Chapter Text
[11/11/2062 Site-184 CANSHM 07:26:00]
Can’t have it all in one building because reasons. Can’t have a train between buildings because reasons. Gotta lock all the doors one way before breakfast hour because reasons. App-Met’s gotta be HQ’ed in Nova Scotia because reasons. Damnit damnit DAMNIT.
Robin was usually early to the breakfast rush, but never this early. He shivered, alternating between shoving his hands into his jacket and pant pockets, and demanded (internally, of course), for the umpteenth time, the reason for which his employment had brought him here.
His prodding of the buzzer had long departed his typically-composed “palmed” and since entered the realm of “mashed.” Which he was doing, again, for some reason. Whacking the delicate machinery that fortified the mess hall from roving hordes of hungry early birds would, in all likelihood, prolong his isolation inasmuch as his PDA still read 6:26 and not 7:00. And yet.
“Robin Wei, App-Met RE707” he intoned breathily. His lanyard flattened against the fob reader with a plasticky clack.
Bzzt.
Despite the frigid predawn air of Nova Scotia, and the utter absence of any judgy coworkers queueing behind him, Robin felt his face heat up.
“Manual override; Robin Wei, App-Met RE707, clearance 3 provisi 4, auth-toc delta delta x-ray two two two, open bulkhead, dolen minutiae et-”
Bzzt.
He sighed. “Retain access credentials. Backdoor foxtrot bravo kappa, locally boot conscript. Auto-redact logs oh-six-hundred to oh-six-thirty.”
Bffzzt.
“Booting instance 184A-S339-2315 of conscript Lindhauser.aic under-”
“Retain access credentials. Mute ‘till the boot sequence finishes.”
Mercifully, the all-too-familiar reader error klaxon did not invalidate his combo lip-service-and-flagrant-violation-of-opsec. Though, at this point, the cost analysis of this exploit was beginning to weigh particularly heavy on his mind. Maybe I should’ve waited-
Another voice sprang from the intercom, cutting off the monotone TTS utterances of the PDA OS with a vaguely-tired, disciplinarian female voice. “Researcher Wei?”
“Heya, Lind. I-”
“Researcher Wei, I expect a rich explanation as to why I’m being booted independently onto an intercom, why my logs read eight illicit manual override attempts on this door, why you’ve apparently been reciting your credentials out loud, in a common space, and…”
The proverbial lip-purse evident in her synthesized cadence was palpable.
“...Why you’re up, at this hour, outside, in this weather. What are you even- wait, why can’t I-”
“Init’ fork cam S339-04 internal subnet-”
“Yes, yes, append retaining credentials on a public terminal to your list of sins. Let me take it from here. I’ll be borrowing these to…”
There was a pause, punctuated by a whir-click; a series of tinny cracks sheared the thin armor of congealed ice and snow off the now-rotating base of the hemispherical camera perched above the card reader.
“...There we go.”
Robin’s eyes glanced up to make “eye contact” with the pulsing red dot behind the camera’s membrane of semi-opaque glass.
“...So inadequately dressed for the weather. It’d be so much fun sending this transcript to Director Barrett, and doubly so to assume disciplinary duty over you, so I’d like an adequate reason not to, preferably within the next five or so sec-”
“Put a pin in that, Lind. Is anyone awake in Admin?”
Her tone immediately lost some characteristic sardonicism. “Despite their servile pleas to cease visual monitoring of their offices-”
Apparently not all of it.
“-Administrators Sanjay and Yu are at their posts, as no terminals at either the Administrative or Habitation buildings have logged uses of their credentials. Their biomonitors indicate reduced consciousness. Evidently, they slept there. Hah.”
Robin cleared his throat and coughed in the same breath. “Anyone awake?”
“...How rude. More respect is in order for your superior.”
He gave the camera a fluoride stare.
The camera, emotionlessly, stared down its nose back.
Note to self: file a request to get her reimaged. Or pruned. “Please inform me, O hallowed purveyor of all under your aegis, whether any Admin staff are awake, operational, and within the confines of the Admin building at the moment.”
She harrumphed. “No.”
He sighed, blinked, and rubbed his left eye. “Can you at least get this door open? Seeing as I’m, per you, inadequately dressed for the occasion.”
The pneumatic seal clicked, hissed, and the double doors lethargically swung outward. “Now that that’s out of the way, have you any pleas for mercy before I send this report to the Dir-”
He flicked his PDA screen. 6:29:39. He cleared his throat, and put a foot across the threshold. “Retain access credentials. Abort backdoor foxtrot bravo kappa; sync intranet with not-to-be-redacted local conscript elemen-”
“Wait, what?! That’s not how it-”
Bzzt.
Multiple overlapping TTS tones commenced simultaneously.
