JANUARY 1967
Really, it was a good thing Doug hardly slept anyways. For the first week or so, he was afraid to take his eyes off Marianne for longer than a few minutes while she was awake, worried she'd roll out of her box, or choke on her own fist, or maybe even disappear without a trace the way people sometimes did here. He made a habit of pulling the baby box back-and-forth between the desk and his cot, keeping her close just in case. Even when it was night (or the hallway clock indicated that it was night), he would lie down and keep a nervous hand on her chest, feeling the rise and fall, hoping nothing bad would happen.
Doug was delighted, however, to find that his new project had come with hard-coded programming and alerts. When she was hungry, she would start touching her face more and opening her mouth wide like a yawn. When she wanted attention, she would give a little cry. She would hum to herself most of the time, and if she stopped, it was usually because she'd either fallen asleep or was using her diaper. Over the days, they figured each other out, and soon enough, they had fallen into a solid rhythm.
Floor 19 had been abandoned for a few years before becoming what it was now. The lights didn't all work, the floor hadn't been swept or mopped in ages, and some of the metal tables and chairs had started to grow a healthy red rust on their legs and edges. Doug tried his best to move things around and clean up, and he'd managed to "acquire" a few light bulbs and air filters, too. Overall, what had been a spooky, dark, dingey floor became a decent place to spend one's day.
Then came the issue of hygiene. The restrooms worked, yes, the plumbing was fine, but it was only a restroom. Showers and lockers were every ten floors, same as cafeterias, and if Doug got a chance, he'd sneak down the stairwell to floor 20 late at night and have a shower. Occasionally, he'd run into someone else doing the same, maybe some security guard keeping an eye on the place, maybe an equally-exhausted engineer rising up from the chilly depths to get access to hot water (floors 50 and below were not known for their hominess in any sense of the word). Lucky for him though, Marianne was small enough to bathe in the average restroom sink, and she never needed to leave the nineteenth floor.
Caroline did as she promised and paid a visit daily as part of her morning and afternoon rounds through the facility. How she managed to get off the elevator at 19 without people questioning anything was beyond Doug, but then he'd never been quite as terrified of her as her other employees seemed to be.
"You seem to be doing well," she commented, looking around the lab. "Where did you get the coffee pot from?"
Doug wrung his hands and scratched his chin sheepishly: "I might have found a spare in the kitchen downstairs. I don't think it's ever been used. I-I just use it for hot water."
She walked to and inspected the coffee pot, prodding and shifting with the same air as when she was surveying a project. Her lips twisted to the side, and she fiddled with the electrical wire.
"It's faulty," she said, reaching into her dress pocket and retrieving a black roll of electrical tape. "That's probably why is wasn't used. Factory error."
She wrapped the port where the wire met the machine in tape, tamping it down with her fingertips: "It should be fine to use for now. But if you want to make things disappear, I'd recommend rooting through the Housewares department. There's so much stockpiled down there that no one would know anything was missing."
Doug smirked a little: "You carry electrical tape in your pocket?"
Caroline raised an amused eyebrow at him: "You don't, Mr. Roboticist?"
"That's Doctor Roboticist, ma'am. And no, my pockets have been commandeered."
He pointed a thumb over his shoulder at Marianne's box, where his coat was still thumb-tacked to the wall and tented over the side. Caroline peeked underneath at the humming little thing hiding there. Marianne batted one of the cardboard animal cut-outs hanging above her with her plush bird and squealed at Caroline, kicking her bare feet.
"No problems today?" Caroline asked, standing straight.
"Not at all," Doug said. "She's pretty talkative today though."
Caroline inspected the half-built personality core on the desk, hands behind her back: "I meant to tell you – you don't actually have to write progress reports on her. So long as I'm kept in the loop, Mr. Johnson doesn't care what goes on."
"He won't check?"
"I—" a plastic cup from the table behind her tumbled to the floor. She frowned down at it and picked it up, putting it back. "I highly doubt it. If anything, he'd ask me."
She sighed, relaxing her posture a little. She had pearls on today, which looked rather nice but were unusual for her to wear. Doug twiddled his thumbs.
"You sound tired already," he joked. "It's only 8AM."
"I know," Caroline droned, "but I was up half the night packing."
"Packing?"
"Oh, right, you probably don't know – there's a storm coming in tomorrow morning. We'll probably be snowed-in, and I don't want to leave the facility to itself for however long, so I'll be staying upstairs."
