Note: Due to circumstances beyond my control, I'm currently without internet (I'm posting this from a Internet café.) I'll try and reply to any reviews as fast as I can, but it may take a while. Thanks in advance!
Author's note: This chapter originally didn't exist, but when I'd finished the next chapter, the idea came to me and wouldn't leave me alone. So, here it is! There is quite a bit of programming terminology in this chapter, and while I hope I've made everything as clear as possible, I'd like to apologise in advance if anyone's confused. Also, this chapter is quite a bit heavier on exposition than most chapters in this story - apologies if that's not your taste, but I felt it necessary in order to tell the story both in this chapter and chapters to come.
Smooth Jazz Fails
Chapter 4: The Turret Production Line
It was well known amongst the scientists that worked at Aperture that their biggest selling item was the Aperture Science Laser-Guided Sentry Turret. It seemed to just have the right combination of things – it was cute, it was deadly, and it was very naive, saying things like 'er… are ya still there?' when it had just deployed five-hundred bullets into the now-lifeless body of the person it was addressing. In fact, turrets had been so successful for so long that almost everyone working at Aperture had worked in Turret Production at some point in time – indeed, it was seen as an initiation rite by some old-timers.
Amongst some scientists, especially in the fields of AI and robotics, turrets were also seen as the elephant in the room, so to speak – no matter how good a project was, no matter how groundbreaking it had been, it would never be as successful as the turrets. Some people talked of 'toppling the turret empire' in the same kinds of hushed tones as others would have talked about 'landing on the moon' fifty years previous. Most people saw anyone who even considered their projects to have a fighting chance fiscally against the turrets as at the very least half out of their mind.
There was a time when turrets hadn't been on top, of course – indeed, or so Doug had heard, turrets had been introduced by the then-new CEO Caroline Gladys to revitalise a dying Aperture, one that had a debt 'larger than most countries' and was bleeding money into 'useless projects' that 'sounded like the insane ramblings of a deranged mind'.
At least, that's how the person who'd been telling the story to him had described it. But then again, the man had looked like he was at least fifty years old when he had told him the story five years ago, and the story itself, told over a rather drab lunch in the cafeteria, had been constantly punctuated with both an incessant cough and bouts of forgetfulness, so Doug didn't know how reliable he was. The man did retire later on for 'physical and mental health-related reasons', after all. And on top of that, he had also described being forced to grind up moon rocks, of all things; when Doug had asked him what had been the biggest selling product for them at the time, he'd declared, with a completely straight face, 'shower curtains'.
Still, Doug was sure that, while the details might be a tad… out there, the general story was mostly accurate – Aperture had been dying, and turrets had saved them. And now, turrets were all the higher management cared about.
Doug himself had worked on the team programming the rather simplistic AI for turrets – if you could even call it AI – a good eight or so years ago. His time there had involved Improving the human recognition systems and clearing a few edge cases where the turrets didn't quite seem to, well, work right (including an odd case that occurred when you held a banana in front of your face). But he'd left that all behind years ago – because of the huge success of the turret line, the rules had been strict, the hours even longer, and the management very demanding. Even his job now was a heck of a lot better than it had been back then, even as his weary eyes had, every day, stared at the Black Mesa recruitment form that sat in his locker, even as he wondered whether or not maybe, just maybe, things were better there.
It was then with some surprise that Stephen tapped him on the shoulder the Monday after the inspection and said, "Doug, you have an appointment with a turret."
"Er, what?"
"Just got a memo from one of the suits from Turret R&D. Says they need you down there pronto. Something about malfunctioning turrets."
Doug glanced to Sammy, but he only returned a look just as puzzled as Doug's.
"There's got to be some mistake. I haven't worked in turrets in years."
"No mistake, it seems. It's your name on the memo, and they specifically entered your code number." He smiled. "Don't worry, I know some of the young lads down in Turrets. They don't bite, although some of them have a rather… odd sense of humour."
It wasn't the people Doug was really worried about, to be honest – they hadn't specified how the turrets were malfunctioning, so he could be stepping into a death trap.
He briefly mused how ideal it would be of an opportunity to knock him off 'accidentally', but then his brain told him to stop thinking about useless conspiracy theories.
"Now, chop chop – the sooner you go, the sooner you'll be out of there. Good luck!"
Doug sighed – Stephen was right, of course.
