out,” Alex said. She braced herself for backlash as she called up mismatched sparks of green-gray magic. Her unstable spellcasting held together long enough to perform one basic analysis spell, which turned out to be enough. “Whatever this is, it isn’t magic.”

“Well, that leaves science,” Vell said.

“I’m on it,” Kim said. She stepped up and aimed her scanners at the portal. The other loopers got to stand back and watch as her face screen turned bright white, and Kim fell over.

For about one-eighteenth of a second, her systems had connected to the other side of the portal, and other side of the portal was noise. Not in the literal sense, though there was plenty of actual sound too. It was data noise: a relentless torrent of information flowing in every direction, buzzing through space in volumes greater than Kim had ever seen. She had access to the entire internet in her brain, a direct connection every bit and byte humanity had ever encoded, and in that one-eighteenth of a second she was on the receiving end of a thousand times more data than all of humanity had created in its entire existence.

“Kim!”

“What? Hello? Yes, Kim. Me,” Kim stuttered. Her face screen flickered for a second before flashing an OK Hand emoji. She had to manually go through and recalibrate some of her systems to talk normally again. “That was weird. Got a data overload when I tried to scan the portal.”

“Data? The portal’s a computer?”

“No, more like there’s a computer on the other side of it. Probably,” Kim said. “It’s pretty clearly a programming language of some kind, but not like anything we know.”

“So, what’s that mean, is there like, another robot on the other side of this?”

“Or robots, plural,” Hawke said. “Wouldn’t be our first robot army.”

“And it won’t be the last,” Vell said. “Portal’s changing, assume we’ve got incoming!”

The portal was starting to change from a dull gray to a bright white, and Vell assumed that meant something bad was coming. He assumed correctly.

Six spider-like metal legs extended through the portal before embedding themselves in the soil, followed by a dozen more, and then even more legs, until Vell had completely lost count. Each of the spindly legs extended from a multi-sided polyhedron of a body, with legs extending from every vertex and glowing white lenses on every side. Once fully through the portal, the strange machine turned from side to side, aiming its myriad eyes at different parts of the environment.

“Oh, hey, big guy,” Samson said. “Are you the nice kind of robot or the vaporizing kind of robot?”

The robot immediately vaporized Samson.

“Oh, not the nice kind of robot,” Kim said. “Neither am I!”

She jumped up, dove through the tangle of spindly limbs, and latched onto a joint on the invasive drone’s polyhedral body. She stared into one of the glowing white eyes for a second before driving a fist through it and ripping out whatever components she could get her hands on. Wiring and circuitry came loose in her grip, and sparks started to shoot out of the empty eye socket.

“Kim and I will handle the robot,” Vell shouted. “You two focus on closing the portal!”

Without a word spoken by either, Hawke and Alex came to the unanimous agreement to do so as far away as possible from the vaporizing robot. Vell drew his guns and started dodging between vaporizing beams and stabbing legs as he shot out the optics of his enemy one by one.

“Kim! You holding up?” Vell shouted. “No more data overloads?”

“No, I’m good,” Kim shouted back. “I’m still getting that weird data flow, but quieter.”

The torrent of alien data was still flowing, albeit to a much more manageable extent. Kim was still trying to figure out the odd flow of information. While still hyper-efficient, it had a number of repetitions and redundancies that made no sense for a code, and even less sense given how rapid fire everything else was. It made no sense for a programming language, only as a-

Kim froze in place, and looked directly into one of the eye’s of the machine. It stared right back, with unnerving clarity.

Then it vaporized her.

Kim appeared in her chair, at 12:01 AM, like she always did. The other loopers got snapped back to when they woke up, but Kim never slept. Every death just booted her right back to the minute after midnight, right in the middle of whatever she’d been doing at the time -in this case, working on a puzzle. She already had a few of the edge pieces aligned.

None of the other pieces moved. Kim stared at them for six hours straight, until the other loopers started waking up. She wandered to their lair and met took her seat at the table, sitting on the sidelines while they talked battle strategy and portal closing. Hawke was the first one to look over and notice how little Kim had moved.

