Two Ibi-Ero Makina soldier droids, one oddly lumpier than the other, appeared out of thin air deep inside the robot species' teleportation research facility. Grimble's control panels exploded with binary communications whizzing by at mind-numbing speeds. Sitting next to him was a miniaturized version of Melock the Wise. 

Melock held a finger up to his lips and mouthed a silent Shhhh. He glanced with his eyes to Grimble's left and a shrunken de Martín appeared with a stunned and shocked look on his face. He felt his body in multiple places to make sure he was still in one piece. 

Melock waved a hand over the control display and brought up a map of the surrounding superstructure and a pathway to the prison block. Grimble smiled and made his robot suit give an arm wave to indicate Murphy should follow. 

Murphy adjusted her armor and looked around the iron hallway. The floor, ceiling, and walls were all built with the same gray steel. There were no windows. Murphy clanked off behind Grimble's robot walking single file down the corridor. She was considerably shorter than the standard two-meter Makina battle bot. 

They moved past several large blast doors, turned left, then right, then left again before they came across any other robots. Two gunmetal blue steel sentries stood on either side of a big freight elevator. Two sets of three electronic eyes scanned them from below curving shoulders. Clamplike hands held wide-mouthed blunderbuss blaster weapons. Their blue scanning beams passed over Grimble and Murphy as they walked between the sentries and entered the elevator. The lift doors closed from the top and bottom and slammed together with a clunk. The two imposter-bots stood at the center of the spacious freight car. 

Inside Grimble's bot, Sabastian worked his magic on the elevator controls and hacked the Ibi-Ero network. The lift began climbing. 

"Bonjour mes amis," came a voice over a newly established private network embedded within the Makina system. "We are on our way to the 27th floor. These binary level indicators tripped me up there for a second. I can't believe we made it past their scans!?" 

Murphy cracked her neck and stretched her legs like she was preparing to run a race. 

The lift slowed, stopped, and the doors opened. 

"This isn't our—" said a voice that fell silent. 

A patrol unit of six Makina guards identical to Grimble walked into the freight elevator and Grimble and Murphy stepped back to give them room. The lift passenger readout indicated eight military units, two with unclear destination assignments. The central control relay hub for the building queried the discrepancy. The six guards stood in a two-by-three formation facing the two units already on the lift. 

Sabastian hacked like the desperate man he was. In his mind, he couldn't help focussing on the fear of remaining twelve centimeters tall if the wizard was killed. He set their destination as guard replacements for level 27. The patrol units did a 180 and faced the door. The lift resumed going up.

Murphy focussed her attention on her breath and slowed it down as well as her rapid heart rate. She prayed for the ability to remain still and gripped her war hammer tight. 

The lift stopped again, the doors opened, and the patrol clanked off. The doors closed and they continued their ascent. 

"That was too close," said Grimble. 

Melock made no comment and seemed lost in thought. The lift slowed, stopped, and the doors opened. 

"We get out here," said Sabastian. "He's in the room at the end of the hall." 

They stepped off the elevator into another iron hallway with two guards at the elevator and two more at a large closed steel door at the end of the hallway. They walked past the elevator guards and they activated and followed, marching in formation to the opposite end of the hallway. 

Murphy listened to their clanking footsteps behind her, not daring to turn around. Through the slit in her helmet, she eyed the two motionless guards ahead. Sneaking around wasn't her preferred activity and she was feeling supremely edgy. The guards marching behind had weapons and so did the two ahead. Grimble had none and she'd have a hell of a time fighting blasters with a hammer. 

When they got to the end of the hall, the sentries did not move. It dawned on Melock, Grimble, and Sabastian that they should be replacing the elevator guards, not the prison block guards. Sabastian tried in vain to reassign the units. 

The door guard spoke in the machine binary language, saying a series of zeros and ones in such quick succession that no translation matrix could come up with a response in time to convince the guards it wasn't a second language. 