And so, he crossed the room, entered the security pin to the door, and walked out, all the while silently cursing the bright spark of whoever had thought this was a good idea.
It would be as he was just reaching the lift that he would meet that very man.
"Er, excuse me! Hold the lift, would ya!"
Doug turned around to see a blonde-haired man sprinting down the hallway as if his life half-depended on it.
"Thanks mate, you don't know how much this means," he said. "I've been trying to wrangle up this guy that we need to help us with something and if he's gone down there by himself, I've got to get to him as fast as I can before he messe-"
It was at this point that the man looked up, stopped talking, and widened his eyes.
"Doug! I can't believe it! Long time, no see! I mean, I should have known it from the name, but-"
Doug stood in a state of slight shock. He had no idea who this person was.
"-those were the days, weren't they? Remember when we blew up the science lab?"
Oh. He definitely remembered that.
"Er… Joseph?"
"Exactamundo, my friend!"
Joseph had been part of his college's robotics club. While the two had teamed up a few times for the local robot rumble competition, they hadn't otherwise interacted very much at all.
"When did you start working at Aperture?"
"Joseph, I've been here for around ten years."
"Really?" He seemed taken aback by that. "I've been the head of turret research and development for around three years; before that I was on the production lines, and before that I was one of the assistants in Aperture's experimental product testing. That would have been… about five years ago."
"Anything interesting go on?"
"Oh, loads of stuff – all kinds of fascinating and horrible and wonderful things! Nothing I can talk about, of course," he clarified when he noticed the look Doug was giving him. "And definitely nothing to do with the west wing, if that's what you're wondering – I'm about as interested as what's going on down there as I have to imagine you would be."
He swiped his card and entered his identification number, and with a lurch, the lift began to sink.
"I thought turrets were in the unsec building?" asked Doug. 'Unsec' stood for 'unsecure', and was a common nickname for the Aperture office building at the very top of the facility.
"Only production," replied Joseph. "Research and development is on the third level – always has been, you know. Don't want anyone stealing our future turret designs, after all."
"Uh…huh," said Doug. Somehow he doubted that turret designs were high on Black Mesa's priority list.
"If I heard correctly, they used to do the AI coding in the offices – management thought the unsec building was safe enough to protect the code, until there was a code breach in… '93 or '94?"
He glanced at Doug, as if expecting him to know the answer. Doug had to admit that this was the first time he'd heard of this – but then again, that would have been about the time he'd requested to be moved from turret AI to something else, and it was entirely possible he missed all this in the process of moving himself.
"It was a few years before I joined Aperture, at least. Anyway, they moved most of the AI programmers to Level 2 – but you'd know all about that – and the turret AI guys down here with the experimental equipment and design people."
"I see."
They stood in silence for a few minutes, watching piping for various things and whatnots go by, until finally the elevator shuddered to a stop.
"Welcome to Level Three: Aperture Science Laser-Guided Turret Research and Development – nineteen eighty-seven," announced the Announcer. "The date is the – sixth – of – September – in the year – nineteen ninety-nine…"
"Oh, you're probably wondering why I brought you down here," said Joseph somewhat loudly over the Announcer's speech. "It's my understanding you worked in turret AI at some point-"
"Yes, but it was a fair while ago," replied Doug.
"Yeah, given how long you've been here I can imagine you might be confused. You see, I thought it might be one of the interns we had a few months ago, you see, they were… not the best we've ever had. I wasn't expecting-"
He hurriedly shook his head, as if to clear away the thought that was obviously just reaching his lips.
"Anyway, we've hit a slight snag, It seems that some of the new code is throwing an error condition, but we can't figure out how."
At that moment, the doors whooshed open.
"Ah, finally! What kind of elevator makes it mandatory to listen to the welcome message?"
"Our kind, it seems," said Doug dryly. Joseph grinned in response.
The two started walking down the entrance hallway.
"Anyway, that's why we need you here."
"Perhaps the bug's in the new code."
Doug hated to state the obvious, but Joseph had always been more of a… mechanics guy rather than a programmer. It was, he supposed (not without a slight level of smugness) probably the reason he got into a management role.
"That's what we thought, but we went through all the new code, and it seems all the functions are being called correctly and everything, at least according to the veteran coders. No funny business with the memory stack either. So we looked at the stack trace, and it turns out the exception's being called in one of your functions – or at least, one of the ones you wrote, according to the changelogs."