“Kim, are you feeling okay?”

“I’m fine,” Kim insisted.

“You’ve just been a little off since you got hit with that data overload,” Hawke said. “Are you sure you didn’t get, like, a virus, or a hacking attempt, or something?”

“I’m sure. It was- It was just data. I’m just trying to decode it, you know, it takes a lot of focus. I’m basically trying to learn a new language here.”

“If it takes that much concentration, could you maybe save it for after the fight?” Alex said. She paused briefly and then remembered her manners. “Please?”

“I’ll focus, we’ve got time,” Kim said.

Alex still had questions, but repressed them for the sake of her ongoing objective of “Don’t be an asshole”. Kim had flaming metal fists and a supercomputer brain, if anyone could balance thinking and fighting, it was her.

“Kim will do her part,” Vell said. “We need to focus on ours. Alex, you should probably start getting your ritual circle ready.”

Though the portal was not magical, it could still be closed by magic. Alex’s spellcasting was still a bit iffy, but they had no way to recruit more help on such short notice under such strange circumstances. Most of the campus hadn’t even gotten out of bed yet. Since she was the only spellcaster available, Alex started setting up a ritual circle, among other preparations that would make the process easier on her. While she drew a sigil on the ground and Hawke started setting up a forcefield projector, Vell stood shoulder to shoulder with Kim.

“You need anything?”

“I’m fine, Vell,” Kim said. “Seriously.”

“Okay. Let me know if that changes,” Vell said.

“Yeah, will do.”

Vell gave her a quick pat on the back and then joined in the prep work, getting some runes ready to help counteract the portal’s formation. Kim stayed back and clenched her fists, keeping her body motionless as her mind raced. She had a theory. Just a theory, for now, and it was impossible to take it any further without more information. The kind of information she could only get when the portal opened.

Sometimes Kim really wished she had breath. She might’ve liked to hold it right now. She settled for staying frozen in place until the first sparks of the portal sprang to life.

Even with forcefields, spells, and runes buzzing around the portal, trying to close it before any dangerous robots could come through, Kim managed to reach out and scan the overwhelming flow of data on the other side. She braced herself and this time, she focused on isolating snippets of the flow, small chunks, just big enough to give her useful information without letting herself get overwhelmed. She focused on the repetitions and redundancies, the things that made it a terrible programming language.

Because it wasn’t programming language. Just language. Whatever was on the other side of that portal wasn’t just exchanging data, sending signals back and forth. They were talking.

“Portal...close it...there...soon…”

Kim focused harder. She had not been lying about how much focus it took to learn an entire language, especially one as elaborate as this. It had no earthly comparison, and was orders of magnitude more complex than any human language.

“Not allowed...send more…”

While Kim was giving herself a headache trying to learn a new language in seconds, the other loopers were dealing with the more literal headache of closing the portal. Vell exhausted his supply of runes and looked to his teammates, specifically Alex.

“How’s closing it coming?”

“It’s, uh, smaller,” Alex said. “I made it smaller.”

“We need a little better than smaller, Alex,” Samson said.

“I don’t see you contributing anything,” Alex snapped.

“I helped with the forcefield!”

“Okay, sorry, you’re contributing, and so am I, good teamwork,” Alex said, through gritted teeth. Operation “Don’t Be An Asshole” was proving really hard to pull off.

“Going through...time...choose…”

A single spindly leg thrust itself through the portal, and nearly impaled Hawke as it did so. Alex let out a small yelp of surprise, and her control over the portal wavered, making it grow slightly larger. On the sidelines of the sudden panic, Kim put her hands on her head and focused.

“I...go…signals...other side...you know…”

“Against...rules…”

A second and third leg extended through the portal and planted themselves in the dirt. They struggled with their tenuous hold on the soil, trying to pull the rest of the body through, but Alex was keeping the portal small enough to bar entry.

