Mirror World / Everyday - Chapter 5

In the brilliant orange glow of the evening light, in a meadow on top of a small hill overlooking the huge, verdant park beside her apartment, Olivia surveyed Alice Underscore’s latest work. Although Alice had looked out to the park regularly while painting, the result didn’t match the scene in front of them at all. Rather than looking down on the park from the edge of a 20-meter rocky cliff, the painting looked across a level path. But even though the perspective was completely different, the details were familiar. The large spruce framing the left side of the painting was recognizable as the tree leaning off the edge of the cliff to their right. The path in the painting was formed of the same red bricks as the path winding through the park. The black metal lightposts and meticulous raised flower beds were also mirrors of the lightposts and flower beds visible in an open field in the park below them. Although it looked nothing like the view in front of them, all its elements had been pulled from their surroundings and remixed with the skill of an expert DJ. And of course, all the scenery was accented by the brilliant use of colour Justice Detective was famous for. The pine tree was outlined in a bright green, while details down to the individual needle were painted in dark, naturalistic shades. Likewise, the field was a muted brown-green, while the flowers throughout it practically popped out of the canvas in an explosion of colour. Among it all, the lightpost over the path cast a spotlight on the right side of the painting, providing a clear focus of attention. It struck Olivia that it was almost criminally wasteful that this painting would likely be used as a background for less than a minute of footage in the upcoming season of Justice Detective. The depth of detail was astonishing.

Perhaps equally astonishing was the string of coincidences that had led Olivia to this very spot. First, there was running into Alice in the first place – which had been unlikely since Alice kept to a normal sleep schedule, while Olivia usually went to bed at noon, then woke up at twilight and played games through the night. Then there was their second meeting, where Olivia had recognized the art style – which had been unlikely since Alice’s usual art style, while still defined by brilliant, almost glowing colour, was nowhere near as idiosyncratic as Justice Detective’s sharply stylized, neon-outlined backgrounds. Then there was their third meeting, where they had once again only chatted briefly, but they’d been able to share phone numbers – which had been unlikely since Olivia was certain she had come across as a cringey and obsessive and possibly insane fan during their first encounter. Then there was the lengthy text correspondence, where Olivia felt like she was walking an impossible line between ignoring her and inundating her with messages. Then they’d met at a nearby café, where Olivia had ordered her ‘morning’ coffee while Alice had ordered a chamomile tea in anticipation of going to bed soon after. All of which led Olivia to this: their second arranged meeting at the park.

Through this string of precarious coincidences, the more they talked, the more Olivia was certain she had found a kindred spirit. From their mutual love of Justice Detective, they also found they shared a similar obsession with the magical girl genre in general, to the point they both remembered an obscure, decade-old series called Blasting Artillery Witch Love-Love – which they both agreed was a masterpiece that never got the recognition it deserved. Finding someone who shared her interests so closely not online, but in her physical reality, was exhilarating, but also terrifying. Such a being was so impossibly rare that if she messed up this human friendship development project, she might never find someone on the same wavelength again. 

After receiving the invitation to meet at the park, which Alice had described as her ‘favourite place in the world,’ Olivia had felt a dull nausea as she uncharacteristically spent nearly an hour and a half trying to figure out what to wear. Not that she’d had much choice – apart from a stuffy, dull suit she’d bought during the brief period she’d tried finding a “proper” job, the rest of her wardrobe prioritized comfort over style. In the end, she’d settle on warm, fuzzy pastel leggings and an oversized sweater. The leggings were technically tie-in merch for the magical girl series Hana Double Zeta, but the only giveaway was a small emblem emblazoned at the waist – which was neatly covered by her sweater. She figured that was the best she’d be able to manage, and after a brief staring contest with herself in the mirror she’d even convinced herself she was kind of cute. 