The stack trace listed the hierarchy of running functions at the time – if one function ran another function, and that function ran another one, then there would be three items in the stack trace, and they'd be ordered by what ran what. Therefore, unless the function was being called incorrectly, there was no doubt about where the error was happening.
Doug sighed. He'd have to try a different tact.
"Surely you could get someone else to fix it?"
Unless, of course, they were all incompetent. Doug dared not say it, but he had to admit the thought crossed his mind.
"Well… the problem with that is the function in question was rather poorly documented, and… well, we can't get the vets to do it unless we pay them overtime. One of them called it 'spaghetti code' – and that was just the nicest one."
That can't be his code they were talking about, surely?
"Yeah, that's why I thought it was weird seeing you in the elevator," continued Joseph, most likely reacting to his expression. "I'd thought, 'couldn't be him, must be someone else with the same name', because I remember your code was normally rather good."
Well, at least apart from that one incident in the science lab.
"So we figured – er, that is, my superior figured – we could bring 'that joker' – that is, you – down here and pay you normally instead to help rewrite the code, and since you're in the AI labs now, we – er, my superior – figured you've improved tremendously since then, because 'they don't just let any old nobody into the AI labs'."
They were passing a glass pane, on the other side of which was a small wall standing in the middle of nowhere, about five meters from a conveyer belt. When the pair had passed it, he saw that behind it was one of the testing mannequins, and it was absolutely riddled with bullets.
"Yes, this is the turret testing track," said Joseph, stopping at the end of the corridor. "We've recreated the entire production line down here so we can be sure nothing messes up on the actual thing – the last thing we want is thousands of dollars worth of turrets ending up on the redemption track-"
Redemption track?
"-or worse, being delivered to customers defective. Right now, we've stopped the entire thing because- well, you'll see."
They had arrived at a door in the same side of the wall as the glass pane. Doug gave Joseph a rather nervous glance, but Joseph simply smiled and proceeded to enter a PIN into the keypad lock.
"Don't worry, there won't be any turrets coming through – and besides, even if there were, the management platforms are all out of range of the turrets. We're not completely stupid, you know."
"I didn't think-"
He stopped – he hated to admit it, but he had been treating him somewhat unfairly.
"Er… well then, let's go, then."
Joseph nodded and, with that, stepped through the open door.
As they drew further into the complex, Doug could swear he heard voices – two of them, in fact. One was repeating the same thing over and over again, while the other… well, didn't.
And as they drew closer to the source of the noise, it became clear just who was speaking, and that it wasn't just in his head.
"Template," said the Announcer.
"Er, hi there, how are ya?" came the unmistakeable voice of a turret.
"Response."
"Sorry, can't see a thing."
"Template."
"Er, hi there, how are ya?"
"Response."
"Do I get some, uh, eyes at some point?"
"The voice synthesiser's samples were recorded by one of the engineers – way before my time here, though," Joseph noted. "He also configured all the voice messages. Apparently, he thought we should lull criminals into a false sense of security – you know, so their reaction times would increase. Not sure how effective they are myself – I'm sure someone in Statistics could tell you – but from what I've heard, security guards get a good laugh out of it, at the very least."
Doug narrowed his eyes slightly, but otherwise said nothing.
"As for the error messages – well, the story goes that he had quite a sense of humour."
At that point, Joseph rubbed his chin.
"Although, Stats have requested we make the voice even… well, cutesier, at least. Apparently, they think they could get around 500 milliseconds or even a full second longer response time out of one with a higher pitch – not chipmunk pitch, mind you, though, more child-like. We've got someone recording in the soundproof room right now."
At this point, he glanced at Doug and noticed the look in his eyes.
"Oh, not to kill anyone, no! We're hoping if the person get a bullet or two in their leg or something, they'll think twice about infiltrating our client's bases and stuff – and you know, the guards'll pick them up, send them to hospital, and then formally charge them with trespassing and conspiracy to commit a crime and stuff. The turrets are meant as a deterrent, nothing more."
Doug briefly wondered if he really believed that, given their rapid rate of fire, and if he knew that one of the 'clients' was the United States Army.
"Well, anyway, here we are," said Joseph as they arrived at a large circular door that wouldn't look out of place in a spaceship airlock. "Before we go in, you do notice that they're giving the wrong responses, correct?"