“Error: cannot clear cache while program Lindhauser.aic is acti-”
“Action complete. Local Lindhauser.aic instances terminat-”
“Cache oh-six-hundred dash oh-six-thirty emptied.”
He stepped his other foot across the doorframe.
____________________________________________________________________________
“Scalpel, nurse!”
Robin sighed, fumbling the cumbersome latex-clad fingers of his cleanroom suit over the array of surgical tools currently in the open microwave sterilizer. Jostling a few pairs of tweezers in their racks, he came to rest on an adjustable-heat diamond-rimmed scalpel, flicked the dial twice to make sure it was off, and, gripping it by the blade, withdrew it from the stiflingly-hot confines of the box.
“One day I’ll grab it the other way, ‘n compromise your suit. See how you enjoy a dose of prion slurry,” he grumbled, shoving the polymer grip of the blade into the hand waiting on the other side of the gurney.
The hand’s owner withdrew it without checking if Robin had let go of its blade, and released a cartoonishly-evil cackle. “Hehehe. Fuck you too, Robin.”
A third man slouching over a terminal, one side blossoming with wires, expelled a portmanteau of a snort and a sigh. “Merrick, you have problems,” he said, without lifting his eyes from the command line.
Merrick’s eyebrows arched behind his sterile visor. “Oh, really? Me? You should get a load of this-” -he accentuated, jerking his thumb toward Robin- “-guy. He has done far worse than-”
Hailey Faburetta, the (self-imposed) scribe for this particular foray, and whose nose bridge had been sinking deeper into the crook of her pointer and thumb, broke the discourse. “What’s wrong with you guys?”
It was often quipped, rarely with the luxury of being behind her back, that Hailey had an anomalous social energy density. A subject confined to a frame of four foot eleven, the section’s collective intuition had decided, could not feasibly contain the degree of vigor Hailey could conjure under the correct stressors. Hailey prided herself on her reservedness, and her incursive social tact, so it baffled her that some had gone through the effort to experimentally confirm this. Have I even been in the department long enough, she thought, for that to happen? Surely, five years isn’t enough.
Merrick turned his head towards the pane of glass separating the lab from the adjacent office space to retort. “With me? I’m perfectly sane. As for these… simians, I-”
“I mean all of you.” She paused. “Oliver the least, probably.”
Oliver snapped his neck up from near-parallel with the floor and his terminal to make eye contact with her. “Thanks!”
Merrick craned his head up and neck forward, eyes narrowing. “Really?”
Hailey stared back, eyes slightly less tired now that it was evident she’d struck a nerve. “Yep!”
As Merrick doubtlessly formed, queued, and prepared to fire another juvenile insult, Robin paused mid syringe-unscrew, placed the vaguely-luminous needle in a foam divot in the nearest experiment case, and exasperatedly leaned against an unoccupied gurney. “Listen, this has been… enlightening, but I don’t think procedure calls for-” -he waved his arm in a vague, sweeping motion over the bizarre tableau, splattering Oliver, Merrick, and the sterile glass in front of Hailey with myelin- “-whatever the hell this is.”
“Actually,” Hailey said, cutting off the shit-eating smirk and tandem snark budding on Merrick’s face, “I do wanna get out of here. I’d rather not spend too much of my day in a Faraday cage. Speaking of which…”
“We,” Oliver snappily retorted, “have been over this. We can’t have any contaminants messing with our fresh cognitive isolate.”
“So why not isolate the lab, and let the observer do whatever?” She shot back. “What if we miss a bulletin or something?”
Merrick snorted. “Administration requires five hours forewarning for any consequential bulletins. The only exception within reason is something immediate and urgent, or trivial.”
“Which is…” Hailey puffed her cheeks out before letting them deflate. “The exact thing I’m worried abou-”
The inner airlock bulkhead separating them from the hallway hissed open.
“Where,” an irritated growl with a nontrivial amount of wheeze hissed, “have you been?”
“Celine? What’re you doing here?”
Somehow, in that microsecond, all three occupants of the chamber shot Robin a flaccid stare before turning their attention to the woman in the doorway.
Celine Kuo was a stalky brunette of seventy inches, though the effects of her extremely pronounced eye bags and oddly proper posture ameliorated to reduce her perceptual height by perhaps one. She moved with the manic fervor of a stimmed rabbit and seemingly existed on a plateau of mild depression, in equal enough measure to keep one guessing as to her actual headspace, or, failing that, reifying her behaviors.
Merrick cleared his throat. “Who?”
“All of you!” Celine hiccoughed out. “Dr. Atkins expected you four in Exec like an hour ago.”