Her meagre self-confidence had fallen away as soon as she had met Alice on the edge of the park. Alice was soooo elegant - a simple white blouse, a simple black skirt, and sensible shoes. Simply, sensibly, effortlessly elegant. Olivia also quickly discovered that Alice was also dressed for the weather, while Olivia was sweating well before she had made it up the narrow, crumbling, and overgrown old stairway that led from the common, well-travelled walking paths of the park to the secluded meadow where Alice had set up a full-size easel, canvas, and paints. Apparently further back from the meadow, in an even more overgrown corner of the hill, was an ancient shrine - apparently it was a big part of the reason there was such a big park in the middle of the city in the first place. In an overly baggy and overly warm sweater, and covered in a film of sweat, Olivia felt like a certified disaster next to the neatly dressed and decidedly not-sweaty Alice, but Olivia was also determined to not let that stop her. She would have a good time with Alice today, and she would make Alice her friend. Friendship is a battle of willpower, she thought, paraphrasing a line from Hana Double Zeta. Of course in that animated series, Friendship was a magical power that could save the world, but for Olivia real IRL friendship may as well have been just as magical and otherworldly. Nor was she going to let Shark stop her, who was now leaning back against a tree some distance away, looking for all the world like a grumpy chaperone.

“So do you paint here often? That painting’s freaking amazing, by the way.”

“Quite often, actually. Don’t tell anyone, but I sometimes leave my easel here overnight. Or I'll sometimes bring my drawing tablet with me if I want a change of pace. It’s a beautiful spot, and I can't stop coming back to it.”

“It really is – the view is spectacular, and there’s no one else nearby.” Olivia paused for a moment, admiring the view. Even though she lived right beside it, she had never explored all that much of the park, mostly owing to her usual waking hours leaving the park cloaked in a veil of darkness. There was the artificial moonlight, of course, and the main paths were all well-lit by lamps, but with all the trees and vegetation, at night the shadows were deep. During the day, though, with the sun shining overhead, Olivia couldn’t help but admit she had been missing out. The park was a verdant island of green in a city of grey concrete and shining glass. Even surrounded by the city, the only distinguishable sound in the park was the rustling of the trees in the light, warm wind. As long as you didn’t mind a substantial hike to bring your equipment to and from the meadow, it was perfect. 

"Hey, how long have you been drawing? Like, not this drawing, but drawing in general. What age did you start? Did you go to an art school?” Was this too many questions? Regardless, Olvia really wanted to know. There was so much she wanted to know. “I draw sometimes, too, but I’ve never really taken it seriously. I mean, my stuff is really just scribbles. They’re cute, if I do say so myself, but if I posted them to the Justice Detective fan galleries, all I’d get would be mean comments and a moderator deleting them for being low-quality. But your stuff is some of the highest-rated on the site! I know you probably don’t pay attention to stuff like that, but you’ve had the number 2 AND the number 7 best-of-all-time spot for months!” 

If there was one talent Olivia had cultivated during her live-streams, it was yapping – she could run her mouth off non-stop for hours. Of course, online, that was why people watched her. Here in reality, and opposite another, single human as opposed to a faceless chat, Olivia wondered if she was yapping too much. Alice didn’t take her eyes off her painting, and her brush kept working, adding countless tiny needles to a spruce branch, but she smiled wryly before responding, “Number 2, huh? And who was number one?”

“Uh, it was Mappatofu’s Finale Frame.”

“Ah, that’s fair. Mappatofu’s really good.” Alice paused, squinted at the details she had just painted in, then sat back to look over the whole piece. It looked like it was finished. “As for how long… I’ve basically been making art since I could hold a crayon. I haven’t been to an art school or anything fancy like that, but I did submit to a bunch of art contests when I was getting started, and the feedback from the judges helped me a lot. It was like getting art lessons for free, from a certain point of view. That was… a long time ago. The real secret to art is just to keep doing it. ‘Persistence is power,’” she quoted, chuckling.

Olivia recognized the quote, “Lyrical Gear, right?!” Smiling was another skill Olivia had cultivated, but she couldn’t think of the last time she had smiled this much away from her computer.
As much as she wished she could stay longer, the sun was falling further in the sky, reaching down to touch the horizon. There were no lights near the meadow, and besides, to normal people dark meant it was time to get ready for sleep. “Hey, uh… how long until the painting is good to move?”

“As long as nothing rubs against any of the wet spots, it should be fine to move as it is. If I wait until the paint is fully dry, we’ll be here until tomorrow.”

“I can help carry your paints?” Carrying the painting while the paint was still wet felt like pure danger, but Olivia didn’t want to merrily saunter down from the meadow while Alice carried the painting and all her supplies down the treacherous, narrow stairs on her own. 

