"There's no handle," Mike Teavee said as if the rest of us weren't also facing the massive steel doors.
Why did some people feel the need to blurt out the obvious, like babes discovering their own toes? Handle-less doors weren't even that uncommon. Though motion sensors seemed unlikely for the SPD entrance, based on the loop of antique keys Wonka produced from his jacket pocket.
"There's no handle," he said, "because I haven't found it yet."
"What's that supposed to mean?" Veruca demanded.
Wonka waved her off and examined the doors, which had pyramid-shaped studs set every few inches in them like they were going through a goth phase. His lips moved in a silent chant as his gaze slid along the rows of studs, occasionally stopping on one for a few moments before he started the chant all over again. There was something familiar about the repetitive words and dramatic stop at the end, but I couldn't put a finger on it.
Veruca huffed, likely unaccustomed to being ignored. "I asked you a question, Willy."
Why did it sting so badly to hear her use his first name?
"Hush," he snapped, "or I'll lose count and lock the door permanently."
Count! That was why it felt familiar! He was playing a children's counting game with the studs. But which one? One potato, two potato? Eeny, meeny, miny, moe? I watched his lips move for a moment more and had to stifle a giggle when I made out a couple of the words. Bubblegum, bubblegum. Of course.
"In a dish!" I said, unable to help myself.
Wonka stopped chanting and turned to stare at me. Oof. Wrong move. Nobody likes a smartass, Charlie.
"How many pieces..." he said.
I exhaled. "Do you wish?"
He beamed, turned back to the door, and said, "Four! One, two, three, four!" Then he set his fingertips on one of the studs. "Ready?"
Veruca was having none of it. "What are you two doing?"
"This is a chocolate factory, not a bran factory, Mrs. Salt," Wonka replied. "We're having fun."
There was a sly curl to his lip when he spoke that I'd never seen before—a glimpse of humanity beneath the saccharine façade of professionalism. It made me wonder, not for the first time, who he was when he was away from work. A complete stranger? A selfish narcissist? Was there even a hint of the eccentric magician who had danced through my adolescent daydreams, turning cherry lollipops into hard candy roses with a flick of his wrist?
That was a drawback of his solitary life, I supposed. It left so much to the imagination of strangers. An innocent boy with a serious sweet tooth, for example, might build a fantasy around the attractive inventor in his candy fortress, only to become disillusioned later in life when the man turned out to be a soulless taskmaster. Or a former chocolatier, still licking his wounds from the drawn-out collapse of his empire, might imagine his secretive rival to be a literal monster in hiding.
"Miss Salt," Veruca said. She brushed her dark hair from her face in a motion I could only describe as purposefully casual. "I'm divorcing my husband."
The other three celebrities gasped as if she'd confessed to a murder, but Wonka merely nodded. "Miss Salt. My mistake. Are you ready?"
"I'm so ready. That fool posted some stuff on social media that got him mobbed, and I can't have that disaster tied to my—oh. You mean ready for whatever thing you're doing. Yeah, go for it."
Wonka's shoulders sagged, a bit of the wind removed from his sails, but his weakened smile remained as he twisted the stud. The half-inch pyramid spun like a screw and came off in his hand, revealing a hole with a tiny peg in the center. It was an old-fashioned keyhole like the lock on a vintage trunk, which explained his oxidized keys. They jangled like windchimes on a rainbow-colored string as he searched for a toothless one with a square barrel and shoved it into the hole.
"Hold on," Violet said. "My cousins play that bubblegum game, and all the numbers are made up. How do you know you've picked the right spot?"
Wonka pondered the question for a bit and leaned toward her conspiratorially. "Since you've signed your NDA, I'll tell you. Every morning, my staff brings me a piece of candy with a numerical code inside. I eat the candy, memorize the code, and combine it with the bubblegum game to find the keyhole."
"You mean you memorize the code and then eat the candy," Mike Obvious said with an eyeroll. "You can't memorize it after you eat it."
Wonka's eyes widened. "I can't? Well, if that's true, you must be right."
"The keyhole moves around?" Violet asked. "Every day?"
"Every day."
Mike crossed his arms. "Okay, but where's the handle?"
