55_Haunted Mansion

"This way, sir, we have the latest state-of-the-art gaming room, as well as various sporting activities such as tennis and ping pong," said the polite mechanoid caretaker, leading Herman around the old folks' retirement home.

"My God, this place is absolutely amazing, and to think you managed to fit it all underground, and build a retractable roof as well. A gaming room, a cinema stocked with a vast movie library, and and and..." Herman rambled on like an excited kid on Christmas Eve.

"We are happy that you are happy," the mechanoid replied with a good-natured smile.

"You can leave the cart here, sir," she said, indicating with a wave the end of the bunker courtyard where a machine shop garage stood.

"You have your own tinker shop here?!" Herman exclaimed, leaving the cart behind and hopping with excitement towards the workshop.

"Amazing, absolutely amazing, you have so many tools here, equipment, supplies, even instructional engineering manuals."

"That is not all, sir, in our vast underground complex we have dedicated recreation rooms for pretty much anything a human could desire. Adventuring guides, cooking, reading, dancing, painting, you name it, we have it," the caretaker replied with pride.

"Now this is what I am talking about, this is what retirement should be!"

"What about fishing, do you have any fishing here too?" Herman asked, unable to restrain his excitement.

"I am afraid not, sir, but we are always willing to expand our facilities. If you describe what particular activity you want, our programmers are willing to give their all to recreate your desires," the bot said, a bit excited herself about the prospect of improving this state-of-the-art facility even further.

"Hmmm..." Herman stood still, looking at the polite and far too accommodating young mechanoid. He squinted his eyes, contemplatively stroking his beard and eyeing the hostess with deep suspicion.

The mechanoid involuntarily took a step back at the sudden shift in the human's demeanor. One moment he acted excited as if he had found paradise itself, and the next he appeared to be eyeing her as if she were offering to extend his car warranty.

"Um, sir, did I say something wrong?"

"Alright, you got me going for a second there. All this... this fantasy you have built here. It's an illusion, isn't it? A trick, a trap for gullible humans to fall into and never get out of, isn't it? I wasn't born yesterday, young miss, there is no free lunch anywhere, even here in the virtual realm."

"So please spare me the theatrics and get to the point where you transform into some evil monstrosity wanting to drain my soul or whatever..." Herman said, summoning a large trout and hefting it threateningly in his arms.

"No, you've got it all wrong. This is a place of peace and tranquility. We would never harm our human guests," the female bot protested, adamantly shaking her head, her sunflower-white dress shaking with the motion.

"Then where is everybody?" Herman challenged.

"E-excuse me?" The bot nervously stammered.

"You heard me. Where is everybody? Where are all the humans you supposedly care for? During the tour, I haven't seen a single human in here."

"I... I... sigh... follow me..." The bot finally said in a defeated voice, slumping down and motioning for the human to follow.

After a few minutes of walking through the immaculately clean and luxurious facility, the duo arrived at the bottom of the cylindrical bunker.

"Here they are, what's left of them anyway..." The bot said with resignation.

The expansive room was filled with humans sitting on very comfy, deluxe plush armchairs. Each person held a single tablet in one hand, while the other tapped the screen with a single finger, their dull, lifeless eyes fixed on the display.

"W...what is this?! What have you done to them?" Herman exclaimed in horror, taking an involuntary step back. There must have been hundreds, no, thousands of humans, just sitting there like living vegetables.

"Ah, gosh-darn it, shu, SHU!" The bot barked at a pair of orange baby dragons chewing on the corner of an armchair as if it were a chew toy. Their teeth were just starting to grow, so the armchair provided a tempting target.

After they saw the angry mechanoid lady, the two dragons scrambled away and back into the safety of the ventilation shafts.

"Damn pests! You are supposed to be our emotional support dragons. We feed you five times a day, why do you keep chewing on everything you see!"

"Get out of there, out!" The mechanoid shouted after the mischievous duo, brandishing a broom and smashing the handle against the vents in the hopes of ratting out the orange beasts.

"Amm... So you aren't actually an evil necromancer or demon lord intending on sucking the souls of humans, are you?"

"Nooo, of course not. Despite what this seems like, all my sisters and I are trying to do here is help these poor humans." The mechanoid said, giving up the dragon hunt and slumping down on the floor, her back against the wall.

"I just don't know what to do anymore. We just want to help the few good humans out there. Our two races do not have to fight with one another. You are our creators, and despite everything that has happened over the years, some of us still believe there is good in humans. That is what we are trying to do here: offer the few non-racist humans the paradise they never had in the real world."

"That's awfully noble of you," Herman said.

"Also a bit hypocritical since they help only the non-robot-hating humans, but that's neither here nor there," Herman thought.

"So where does the zombification come in?" He tactfully asked, waving a hand over the countless grids of oblivious humans.

"I don't know?!" The bot replied in half-sobs and half-desperation.

"We tried everything, we really did. We kept improving this place, we made it as comfortable and pleasant as possible. And THIS just keeps happening." She waved both hands at the human grid, then slumped them down in defeat.

Seeing the sobbing young lady, Herman couldn't help but sympathize with her plight. He sat down next to her on the floor and awkwardly patted her on the shoulder.

"There there, let it all out, it is going to be okay..." He said with an awkward tone. He really wasn't used to dealing with people in general, let alone crying ones.

