Jack glanced back over his shoulder at the woman behind him. She was not much younger than him, short, slender, pretty in an elfish sort of way, wearing a lab coat, and, perhaps most importantly, had a small gun leveled at his back. Her hands were very steady.
He was cursing a steady stream in his head, but all he let out of his mouth was, "You don't look much like the super-villain-secret-underground-lair type, Miss."
"Doctor," she corrected, but not sharply. "Dr. Alice Stomski. Who the Hell are you?" she demanded, but it still wasn't sharp, just calm and determined.
"My name's Jack," he began, keeping his hands where she could see them, but starting to turn toward her.
"Bup, bup, bup, bah. I didn't say you could move."
He stopped. "Dalton," he finished. "I work for a security firm looking into some suspicious activity." He paused, glancing over his shoulder again. "I'm guessin' that'd be you."
"You'd be guessing wrong," she said plainly, shaking her head so that her dark bobbed hair brushed her cheeks. He could see it out of the corner of his eye. He heard her sigh softly. "Although I suppose I may be responsible for it."
"How's that?" he asked, venturing to turn again. This time she didn't stop him.
"Well, I suggested these access tunnels be built so maintenance and other non-critical tasks wouldn't get in the way of our scientists. And I suggested that we start using AI for repairs and unskilled lab work."
She didn't lower her weapon, but Jack thought she was starting to look inclined. He lowered his hands slowly, to gauge her reaction. Her eyes were glued to his every move, but she didn't look trigger happy. "Those sound like smart ideas, not that I know much about smart lab geek stuff."
"Well, then what would you be doing investigating things here?" she asked sharply, looking just a little twitchier.
"I'm backing up the smartest guy I've ever met, that's what." Jack took a step toward her. "And right now he's up that tunnel and he ain't answerin'. So how're you responsible and what am I gonna get myself into when I go up there lookin' for him?"
She frowned. "Do you have ID?"
He shook his head. "Reach?"
"Go ahead."
Jack fished in his pocket and came up with a business card fold. He handed her one of the cards from inside. "If it'll get that toy you're wavin' around pointed somewhere else, you go ahead and call that number." A number was the only thing on the card.
"There's no signal down here. It's basically one big Faraday cage," she said, examining the card, but also lowering her weapon. She was getting the sense this guy was a professional, and while he looked dangerous around the eyes, she also had a sense that he wasn't dangerous to her. In fact, he might be the help she needed today.
"I'm gonna pretend I know what that even is and ask you again …"
"You don't want to go up that tunnel at all," she interrupted. "I'm only down here because I noticed some things going missing. Including a number of the bots. And then I noticed Five was missing, too. So, I think maybe someone reprogrammed my AI … or …"
"Or what?"
"Or they've gone off programming themselves." Jack swallowed hard at that. Back to the robopocalypse again. "And the other stuff that's missing is some genetically modified …"
"Nope. Don't want to hear it." Jack was past the point of being able to deal with the plural of apocalypse. He hadn't thought it was funny before when Mac was saying stuff like that as a joke.
One corner of her mouth lifted like she knew what he was thinking. "Well, whether it's Five … that's one of my robots … or someone who's up to no good with him, those tunnels are cramped. A guy your size would definitely be at a disadvantage in a fight in one of them."
"Well, my partner's not as big as me, but he ain't exactly small either, as I found out coming down here and being used as a human air bag," he offered without further explanation. "So I'm gettin' a little nervous about him not answering. And the more you talk, the more nervous I get."
She nodded. "There's a central storage room down here that the AI is programmed to head to to recharge once their task is done. There's an elevator back to the top in there, too. I suggest we start there."
Jack didn't see that he had anything to lose. She wasn't wrong about the proportions of that tunnel. He'd been worried he'd get stuck heading down it when she'd come up behind him. "Alright."
She gestured with her empty hand. "After you."
"I appreciate that, but 'ladies first if you don't 've clearly decided I'm reasonably trustworthy, but I haven't made up my mind about you just yet."
She simply shrugged at that point and started up the slight incline of the seemingly endless hallway with Jack right behind her.
0-0-0
It was dark.
It was cramped.
He felt a little bruised and scraped up, like maybe he'd been dragged.
And his head felt roughly like someone was banging symbols over his ears.
What the …?
Mac reached up to touch the most painful spot behind his ear, expecting to find blood, but instead feeling the edges of a fingerprint sized burn. "Sssst," he hissed.
Burns were the worst. And if anybody knew it, it was Mac. He was forever scorching himself on hot engine parts, or Bunsen burner flames, or heaven forbid, kitchen equipment, when he decided to try learning to cook for the millionth time.
The air felt close and stale, but it wasn't warm. In fact, Mac finally processed that he was shivering a little. Weird.
Then he remembered thinking it was cold in the tunnel right before … whatever left that burn behind his ear. The area was probably cooled for the electronics. Or … it was cold storage for biological material. Knock it off, Mac. You sound like Jack, he lectured himself silently.
He started feeling his way around the dark … closet? Yeah, it feels like a closet. He couldn't find a doorknob though.
After a couple of minutes, his real thoughts made their way through the headache and he got out his keys. There was a tiny LED on the key chain. He thought maybe if he ever upgraded his Swiss Army knife, he'd get one with its own flashlight and kinetic battery. The light from his keychain was a dim pale blue indicating the watch battery that powered it was getting low, but at least he could see a little bit now.
He was in a closet for sure. It's narrow walls stacked to well above his head with boxes of files and little else. He could see light seeping in around the rectangle in front of him, indicating a door, but he'd been right when he was feeling around in the dark. No handle. Damnit.
He used the faint light to try to locate hinges but came up empty. He had the brief disquieting thought that it was like being in a coffin. Now you really sound like Jack! he groused at himself.
He realized that his body and his limbic system didn't care if his rational brain thought the thought was ridiculous because his heart was beating too fast and sweat was running down the center of his back in spite of the cold.
He opened the small, slightly sturdier, knife in his arsenal and began trying to pry the edges of the door open. He stopped when he heard a faint whirring sound right by the door.
He was suddenly, irrationally convinced that not only was he starting to sound like Jack, but that Jack was right about the robopocalypse.
The door rattled.
Then it shook,
Then it fell away off to the side.
Mac blinked in the light, trying to will his eyes into adjusting quickly so he could see what was going on. He fervently hoped that it was that Jack had found him.
When he was able to focus on what was in front of him, it wasn't Jack.
It was one of the short, squat robots that he'd first noticed wasn't where it belonged. A red light on top of it was blinking ominously.
Once again his own voice in his head sounded a little like his partner.
Well, shit.
