Overclocked by K. S. Augustin

ap­plic­a­tions, filled the air.
    He shook his head. “Why?”
    She frowned. “Why send me? To find you, of course.”
    “After all this time?” He shrugged. “Not that it mat­ters. I’ve got work to do here. I can’t leave. Not yet.”
    Tania’s next ques­tion was drowned out by a large thump that shook the build­ing. It soun­ded like a bomb had det­on­ated nearby. She opened her mouth to ask a ques­tion, make a state­ment, but Carl beat her to it.
    “Shit!”
    He yanked at a drawer of the desk closest to him and with­drew an­other weapon that looked sus­pi­ciously like the one he’d shoved in her face. He threw it to Tania and she caught it with both hands. It felt lighter than it looked. To one side, above the trig­ger, a small light blinked green.
    “If any­thing comes through the door, walls, floor or ceil­ing, you blast it,” he said. “I bet it’s your god­damn tether. Gave us away.”
    The feel­ing that she was caught in the middle of a video ar­cade game was in­es­cap­able. An­other vi­bra­tion and dull thud shook the build­ing. Sta­bil­ising her­self, Tania stood with her feet slightly apart and scanned the room, won­der­ing what the hell she was sup­posed to shoot at.
    She was about to ask Carl what the in­truders looked like when the first blood-red sphere came through the wall to her left. There was no doubt about its in­tent. Be­fore it had even cleared the wall, it ori­ented it­self to­wards her and a rifle sprouted from its smooth shell. As the skin of the house ripped to let it through, Tania sighted down her weapon and pulled the trig­ger. She was ex­pect­ing noise and a sense of re­coil but there was neither. All she saw was a dot­ted line of blue shoot­ing from the bar­rel of her gun. The lead­ing bolt hit the sphere and the ob­ject ex­ploded. Tania closed her eyes and turned away but no fal­lout hit her. Open­ing her eyes again, she saw the wall re­pair it­self un­til it was once more a seam­less white sur­face.
    A quick glance over to Carl showed her that he was bat­tling four of the spheres. He seemed to be hold­ing his own, so Tania con­cen­trated on her own half of the apart­ment.
    Two spheres were try­ing to bur­row in from the ceil­ing and an­other was bul­ging up through the floor. Tania waited un­til the walls cracked be­fore let­ting off a bar­rage of shots. The small light on the bar­rel blinked am­ber and Tania took a few deep breaths while wait­ing for her strange weapon to re­charge.
    As the spheres around her ex­ploded, it seemed to her that a fifth seemed to hes­it­ate. Was it go­ing to re­treat? Tania didn’t give it a second chance. Coolly, she sighted down the bar­rel and blew the in­vad­ing globe into multi-col­oured shards.
    The battle las­ted little more than a minute after that.
    “Nice shoot­ing,” Carl said.
    Tania turned to say some­thing, ask some­thing, but he was already busy, his at­ten­tion no longer on her. In­stead, he was con­cen­trat­ing on one par­tic­u­lar screen lit up on the wall.
    “Let’s hope we got them all.”
    Tania put her weapon down on a nearby desk sur­face and ap­proached him.
    “Got what all? What
were
those things, Carl? What’s go­ing on here?”
    “They’re bots, sent to sniff out par­tic­u­lar in­form­a­tion sig­na­tures. Once they find what they’re look­ing for, they’re pro­grammed to either des­troy the tar­get or head back to their base and re­port their find­ings.”
    Des­troy? Base? Re­port find­ings? This was start­ing to sound less like a re­trieval as­sign­ment and more like a war.
    Ir­rit­ated, Tania grabbed Carl’s arm. He looked down at her fin­gers in sur­prise for a mo­ment then let him­self be turned around.
    “I don’t un­der­stand any of this,” she said, search­ing his weathered face. “I don’t un­der­stand why the spheres at­tacked us or where they came from. I don’t