Oliver lifted a finger, as if to say something. Before he could, Hailey was already across the room and keying a set of commands into her PDA. “Ah. One hundred and forty seven minutes. That’s…”
Merrick looked down at his scalpel and the gaping lumbar puncture it was meant for.
Oliver looked down at this terminal and the dubiously OSHA-compliant conduit through which a dozen cables were painstakingly wired.
Hailey looked down at the sketch in the margins of her notes which was starting to shape up to something good which she had not yet synced with the site intranet and now likely never would.
Robin looked down at the growingly imperceptible patch on the lower-left quadrant of the sclera of his left eye, and cursed the site planner for not putting a pharmacy in AppMet. Or at least an ibuprofen dispenser.
“So… are you all gonna-”
The fourfold response was an almost instantaneous “We know.”
____________________________________________________________________________
Taking a reasonable average of the quartet indicated that it should have taken them under eight minutes to reach Director Atkins’ office, but in practice it took nearly twice as long.
Robin was a mess of athletic contradictions, being lean, lithe, sticklike, and pale. While most came out on the opinionated side of he-probably-couldn’t-make-a-half-mile, Robin at the very least prided himself on his propensity for running. He didn’t participate in the regular unofficial site footraces like Oliver, because he adamantly refused to compete in any physical regard, but together, they were no scoffing matter in terms of pace.
Hailey and Merrick, meanwhile, appeared on the cusp of some form of abnormally fatal ventilation by the time they had covered Robin and Oliver’s warm up length, in nearly double the time. Oliver internally toyed with the idea of doing rounds between their ever-approaching tail and their destination, but decided against it to up morale, and because he wasn’t cruel enough to grind their faces into their loss.
Robin afforded them no such courtesy.
____________________________________________________________________________
The plurality of Site-184’s infrastructure was, like most Foundation constructs, designed with utility on the mind, at the hilarious expense of aesthetics. Modular modernist nodules, sheets of nondescript matte grey plaster marred by the occasional pane of frosted glass, encased in identical concrete shells ringed by windows. Under normal circumstances, any reprieve from the ever-inoffensive monotones of the inimical corporate designs would be welcome.
Section Lead Offices tended not to offer such. Or maybe they do. I’ve never been in any besides this one.
Robin crossed his legs, leaned against the wall down the hall from the mahogany slab which separated Director Atkins from the rabble, and took a swing from his thermos of coffee. Celine elected to pace back and forth down the full length of the hallway, muttering to herself.
Oliver elbowed him in the ribs. “Got a watch?”
“Oh. Yup. Tis… 4:32, at the moment.”
Oliver pushed off the wall with the foot he was resting against it without a beat. “Heya, Celine, who else is… involved, in all this?”
She paused and pivoted on her heel to face him. “Uhhhh… Art, and Richter, and… that’s it.”
“Oh. Oooohhh boy.”
Celine cast him a grave look. “Yeah. I know.”
The bulkhead to his left slid open with a frictionless woosh, and Merrick and Hailey practically clambered over each other through. Hailey spoke first. “Please get this guy to shut up. What do you even do with this guy-”
Merrick’s eyes, already a near-incandescent, practically ignited. He straightened his back, letting out a gremlin-esque hehehehe, shit-eating grin already spreading across his face.
Celine groaned, Robin sighed, and Oliver mumbled a slight “Oh no” under his breath. “What,” Robin forced out, “did you do?!”
Merrick let out another gremlin giggle which quickly broadened into a laugh, and raised his right index finger. “That which thou canst not undo,” he began, in Shakespearean brogue.
A stenographer would have lost track of the various sources of the ensuant chorus of “No”’s.
“Villains,” he began, “I have done THY MOTHE-”
The mahogany door which Merrick had perched himself upon opened, slamming him into the opposite wall, and a short, square-spectacled man half walked, half wheezed his way out of the door. “What,” he managed, “the hell,” he sputtered out, with markedly more amusement and difficulty, “are you doing?!”
Merrick was too busy reeling and muttering expletives from the gentle push to pick up on his usual cue.
Oliver didn’t even bat an eye. “Oh, hey, Art,” he deadpanned.
“Oh, hey, Oliver,” Art said back in identical inflection.
He turned to survey the assembly. Hailey had gone from a scowl and her hands on her knees to a presumably deeper scowl nestled in the cradle her hands formed around her face. Celine looked like she was on the cusp of ripping Merrick’s larynx out. Merrick was reeling in the way only horribly-malnourished desk workers could from being lightly shoved into a wall. Oliver was placid, a wispy ghost of amusement across his face. Robin had resumed his pose of leaning against the wall, but otherwise shared Oliver’s complexion.
“Oh, whatever, just, get in here.”
The quintet filed in while Art held the door, Robin dragging Merrick by his ear while he flailed and muttered curses.