01010111 01101000 01100001 01110100 00100000 01101001 01110011 00100000 01111001 01101111 01110101 01110010 00100000 01100100 01100101 01110011 01101001 01100111 01101110 01100001 01110100 01101001 01101111 01101110 00111111 00100000 01010010 01100101 01110100 01110101 01110010 01101110 00100000 01110100 01101111 00100000 01100001 01110011 01110011 01101001 01100111 01101110 01100101 01100100 00100000 01110000 01101111 01110011 01110100 00101110 00001010

"This jigs up! Get me out of here!" screamed de Martín but the guards were already raising their blasters. 

Melock woke out of his daze and snapped his fingers. Both he and Sabastian vanished from the control compartment. Grimble's robot reached forward and grabbed the blunderbuss of the guard in front of him, pointing the barrel at the second guard as it fired. A fat ball of bright yellow energy shot out of the gun nullifying the second guard and sending it stuttering to the floor.

Muphy turned with a wide arching swing and her gravity hammer slammed into the first of the two elevator guards who had just stepped into an attack formation behind her. It was knocked into the other and both crashed into the wall before jumbling to the floor. She raised her hammer overhead and flattened the head of the first fallen guard. The robot sparked out of existence. The second was on its feet shockingly fast, aimed, and fired. Murphy twirled her gravity hammer and smacked it into the yellow ball of electricity at point-blank range. The explosion reverberated down the hall. The robot aimed a second shot as Murphy cracked her gravity hammer into its side. She broke the spinal column of the Makina and it fired wide leaving a burnt charred scar on the wall. It locked on her from its bent position, but the hammer came down before it could fire again. 

Grimble and the door guard wrestled for control of its weapon. The blaster fired and tore the left arm of Grimble's suit clear off. The guard took its moment of advantage to kick Grimble away. It aimed at the Grimble as he stood up but was distracted by the floating blunderbuss taken from its fallen partner. The hovering gun fired and fried the guard's circuits. It stood there frozen until Murphy smacked it to the ground with her hammer. Sabastian became visible, back against the wall holding the Makina weapon.

"Mon dieu, this packs a wallop." 

Melock appeared next to him. "If you wouldn't mind opening the door?" 

 Sabastian worked a device on his wrist, gave up, and pried open a panel on the side of the door. Murphy slammed her hammer down a few more times on each of the fallen robots just to be sure. Melock was about to suggest another tactic when de Martín threw up a hand indicating he had a better idea. He grabbed the arm of a fallen door guard and held his own arm device near it. It beeped and the heavy metal door opened. 

The sound of psychedelic sitar music drifted into the hall. The room beyond was decorated on all surfaces. Posters, paintings, architectural plans, digital schematics, mathematical equations, and crude pornographic images covered the walls. Stacks of paintings, art supplies, a multitude of musical instruments, journals, and loose writing materials were scattered everywhere. At the center of the prolific production of multimedia expressionism sat a young man in the lotus position. He was barefoot in only a pair of black leather pants. A long beaded necklace hung from his neck and expressionless eyes stared blankly at the unexpected company.

"Who might you be, then?" said the man. 

"We might ask the same. I am Melock and this is—"

"Melock the Wise? The greatest divinationist in the universe?" said the man rising to his feet?

"Conjurer, but I've been known to dabble in divination in my younger days."

"And is that de Martín?" said the man continuing to be surprised. "How is it you're with this wizard?"

Sabastian looked deeply at the man. "My god..." he said notably not in french. "You're Tykö, a young Tykö?"

The man tilted his head and brought his forefinger to his nose as if just remembering. "Arvuti Rekenaar Computatrum, the TechnoWizard...  Everyone calls me Tykö. I'd somehow forgotten. Does this mean my Palace is still there? Does she continue the work? I must know." 

"Abeba is—"

"Don't speak her name! Not here!" screamed Tykö, then he whispered, "It's not safe. They're listening. We must go." Tykö grabbed Melock's arm and led him out of the room. "We can't teleport out of this facility. They're tinkering with teleportation and have learned enough to put a destination scrambler on this building. How else do you think they keep me here?"