“Kim! A little help?”

Kim almost jumped in to help her friends, but one final stream of data caught her attention.

“Don’t...rules...have to help her.”

Kim froze in place.

Her.

“Hold on,” Alex said. “I might be able to close it. Just give me one second.”

She didn’t get a second. She got Kim’s arms around her waist. With one gentle heft, Kim tossed Alex aside into the dirt. It wasn’t hard enough to hurt, but it was hard enough to disrupt her spellcasting. The tenuous magic that had been holding the portal closed faltered, and the portal surged open enough for even more legs to pull through.

“Kim?”

Without responding, Kim turned and smashed her heel down on a rune sequence Vell had left in the ground, shattering it and rendering the magic inert.

“Kim,” Samson shouted. “What the fuck?”

“She’s gone rogue,” Alex said. “She’s been -hacked. Or possessed. By outside forces. Not her fault.”

“Nice recovery,” Vell said. “Kim! What’s going on?”

The invading robot pulled itself fully through the portal, and Kim just stared at it with a blank face. The other loopers started to back up and take cover. Behind Vell, specifically. Hawke and Alex picked a shoulder each and tried to cower behind Vell’s slender frame.

“Vell…”

“I’m sure she has a good reason-”

The portal widened even further, and deployed three entire new robots. One looked like a floating tank with a semi-humanoid torso in place of the turret, complete with massive crushing arms. The second was more of a swarm of drones than a single cohesive robot, through the way the drones clustered together made it clear they functioned as one unit. The third and final robot had a long, serpentine body, culminated in a flat head with six eyes embedded on either side of a cobra-like hood, and four grasping arms extending from the upper portion of the snake body. The three newly arrived robots briefly stopped and stared at their comrade.

“Okay,” Vell said. “We might have a slight-”

The snakelike robot cocked two of it’s four arms and punched the polyhedral drone in two of its eyes.

“Oh, no, never mind,” Vell said, as the hovering tank-bot surged forward and slammed into the spidery robot. “Those are good guy robots. We’re good.”

The swarm of drones joined the assault, shooting out the eyes of the polyhedral spider in a flurry of blaster fire. With one side completely blinded, Kim dove in from the other, latching on to the invader and punching out eyes. The snakelike robot coiled around multiple legs to keep the invader immobilized, while the tank robot hovered above, intercepting any vaporizing blasts from the spider with a powerful forcefield. Hawke watched in awe as the flying behemoth absorbed one of the same blasts that had vaporized him last loop.

“Why do I feel like I’m watching one of Freddy’s anime all of a sudden?”

While superficially similar, Freddy’s preferred mecha anime emphasized stylish combat, but Kim and her new robot friends were focused on efficiency. After a short and brutal barrage of attacks on the spider, Kim jumped off its core, and the snake bot slithered away from the spindly legs. Then they dove in from either side in a devastating pincer, knocking the polyhedral spider to the ground. As soon as it hit the dirt, the snake robot coiled itself around the core and crushed, constricting the spider until the aggressive machine stopped moving.

The swarm of drones swooped in, individual units latching on to the dozens of limbs, and dragged the spidery invader back through the portal. As the intruder and the drones vanished, Kim and the two remaining robots froze. They didn’t move, or speak. They just stopped in their tracks for a few seconds, until the loopers on the sidelines mustered their courage to speak.

“Uh, Kim?”

“Oh, right, shit,” Kim said, suddenly snapping back into motion as if she’d broken out of a trance. “Talking out loud, I almost forget.”

Kim gestured to the hovering tank and the snake robot, who similarly unfroze and turned their attention to the loopers.

“These guys taught me their language, it’s entirely data encoding, no audible elements,” Kim said. “Very efficient.”

“Right,” Vell said. “And who are ‘they’?”

“They’re- they are-”

Having been force fed an entirely new language in the past few seconds, Kim struggled to come up with a way to describe them in her native tongue. She settled on the shortest, and simplest, possible description.

“They’re like me.”