We ran down Sabre St. and hung a left at Oodles of Noodles. It was hard keeping up with the girl from my class as she ran pretty quickly for someone who worked on machines. She didn’t appear out of breath or slowed down at some of the corners, like she’s run this way hundreds of times. She led me down streets and side streets as we slowly left the inner portion of Hitomi and headed for the outskirts. People probably looked at us like we were crazy, but we paid them no mind.

We ran down a few paths and sidewalks I didn’t recognize all too well. Various shops and apartments were gathered along the sidewalks. Convenient stores and dollar stores seemed to be the most common, having one every few blocks. None of the faces looked familiar, but it was a section of the city I’ve never been to in my three years of living here, so I wouldn’t know anyone. I felt out of place.

 

Casting it aside, I continued to follow her until the sidewalk eventually branched off to a beaten path with plenty of trees and bushes, almost like a forest. For a second I thought we were going to get lost in it, but that was before I started seeing various cabins and homes lining either side of the dirt. Kids were playing in yards and looked toward us as we raced by, pausing their games of tag, hide n seek and Frisbee. Multiple dogs barked up and down the side of an iron fence outside a worn down cabin. It was mostly Rottweiler’s and pit bulls. I could see the owner glare from behind the glass window, but he just let it slide. I got a feeling from him that he didn’t like kids, animals, or anything else ruffing up his dogs.

 

After taking a few more twists we finally arrived outside what looked like a freshly built, one story home. It wasn’t anything extravagant though, having some porch steps leading to the door, brick siding and a black shingled roof. The door was in the center with one long window to the right and a small window to the left. It was hard to imagine someone taking something like AI would live in a remote location like this, but I was too exhausted to think about it.

 

“This is it,” she says, gesturing toward the house. She looked completely fine, like that run didn’t tire her out all, no sweat anywhere.

 

“How are…you not tired?” I ask between gasps.

 

“Oh, I run this road, like, every day. It is how I get to school on time, after all.”

 

She rolled her eyes like I asked a stupid question, but at least her mood changed. She seemed calmer.

 

“Come on, my sisters inside,” she said, her tone returning back to worry. “But don’t forget to take off your shoes; my parents don’t like it when I attract dirt in.”

 

From the way she said that, it sounded like she ran more than what she let on. She led me up to the door and opened it up. I followed her inside and couldn’t believe what I saw. From the plain outer looking surface, you’d never tell there was this much technology on the inside, looking almost like something out of a sci-fi. Machines lined the house. The shoe rack at the entrance automatically took my shoes the second they were off my feet. The doors, although non-sliding and rather wooden, opened and closed automatically as we approached them, probably pressure sensitive. The living room held a couch that had more buttons than a computer on overdrive. I couldn’t tell if half the buttons worked the TV, the computer that was attached to it, or the lighting for the whole house or even everything within it. Even the walls had panels by the refrigerator, washer and dryer combination, and almost every doorway. The walls were painted a faint yellow with a red trim running along the center all around the house. It had a living room, a kitchen, a bathroom and 2 bed rooms from what I could see.

 

“Serena, you’re home.”

 

A woman about in her mid-thirties came out form the kitchen. She had dark brown hair, bound up in a ponytail and a face that would make many women in their 20’s jealous. She wore an apron and had a wooden spoon in her left hand.

 

“Oh, and who’s this? A friend?”

 

In the few weeks I’ve sat next to this girl, I’ve never gotten her name. I felt quite embarrassed. But I nodded and told her my name.

 

“Oh, you’re Random. Our Serena here tells us all sorts of things about you,” she said wistfully. “Says you’re the smartest in her class, that you help her on occasion.”

 

“Mom, my sister?” Serena cuts in.

 

“Oh, right…”

 

Her face turned grim at mention of her sister. It must have been serious.

 

“She was fine when you left, but before your dad went to work she shut herself away in her room. Anytime I go to check, these little saucer like things shoot electricity at me. It’s harmless, but I can’t get her to eat anything or even talk to me.”

 

“That’s why I brought Random with me. She’s god at things like this, right?” She turned to be with a smile that said, you can do it, right?

 

Technology yes, people however… But after exchanging glances between Serena and her mom, she points toward the bedroom where her sister had shut herself up in. I nodded and began to approach the door, it starting to slowly open from the pressure sensor. When I peered inside, saucers came out from around the crack of the door.

If it’s one thing I’ve learned from Aurora, it’s that I needed something that could disrupt machines, whether for seconds or hours. That’s what the gloves I was wearing were supposed to do. At the push of the button on the back, I could disable most machines that thought independently or were being controlled from a distance. That held true when the saucers approached me then started spinning out of control and fell to the ground. I picked one up and headed inside.

Most of the objects in the room looked like they were modified to reach higher areas from a low point. That’s when it dawned on me that Serena said her sister was short for her age and needed to create machines to allow an ease of access. The chair to the desk looked like it raised and lowered automatically. The bed had a height adjuster in front of it. I didn’t know what the dresser did. The room looked the same as the house, only it was darker from the closed curtains.

 

“Hello?” I whispered as I scrutinized the room for any trace of Serena’s sister.

 

For the most part, I didn’t see anyone, but the room was larger than what I took it granted for as I walked further in. Because of the way it was designed, the room looked like a simple 10 x 12 bedroom. But it soon began wrapping around in an almost full 360, like an incomplete oval. I began seeing even more inventions, either taken apart or put together, along the walkway. Gears, wires, panels, and various tools were everywhere. I also noticed sketches on the walls and floor, some crumbled and others torn. With how much there was, you could build almost anything from all the parts I saw in here. Whoever this girl was, she had a lot of time on her hands.