Melock pulled his mobile device out of his bag and looked at it. They all stopped in the middle of the hallway. 

"They're jamming my mobile?" he said. 

"This is not good," said de Martín.

"Can you remember your home coordinates?" asked Tykö. 

"Of course, I can, it's... it is..." Melock's hand went up to his mustache and trailed down to its end slowly. "It's on the tip of my tongue. I can almost see it in my mind but yet, I can not."

"They're running some kind of synaptic transmission scrambler. I suspect it's a subsonic brainwave interference pattern that targets specific memories." 

The two wizards looked at each other in a stupefied silence of desperate remembrance, Sabastian disappeared from the visible spectrum, and Grimble grabbed one of the guard's chunky guns with his remaining arm. Sister Murphy took off her helmet and dropped it to the floor with a clank. 

"Then we fight our way out," she said and led the party back to the elevator.

On a digitally perfect cue, the lift doors binged open to a fully packed car of Makina. The soldier robots were lined in groups of three to efficiently fill the elevator. The first three stepped out speaking a dizzying phrase of 0's and 1's. 

The center one recalibrated its language processor and commanded them to, "Drop your weapons and surrender the technowizard."

Grimble responded by blasting them. 

The second row activated energy shields that absorbed his blasts and advanced over the fallen into the hallway. From under their shields, crept smaller spider-like droids armed with particle weapons that fired steel razor darts. Grimble stepped in front of the wizards and the bolts tinged off his armor. Murphy spun her hammer like a propeller knocking away the projectiles. 

"Ow!" said Tykö when he caught a dart in his left arm. 

Melock stepped around Grimble's robot and holding his hands out in front of himself, brought the fingers of each together in a point, then opened his fingers wide, palms out to the robots. Every individual part that made up each robot (a screw, wire, circuit, bolt, or gear) separated the distance between Melock's fingers from the part next to it. What was once a hall full of robots, became a hall full of floating spaced-apart pieces. Melock lowered his hands and all the pieces rained down to the floor like machine shop flotsam. 

They climbed over the debris and boarded the lift. 

"Up or down?" Murphy asked. 

"Down," said Sabastian's disembodied voice. "We've gotta get out of this building."

"No, up," said Tykö holding his arm.

"We can jump from the roof," added Melock.

The lift jerked down half a floor, stopped, and headed back up, ignoring all requests to stop. 

"This is a one-way ride," said de Martín. 

"It'll do," said Melock. "Now let's look at that arm."

Tykö released his grip on the short steel arrow stuck in his bicep. His skin was poisoned and turned an inky black. The discoloration spread down his arm toward his hand in a digital fractal pattern.

"Hold fast," said Melock and he yanked the bolt out. 

"Aaaaaaaah!" screamed Tykö breathing heavily. "Cut away the flesh at my shoulder! Stop the spread. Quick!" 

Melock reached in his bag and pulled out the lich's dagger. When he unsheathed the golden blade it sparked with green electricity. He probed Tykö's shoulder, felt metal where bones should have been, and sliced away the flesh cauterizing the wound ahead of the growing fractal pattern. He dropped a chunk of shoulder into the robot parts on the floor and continued until he had cut away all the flesh around the top of the arm. 

Tykö's shoulder and upper arm were mechanical, like in the holoimage they had seen of him. Blood dripped over the robotic skeletal structure and mixed with the rotting flesh that was quickly becoming oily black liquid. 

"I think that did the trick," he said steadying himself and taking a series of deep breaths. He shook the arm and the rotting skin fell to the floor. 

Melock slid under his other shoulder to help him stand. They watched Tykö as he seemed to age with each passing floor of the elevator's ascent. When the lift stopped he looked twenty years older. His lustrous dark hair was full of gray and his youthful face hardened with wrinkles. 

The lift reached the top and the doors opened to a dark foreboding sky.