"In the office?" Doug asked, confused. He hadn't seen anything up there that looked comfortable enough to sleep on.
"Yes, in the office," Caroline replied, "and I imagine I won't be alone, regardless of what he says he refuses to do."
She looked around the lab again, and Doug could see the checklist behind her eyes.
"Do you need to go home and get anything?" she asked.
Doug looked around, too, biting his lip: "I don't think so. I pretty much live here now, so my things are all here. Besides, there's plenty of food downstairs, a-and like you said, we can raid Housewares if anything happens, so…"
Caroline sighed and straightened up again: "Alright, if you say so. I'll be back this afternoon if you decide otherwise."
She walked past him, patting his shoulder, and left. The door swung shut behind her.
"Mmmmmmm?" asked Marianne from her box.
"No, of course not," Doug replied, defensive. "She's just a busy person."
"Mmmmmmmm."
"I was not!"
"Mmmmmah!"
"Fine, yes, okay, I was, but I look at everybody!"
"Aaaaahh!"
"Well, that's your opinion. We'll have to agree to disagree."
He picked up Marianne in one arm and spread out the big blanket over the floor, placing her gently down on her stomach. She immediately pushed herself up, wobbling, to look at him.
"Aah?"
"I need to work," Doug explained, "and the book says you need floor time."
Marianne dropped down and hummed into the blanket as he sat at his desk.
"When this ball is finished, it'll be able to talk. Did you know that? He's a Robotic Personality Core, my first real step into A.I. – that's artificial intelligence. That's a brain in a machine. Neat, right?"
Marianne pushed herself up again, craning to look up at him, and teetered on to her side.
"I've got the voice down, but the movement is giving me problems. Bit like you, I guess."
He turned to look down at her, now flipped on to her back and kicking the air: "Would you like to see it?"
She waved her fists, eyes wide. He picked her up and held her with her back against his chest. Core-3G was just a ball at the moment with one side entirely open, all the wire and cord and gears exposed. He rather liked this design – it was quite a bit cleaner than his last few and was made to have a porcelain enamel-coated casing so it could rotate within a suction harness, allowing it to turn like an eyeball in a socket.
"Right now," Doug explained, "he's just a naked little sphere with his guts out, see? But check this part out – that's his voice-box. If I take this little wire here and touch the nodes, they make sound, see?"
He flipped the switch on the power strip and turned the knob on the voice-box so that it buzzed. He took up the red wire and touched it to each of the nodes, interrupting, dampening, and wavering to form the illusion of consonants and vowels. Marianne stared, fascinated.
"Once I figure out the proper tone and order, I can program him to say words, like his name. Watch."
He touched the wire to the nodes again in a different order, and the buzzing tenor stuttered out: "G…R…AY…D…EE."
"See? His name is Grady!"
"Mnaaah!" Marianne shouted, kicking her legs out over the core.
"I know, right? Greg – that's Dr. Hirsch downstairs, I work with him – he wanted me to name it after him, but Adele – uh, his wife, Dr. Beneviento – she wanted it named after her, so we smashed the names together and ended up with 'Grendel,' but that's an evil monster from a book, so 'Grady' was the next best thing."
Doug turned the knob and flipped the power switch, and the buzzing voice died.
"I guess if you stay long enough, you'll actually get to meet him. That's exciting, right?"
Marianne thumped her head backward into his chest and kicked.
"Ow. I'll take that as a 'yes.' Okay! Back on the floor with you."
...
The booming voice echoed from every P.A. speaker on every floor:
"GOOD EVENING, EVERYONE. CAVE JOHNSON HERE. IN CASE YOU WEREN'T AWARE, THERE'S A BLIZZARD BLOWING IN RIGHT NOW, AND WE'RE ABOUT TO BE TRAPPED DOWN HERE UNTIL IT'S OVER. NOW, THE REACTORS DOWNSTAIRS ARE ON THEIR OWN GRID, SO THE LAB SHOULD HAVE POWER EVEN IF THE MAIN GRID GOES DOWN. IF YOU HAVE FAMILIES, I'D HIGHLY RECOMMEND GIVING THEM A HEADS-UP THAT YOU'LL BE WORKING THE ENTIRE TIME THEY'RE SNOWED-IN AT HOME. THE SECURITY DESK PHONE IS AVAILABLE ON THE TOP FLOOR, BUT THERE'S ONLY ONE, SO PLAY NICE AND TAKE TURNS. ALRIGHT, THAT'S IT. CAVE JOHNSON OUT."
