AAH!” Owen shouted as the tube shot him and Charm straight up into nothingness, then twisted and jerked them around in a dizzying maze of other tubes and screaming billboards advertising cool science thingers.
“I need to clear our history!” Charm shouted into his ear over the noise of the ads. “The security system is going to catch up with us otherwise. This might scare you a little, so try to stay calm!”
“What does that mean?” Owen said, then screamed in terror as Charm shot at the sides of the tube just behind them with her ray guns. The tube instantly shattered, sending pieces of tube off to plow into various ads and other search tubes.
“That won’t hide us for long,” she said, putting her guns back in their holsters. “We’ll need to be quick.”
“Aah!” Owen told her, hugging her for dear life.
She pushed him off her, and they continued zooming along the tube separately—her looking impatient; him caught between terror and feeling like this was the greatest roller coaster ride ever, though leaning toward the first one, if he had to pick.
Just as Owen began to get used to the ride, or at least everything but his stomach did, the tube spat them out into what looked like a mass of zeroes and ones, the numbers actually breaking their fall.
Charm got to her feet before Owen did, then leaned down and yanked him up with her robot arm so hard he actually flew for a moment. “We’re here,” she said. “The Original Computer.” She made a face. “It even smells out of date.”
Owen sniffed loudly and nodded. There was an odd sort of sour-milk odor, weirdly.
“See all these?” Charm said, pointing at the zeroes and ones. “Can you believe computers ever actually ran like this? Binary? I mean, c’mon. We’re up to centidecimal at this point in modern computers.” She frowned at the streams of ones and zeroes. “It’s like visiting prehistoric times.”
Owen glanced around, seeing nothing but numbers. “So how do we find the location of the Seventh Key in all of this?”
“These numbers here don’t mention anything about it,” Charm told him, glancing around. “We could use an interface, but I don’t see one anywhere. There should be one farther in, though. Come on.”
With that, she led Owen off into the stream of ones and zeros, parting it like a curtain.
“What are these numbers, anyway?” he asked, dipping his hand into a bunch of zeroes. They felt cold to the touch, kind of like water, only less wet. Which was really all water was, but still. He reached for a one, then yanked his hand back as a tiny jolt zapped him.
“Ones and zeros are actually all a computer understands, at its core,” she told him as they walked. “They’re not even that, one or zero. It’s actually just a different way of saying ‘on’ and ‘off.’ ‘On’ means there’s electricity, and ‘off’ means there isn’t. Everything else here is built off of those two ideas. On, off, one, zero. Get it?”
“So don’t touch the ones,” Owen said, and stuck his hand into another stream of zeroes, letting them flow over his hand. It actually felt kind of relaxing.
“Be careful,” Charm told him, pointing at a different flow of numbers that looked exactly the same as the one he was touching. “That’s the Original Computer’s avatar software over there. Touch it, and you’ll glitch us right into nonexisting.”
“It looks exactly the same,” he said, glancing between them quickly to see any difference.
Charm snorted. “So read the numbers before you touch them. Quanterian children learn to read binary in primary school.”
Owen rolled his eyes. “Who cares if I did touch those specific numbers, the avatar software? What’s the worst that could happen? We stop existing here and end up back in the ship?”
“I have no idea,” Charm said. “But that’s definitely not the worst that could happen. Enough of this. We’re running out of time. Dr. Verity’s armies are going to attack Magisteria in less than twenty-four hours, and we still don’t even have the Seventh Key. I’m going to hack my own user interface, or we’ll be here all day.”
“Hack?”
She pulled something out of her glowing pocket and dropped it to the ground. The object instantly expanded into what looked like a desk, a chair, and a keyboard. She sat down and immediately began typing, and the air in front of her lit up like a computer screen. “One second,” she said. “I have to make sure we’re hidden.”
“Hidden?” Owen asked, feeling like an idiot with all his questions. Though that’s what Kiel always did whenever they were in Quanterium, so at least he was playing his role correctly.
“Hacking sets off alarms,” Charm said, then nodded. Owen turned around to find a wall rising up to just about eye level in a wide circle around them. “There, I’ve set up a firewall. We should be safe now.”