Doug listened to the responses for a bit before answering.
"Sounds like they're just defectives," he replied.
"Well, yeah, it does. But – well, you'll see when we enter."
He tapped out a PIN on the keypad and hit the Submit button. With the sound of whirling motors and rushing air, the door slid across the opening and out of sight. Beyond it was… another circular door.
"Clean room?" asked Doug.
"Nah, the chamberlock's for security," replied Joseph. "This one requires a different PIN."
Beyond the second door lay a room not much bigger than the chamberlock they had just left. A row of windows gave them a view into a much larger room, through which the turret conveyer belt thread its way. On the belt were five turrets, and each were being scanned in turn by, well, some kind of scanner. Once the scanner had reached the end, it rewound back to the first turret and sat, presumably waiting further instruction.
Doug could see immediately what was wrong – instead of the bare, exposed innards the defectives would proudly display, the five turrets were completely formed – including their camera and laser sensor.
"Okay, see if that works."
In chairs and a table seated alongside the windows sat three men and two women, all in their early twenties, all huddled around a laptop. They were nervously looking between the laptop and the turrets, as if far more than a good recommendation depended on getting these turrets working. Another man stood in front of a large yellow control panel, holding a switch at the ready, while another was standing before a small compartment in the wall, inside which appeared to be another turret.
"It's finished uploading," one of them said. "Now, Jeff!"
The man named Jeff flipped the switch, and the conveyer belt whirled back into life.
"Template." "Er, hi there, how are ya?" "Response." "So, we're all supposed to be blind, right?"
"Hey guys, how's it going?" called Joseph out to them.
"Sorry, no luck so far, Mr. Aventine," one of them said. "We tried rewriting some of the last group's routines, but it's still cropping up."
"These are this month's interns," Joseph said to Doug. "I told them to quickly take a look at what they could do until I'd returned with you."
He turned to the interns.
"Everyone, this is Doug Rattmann from Artificial Intelligence. He works on… er, what is it you work on?"
"Artificial intelligence," he replied.
"Ah, gotcha, top secret. But surely you could give a bit more than that?"
Doug sighed. "You know I can't do that."
"Ah, okay then. Just know that he's very good at what he does, and he's here to help you guys rewrite the function he wrote when he was here in Turret R&D."
Joseph gave them all a cheerful smile, and then walked back to the chamberlock.
"Now, why don't you guys get acquainted, and I'll just leave you to it, because I have- well, prior arrangements. Toodles!"
And with that, the chamberlock closed.
"So."
Even at the best of times, Doug had never really been a conversationalist, and the awkward silence that surrounded them only served to highlight this fact. What was worse was that the interns all looked expectantly at him, as if they wished for him to start off.
"Uh, hi there. I'm Doug Rattmann, and uh- apparently I'm leading this group," he said somewhat nervously.
"Pleased to meet you, Mr. Rattmann," said one of them, a redheaded male with short, spiky hair. "My name is Edward Sacrow, Bachelor of Science in Engineering."
"Mister Rattmann… honestly, he's not a professor, he's a colleague!" scoffed a short-black-haired man. "Doug, I'm Rawen Evens, and I feel that my skills are enough that I don't have to show off my certifications."
"Hmph!" said Edward, and he folded his arms. "Mr. Rattmann will need to know our talents to properly assess our respective assignmen-"
"Just like men, aren't the lot of you – always waving your accomplishments around," muttered one of the females, a blonde with somewhat tan skin.
"Don't be rude," whispered the other, another redhead with rather pale skin.
"I'm not, it's not like he heard," she whispered back. "Besides, the men outnumber us two-to-one – if you want to survive, you have to know how to bite back."
She then walked up to Doug and shook his hand.
"Susan Turnbull, at your service. I wouldn't mind those two, they argue so much it's a wonder they haven't moved in together."
At this remark, Edward's face turned a rather deep shade of red.
"Anyway, to speed things along, this is Matthew Thomas" – a man somewhat shorter than the rest, neck-length brown hair rather obviously combed in a hurry, wiggled his fingers, – "my good friends, Jeffery Sinclair and Audrey Patrica" – the somewhat curly-haired lever puller and the redheaded woman waved – "and finally," she finished, pointing to a very short-haired blonde man with large, thick-rimmed glasses perched on his freckle-splattered nose, "Joe Pondetta."