...
"Electrons have an equal opposite called a positron. It even moves backwards compared to electrons, but the thing is, it might actually be an electron moving backward through time."
Doug patted Marianne's back, and she pulled idly at the hair on the back of his head.
"Of course, there's no real way to prove any of that."
"Mem mem memmm?" she asked.
"Oh, certainly. The opposite of a proton is an antiproton, and the opposite of a neutron is an antineutron. I don't think the names are as fun, but I wasn't there when they came up with them, so... nothing I could do about that."
Marianne hummed sleepily.
"But it's believed that if we had enough energy to, we could throw anti-particles together to make anti-matter, which would be very neat, in my opinion. Can you imagine having anti-food, anti-clothes, anti-cars, stuff like that? It's not likely at all, since anti-matter and normal matter annihilate each other when they touch, but I think it's still an interesting idea. What if there's a whole planet out there somewhere, somehow, completely made of anti-matter? Anti-people with anti-goldfish in anti-houses. Imagine if they flew out here to say hello! We wouldn't know they were anti-anything until we shook hands and exploded! Tragic."
Marianne breathed deep and even against his neck, asleep. Doug sighed, relieved, and set her down carefully in bed, pulling his lab coat over the side to block the light.
"Real genius I'll have on my hands," he muttered. "She'll be talking Dirac and Fermi before her ABCs."
He pieced Core-3G together, plates and all, and gathered up his materials. If he was lucky, Marianne would sleep for an hour or two, so he had time to go upstairs and update Adele and Greg. He very quietly crept out the door, shutting it softly, and scanned into the elevator.
Adele (female, age 57, albino) turned in her seat as the computer room door opened: "Ah, Doug! How's our little guy today?"
"Should be good to test out, ma'am," Doug said and held up the core. She tapped the metal shell with her pen.
"Alright, then go ahead and put him in the cradle. Let's see what we've got."
The rectangular cradle light blinked on as Doug set the Core-3G in, nodes contacting with a slight spark. The magnetic tape unit beside the desk began to hum, and the reels creaked to life. Adele tapped away at her keyboard, the paper record hissing out the top.
"Loading up," she announced, adjusting her thick, winged glasses.
The core beeped once, then twice. The red lights making up the optic blinked in alternation, then all at once, and the metal aperture constricted, then dilated. The protective lids blinked.
"Okay, function's looking good," said Adele. "When do you get the outer shell?"
"If I put in the order today, probably next Monday."
"Alright, we'll save the rotation testing for then." She hit a few keys, and the magnetic tape whirred in the cabinet nearest them. "Did you work out the voice issue?"
"I think so."
"Okay, let's see…"
There was the click of the voice-box knob turning, and the tenor buzz pitched up and down. The pronunciation nodes each triggered, working down the alphabet. After several minutes, Adele nodded her head.
"Sounds like he's working!" she sang excitedly. "He just needs the personality tape and the outer shell. Are you doing his programming?"
Doug nodded: "On one of the new computers downstairs with screens. They run on disk memory, too, so they're a bit quieter."
"Poo," said Adele. "Who wants a quiet computer? What happens if it gets a mind of its own and starts scheming? You wouldn't hear a thing!"
"I know," said Doug nervously. "I think about it sometimes. But if we program them right, that shouldn't be an issue. Hopefully."
"Mhm, sure. I raised my sons to be good, honest gentlemen, and you know what they did? They both went and became politicians. They send little boys out to the jungle to die miserable deaths. Sometimes, there's nothing you can do, except maybe prepare for the worst."
She stood up and picked the Grady out of the cradle, handing it to Doug.
"But don't let that get you down, dear. We've got a good little guy coming along. Go off, make your orders, and I'll see you next week, alright?"
"Yes, ma'am."
"Oh, and Doug?" She motioned with magnified eyes down at his clothes. "Don't forget your lab coat when you go walking around! It counts as a uniform, you know."
Marianne heard the door open and close and sleepily sang out, waving her plush bird. The bird slipped out of her hand and fell over the side of the box. She frowned a moment, looking at her empty hand and waving it around uselessly, before giving an angry screech, the kind that usually summoned the big man to her when she needed him. But he didn't come. She screeched again, kicking, but he still didn't come.
