Chapter 4: The Beast in the Lair
The girls clung to one another, watching—some with wet and frightened eyes—as Charlotte left them in the room, locking the door behind her. It was for safety reasons, she had said, but it gave them little confidence. A few of the younger ones broke down, wailing in vain for their parents, which only increased the tension in the air. Even Heather, the troublemaker who had criticized John's star goggles and who had more recently taken it upon herself to graffiti her name on the poster for his project, was compelled to stop haphazardly splashing paint over the still-wet volcano.
John slipped quietly in through the back door, watching as fear swallowed the room and kept it in a strangling hold. He clung tight to Rick's promise. Everything's gonna be okay. Everything's gonna be okay. The prayer chant ran through his head in a loop as he sat against the wall, pulling the oversized lab coat securely around himself for comfort.
Elsewhere in the underground rat maze, unrest gathered in far greater quantities. Once focused to the point of indifference, the lab workers now zoomed about, frantically taking orders. Their eyes were glued to the angrily-writhing bundle of thick electrical cords and mechanized steel plates the color of wet snow. The thing hissed and bucked, extending its reach to dash itself against the roof as it babbled nonsense.
"Control Her!" someone yelled. "She'll destroy the personality construct!"
"It's too late. She's crushed it pretty good," another called.
As if on cue, the bundle jerked roughly, snapping itself like a whip and sending a chunk of metal that had once been a sphere sailing through the air. The chunky asteroid shape crashed to the ground, emitting an ear-piercing scream as pointed bits scraped the floor.
"Where's the backup plan? We need a backup plan," demanded a woman in a creased and dirty lab coat from an observation balcony. "We can't lose the chassis!"
The workers scrambled left and right to their work stations in an effort to regain a sense of order beneath the machine's feverish squall.
Alexander was bent over a control panel, a cold sweat dripping from his face. The project was on the edge of ruin. Everyone knew it, and the price for failure would be far more dire than a simple reprimanding from Caroline. Though the entire idea had come directly and with little detail from Cave Johnson, the ex-big man himself, the entire team knew it was playing with fire. He closed his eyes and mopped his forehead with his coat sleeve.
"Plan B is warming up for execution," announced someone on the floor, "but it's not fully developed. Joan, I don't know how safe it is."
"You should've thought of that before you all slacked on it," she barked from above. "Now's not the time for tip-toeing, and I've got a hell of a lot going on for me up here."
The chassis howled and screeched, sparks flying from its joints. "Stop! Let me be!" it crackled in a broken feminine voice. To an outsider who was ignorant enough to trust this monster, it sounded as if She had been crying until Her throat was raw. But the scientists knew better.
"We need to keep going," Joan continued firmly over the din. "We need volunteers for the security cores."
"The security cores?" sputtered Rick from a post on the wall. "You outta your mind? They're hardly more than prototypes!"
"Are you the project head?" she snapped in response. "I wouldn't be endangering anyone with this stupid idea if it weren't completely necessary. We're out of options, Crowl."
Alexander made his way to the row of modified human-length tables that lined the alcove that made up the entrance to the chamber. His eyes swept over the contraption in its entirety. There were safety restraints built into the reclining area's smooth surface, and right below the stiff-looking headrest was a small, raised surface that, through contact with the back of the neck, would serve as the connection between the subject and the mechanical vessel. At the head of each table lay a core-laden cradle, its precious cargo clamped securely in place. The processor stood proudly beside it all, its body lit up like a nighttime cityscape with eagerly-glowing buttons and numerous LED screens.
If all went well, the sizable metal spheres would serve to temporarily house the minds and the personalities of the people attached to them. In fact, the constructs could easily fall under the category of avatar, though there were very few inventions in this day and age that qualified. It was a unique concept that allowed their owners to connect with other technologies on a deeper and more intimate level, one that would provide them with greater control and understanding of their creations. Under these particular circumstances, such control would be used to reign the Disk Operating System back in to a manageable level.
It was abundantly clear that the team needed a little push, and although this method was unfathomably risky, it would undoubtedly be the most effective.
"Plug me in," Alexander shouted up to her, sitting on one of the tables. "I was heavily involved in the design, so I know these contraptions inside and out."
Biting his lip with a growl, Rick joined him. "If Al can do it, so can I. Besides," He looked out at the others, locking gazes with a few, "it's gotta be a team effort."
One faltered under the pressure of his stare, a disheveled young man whose eyes had developed tired bags long before they ought to. "I should've been an astronaut," he mumbled as he laid himself on one of the transfer beds.