 

“So, you’ve managed to disable my saucers?” a small, depressed, almost robotic voice calls from a dark corner.

 

Before I had time to react I felt an electromagnetic wave pass over me, disabling my gloves.

 

“That should stop you from shutting down my saucers.”

 

She stood up and I finally noticed where she was sitting. Serena wasn’t lying about her height. If they were about the same age, she was definitely short. She looked about 4 feet and had brown hair like her mother. Only it wrapped around her head almost like a rain coat, leaving just her face uncovered. She was wearing what I guessed to be a white dress, but had jeans on underneath. She was petite and had a face that looked like it frowned more than anything with dark grey eyes that matched the pain I saw on her face.

 

“No one understands me but my machines,” she continued. “Leave me alone.”

 

She waved her hand and I didn’t have much time to react before more saucers came after me. It looked like she turned the “safety” off on these though. As they were spinning they were letting loose electricity. I guess she really didn’t want company, family member or foe. But I didn’t let them intimidate me and remembered I had an auto homing laser pen on me. It was activated by the user’s body temperature, the warmer the better.  One by one they went down, swerving out of the way only to have the shot do a 180 and take them down.

 

“Not bad,” she said then took out a small device of her own.

 

After pushing a few buttons, shackles gripped my feet and pinned me where I stood. More extended rapidly from the walls, ready to shackle my arms no doubt. I dropped the saucer I had picked up and it rolled toward her. Ignoring it I pulled out my minipad and took off the small metal disks on the back. They looked innocent enough, but when I tossed them toward each shackle it sent jolts of electricity through them, disabling each one. She didn't seem to mind much as she slow stood up and began to walk toward the dropped saucer that rolled near her and picked it up, examining it, almost like she was trying to figure out how I disabled it.

 

“So disabling inventions isn’t your only strength? You’ve got other tricks that bypass my electromagnetic wave.” She pushed a few more buttons on her device and Nano mites started crawling out of the floor behind her.“But let’s see how you get out of this.”

 

With my feet still shackled and me unable to move, Nano mites started crawling toward me, what appeared to be thousands of them. I guess she gave up trying to trap my hands. Nano mites weren’t something you’d see every day. I had to think fast before they got to me and started doing whatever she had them designed to do. Pushing a few buttons on my minipad, I managed to cause a blast of blue mist to spread across the floor. I designed the blue mist to get into the Nano mites programming and cause them to go haywire, often shutting down or targeting one another.

 

“I don’t want to fight you,” I tell her, although I could tell she wouldn’t let up so easily.

 

“You don’t understand, no one understands…”

 

She began mumbling to herself, saying how she was cursed with the gift of inventing, cursed that she couldn’t grow taller than 4 feet. How she’s been starting to feel lonelier and lonelier all these years, her machines quickly becoming the only thing to really confide in that understood her.

It was painful listening to her as it was the same for me, minus the height. I felt like an outcast when I first got here, having only Tipsy to rely on. Everyone saw my inventions as weird or strange. They found me weird and strange. But it was Cocoa who started showing them I wasn’t what they thought. It was she who helped me get through it all. She was the first friend I ever made here that wasn’t a machine. Then I understood; she’s just like me.

 

“No one understands!” she said once more, shouting this time, and tears began dripping down her cheeks.

 

“I understand,” I tell her, in a more gentle voice.

 

“You can’t understand, only my machines do.”

 

Tears continued to trickle down her cheeks and onto the carpet, causing a few of the incomplete machines around her to sputter. She must have had so much pain hidden inside her. I tried to think of a way to cheer her up. There had to be some way I could show her that I understood, that she wasn’t alone. Then it hit me and I took off my gloves.

 

“You’re not alone,” I tell her again, holding up my bandaged hand.

 

She stopped sobbing long enough to look at my hands, which were still bandaged from Tipsy.

 

“So your hand is bandaged, what does that have to do with me?” she asks, still sobbing.

 

“I’m the same as you,” I tell her and begin explaining of my first year here. How no one trusted me or listened to what I had to say. How they thought I was a freak that should be erased. How I got more comfort from building machines than anything else. But she continued sobbing.

 

“Y-You don’t understand…” she said again, only more frightened and began to back away, like finding someone similar to her was a lost hope.

 

 She dropped the device she was holding and as she did, the shackles around my feet retracted into the floor. I tried to slowly approach her, but a laser guided turret system began to extend and point toward me from the wall, red dots lighting up my entire body.

 

“Listen,” I told her, being cautious of the turrets. “I know what it’s like. Machines were my only confinement to but they don’t have to be.”

 

She looked up at me, confusion on her face and in her eyes.

 

“A very good friend of mine showed me this when I first moved here. These bandages are from the dreams I have, or more so nightmares…” my voice began to trail off. “But I’ve gotten better over the years, and I can show you there’s more than what you think there is. That there are those who will understand you. If you let me, I’ll be your friend and show you.”

 

At the sound of “friend” I thought I saw a faint glimpse of hope in her eyes, like a spark in a machine you thought had failed. Then she spoke up and said in the same voice, “Security Turret system: deactivate.”

 

The turrets shut down and retracted back into the walls and she raised her hand toward me. I took it and together we returned to the living room.