With the division of labour settled, between the heavy paints and the awkward canvas, they were quiet as they navigated the trails that led out of the park. Safely back on level road, Alice slung the paints over her shoulder and repositioned the canvas slightly to accommodate. It was a precarious set up, much the same as the first night they had met. Slightly winded from unfamiliar exertion of hauling the heavy bag of paints, Olivia questioned, “Do you really need that many different paints? I’m sure you only used half of them.”

Too late, Olivia considered her choice of words was perhaps a bit blunt, but if Alice was bothered, she didn’t show it, “I don’t think I even used half. The problem is figuring out which half is the half I need and which is the half I can safely leave behind.”

“The struggles of an artist. I’ll text you later.”

“Of course. Well, good night.”

By this point, they had just passed Olivia’s familiar Square Mart. Alice kept walking aimed towards the nearest subway station, while Olivia considered how hungry she was. Once Alice was out of earshot, and verifying there was no one else nearby to see her conversing with empty air, Olivia turned to Shark. 

“There, that wasn’t so terrible, was it?”

Shark seemed lost in thought, which was obvious not just from her slightly vacant expression, but also from the fact that she was slightly transparent and her outline was more blurred than usual. Olivia’s question snapped her back to reality and full opaqueness. “It’s so strange. There’s a human mind there, but there’s also a separate mass of consciousness fixed to the same body. Any human mind anchored that close to a consciousness mass that huge should be overwhelmed, yet here the consciousness mass is bizarrely passive, and the human mind is still there as if it were completely normal. It’s completely not normal, and I can’t make sense of it.”

Shark’s tone told Oliva she didn’t like things she couldn’t make sense of. “I didn’t feel any kind of massive consciousness. And for that matter, is that really that different from you and me?”
It was a bit of a challenge, but Shark didn’t take the bait. “I’m not overlapping your physical space. Since you love horror, consider it like the difference between haunting and possession. My consciousness is also a friendly and hospitable size. We’re like... Earth and Jupiter. I’m bigger, obviously, but we’re two different bodies merrily orbiting in the same neighbourhood. She’s like Venus orbiting at the edge of a black hole. There’s a world of difference.”

Olivia shivered slightly. She hated horror, but since her chat seemed to love seeing her terrified, she would occasionally, begrudgingly play horror games or watch horror movies on stream. Shark no doubt knew she hated horror, so if this was her idea of a joke, at least it meant she was less on-edge than she’d been the first few times they had run into Alice. The realization suddenly made Olivia realize how hungry she was. 

A quick stop in the Square Mart, and a familiar friendly greeting to Friend, and she was back on the street, a familiar warm, brightly coloured paper package of delicious fried chicken in her hand. Striding off in the direction of her apartment, Olivia took a bite. And swallowed in disappointment. “Square Mart is off their game today, this chicken barely tastes like anything.”
She sniffed it. It didn’t smell like anything either. 

“Olivia !!” Shark’s voice was quiet, distant. A creeping darkness started infiltrating the edges of her vision. What was going on? Was she sick, was she having some kind of medical emergency? As her vision slowly filled with empty blackness, she braced herself against a nearby wall. Even that felt distant. Her vision now was little more than outlines of black on black, but at the very edge, just as everything fully gave way to pitch black, she saw a glowing red halo in the distance. Panic was starting to set in. What was happening to her? She couldn’t see anything. She couldn’t hear anything. She couldn’t feel the wall she was leaning on, or even the ground under her feet. There was no up or down – or sense of physical reality at all. Fully cut off from the world, terror enveloped her. Was she dead? Dying? Was this what death was like? What was happening? What was happening!?! 

*drip* *drip* A distant sound reached her ears. Her thoughts stopped. Was this reality? Or was this some phantasm her brain concocted to make up for the absence of reality? But no, there was a sliver of light creeping into her vision. Through that sliver, she could see Shark standing in front of her, her back turned. Her clothes were splattered with red. Her hands, clenched into fists, were drenched in a sickly red liquid that was dripping to the ground, a drop at a time. *drip* *drip*  Then, as if a light switch had been flipped, all Olivia’s senses came rushing back. She could hear sirens coming closer. Her butt hurt – and she could feel the ground underneath it. And she could see Shark, now facing her with a look of worry on her face. Not a spot of red was visible anywhere on her. “Are things better? Are you okay?”
 