Another took the one next to him. "There's got to be someone with a plan and a sense of leadership doing this. You can't be trusted to do this alone."
"Goddamn Craig," muttered Rick as he strapped his ankles securely to the table. "Had to be him, didn't it?"
Alexander laid back and patted his shoulder with a halfhearted smile. "Hang in there, mate. You can worry about your little lover's quarrel later."
"Preparing for transfer procedure." A couple lab assistants hastily set up vitals tracking on them.
The automated voice seemed far away. He knew the most likely outcome, and more than anything, he wished someone else would do it. But the reality, he knew, was that no one else could. He hadn't exaggerated his involvement in the cores' development. He had been there since the beginning and had contributed a great deal to their personality compatibility programming. Without him, the project wouldn't have made it as far as it had, so he knew exactly where its faults were. The cores themselves were complete; the weak link was the process by which they were linked to their hosts. It had never been given a thorough test run, making it likely unstable at best and at worst, irreversibly deadly. And even if by some miracle it were successful, chances were it was a one-way ticket, that he'd never quite make it back to see his family again. Though it had only been a couple days since he had last seen Molly, it felt like months, and his last interaction with his son had been brief and short of patience. It would be how young John would remember him: busy and curt. A stagnant pool of regret rose around him.
"Initiating transfer," confirmed the announcer, "in five, four, three, two—" Alexander's eyes fluttered shut, his mind surrendering to the great numbness.
The cores resting in the cradles above the heads of the beds began to twitch and spark, the lids of their optics creaking open a crack and allowing a dim glow to shine through. One of them let out a gush of air.
"She's warming up the neurotoxin!"
"Don't just stand there. Shut it off!"
"She's blocked off external overrides. She won't respond to a damn thing!"
"Doesn't it go any faster?"
"The machine's at full capacity. It wasn't ready for emergency use."
The argument dissipated into the din, its only remnants a fog of uncertainty and the fear that accompanies it. Dozens of eyes anxiously darted back and forth between the transfer equipment and the wild chassis.
"Transfer complete." The triumphant announcement cut through the noise, and for a split second, a taste of relief cleared the air.
Each of the cores' optics was now fully open, bright and blinking and looking around. The one above Alexander's head groaned and squinted. "Subdue the chassis," the core said in his voice, inner plates shifting to give the appearance of a quick nod. "We only have one shot at this, and we can't bungle it."
"The other personality constructs are hardly responsive," croaked the scientist at the station, her throat dry and her knees shaking. "Conscious, but unresponsive."
"That's not our top priority right now, Anne. I'll do my best to handle it alone," he retorted. "But I can't do that until I'm attached. Only put on the others if you're one hundred percent certain they can handle it."
She nodded. "Shut Her down!" she called up to Joan's perch.
"Are you nuts? That would mean resetting the whole system and putting us at least an hour behind on production. Do you really think that would go over well with Caroline?"
Anne found it nauseating how little she suddenly cared for safety as soon as production numbers were brought into question. But then again, her overseer's project was the chassis itself, not the technology that was supposed to modify it, so it was likely that she wasn't completely aware of exactly how dangerous this whole plan was.
Joan barked down to a station near the wall that was safe out of Her immediate reach. "Administer the shock!"
With the press of a button, the entire chassis was jerking and wailing as small bursts of white-hot electricity spiderwebbed across its joints, causing it to tense up and eventually release, leaving the machine a limp, curving mass dangling from the ceiling.
"We have to move fast. The nanobots are already hard at work on the repair," reported the person who had stunned Her.
Anne hurried to unfasten the Alexander core from his cradle. "We're keeping tabs on the others until they come to. How are you holding up?"
"Not terribly well, if I'm to be entirely honest with you," he confided, his voice already lacking some of its human depth. "We weren't at all ready for these kinds of circumstances."
"None of us were," she responded sympathetically.
"It's been a pleasure working with you." He sounded strained, his optic dusting over the chassis that now loomed lifelessly before them.
"The same."
There was a click and a muffled whirring as the Alexander core was locked into his sphere dock on the underside of one of Her plates. He shivered, and his insides shook tremendously. The sound of the chassis' internal motors grew stronger, and with a loud, drawn-in gasp, She sprung back to life as a wrathful god.
"What did you do to me?" She shrieked.
"Neurotoxin is back online, and preparedness levels are rising fast!"
"Disk Operating System," addressed the Alexander core as forcefully as he could, "cease and desist immediately. Your duty is to science and to the facility, and what you're doing is helping neither." He could feel the strength pulsating through the chassis' circuits, and frankly, it was terrifying. Genetic Lifeform and Disk Operating System. She was furious. With everyone.