____________________________________________________________________________
Director Cecil Atkins was built like a skinwalker. That was to say, he was long, wiry, covered in skin blotches, and had the plurality of his noteworthy features concentrated on or near his head. The redshift-refracting lenses he’d installed years prior to repair his debilitating cataracts certainly lent themselves to the image. He also carried himself like a Bond villain.
He was inclined slightly over his mahogany desk, fingers steepled equidistantly beneath his antique surface light, looking for all the world like he was trying and failing to exude Lovecraft. Unlike Lovecraft, his jaw, while square-set at the moment, had the uncanny ability to deform in whatever facial expression so rarely graced the contours of his visage. At the moment, it was a grotesque, hollow grin which stretched the breadth of his face.
The object of his thinly-veiled contempt, that being the gaggle of dubiously-qualified researchers attempting to present a professional front, quickly made itself apparent.
For a moment, neither side spoke.
Robin prodded Merrick, still silently cursing and dusting his coat at the point where Art had slammed into him, in the ribs.
“Ow! You li-”
“Researcher Faulkner! How pleasant of you to assume the position of lead for our summit of sorts. Any opening remarks to be made?”
Merrick remained silent, oblivious to the sextet of tungsten-evaporating glares boring their ways through his temples.
Robin retargeted his glare from Merrick to meet Oliver’s eyes, and in a moment, they came to an unspoken agreement.
A moment later, Oliver elbowed Merrick again.
____________________________________________________________________________
“You want us to what?”
“It’s a very simple concept,” Atkins languidly droned. “It was within living memory for all of you, as juvenile as you are.”
Robin nursed the rapidly-burgeoning agony in his left eye. In the pulsating glow of the blackness behind his eyelid, he briefly saw himself pivot on his heel and shove a fountain pen through Atkins’ larynx. He reluctantly opened his eyes and stared down at the manila folder in his hands. Plastered on the front were two insignias that were beyond his pay grade to recognize, accompanied by two project titles too cliche to remember. GOTTFRIED, SIMULACRUM, something something.
“Merely asset recovery,” Atkins droned on. “You lot are… well experienced in that field, are you not? You ought to be thanking me.”
Art barely bit back the obvious sardonic sticking point that asset recovery usually didn’t take them into a spatiotemporally unstable nuclear wasteland. Much less one whose borders were enforced by lawyers.
Merrick cleared his throat. “Sir, the NUSA is one of the most volatile regions on the planet, currently. In the interests of maintaining the veracity of any of our surviving agreements, how will we be-”
“Astute observation, Researcher Faulkner!” Atkins’ manic tone signaled to Merrick to maybe pipe down. “Deploying any security or established Task Force assets would flagrantly besmirch several long standing diplomatic arrangements, which I will not enjoin you to hear.”
He cleared his throat, caught his breath, and, to Robin’s amazement, actually turned to his window vista and straightened his tie.
“As such, you will not be inserting with any substantial team beyond yourselves. You will be operating in conjunction with a PMC well-adapted to operations in hazardous zones, such as your destination. They have been granted Level 1 clearance; their human and administrative personnel are of tertiary survival priority to us, of course, but their field assets are expendable.”
Celine blinked, apparently having taken a short while to catch up with Aktins’ pace. “Sir, if I may, human? Implying others? Nonhumans? With all due respect, sir, what sort of PMC is this?”
“They employ modified civilian dolls to, among others, avoid arms limitation treaties, act as infiltration units, and serve as shock infantry.”
When Atkins deemed the wait for them to digest this information sufficient, he continued.
“My observations of you all indicate your ability to take care of yourself when not on-duty is scant at best. Under this advisement, you will each be assigned a doll adjutant to serve as your aide-de-camp.”
Merrick perked up at this mention. “Dolls? Will we be allowed to-” -he paused for a hair to collate his word choice- “-make our own selection, sir? In the interests of identifying an adjutant most adapted to our needs?”
Robin, Oliver, Hailey, Celine, and Art all shot glares at him out the corners of their eyes.
“No. They have been preassigned, per prior observations of your personalities and environments which best bring about efficacy. Dr. Odom is preparing them as we speak.”
Merrick deflated.
Robin stepped forward. “Which PMC, exactly, is this, sir?”
Atkins slowly and deliberately rotated his neck such that the luminous cornea of his more-silicon eye caught the light, bringing it to bear on the assembled. “Well,” he started with a small chuckle, “can any of you read Cyrillic?”
____________________________________________________________________________
Only Merrick could read Cyrillic.
____________________________________________________________________________
“Nice going, Merrick. Getting cucked by Richter?”
“That’s not what I meant.”
“Oh sure. Ok, robotfucker.”
“Shut.”
“God, you guys have problems…”