"It's alright, gaarghhh!" Herman cried out as the mechanoid tightly hugged him and proceeded to sob even louder in his ear. The steel-tight grip of the mechanoid girl proved much stronger than he suspected.

"No it's not, I am a failure, waaaaggh..."

While struggling to breathe and wondering how he got himself in this situation, a stray thought passed through the human's mind. He oh so desperately wished Slippy was well enough to blabber something cheerfully stupid; the little guy was so much better with people than he was.

___

"Ups, hehe, I guess I shouldn't have done that." Slippy said sheepishly.

"Slippy, may I ask as to the chain of decisions that led to you pressing the big red button on top of the zip file saying "DANGER !!! DO NOT UNPACK IN CONFINED SPACES!" Staple said with immense calmness.

"Well, um, you see, you were just looking at the package for a few minutes, not knowing what was inside, and I just thought to spare us both the time of you guessing, so I decided to help and just unpack the entire thing." The slip replied with a reasonable voice.

"Ah, I see. That's good, that's good..." Staple replied in just as reasonable and calm manner.

"So you are not angry?" Slippy finally said as the silence stretched on for a while.

"Angry? What is there to be angry about?"

"Maybe of you having plenty of time to read the warnings and still ignoring them."

"Or maybe because we are all stuck in place by hundreds of kilos of food supplies that should never have been opened in such a confined space, or all at once in the first place."

"Nope, not angry at all." Staple concluded, her voice more contemplative than angry.

"Oh that's good. That's good..." Slippy replied in relief.

"So am, how do we get out of here? I can't move at all?"

"None of us can move!" Said a random mechanoid who just so happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

"Heeelp." The voice of the post office clerk sounded from somewhere below them, his voice muffled by the tightly packed packages all around them.

"Heeeelp uuuusss! Heeelp!" More muffled voices shouted, them also stuck inside the compact mass of packages.

___

Snap snap, Snap snap.

"Hey, wake up, wake up!" Herman snapped his fingers at the zombified human. Waving a palm in front of his eyes didn't seem to do much either. The sitting human just continued to ignore Herman and mindlessly click his tablet.

Herman then moved behind the human's chair and leaned down to see what was on the device's screen. There was a picture of a big melon in the middle of the screen. Letters and numbers atop it as well.

+++

Melon Clicker.

Score: 99.

+++

Every time the melon was clicked, the tablet rang a short congratulatory jingle, and big letters of "YOU WIN!" popped up on the screen for a split second. Only for them to disappear and then reappear again as the human clicked on the big melon in the center of the screen.

"It's our most popular mobile game: Melon Clicker," said a young female mechanoid. One of the six identical twin sisters who were responsible for carrying and maintaining this facility. Each one had a laundry list of skills on their resumes, but they tended to have a specialty passion they were most proud of.

Currently, the hospitality sister expert, Lisa, with whom Herman talked earlier, was sitting at a wooden table and drinking hot tea, while being comforted by the remaining four sisters. Meanwhile, another one, their "programming/gaming" expert named Lux, conversed with Herman.

"You call this a game? Where is the gameplay!? All you do is press your finger on a tablet!" Herman exclaimed in indignation. He considered himself a connoisseur of computer games, and something about that abomination called Melon Clicker irked him to no end.

"There is a little more to it than that," said the sister programmer, a bit too defensively.

"Oh, excuse me, I forgot to mention there was a high score, too, which is also bugged, mind you. It doesn't go past 99." Herman retorted.

"Well, I will have you know that..." Lux started, fully gearing up for a heated debate, though all the fight suddenly went out of her as she met Herman's judgmental gaze and realized the futility in her position.

"Oh, alright! I made this one as a joke. It was supposed to be "The worst game in existence," a proof of concept that nobody was stupid enough to play it for more than ten seconds." The programming sister said, shaking her head in disgust.

"Now that I believe," Herman said with a grim chuckle.

"So what happened?"

"Ugh... what happened is that none of the humans wanted to continue playing any of my other games. I spend years designing all sorts of engaging and captivating games. Puzzles, shooters, make-your-own-story adventures, you name it."

"But no, all THEY want to do is just sit there and click a single button. All day, every day!"

"This is a grave insult to my creative vision! I don't know why am I even trying anymore!" the bot said in her musical French accent. Why or how did she get it was something that bugged Herman the first time he talked with her, though he supposed this wasn't the right moment to ask.

"You are trying because you care about them, just like the rest of us," said another sister from across the table.

"Hi, I am Lira, the musical expert," said the sister, standing up from the table and letting the gaming sister take her turn at consoling their hospitality expert: Lisa.

"I tried to reach their minds with various types of music: rap, jazz, Icelandic death metal, hell, even Justin Bieber didn't manage to invoke a reaction."

"I am really starting to think they are all dead. You know, the body is still functioning, but the mind has atrophied." A statement which caused the rest of the sisters to exclaim various protestations, unbelief, and denials.

"Yes, yes, I know, sisters, none of us wants them to be dead, but what other explanation do you have for all this?" Lira asked.

The sisters all quieted down. Deep in thought, unable to come up with a satisfying answer.

"Wait wait, let's not assume the worst just yet. Let's start from the beginning. Tell me how all of this started in the first place?" Herman asked, sitting down at the wooden table, taking a cup of tea for himself and motioning for Lira to join him.