Owen touched the top of the maybe four-foot-tall wall in front of him. “Uh, really? This is hiding us?”
“Things don’t work by sight here,” Charm said. “Now stop talking.”
“You need quiet?” Owen asked, looking out over the firewall. Something fluttered in the streams of ones and zeroes, and Owen stood up on his digital toes to get a better look.
“No, your voice just irritates me.”
Fair enough. He glanced around at the number streams, but the flutter seemed to have disappeared.
“This is odd,” Charm told him, typing away. “Yes, it’s the very first computer. But there’s history in here that goes back further than anything I’ve ever seen. Almost to the very beginning.” Her eyebrows raised. “What? This isn’t right. It says that magicians originally came from Quanterium.”
Something caught Owen’s eye far to the left, and he circled around. “Who cares? Concentrate on the key.”
“It says that there used to just be one planet,” she said. “Not two. That’s plainly false. Are all computers just failing on me today?”
“Planets don’t just pop into existence,” Owen agreed, slowly moving around the wall. What was out there?
“Unless you magicians did something unnatural again,” Charm said. “It can’t be right, though. Magicians never lived here. Magic and science together? They’d have killed each other. Trust me, I think about that every day I’m with you.”
Owen grinned, throwing her a look. Magic and science working together was sort of the entire point of the Kiel Gnomenfoot books. She didn’t notice his look, though, and kept typing.
“Here, something about the Source of Magic. It says the first magic-user and the president of Quanterium jointly locked it away in the Vault of Containment. They each made three keys to lock the door, then together formed a Seventh Key, to ensure that neither scientist nor magician could separately open the door.”
“So what’d they do with it?” Something flickered in the corner of Owen’s eye again, and he turned back to the firewall. “Charm, I think I saw something,” he said, his eyes locked on the spot.
“Good for you,” Charm told him without looking up. “There’s lots more about the first six keys. That’s useless. We have those.”
Something glitched in a different stream, and Owen shook his head. “Seriously, come look!”
She growled in frustration, then stood up and leaned forward to look over the wall. “You know what I see? You wasting my time.”
“There,” he said, pointing at a new glitch. “Did you see that?”
Charm squinted, then stepped back, her hands on her ray guns. Without a word, she ran back to her computer and typed something in, then turned back to the wall. “All right, this isn’t good,” she said quietly. “If they are what I think they are, then the command I just typed in will make them reveal themselves.”
Owen pushed himself up to his tiptoes and looked out, expecting to see streams of numbers.
Instead, the numbers glitched into what looked like old, clunkier versions of Science Soldier robots. And they extended as far as the eye could see.
“Um?” he said.
“The alarm couldn’t have worked so fast,” Charm said, backing into her computer, then sitting down and typing frantically. “And the security systems didn’t follow us this soon either. The soldiers must have been left here as a trap, to protect the location of the Seventh Key.”
“Why aren’t they shooting?” Owen asked as the now-visible robots began to silently march forward toward the firewall from every direction around them.
“They’re not actually robots, any more than you’re a real person in here,” Charm told him, not looking up as she typed. “They’re viruses.”
Computer viruses that looked like robots? Awesome! “Those just affect computers, though, right?” Not that he was scared or anything, but the robots were pretty big.
“Right now, you are a computer,” she said. “These viruses infect by touch. Here you’re just as digital as they are, so they’ll overwrite whatever data they find.”
Owen sighed in relief. “So then we’ll just get sent back to the ship or something. That’s not so bad.”
“You don’t get it,” Charm told him, her voice more panicked than he’d ever heard it before. “What do you think happens if they overwrite your brain here, Kiel? It’ll get uploaded back into your head that way, as the robot virus. So anything in your brain—if there is anything in your brain—gets written over until the virus is all that’s left.”
Owen swallowed hard. This book was turning out to be much darker than the last few. “At least we’re safe behind this firewall,” Owen told her. “Right?”
The first robot virus reached the firewall and extended a hand to touch it. The entire wall trembled like a leaf in the wind.
Charm’s forehead furrowed. “Of course.”
Owen let out a huge breath and smiled.
“We’re completely safe until the wall falls, which won’t be for at least a minute, maybe two,” Charm continued. “Now, what did I say about you talking?”