Blue-tinted light bursts out of the room and washes over me, painting a galaxy home to countless stars. For a moment, I indulge in the sparkling spectacle taking me back to long discarded childhood fascinations of outer space.

Drawn to the room, I head inside. The projection reacts to each of my steps, creating ripples in a galactic sea.

Untouched by the chaos, glass cabinets housing hundreds if not thousands of computers are neatly arranged in rows, their blinking lights dancing alongside artificial stars. At the source of it all, in front of a mountain of bluescreening CRT monitors, a tall, chubby body is suspended from the ceiling like a puppet led by strings.

Without hesitation, I run straight ahead toward the harsh light.

"Hey!" I shout. "You alive up there?"

I should've anticipated the lack of a response and asked something slightly less morbid, but perhaps "alive" wasn't quite the word to begin with.

The face I'm looking up at, its eyes closed and lips slightly apart, doesn't plague me with discomfort like the faces of people do. Dressed in an ornate lab coat with rolled up sleeves, the figure exposes peculiar hands and forearms. Its left arm is robotic, and its right arm, sure enough, is reminiscent of ball-jointed dolls.

A robot doll? A doll robot? Whatever it is, it's sick as hell.

This must be what Róisín wanted me to find. Now how do I free her son and earn my kiss as the knight in grubby armour?

Tugging at its leg doesn't do much. Even as I jump and cling to it with all my remaining strength, the sturdy cables holding its body in the air won't budge one bit.

Back turned to the doll, I look around. This room seems to be a supercomputer setup, even bigger than I would've guessed from the outside. I'm neither painfully aware of heat emitted from all this tech, nor am I shivering from excessive ventilation. There's nothing. The temperature is absent.

I consult the monitor on the desk next to the suspended doll and squint against the vibrant blue.

ERROR

System crashed

Hello, world

Host could not be reached

Memory overflow www w ww wwww ww ww

Hello, w www w ww www world

And so it continues.

Sounds to me like it's time to turn it off and on again.

Crouching next to the tower unit under the desk, I search for the right cable to unplug. Easier said than done when there's so many, but I'm not defusing a bomb here. Might as well grab a bunch and pull 'em out at once.

—Then everything happens in the blink of an eye.

As the monitors shut down, the light projection intensifies, consuming the room as if we really were in space. The computer I was leaning against only a moment ago—gone.

What the...?

I mouth the words, but no sound comes out. The desk, the supercomputer, the contraption holding the doll, everything but us is—yes, gone.

At speeds too fast to fully comprehend, stars stretch into lines drawing out the walls, then into the shapes of the missing cabinets, all filled with zeroes and ones only a machine would understand. Before I know it, each line of code transforms into our previous surroundings, washing away the fancy projection.

And the doll?

Released from the cables' grasp, it falls. Despite our size difference, I try to run and catch it, but instead I hit my head against the desk.

"Ow!" I yell at the exact moment the doll hits the floor with a heavy clank.

Muttering more "ow"s as I rub my head, I stumble over to where it crash-landed. Its vibrant maroon hair stands out against the plain white floor.

"You good, buddy?" I ask. Reflex. Common skatepark courtesy.

But the way Róisín talked about it...

Without moving an inch from its face-first-onto-the-floor position, the doll responds cheerfully, "Sure it's grand."

That's Róisín's son all right. The accent and attitude don't lie.

So it really is—well, not "alive". But something like that.

The stress from the strange reboot leaves my body through a sigh. But as the doll continues to not move, I wonder if I need to reconsider what "grand" means.

"You're sure?" I ask. "Can you get up?"

"With pleasure!"

I flinch as it leaps up and towers over me. Not in a threatening way, more an "oversized puppy wants to play and be called a good boy" way. Never having seen a doll or humanoid robot built with anything but slender limbs, its round face and belly come as a pleasant surprise to me. Róisín promised a handsome guy, and she wasn't lying.

The doll smiles, blue-orange eyes wide open behind thick-framed glasses, wavy strands of hair bouncing with joy. "How else may I be of service, User Lambda?"

"User what now?" I ask.

"I'm ready to serve you, User Lambda," it—he?—rephrases without elaborating.

It's starting to dawn on me that Róisín arranged this whole "Lambda" thing so I could use the terminals, and that's the information her son is working with. At least that's the best explanation I've got.

"Call me Lulu," I say. If I'm gonna have to be called something, it'd better be the nickname I chose for myself.

"Preferences updated."

In my mind, telling him my name is an open invitation for him to tell me his as well. But if I can barely communicate with people, I can't expect a living object to read between my lines either.

"What about you?" I put my hands in my pockets, unsure what else to do with them. "Do you have a name?"

I brace myself for a series of letters and numbers I'll never remember, only for him to say, "Ah, it's Alvin."

That's so... normal.

"Okay, pal, basically, your mother sent me to free you. So here I am."

"My mum?" Alvin's eyes light up for a moment. It's subtle, but if I can actually look into someone's eyes for once, I'm not gonna miss a single detail.

"Y'know, your ma? Róisín? Ring any bells?"

"Processing..."

That can't be good.