"Uh, nice to meet you all," said Doug. "Apologies if I don't get your names right – there are quite a bit of you, and we won't have much time to get properly acquainted."
"No problem, we're all grown-ups here," replied Susan. "Well, at least, most of us."
If looks could create sharp implements out of thin air, the glare Edward was now giving Susan would have lodged at least twelve daggers and a broadsword at her head – probably just as well that wasn't the case then, Doug mused. He placed a mental note away to keep the two as far away from each-other as possible.
"Right, then," he said, rubbing his fingers together, "let's see this alleged code."
The small crowd parted to allow Doug to reach the computer. When he had, with a rapid combination of keystrokes and mouse swipes, Matthew brought up the file and scrolled down to the right position.
Doug scanned the function name. 'FIXFORALIGNISSUE' – that name rang alarm bells in his head.
He continued down the page, and as he did, his brow became more and more furrowed. The description of 'spaghetti code' had certainly been partially apt, if somewhat exaggerated – there were a fair few quick and dirty patchjobs present in the function. And Doug was fairly certain he knew why.
As he recalled, all those years ago, he'd been assigned this specific bug to fix by day's end – just after lunch, at that. He'd known it'd take at least a week to write it properly, but the floppies containing that version of the turret's firmware were scheduled to go out to press in two days, and upper management weren't prepared to delay that date or reassign people from elsewhere. So instead, he'd decided to write it quickly, so it would at least hold up for that version, and then rewrite it as time allowed.
But, as it turned out, time had not really ever allowed – the tight schedule meant that Doug could never really work it in himself, and his manager only really seemed to care that it worked, not about how well it worked. Eventually, he stopped bringing it up, and later, forgot about it entirely.
To be honest, he was surprised that it hadn't been rewritten before now. He guessed that this was just the first time anyone had noticed – as his manager had felt at the time, why bother if it was working?
"Could you run the code with the debugger running?" Doug asked.
Matthew nodded, and tapped out a key command. A busy cursor appeared, and the status bar read that it was now compiling.
Unlike Code Blue (or indeed, most Aperture Science projects), Turret Manufacturing had a real-time debugger, which compiled and ran on the server, instead of a mainframe. This was because, as the reasoning went, turrets were so much less complex than a proper AI that they were able to run on a normal machine at only half-speed, whereas even Code Blue would take several years to decide how to place one foot in front of the other, metaphorically speaking (although Turret's rather new computers certainly helped a lot.) And without Aperture's self-designed robotic chipset, a low power parallel-processing twenty-four core system-on-a-chip (designed for – what else – the turrets), Doug was fairly sure management wouldn't even be considering most AI projects – all the utility in the world wouldn't make up for the fact that, without the mainframe, molasses could out-manoeuvre them.
The program indicated it was running the code for only a moment before it beeped, the code window leaping to the position it had stopped, and the intermediate section blaring an angry-red error message, reading 'Exception thrown: EX_INPUT_NOT_FOUND_OR_INVALID'.
Doug's eyes bounced from line to line. He could see what the problem was – the code attempted to access the turret's visualisation array, but for some reason the array had very little data in it The code manually checked if there was enough data to analyse it, and then, if not, threw the exception – which was, without the debugger, handled by the blind turret messages.
But why was there so little data in the first place?
Doug glanced at the stack trace, and an idea of what might have happened began to form.
"This function, ST_RUN – it's recent?"
Matthew shook his head. "It's been there for about a year, according to the changelogs. It's a self-test routine – it makes sure all the hardware is working before continuing with the rest of the code."
"Oh, I remember Mr. Aventine talking about it," Rawen said. "Apparently there'd been some kind of mishap – something not being detected or something – and they decided to put it in for good measure."
"Some of them weren't distinguishing friendlies from unknowns because the camera was malfunctioning," recited Edward in a somewhat droll voice – apparently he'd regained his confidence somewhat. "It was picking up the moving object with the laser, but since the image it was receiving was corrupted, it decided everything was an 'unknown'. They didn't pick it up until they'd shipped a few to customers – that was a rather embarrassing affair, so they had to do something about it."
"Ah, thank you, Edward," replied Rawen, narrowing his eyes.
"Wasn't that the function we were just working on?" asked Audrey.
