AUTHOR'S NOTES: To whoever reads this, I'm sorry for missing the weekly update. I'm also even more sorry that (despite this being a story about Doctor Who) You haven't seen any mention of him.
He'll appear in the next chapter, I'm pretty sure.
-REC IU074-OUTSIDE SETI CAMPUS, OKLAHOMA
5 DAYS BEFORE THE INCIDENT
Mrs. Galbraith is the most relieved she's ever been since she started this job when she spots, on the vaguely named Security Room screen, the doctor's venerable Camaro pulling into the car park. It's his personal business to keep everybody's noses away from each other's business, so it's a little astonishing that he's here at all. With the press of a key, the today-renegade data analyst switches to the screensaver on the surveillance feed monitor and scrambles out of the chair, pausing only to carefully lock the door. Once in the main hall, she notes with satisfaction that the hall is deserted.
Good.
She allows herself to break into a trot. The sooner they got the doctor in on this, the better-
"Excuse me, Mrs...er...Mrs. Galbraith? Um. I...May I have a word with you?"
She can't deny herself an eyeroll as she discreetly screeches to a halt. It's Corsa, the campus 'detective', more commonly known as the resident chair warmer. She has to reply, or he'll give her a displeased Post-It note or some other passive-aggressive torture. "Sure, what's going on?"
"Um...Do you know what's happened to the, y'know, the coffee machine?" he struggles, fiddling neurotically with his tie.
Something grows cold in her gut as she hears his query. Why is Corsa asking her about this now? She recognizes the sinking feeling: it's dread-that he'll find out about Maurice and the others. And the doctor. If Corsa sees the doctor now, he'll really start asking questions.
She tries to maintain a nonchalant air as she gives her answer. "Oh, yeah, it broke down, didn't it? Guess it's seen too much use at last." The woman punctuates her last sentence with what she hopes is a dismayed-sounding sigh.
"Yes...You could be right, Mrs. G-ah, Mrs. Galbraith." He appears to trust her explanation...yet he doesn't drop the topic, either. He just sits there like a discovered aye-aye, locked into a nervous standstill.
Mrs. Galbraith wants nothing more than for Corsa to get out of her way, but instead, he blathers on about coffee all over the floor and chaos in the cafeteria and didn't she think that was terrible, someone could've gotten burned, while she steals glances at the parking lot through the building's glass front (only meters away, and yet so distant) and replies to Corsa's twittering in progressively crisper tones.
(_from_)
When at last that socially inept weirdo is satisfied with the conversation and scuttles away, Mrs. Galbraith barges through the doors and past their blank-faced security guard, who has the wisdom to stay where he is and let it be. Calling out the doctor's name in a harsh stage whisper as she weaves among the parked cars, the data analyst discerns, from her position behind the navy 500L van, the doctor's Camaro. And the man himself, crouched in the space between his car and the next.
"Hey! Sir!" she calls.
The doctor pops up like a meerkat to identify the speaker, then, upon seeing Mrs. Galbraith, swiftly moves out of his hiding place and towards her. Seamlessly, she turns and takes the lead, the doctor
following close behind. Underfoot, rotten leaves and cigarette butts float in a tepid scrum of rainwater that sloshes over her shoes at every misstep, making her grimace and try to run and tiptoe at the same time.
The doctor makes no comment as she uses the fire exit door, nor as she lets them in with a card they both know to be stolen. It's deep blue, the card color for janitorial personnel. It also means that she can go most anywhere in the building.
Door 1: Hall. The scientist and the data analyst are the only staff in the vicinity. The others are likely in the cafeteria, as evidenced by the sounds of banter and grumbling drifting from the far end of the hall.
"Looks like Doctor Corsa's got a new job in the barista business," jokes Mrs. Galbraith.
The doctor remains unsmiling. "What did you arrange?" He refers, of course, to the empty hall and the cafeteria chaos.
"Sent out one of the trusties to fiddle with the coffee machine. It's out of order but not unfixable, so it'll give us enough time." The data analyst hesitates, before asking, "Hey, sir?" She doesn't turn around to engage him, rather relying on his ability to pick up on the change from answer to question.
He doesn't miss it. "Ask away."
"I saw Doctor Corsa in the halls a few minutes ago. He asked me about the coffee machine."
"What did he ask about the coffee machine?" he probes, as they veer towards the first corridor, the one that's sort of tucked away so it isn't mistaken for the toilets next to it.
Trying to push down the unease in her mind, she replies, "If I knew what happened to it."
She can see the Security Room's bulky grey door just a few feet away, but she feels compelled to stop and listen to her superior's response.
The doctor tugs lightly at the ends of his moustache. "Corsa won't be an issue. Now, no time to stop, Jen. We need to work on the footage." With that, he saunters past her and up to the door, leaving Mrs. Galbraith pleasantly surprised at his use of a nickname for her.
Looks like he's in with us after all, she thinks, and brightens up at the idea.
"Jenna? The card?"
Remembering herself again, she darts over and hands him the card. The scanner lets out a little buzz of approval, and the doctor pushes open the door. Inside, they find what is clearly one of the trusties, Marvyn, perched on the swivel chair and absorbed by the footage on the screen. Hearing Mrs. Galbraith and the doctor enter, he whips around to face them, looking irritated. His expression relaxes, however, when he sees the two of them.
"Welcome back, Mrs. G. That old Mr. Chekhov with you?"
Dr. Chekhov frowns. "That's Doctor Chekhov to you, and even if I did let people address me as 'Chekhov', you wouldn't be one of them, young man."
Marvyn's face arranges itself into something like a smirk. "Alright, doctor, we're glad to have you on board anyway."
