“It has to be around here somewhere,” Kerry muttered to himself, lodging the flashlight in his mouth so he could get a better look at the blueprints he was using as a reference–but which must be wrong. The first couple of floors had been close enough to the paper, but down here in the basement–everything was all off. Had the company sent him a print of a different building’s basement or something? He took the flashlight back in his hand and shone it around the pitch black space surrounding him. They hadn’t told him, or the rest of his team, what was up with this facility–all they’d said was that they needed the power back online as soon as possible. The place seemed fairly new…but also neglected somehow, and in a few rooms, he’d nearly gagged at the strong scent of bleach hanging in the air. Someone had already come through the building, cleaning something–but what? Still, he might be the team leader, but he was still just some flunkie contractor as far as the company was concerned. Still–the blueprint might be wrong, but why wouldn’t the generators be down here somewhere? They certainly hadn’t been anywhere else he’d looked already.
He was alone inside–Quinn and Holden were outside, checking the ground lines together, while Kerry found the generators and saw if the problem was with them. He checked a few more rooms, occasionally checking back with the mostly wrong blueprint, but finally he found the generators. He poked around for a few minutes, and the problem was definitely internal–half of the control panel had been mashed to bits, with what looked like a club of some kind. That wasn’t too much of an issue, though. He found the system outputs and inputs, hooked them up to the laptop he’d brought along in his backpack, and he was able to run a basic system check if nothing else. He breathed a sigh of relief when he got the result back–there was nothing wrong them them physically, it seemed. Someone had just run an emergency shutdown, and then smashed the panel after the fact–but why?
The company had been tight lipped about the project, tighter than normal. They hadn’t even been told where they were going–just flown into some town, where the company had a small camp established, and then brought them here by truck to get their work done. He was a bit surprised he wasn’t under armed guard or anything, from the way they’d been acting, which was a bit of a relief–they wouldn’t let him in if there was anything to worry about, certainly. He got the system to reboot, and waited a few minutes, listening to the machinery around him start to come back to life, slowly. He expected a mechanical error or two, and sure enough, they were there–he went and fixed the relatively minor issues, and soon enough the place was humming back to life, lights on, and he breathed a sigh of relief. Last time he’d gone on one of these contracts, he’d had to spend months in the field, laying wire to fucking nowhere. It would take a few days to get a new control panel hooked in, but if there was nothing more than that, he’d be home in another couple of days.
He spent a few minutes with the system, making sure everything was running smoothly, helping it get back to it’s proper capacity. He’d have to leave the laptop down here for the meantime, but he plugged it into a nearby socket–and he heard the noises for the first time. A hiss of hydraulics, the odd clank of metal on metal–but it was distant and muffled by the sound of the turbines beside him–he just assumed it was the system, and hoped it wasn’t a major issue he’d have to fix. Still, he should radio in and let them know things were working. “Ground crew, this is Generator,” he said into his walkie talkie, “Got the place lit up again–obviously not a cable. Come on–” but that was as far as he got, before the radio squealed back at him, unleashed a burst of static and went silent as it landed on the floor, and he backed away from it.
The noise again, except this time, he heard it clearer, both because he was away from the generator, and because it was coming closer. He looked back towards the door, and through it came some odd, squat robot. It had a wide flat head with a few sensors, and it stood on three jointed legs which met at a small body below the head. It swiveled towards him, and a dull voice said, “Unknown personnel. Scanning. Unauthorized entry. Secure and sedate.”
The thing started towards him, and Kerry ran towards it, planning to shove it over and run past, but three tendrils shot out as he got close, wrapping their way around his body and neck, one puncturing right into his vein and administering a shot which made him feel almost instantly woozy. He fought for a moment, but the thing was holding him much too tight, and he started to droop, holding onto consciousness as best he could. The thing wrapped him up further and then lifted him off the ground, carrying him horizontally off the ground, and backtracked out of the doorway and headed down the hall–until it stopped and froze in place for a few, long, seconds.
Kerry didn’t know what to make of it’s sudden hesitation, but it hadn’t loosened it’s grip on him in anyway. His vision was beginning to tunnel too, and it was too much effort to even hold up his head. “Unauthorized personnel has been reclassified as test subject Eta One. Will proceed to testing level, and continue with testing.”
It turned around and went back the other direction, heading for a working elevator against one wall, and stepping inside. Kerry couldn’t…see anymore. His eyes wouldn’t open. He expected to go up–but instead, his gut shifted uncomfortably and they dropped. The blueprint hadn’t mentioned a sub basement. Make that, sub basements, as they descended even further, and Kerry passed out as he sank into the earth.
Bracken's Corner 