A Long Shot

It was finally time.

It had been nearly half a year since she’d last seen Camden, and now was the time to act on her plan. That she definitely had. Well, more the beginnings of a plan. The bones of a plan. Okay, she didn’t have any plan in the slightest. More so vague allusions to a plan rather than anything concrete.

Back when she’d first found the machine, she didn’t know what to do. And so she did what she always did, which was diving headfirst into whatever problem laid ahead. With it being summer, she’d had some time off of work and school, which provided ample opportunity to learn about whatever this weird mechanism was.

She had initially tried asking the Automaton for details using binary “yes” or “no” questions. It seemed to work for a time, but eventually it stopped answering entirely, much to Maya’s chagrin. Nowadays it just stood in the corner, watching her every move like some sort of hawk. Very off-putting.

So with no other option, she got to investigating. To looking at the machine in excruciating detail, noting anything that could help her figure out what it was. The first thing that she noticed was how roughly it had been assembled. How the parts didn’t seem to quite fit together, as if they hadn’t been designed to do so initially. The welding job was messy, the rivets in the sphere’s plates were placed without much precision. Whoever made this must have been in a rush, she concluded.

Searching the web didn’t yield much either. The machine was decidedly steampunk, which narrowed things down a little. But no matter how much she looked, no matter how many obscure history forums she scoured, she was unable to find anything that even resembled what she was looking for.

She also tried the local library and archival service. Perhaps the info laid not online, but in physical documents and files. But despite her best efforts, she found herself unable to discover any new information, beyond the fact that this machine didn’t seem to have any historical evidence of existing. So then maybe it was newly constructed? Well, not that new, but perhaps it had been built within the past, say, 15 years. She had been operating under the assumption that it was some kind of historical device. But if it was new, that would explain the distinct lack of information that she’d been able to find.

Was this too much? Wasn’t this going too far, her doing such a thorough investigation? But she knew that it wasn’t. That deep down, even though he’d never admit it, he’d do exactly the same for her. She did at one point report him missing, but the police also weren’t able to track him down. His parents didn’t care either, so it wasn’t like she could count on their resources as backup.

She then went back to investigating the machine. It looked like one of the panels was designed to come off, and with a few pulls, it did just that, revealing a strange object in the middle. It was shaped like some sort of multisided polygon, like a dodecahedron or a geodesic sphere or something. Though this did nothing more than providing her with more clues that yielded no results.

She searched the room once more, testing every panel in the ceiling, every brick on the wall. She was about to give up, when one of the bricks clicked inwards, releasing a latch that held a secret hinged panel in the wall. It fell flat against it, revealing a sort of heavy duty lever. An undoubtedly notable development.

After discovering the lever in the wall and the glowing object in the middle, she attempted to do a little more research online, but to no avail. Even posting it on mystery themed discussion boards didn't yield any result. If some of the biggest fans of all things mysterious were unable to uncover any information or clues, it was unlikely that she would be able to without doing further testing.

And so that's exactly what she did.

She only considered briefly that this might be a bad idea. It was definitely quite the long shot. But she didn’t have a choice, did she? It was time to see this through. Hesitating only slightly, she pulled down the lever with a satisfying clank. And then the machine roared to life.

She stood, watching it activate with an almost otherworldly glow. The middle sphere got brighter and brighter, the pipes shaking violently as they drew in the air around them. The whole basement began to shake, a rumbling that she hoped didn’t set off anyone’s car alarm.

What now? She didn’t have the slightest idea. The machine reached a painfully bright amount of luminance. And then it just seemed to stay there. Idling, much like a car. Was it waiting for something?

She searched around the lever, but there didn't appear to be any other form of controls. No buttons, no switches, no nothing. The machine continued to glow and shake.

“...Hello?” she asked hesitantly, barely able to hear her own voice over the machine’s rattling. She couldn't believe that she was talking to something built of nuts and bolts. Then again, she had talked to the Automaton, hadn’t she? The difference was that it at least appeared to have some form of mental faculties, much unlike the contraption that stood before her.

“Can you hear me?” she queried. The machine did not respond. This was stupid. One more attempt, and then she was going to flip the lever again, turn the machine off, and do some more research, despite the lack of success that she’d been having.

“Do you know what happened to Camden Valaraki?”

The machine… appeared to respond? Not with words, but with action. The shaking seemed to briefly intensify, along with the glow.

“Y-you do?” Maya stammered. She truly hadn’t expected anything to happen. She stumbled over her next sentence. “Take me to him. Take me to where he went.”

An ultimately poor choice of words. The machine glowed painfully bright, the shaking reaching levels more intense than it was prior. Was this it? Was she finally going to figure out what happened to Camden? She began to feel relieved. Like the search was finally over. Like she would finally get her answers.

Until waves upon waves of pain began to surge their way through her body. She collapsed to the ground, writhing in agony. The world slowly vanished around her. The pain not subsiding, never lessening, never ceasing. Her eyes burned. Her nerves set alight in a bright hot searing torture. She felt herself floating in a state of nothingness. Her lungs felt like they were on fire. She tried to take a breath in, but wasn’t able to find any air.

And just when she thought she couldn’t take it any longer, her senses completely overwhelmed…

…

It all came to a stop. Maya opened her eyes.