“Hurry! Get in!” I shouted at my partner.

I quickly settled into the cockpit of a large mechanized robot, a mechbot. About forty feet away in the underground hangar, my partner, a uniformed man in a dark green military suit, leapt towards me as an alarm started wailing.

MechBot

The bay doors cracked open, though I knew that there would be a wall of guards outside it in a convoluted mess of a hallways. I had a map in my head, and navigated the football field’s worth of offices, men with guns, and granite walls between us and the surface.

A few bullets whizzed by us and clanged and ricochetted off the bulletproof glass of my still open windshield door, the visor that was my mech’s “eyes”. My partner managed to climb up and into the cockpit, just as I started the mech’s power source. The automated visor slowly whirred down to closed position, and I powered up the weapons system.

More ricochettes off the mechbot. I turned our mechbot and dashed towards the hanger doors…toward the soldiers that were shooting at us.

“I’m assuming you have a plan,” my partner calmly quipped. Ever the professional.

“Yeah, I got it.”

The bullets weren’t the problem; none of the armed guards appeared to carry high power rifles, and even if they did, the ceramic armor layered on top of the mechbot machinery could defeat most kinetic energy projectiles. In truth, the only weaponry to be worried about at the moment would be artillery pieces towards the rear of the hangar, which is why I was charging the guards. By placing them between us and the guards,the guards would have to go through or around us to get to the M777 howitzers.

We started taking longer strides, leaping 15 feet per step, and we closed on the front lines at the hangar entranced within seconds. The chips on the bullet resistant glass were multiplying in force. As we approached the firing line of the soldiers, most of whom were hunkered beyond wooden crates. Their commander, even at our distance away I could tell, was a dimunitive man compared to his soldiers, but he realized our intentions. I imagined his eyes widening as he quickly turned his head to the dispatch radio on his shoulder and shouted something over the gunfire. Too late, I smirked as we jumped over the front lines and through the hangar doors.

We landed squarely outside the hangar doors, and I could tell that the shell-shocked soldiers inside weren’t clear on what their next move would be. Do they fire in towards us…towards the offices outside the hangar? Do they give chase? What could they do? If I were them, I would start looking for gainful employment elsewhere, because the ease that I had purveyed in stealing a $15M piece of equipment would make any Congressman blush.

No time to empathize with them now, though. Their more immediate concern was trying to kill us, and our was trying to escape. I turned the mechbot outwardly toward the elevator shafts near the end of the large hallway. While the hangar was an immense underground construction achievement, the hallways abutting the facility were dimunitive, and the mechbot needed to crouch to avoid the ceiling. I could safely ignore the gunfire behind us now that the mechbot visor wasn’t getting shattered and I could see through the heads up display.

As we awkwardly raced toward the end of the hallway, a mix of engineers and soldiers littered our way. Some of them shot at us, but most were too stunned to know what to do. I had to knock a few of them out of my way, but tried to avoid doing it too often, as momentum was on the seven ton machine rather than the average 150lb male human. We turned the last corner and four elevator doors lay ahead. Pausing for a moment, I waited until one of the elevator lift indicators, the third one on the right to be precise, displayed that it was going down and below our current level. A crowd had gathered behind us, but quickly dispersed as I backed up 30 feet.

Luckily the ceiling around the elevator doors was higher than the hallways, because I needed the extra head room to sprint towards the closed elevator doors. I could tell that my partner was confused about what I was about to do from the visage in the reflection of my Heads Up Display. His face spoke volumes, but he trusted me enough to say nothing. The speedometer read approximately 30mph as we hurtled toward the closed elevator doors.

The impact was loud and as the metal twisted, much of the surrounding brick crumbled loose and the frame itself detached from any structural embankments that it was nailed to. I didn’t intend to burst through the doors; I intended to knock them down, jump atop the floor ledges, and hopscotch ourselves upwards through the elevator shaft.

It worked for the first three floors, but the I had miscalculated the second to last floor ledge and slipped. As I slowly realized that we weren’t going to make it, I pushed the mechbot’s legs hard and landed on the floor below, busting through the doors there. Our mechbot landed on its back, and I worried that we would be exposed. Oddly enough, the floor was largely deserted, and I was afforded some time to reorient the mechbot. It seems that the workers, probably scientists and engineers, had vacated the premises on the alarm sounding, and the soldiers didn’t really know where we’d end up and hadn’t been deployed yet.

“Whew,” I sighed in relief.

My partner, visibly uncomfortable, simply raised an eyebrow.

I took advantage of this extra time, and recalculated the last sequence of jumps toward the top of the shaft.

“Here we go. Hold on to your butts!”

The mechbot leapt forward and our velocity carried us upward to the ledge. With that extra speed, we were able to burst through the shaft ceiling, and a mix of sand and glass shattered as we flailed out through the top into the surrounding sands. Miles of desert surrounded us, but we’d made it!

Not many land-vehicles and machinery could keep up with us now. We started running in no particular direction, and I looked at the gauges to deduce the range of our hydrogen fuel cells. The navigational equipment had been disabled, or at least, unloaded, but I did see the outline of a city a ways away. Once we found the nearest populated area, we could abandon the mechbot equipment and disappear.

My partner yelled out, “I’ll start scanning radio frequencies to provide some accurate intelligence!”

Seems rational, I thought. I continued in the current direction for the time being.

Then, a fog of doubt rolled over my mind. I was sure in my ability to drive and operate mechbots, and I was confident in being able to navigate the floor plan of an incredibly complex facility. But, just then confusion crept over the recesses of my brain. These doubts fueled some questions. Why could I so dexterously operate complex machinery? Handling the controls seemed natural, but I couldn’t recall the motion sequences that effected a desired outcome. I had a general idea of the direction of where I wanted to go, and the mechbot simply moved in that direction through some unknown manipulations of controls.

These became but trivial realizations when a more fundamental question arose: why had I never been confused before? Confusion about the confusion itself, in other words. In our haste, I had never contemplated the reasons for which we were escaping. A concept like this should have been in my possession this entire time, swimming somewhere in the depths of my neurons.

I swiveled my head towards my partner, but as my lips pursed to initiate a question, a sly smile crept onto on his face. The lips curled, and a Mona Lisa grin appeared, one where he alone was in the know and reveled in that exclusive status. My thought processes slowed, and the grin grew more obvious, less restrained…grotesque.

Abruptly, he diverted his eyes to surf the FM band of radio frequencies. The static noise in the cockpit briefly cleared, while the robotic hymns filled the void with periodic rocking from the mechbot high stepping through the sand. Then voices: local news.

“…these men are considered highly contagious in addition, of course, to being armed and dangerous. If approached, cover your mouths and noses, as there is no known cure for the afflictions that they suffer from. Avoid contact with them at all costs, and alert your local authorities. Let professionals reason with them as they may have had some amnesia due to the infection…”

My lizard brain realized it had been in possession of my consciousness for too long, and my more analytical side ravenously took hold. I began to understand everything as I took my last deep breath…just before I opened my eyes in the real world, promptly becoming hopelessly confused again.