Mrs. Galbraith takes up a position behind Marvyn. "How's the footage edit going?" she asks.
"Pretty well. I've had a program made for this." He holds up and waggles a high-quality-looking CD-R. "Took me all week to get the code down, and her interface won't exactly win any hearts, either."
"Never mind its' looks. Just get it to cut out the footage for Fire Exit U3 and everything that caught us in the hall and corridor leading up to this room. And try to cut out the coffee machine's sabotage."
"No need for that last one, doctor. Checked all of the cameras, and exactly none managed to get my tampering in the cafeteria. So far, I'm in the green," Marvyn replies as he works.
The silence that follows his last comment is not entirely relieved. Jenna Galbraith knows that there's one person who's most definitely not in the green. "Marvyn? Have you...have you seen Maurice on any of the screens?"
Silence again. Marvyn rapidly flicks through the footage, stopping when he reaches the ones from last night. Among them, Mrs. Galbraith knows, from her time spent watching it over and over again, that there's a segment from the seconds before Maurice disappeared.
"We should watch last night's footage of Maurice again," suggests Dr. Chekhov, ignoring Mrs. Galbraith's protests, "and no, Jenna, we do need to watch it again, in case there's something we missed."
Jenna sighs, and Marvyn plays the footage, skipping to the time that Mrs. Galbraith points out. She forces herself to concentrate again.
"Wait." Dr. Chekhov looks somehow more serious than before to Mrs. Galbraith as he takes a step towards the screens. "Play it at the lowest speed possible."
Impatient despite her training in patience as a data analyst, Mrs. Galbraith crosses her arms. She's already watched the footage slowed down, so this seems a little overkill. Marvyn just shifts in his seat and does as he's told, pulling the slider that controls the playback speed all the way to the left extreme.
When he plays the video, the individual frames flick past like a slideshow, lending a jerky amateur-animation quality to the footage.
The hallway captured by the cameras is distorted into a curve, leading up to a turn, and then a line of potbellied doors.
"That's the supply closet. Maurice was restocking it," she comments.
And indeed, they see Maurice, pushing, in a frustratingly step-by-step manner, a cart piled with boxes containing cleaning supplies, papers, toiletries, office supplies, and everything their SETI campus needed to function. Down the hallway he pushed his load, visibly straining-beyond the delay of the video-to push the cart 'round the corner. He stops at the third door, the door to the supply closet, meticulously maneuvers the cart in line with the doorway...and freezes. Even in profile, they can see the alarm on his face. Marvyn pauses the video there.
The men turn towards Mrs. Galbraith for explanation, but she only shrugs.
"An intruder? A pest? What's he so scared of?" Marvyn wonders aloud, peering intently at Maurice's shocked face.
"Let's keep watching for the answers," murmurs the doctor. He seems every bit as focused as Marvyn, but without the slight tinge of anxiety the younger man has.
Marvyn clicks on the 'Play' icon. Maurice grabs a formidable-looking mop, then scans his card and shoves his way through the door in the space of what would be, in real time, a few seconds. Suddenly, the screen, and the one next to it, goes white for a few moments, then returns to normal.
"Wow. This is actually weird. See," Marvyn explains in puzzled tones, his eyes never leaving the monitor. "The screens are fine. It's the cameras that went down. As we're watching this at a thousandth of normal speed...for this, one frame represents a millisecond. Seems like it lasted for 3 milliseconds; way too quick to catch at normal speed."
Too fast for me to have caught it before, Jenna realizes.
"What is 'it'?" Mrs. Galbraith asks, mentally reprimanding herself for her petty impatience.
Interestingly, the doctor beats Marvyn to the answer. "Interference, momentarily interrupting the flow of hardware communication and possibly electricity within the cameras' mechanisms. Had it been a software or programming delay, we would've never detected it."
The sinking feeling returns.
"I'd usually say electrical problems, but the cameras are set up in a parallel circuit. And it's not an interruption in the main supply, 'cause only two of them went down." Marvyn adds.
With a sense of growing dread, Jenna continues the theory. "Only the cameras closest to the supply closet went down."
Both men turned to stare at her, and the doctor looked away first. "That's the likely theory,"
Mrs. Galbraith looks at her shoes in a desperate bid to hide her distress. "Marvyn. Play the footage. Please."
Hearing the click of the mouse button, she looks up. She sees Maurice disappear into the brightly lit supply closet, the door slowly closing behind him. They all see, to their shock-and Mrs. Galbraith's especially for missing that-the sticky notes on the cart ripped off by some kind of gust, even as the door is halfway closed. And when the door closes...the scanner's indicator light turns red, locking the door with Maurice on the inside of it.
Marvyn pauses the video to ask Mrs. Galbraith if she tried to get in.
"Yeah," she manages to reply, still in the chokehold of shock. "But only Maurice's card works on that door."
"And Maurice's card is in there with Maurice. God knows what he's doing in there; there's no camera on the inside."
No camera on the inside. It's been that way forever, yet it's never bothered her before now. Maurice's safety never bothered her, despite all of their time together. Now, with new clarity, she notices the weight of the supply cart he pushed, his straining as he turned it, and the insufficient stop he'd made at the turn, bent over his cart and breathing heavily. So much for being a good data analyst, let alone a good woman.
"It seems that this matter is more complex than it looks." Sensing Mrs. Galbraith's distress, the doctor moves to stand next to her. "Something inside that room shorted out the cameras around it for an incredibly short amount of time and possessed enough of some kind of force to rip the Post-It notes from the supply cart...some kind of short-range EMP blast, perhaps...?"
Marvyn, however, seemed to feel the same way Mrs. Galbraith did. "You guys...whatever it is, Maurice is stuck in the supply closet with it."
(_a carer_)