Wonka's grin returned, and he turned the square key like a screwdriver. With each rotation, a cylindrical section of metal about the size of a doorknob twirled outward from the door. I was impressed. The precision fit was so perfect I hadn't even noticed the outline of the knob before he began.
"There. A handle. And now, the latch."
One at a time, he inserted all the remaining keys into keyholes around the perimeter of the cylindrical doorknob. Two had to be turned together like a missile launch control mechanism. One was a featureless stick that made something go pop when jabbed into the appropriate keyhole. The final key he turned produced a gear-grinding sound and five loud thuds like drawn-back bolts within the doors. He set his hand on the knob.
"Gentle humans. Esteemed guests. May I present: The Special Projects Department."
And then, we were in outer space.
At least, it felt like we were in space when we stepped from the security area with its patterned carpets and LED lighting into a transparent plastic tunnel that ran directly through the center of a pitch-black room. Everywhere I looked, even beneath my feet, colorful candy balls whizzed through the nothingness like shooting stars.
"I can't see where I'm walking," Veruca whined when Wonka shut the door behind us and snuffed out the last of the light.
That may have been true, but the rest of us could hear where she was walking with her thick heels on the hard plastic surface. Was it wrong that I felt resentment toward her for ruining my experience? And why was it that I could hear her shoes but not the devices launching the candy? How thick were the plastic walls?
"Your eyes should adjust in a moment," Wonka replied. "We keep the room deliberately dark so we can see all the candy in flight. Otherwise, a small miscalculation could—"
"Badass!" Mike cried. He picked at a shattered plastic section with a candy ball stuck in the center like a bullet.
"Are...are we in danger?" Violet asked.
"Oh yes! Very much so."
I whistled as my eyes acclimated to the darkness. We were standing directly in the center of a multi-axis machine with spinning rings as tall as a two-story house. As they rotated around a system of shifting pipes, they flung the twirling candy balls through rainbow-colored waterfalls of flavored sugar coating, depositing one layer per pass. It was a fully-contained gobstopper machine! And it was one hell of an upgrade from the rows of stained tumblers and hand-ladled liquids on the factory floor.
"Everyone talks about the factories of the future," Wonka shouted over the clomp of Veruca's shoes, "then they design robots that simulate human operators and stick them on assembly lines. That's not futuristic. It's unimaginative. I asked myself what I'd build if I'd never seen a human before."
He nailed it. The machine was breathtaking. Beyond bleeding edge. But it was the most un-Wonka-like piece of equipment on earth. The man notoriously over-engineered everything for accident prevention to the point where we joked that his future children would be stuffed in spacesuits, covered in bubble wrap, and sent to school in hamster balls. No employee ever suffered a scrape or opened the big box of plaster bandages bolted to the warehouse wall—with one exception: the horrible drug tests.
Just thinking about the things made me shudder after experiencing two "random" tests in my short stint on the factory floor. There was nothing like having a vial of blood taken mid-shift because, according to the nurses, it caught fewer things than a urine sample. I suppose they thought I'd be comforted by the knowledge that Wonka cared more about my safety than my recreational habits, even as they jabbed massive needles into my veins. Ugh.
"I'm feeling sick," Violet moaned as if she'd read my mind.
Mike rushed to her side and wrapped an arm around her shoulder. "I got you, babe."
I winced, sure Mike's punchable face was about to be spiked across the tunnel like a volleyball. Violet didn't seem the type to put up with unwanted physical contact or outdated chauvinistic language. Nonetheless, she leaned into the gesture. She must have been seriously ill.
Wonka sighed, and I felt for him. On a much grander scale, this situation was the equivalent of me showing Grandpa Joe my second-hand analytic geometry textbooks. Grandpa cared that I cared, and that was enough for me. But any attempt to walk him through the problems put him out like a lullaby.
"I'm nauseous as well," Augustus said. Mike did not hurry to his aid.
I was a tad queasy myself when I thought about it. And was it my imagination, or had the candy picked up speed since I'd last looked? I turned to Wonka for a clue, only to catch him staring off into the distance in a trance. Emergency lights sprung to life and flashed bright crimson across his skin. They enhanced the feeling that we were all standing in a massive Gravitron.