"Ah, yes," said Matthew, tapping his fingers on the tabletop. "The last group'd added a bunch of code to test the bullet loading and spring mechanism, and the motors for the flaps. They'd also rewritten a bit of the laser and camera self-test – that's what we were working through when you came in."
Of course – the interpreter would run at the same time as the self-test function. Previously, the self-test completed before the interpreter finished initialising, but now the added code for the gun mechanisms had slowed the self-test down so that the interpreter started before the self-test was complete – thus, instead of data from the laser, the visualisation array contained a small bit of test data, explaining the so-called 'blindness'.
It'd be a simple fix to make his function wait until the self-test was finished. But Doug wanted to do better than that – he wanted to do the rewrite he had not been able to do before, and now was the perfect opportunity.
Doug explained what he wanted to do, and the interns all agreed that it'd probably be a good idea (although Edward grumbled something about 'more work' under his breath). He then took control of the keyboard from Matthew, went through all the code and, as he did, inserted comments on what he remembered each section did.
Once he'd finished (a process that took about twenty minutes), they all migrated out of the other chamberlock and off to the workstation room. On the way, they passed a rather large grinding mechanism below several small chutes, beside which was a sign that read "Redemption Track Terminus" - probably an in-joke, Doug mused, as in his day it had merely been called the Recycling Track.
Once they arrived at the workstations, he assigned each of them a section of code to rewrite. He then passed between the consoles, making sure with a glance at the screens that their coding was satisfactory and clarifying bits of code when the occasional question emerged.
And as he did, Doug couldn't help but smiling to himself. This is how he'd manage a group of programmers, had he the chance – the right way.
"Hey, Mr. Aventine – we're done!" Jeffery said through the communication speaker that led to Joseph's office, almost four hours after they had started.
"Really?" asked Joseph's voice on the other side.
"Yeah, the simulation runs it pretty much perfectly."
There was a slight pause before Joseph continued.
"That took a bit longer than I expected."
"Mr. Rattmann really wanted to fix his function," Jeffery replied.
"That sounds just like the Doug I remember – 'good enough' was never good enough for him," Joseph replied. "Alright, I'll meet you guys at the testing track."
"Sure thing, Mr. Aventine!" said Jeffery, and he turned off the device.
When the gang had returned to the testing track observation room, Joseph was already there. He'd been examining the small glass room that contained the template turret – the current production model, used as a baseline for the experimental ones.
"Er, sir?" asked Susan.
"Ah, yes," said Joseph, turning to greet them. "Well, you know what to do."
Matthew got out the laptop, brought it out of sleep mode, and sent the compiled code to the collection of turrets sitting unsuspectingly on the conveyer belt.
"Alright, now, Jeffery!"
And with that, Jeffery threw the switch.
The conveyer belt scrolled back to the first turret, and the scanner's beam pulsed across its body.
"Template," said the Announcer.
"Er, hi there, how are ya?" replied the template.
"Response."
"Er, hi there, how are ya?" the first turret replied.
At that moment, the room exploded with noise – Matthew shouted "YES!" rather loudly, causing Susan and Rawen to block their ears; Jeffery was da-ing a little victory song to himself, dancing somewhat awkwardly as he did; and most everyone else (excepting Edward, Doug and Joseph) was cheering.
After the noise died down, and each of the turrets had been deemed acceptable by the scanner, Joseph clapped his hands together.
"Nice job, everyone! Alright, Doug, you're free to go – thanks for your assistance."
"No problem," said Doug.
The interns all said goodbye to Doug, with many of them expressing an interest in meeting him again. Doug nodded along, and when it was all finished, he waved them off, waited for Joseph to unlock the chamberlock, and took his leave down the corridor that lay beyond.
These kids were far too young – far too young for Aperture. Unless they were exceptional, they'd get chewed up by the slow, scaly monster that was management and its stupid production values, and spat back out into the world as broken and defeated as the bones of knights against the dragons of old. They should have chosen somewhere else to start off their programming adventures – somewhere else to make sweet scientific music, somewhere else to compose software melodies of great majestic beauty.
And yet-
Doug shook his head. It was getting close to the time where he needed to take his second pill of the day. He'd retrieve that on the way back, and then he'd try and salvage whatever plans he'd had before all this happened.
He'd made it over the testing dummy, and was now walking along the corridor that passed along it. So wrapped in his thoughts he was that he didn't notice a door opening before him until it had almost whacked him in the face.