When she screeched the third time, something strange happened. It was cold, suddenly. The cardboard animals above her rustled in a chill breeze. And the plush bird slowly, very slowly, pulled itself up over the edge of the box. Marianne stared, wide-eyed, but accepted it. There were so many times where she had no idea what was happening, and this was just one of them. She blew a bubble and grabbed her bird, and all was right in the world.
...
A week passed with no contact from the outside. The few times anyone ventured up to floor 00, it was nearly pitch-dark with all the snow pressed up against the windows and the glass door. More than once, the security guard on duty at the front desk abandoned his post to warm up on floor 02 and grab a coffee from the breakroom – it wasn't like anyone was going to break in at a time like this.
Both Mrs. Caroline and Mr. Johnson had elected to stay at the facility during the storm, adamant that if something were going to happen, they'd better be around to fix it. Of course, with the floor 01 main office being so close to the frozen surface, it surprised no one to see them both wandering the lower halls, checking in on individual labs and projects, even sitting to eat lunch with some of the project heads. Doug made sure to steer clear of them when they happened to be in the floor 20 cafeteria, keenly aware of Mr. Johnson's dagger gaze boring into his back.
Was it anger? Maybe a kind of jealousy? Betrayal? Doug had no idea, if he was completely honest – he only knew that if he wanted to keep his job and remain unmangled, he'd best keep his distance.
On the third day into the storm, the power shut down. Thousands of people were trapped underground in the most absolute darkness any of them had experienced. They waited, listening in the silence – the familiar hum and whir of the place had died – only able to hear their own breathing and the fragile pumping of their hearts in their ears.
One person can survive six hours in an average-sized room with no ventilation.
Doug had picked up Marianne immediately after the lights had gone out. She clung to him, clawing at the cloth of his shirt, even as he chattered away about how it was all going to be fine. She calmed as he counted one, two, three, four, five…
And then the lights were on, the sounds of machinery and life returned to the walls, and everyone breathed a collective sigh of relief.
The same could not be said outside. Even as the staff of Aperture warmed themselves over cheap coffee and running computer cabinets, the town of Goose Lake above them froze.
"It's a good thing we also have our own aquifers," Caroline said on one of her visits. "The shortwave says pipes are bursting topside, and people are boiling snow to drink because there's nothing else."
Doug was glad neither he nor she had anyone they loved living in Goose Lake anymore. He could feel the tension through the walls, hear it through the vents connecting the floors. When a week had passed and the announcement came that the floor 00 external-line telephones were working again, a thunder of footsteps could be heard going up the stairwell, and he could swear he heard the elevator creak as it zoomed past the other side of the lab wall. He'd never once thought that he'd be relieved his mother had already passed years ago until he heard the stories of people's homes collapsing under the weight of the snow, crushing and smothering them to death with no hope of rescue. No, he was quite fine with having no one left to care for out there.
One night, as Doug was dreaming about being trapped in a stone sarcophagus, something fell. He sat up, feeling for Marianne in her box, and finding her safe, he listened. It was cold, unnaturally cold. Goosebumps prickled across his skin. The thin window in the door was covered with tape and paper, and he could see in the dim light from the cracks that the door was still locked. And he could see his breath.
"Hello?" he asked shakily, blood rushing in his ears. There was no reply.
The clock in the hallway ticked loudly, louder than usual, echoing. Heart thumping, he picked Marianne up slowly and held her over one shoulder as he stood and stepped cautiously toward his desk, flipping the lamp on and bathing the room in warm, yellow light. The coffee pot lie still, cracked, on the floor.
Doug sighed and walked to the table, picking the coffee pot up and looking disappointedly at the fissure in its clear crystalline surface. At that moment, there was a buzzing sound, and the desk lamp and hall lights flickered. There was a whisper against his ear that raised every hair on his body, and the socket the coffee-maker was plugged into sparked. There was a smell like smoke, and a thin stream rose from the tape around the faulty wire connection. Doug hurried to unplug it and backed away. It only took a moment for the power to blink out, then blink back on, stable at last.
The chill dissipated quickly, and Doug breathed a shaky, now-invisible breath before sitting back down on his cot. Marianne remained still, fast asleep against his shoulder. The slight smell of smoke disappeared without a trace. He put the baby back in her box and lied down, an uncomfortable hammering within his chest.
That voice he'd heard… it could have said anything, it was so breathy and quiet… but he found himself sure that it had whispered, "Fire."