“I’m fine. Or…” ‘at least I’m here,’ Olivia was going to say, but she stopped. Her throat hurt. It hurt worse than when she had spent 3 hours screaming her way past every stupid jump-scare in the game Horror Hill. She shook her head, trying to reset her mental state, and a rush of sea-smell filled her nose as Shark threw herself into a hug. Olivia felt the subtle warmth of her body, the tickle of breath past her hair. She felt calmer. She hadn’t realized how not-calm she had been. As she reached out to return the hug, she caught glimpse of the street past Shark. A huge red smear lay across the road and sidewalk, as if a giant water balloon had been dropped there. 

Olivia barely had time to register that the red smear looked oddly lumpy before her view was interrupted by a figure in an ill-fitting suit, with greasy, slicked back hair and a slightly asymmetrical moustache. An android came up beside him. “Mr. Cooper-Bullet is en-route, but I’ve informed him that containment is no longer needed, just clean up.”

“Thanks, Four,” the man intoned, before turning his attention back to Olivia. “Well miss, I dare say this hasn’t been a good day for you.”

Mirror World / Everyday - Chapter 4

 

“Hey Stocks, great job on the Eingopher report.”

William Stocks, known to his colleagues as Stocks and to his android assistant as William, felt a chill go down his spine as he heard those words. No one who had actually read his summary of Eingopher’s nonsensical, deranged, and borderline incoherent research papers could possibly say those words with a straight face. Ignoring the unsupported conclusions, increasingly dubious experimental methodology, and the occasional unhinged, raving rant sprinkled throughout the document, there were several sections where William had no choice but to concede and mark only ‘unintelligible.’ He had summarized Eingopher’s frantic writings as well as any human or android could be reasonably expected to, but William knew the report was a complete and unmitigated disaster none the less. And yet here was the mustachioed face of Damien Cash, his immediate supervisor and Manger of Sect. 7 Records, on his video-conferencing screen saying exactly those words with a beaming smile on his face.

“Er, you did read the report, right?”

“Mmm? Oh yes, I suppose it was a bit… colourful… in places, but by and large it meets expectations. Eingopher’s honestly been a bit of a problem case of late. Requisitions way over budget, erratic reporting, you know… between you and me, the man can’t keep to a schedule to save his life. We had quite a few questions about exactly what was going on there, and you’ve actually helped us shed some light on the situation. Some, you understand, there’s still a great deal that needs to be reconciled. In fact…” Cash pensively pulled at his mustache, making an exaggerated display of having just thought of something, “Now that I’m thinking of it, I’d appreciate it if you could meet our auditor at Eingopher’s lab facility. I’ve requested one of our staff to be on hand to assist with their audit, and you’ve been quite helpful on this case so far.”

So that was it. William groaned internally.

“The Audits crew have been kept quite busy lately, so unfortunately the inspection is going to be at 7:10pm. I realize that’s a bit out of your regular hours, but we can add an overtime premium to cover it off, so no worries there. Oh, and make sure to take an android as well – Audits will of course have their own records, but for posterity I’d like our own recording as well. You know what getting a file from Audits can be like.”

William quickly considered a dozen scenarios to justify refusing this sudden imposition of yet more overtime, but in the end reluctantly just said, “Understood…”

Cash didn’t wait for him to finish. “Splendid!” he exclaimed, and the video conferencing screen went dark.

William considered his entire vocabulary of profanity, before simply sighing loudly. There was no sense having a tantrum like a child. Besides, William didn’t want to be angry, he just wanted to sleep. His android assistant, Four, noticed the sigh and looked across the room from her computer terminal. “Is there a problem, William?”

“Depends on how you look at it. You could call it mandated overtime. Or, if one was inclined to optimism, you could think of it as a vacation away from the office.”

“Vacation?” Four’s metal ears twitched slightly.