"Mr. Wonka?" I asked. "Is everything okay?"
"It's accelerating," he responded. "But why, I wonder?"
"Vi's gonna puke!" Mike shouted. "Let her out!"
Liquid splattered above us like rain, and I looked up, already knowing what I would see. Rivulets of rainbow-colored candy ran across the transparent tunnel's surface, merged into a purple-gray sludge, and dripped down the walls. I sucked in a breath but didn't allow myself to panic. Wonka was calm, so I was safe. Right?
"Open the door!" Augustus begged. In the flashing light, he resembled an action hero mid-movie-climax. "This isn't funny!"
A spray of hard candy struck our plastic tunnel with the rat-a-tat-a-tat of machine-gun fire, and Veruca screamed. I felt my legs weaken. The spinning motion affected my balance, but I didn't want to close my eyes and miss all the excitement. According to my mother, the trick to preventing motion sickness was to focus on a single fixed point, so I chose Wonka's serene expression. If we were about to die in a failed factory experiment, childhood me would be giddy to know his face was the last thing I saw before the end.
"Faster, faster," he said, more to himself than any of us.
Another round of candy bullets impacted the wall just beside us, splintering the thick material.
"Yeah! Heheh. W'hoo!" Mike hollered before coming to his senses and muttering, "Sorry, Vi."
Veruca's heels were almost inaudible in the din as she stomped toward us. "You think this is a joke? Turn it off at once, or I'll report you to…to…somebody!"
"They're certainly not showing any signs of slowing," Wonka said in a sing-song voice. The walls weren't the only thing starting to crack.
Splattering sounds from above mixed with others close beside us, and the whole tunnel filled with the acrid smell of vomit. Candy pelted the walls from every direction in a rhythmic bump-bump-bump-bump. Emergency lights stung my eyes like sunlight flickering through trees in a moving car. Violet began to sob.
"Please, Mr. Wonka," Augustus said. "You have to stop this."
Wonka nodded. "You're right." He lifted his lollipop cane to his mouth, pressed a button on the side, and said, "Hit the breaker to room one."
Everything stopped.
The machine didn't gradually decelerate. It halted so quickly the whole thing could have been passed off as an elaborate VR prank—if not for the horrific mess we witnessed when the lights came on. Now that was the safety-conscious Wonka I knew. Someone with a physically impossible kill-switch at his fingertips just in case things got too dangerous.
Doors on the far side of the tunnel opened on their own, and he urged everyone towards them. "Next room, please!"
His urgency gave me second-hand embarrassment. That performance was not likely how Wonka thought his magical tour would begin. And the glances he snuck back to the ruined machinery were more pathetic than the ones my father's dog gave me when I refused to share my lunch meat.
I was no professional engineer, but I knew something had absorbed the force of deceleration when those enormous rings stopped turning. And that something was now a smoldering chunk of garbage. Wealthy or no, it was a disappointing setback for Wonka, and one he could have avoided if the five of us weren't in the tunnel.
"Your machine is brilliant," I said before I could stop myself. "I've never seen anything like it."
A glimmer of joy returned to his eyes, and it warmed my heart more than I anticipated. "I'm so glad you think so, Mr. Bucket! I know you're insecure about your abilities due to your lack of formal education, but I assure you, you're just as capable as my special project engineers. More so! Perhaps, if I can convince you to rejoin us, you can help me solve this tiny alignment problem."
"Tiny alignment problem!?" Veruca snarled. "You nearly killed us!"
Mike snickered. "Heh. Mr. Bucket."
His mockery didn't bother me. I was riding high on Wonka's compliment. Willy-freaking-Wonka thought I was smart enough to fix a machine so futuristic it belonged in a sci-fi movie, not a chocolate factory. Nothing that happened for the rest of the day could bring me down from that. Except...
I stopped walking and let the group pass by while I mentally disassembled his praise. When on the job, I'd deliberately adopted a fake-it-till-you-make-it attitude. I wanted everyone to think I was confident and competent, not suffering from imposter syndrome.
So how did he know I was insecure about my education?