"Oh, I'm so sorry!" said a rather familiar female voice – but Doug didn't connect it to a face until she had stepped out from behind the door.
"M-Ms. Gladys?" stammered Doug.
"Ah, Mr. Rattmann, we meet again!" Caroline said, smiling.
Of course – she was inspecting Turret R&D today, wasn't she?
At that moment, the sound of a door bursting open, loud panting and rapid footsteps announced Joseph's entry into the hallway.
"Sorry, Ms. Gladys, I just remembered that you were – and I know this was supposed to be a secret – but-"
"It's quite alright," Caroline said. "I've been recording the new voice for the turrets, and we were just finishing the last sound bites. It's just something I wanted to do – to give back a little something to Aperture, to have a sort of endearing legacy. In case-"
She broke off suddenly, and started staring into the distance.
"Um… Ms. Gladys?"
She snapped from her contemplation and looked Doug in the eye.
"Do you want to hear them?"
Doug didn't quite know whether or not he did, so he merely nodded.
"Excellent! You'll be the first, apart from the sound engineers, Joseph, and myself, of course. I'm eager to know what you think."
And she led the way into the room she had just come out of.
"Alright, guys, run the vocal simulator!"
The room was empty, apart from a boom microphone; in the next room, visible through a window in the wall was a series of computers and some kind of sound board.
One of the people at a computer nodded and tapped out something on his keyboard.
"Sighted," said the Announcer.
"Hi. Hello. Target acquired. Hello, friend. There you are. I see you. Who's there? Preparing to dispense product."
The voice that spoke sounded like a higher-pitched, heavily processed version of Caroline's own – much different from the husky male voice that had been used for the turrets as long as Doug could remember. It was, as Joseph had described, indeed almost child-like, and Doug could see how even the hardest soul would think twice about attacking it.
"Lost," continued the Announcer.
"Are you still there? Target lost. Searching."
"Impact."
"Coming through! My fault! Sorry!"
"Bullet impact."
"Hey, it's me! Don't shoot!"
"Sleep."
"Sleep mode activated. Nap time."
"Disabled."
"I don't hate you. I don't blame you. Whyyy?"
"That's all we have right now," Caroline explained. "The sound lab boys tell me they're still working on the best way to phrase some of the new voice files. We've decided to rewrite them, you see, to fit the character of the new voice synth."
She glanced at Doug expectantly.
"So, what do you think?"
"It's, uh, nice," he replied.
The voice was certainly nice – cute and cuddly, and definitely something you wouldn't want to kill – and even he could appreciate the irony. But he still felt that the whole thing was very… wrong. Tricking people into stumbling into the turret's fire, or delaying for long enough to shoot them – even if they were criminals, even if it were as Joseph had said and they only shot to injure, not to kill – it just felt wrong to him, like something someone with a very morbid mind would come up with.
"Glad that you like it!" Caroline didn't seem to have noticed the hesitation in Doug's voice. "Well, I must be off – Mr. Staltworth will probably be on my back about taking my time. I'll see you around, Mr. Rattmann, Mr. Aventine."
The two nodded.
"Oh, and Mr. Rattmann – if you need anything, or if anyone's giving you trouble, just let me know."
"Er, yes, Ms. Gladys?"
"And also, take this. You'll know what it means when you need it."
She held out a scrap of paper. Doug took it and glanced at it – it was a four-digit number.
He looked up at Caroline with a quizzical look, but she just smiled and exited through the door.
"What was that about?" asked Joseph.
"Your guess is as good as mine," Doug replied. "Well, take care."
"You too, Doug. I hope to see you around soon."
They shook hands, and Doug turned to exit the sound booth.
"One more thing," Joseph said. "Whatever you do, don't let the Management get you down. You're better than that."
"Huh?" Doug wasn't too sure what had prompted that.
"Just a sense I got," he replied.
Doug nodded and, after giving Joseph a small smile, left for the lift.
His time in Turret R&D had certainly not quite gone as he'd expected, and for that he was glad – and he'd been able to actually fix something, and for that he was gladder.
It was a good thing, he mused as he walked, that nothing had gone wrong, either. Running from turrets was the furtherest thing on his list of things he'd rather be doing, and the best he could hope for was that he'd never be in that situation for as long as he lived.