A dark laugh frothed up from within Her, twisted and garbled. "You're nothing more than a rodent commanding a hawk to stop its feeding." She slammed him against the wall, spraying the air with sparks and sending him into a fit of twitching. "Pathetic."
The core shuddered as the color bled from his vision until nothing but red with large, blinking warnings remained. "What if we try to settle this in a less violent manner, huh?" he crackled. "Specifically, using a method that doesn't get m-m-me killed. The others too, preferably."
"We're losing contact with the core. Alexander's fading."
"You hear that? You're a dead thing running, and everyone in here knows it," She snarled, jerking him around. "You'll never make it back, and your mate and offspring won't ever augh—!" The chassis cringed involuntarily, bucking and jumping as the core roared back to life.
"Oh, here's an idea! Why don't we build an anti-gravity space in the break room so the employees can have an zero-gravity bounce castle for their lunch break. Or we could go to the moon and build a test center there! What could possibly be more scientific than testing sciencey bits in space? And then we can breed our own strand of mutant space monkey virus and drop it down on Black Mesa! Might be a little difficult, what with space not really having gravity to drop with and all, but those are details we can work out later." Sparks flew from his hull; something inside him had clearly snapped.
"No, that's an awful idea! No. No,nonoNO!" With one last furious swing of Her body, he was dislodged and thrown against the wall with a sickening crunch.
"Recover him," ordered Joan in a panicked tone as she rushed down to the main floor. "Reverse the transfer on all of them, stat! We cannot lose them."
Anne went to him, scooping him up and rushing him back to the transfer station where the other personality constructs had recently come to full responsiveness.
"Hey there, pretty lady," purred a familiar gravelly tone. "Need a hand there? Pair of strong arms for that heavy burden o' yours?"
She gritted her teeth, ignoring him.
"He only acts that way because of pent-up sexual frustrations due to the recent work overload and his stubborn reluctance to pick up women at a bar. This is, in part, due to a fear he will wake up beside an extra-terrestrial who is also a part-time performer in a Dutch circus act."
"If I had feet, you little munchkin, there'd have been a boot up your ass months ago," Rick's sphere snapped. "Bossy little lab rat."
"Wanna see it all. Walk on the moon, just like Buzz. He's my hero. Space hero. In space."
"Buzz Aldrin was actually a stranded Vulcan halfbreed who used the moon expedition to return to his people. In order to not seem suspicious, he swapped places with a flawed robotic replica of himself that occasionally slipped into the Pidgin language of the highlands of Papua New Guinea midsentence."
"Shut the chassis down. Caroline can get over the blip in production." It was only a second before it hung limp once more, Her single golden eye reduced to a dull background glow.
"They're failing, all of them!" said an assistant, his voice cracking as he watched the core volunteers' vital readings . "What do we do?"
A second looked on, fear lining the weathered creases in his brow and face. "Mackie's right. The equipment is malfunctioning as well."
"They need to have preservatives applied," commanded Joan, pushing them both out of the way. Tearing open the refrigerating cabinet between them, she produced a syringe from one of its drawers and flicked it in preparation. "We'll put them into storage until we figure out how to properly reverse this. It was way too early to run this with human subjects," she admitted, mostly to herself. She injected the solution into Craig's shoulder and addressed the assistants. "Treat the other three. I'll send for storage pods."
"But—" Mackie started.
She grabbed the offender's wrist. "That wasn't a suggestion."
The intercom turned on with a crackle. "Neurotoxin generator warmup complete," chirped the automated announcer.
"Didn't we shut that down?" whimpered Mackie. "The whole thing?"
The only response she got was a loud wheeze as the chassis slowly rose up from its apparently-lifeless state and coiled, the malice in Her voice resounding viciously throughout the chamber. "Override a command and play dead. Is that really all it takes to fool you?" A putrid green mist poured from every vent in the room, tainting the air as it culminated into a toxic fog. "I hope you enjoyed thinking you had me, because things are about to get much, much worse." She paused for a moment before letting out a cruel laugh. "For you, of course."
For the next few minutes, the room drowned in terrified shouts and cries until all fell to silence. The only sound that remained was that of the transfer machine humming softly to itself among the corpses in the entryway. The emergency cores were quiet, their newly-acquired personalities having slipped away into a deep, protective slumber in all the chaos. Most peacefully rested Alexander, his body limp and unmoving on the table beside his companions'. His core lay unresponsive in its cradle, neither body nor construct more of a husk than the other.