Was that insensitive, or would it actually pass as a vacation to the android? Four didn’t get to leave the office much – in fact, as an Android Processing Assistant assigned to this building, she really never got to leave the building – she worked within the walls of Office 87 twenty-four hours a day, 365 days a year. Would leaving the office be an interesting and novel experience, or would her positronic brain register it much the same as strolling around the city in street-view? Although thinking of street-view, William had caught her idly scrolling past the colourful streets of Old Downtown in street-view once during a particularly quiet period a few months back. He remembered wondering if being essentially locked away in an office tower for her entire existence ever weighed on her. Did her programming even allow such thoughts in the first place? He was dreadfully curious, but he restrained himself. He imagined it would be quite insensitive to ask. It may have been insensitive enough even to mention vacations – after all, androids didn’t get vacation time included in their contract. Although come to think of it, even if it was in William’s contract, did it even matter if he never used it? He couldn’t think of the last time he’d taken any time off - he just seemed to keep banking more overtime. William shook his head, and asked Four to brew more coffee. His mind was already wandering and it wasn’t yet 4pm.

Two hours later, William and Four were in a company car speeding away from Central District. Four had been nonchalant as they had stepped into the car, and her face kept a perfectly neutral expression as she stared out the windows as the city sped past, but Williams couldn’t help but notice that a small red light at the base of her metal ear unit indicated she was recording the whole trip. There wasn’t any need to record until after they arrived at Eingopher’s lab – was Four actually excited by this trip? The red light held back William’s urge to ask, or otherwise make conversation. After all, if Four cared about this enough to archive it into permanent memory, the last thing he wanted her to archive was him making a clown of himself by asking inconsiderate questions. From the glistening towers of Central District, to the warm neon signs of commercial streets running alongside the highway, to the dark outlines of smaller buildings in the residential quarters interrupted by occasional streetlights and the beckoning signs of local convenience stores, they passed district after district. Gradually, the light from the artificial moon grew fainter behind them, replaced by the evenly-spaced glow of streetlights, and soon even that light was hard to come by. The streetlights began to space out, and more and more houses were only visible as dim silhouettes. Finally, over an hour out from the city center, barely one in ten streetlights were lit, and even those flickered ominously. In this derelict district, Eingopher’s lab finally came into view, a hulking two-story concrete slab of a building. Here, the steady red light at Four’s headphone unit finally blinked twice, indicating she had finished her recording, and almost immediately, the steady red light returned, indicating a new recording had just been started. William smiled wryly to himself – just as there was no need to record the highway trip, there was also no reason to separate it from their work at the lab. As he suspected, the recording of the car ride must have been purely for Four’s personal use.

As they stepped out from the car, a small beep from his phone brought William’s attention back to business. “Mr. Stocks, I presume.”

The small, crisp voice coming through the phone was identified on-screen as ‘Chloe Sharp, Inspector Auditor, Sect.13’. On the same screen, just above her name, a small glowing number read 6:47pm. They had been safely early for the arranged meeting time at 7:10, and the auditor had still managed to get ahead of them and get started early. As much as he resented the forced overtime, William couldn’t help but admit that it was probably a good idea for his department to keep their own records. Audits didn’t play nicely. Beside him, Four’s voice chimed in, “I’ve downloaded the floor plan and found the relevant sections for our inquiries. Shall we have Miss Sharp meet us there?”

The terse, crisp voice returned, “Audits has a few additional locations flagged, and Miss Sharp is currently following up. It has nothing to do with your department’s inspections, so please feel free to proceed as you like. I’ve created a group Team line - share your location there, and I’ll meet you once I’m finished.”

 William nodded grimly, before realizing it wasn’t a video call and nodding communicated nothing. Working through his own list, and using his shared location to only meet up when it was convenient did made sense, but it also meant Sharp would have exact tracking of his every move, while he’d have no idea where she was and what she was looking into. He couldn’t shake the feeling that whatever Audits was looking for here, they didn’t want his department to get involved. Although, he reflected, cross-department squabbles weren’t his responsibility. William and Four had their list of locations to review for the audit, and as long as the Auditor didn’t get in the way, anything they wanted to hide was a problem for his supervisors. “Got it, we’ll share our location,” he nodded at Four to proceed, “And we can meet up once you’re done with your list. It’ll probably help both of us if we compare notes afterwards.”

There was a cold silence on the other side, then the voice returned, terse, crisp, and now positively icy, “Understood. We’ll share notes once we meet up. Do try not to take too long with your investigations.”

The line went dead. William allowed himself a brief smile. He was certain Auditor Sharp didn’t think too highly of his notes, but if there was something Audits didn’t want him to find here, she’d want to look over the data he’d collected. If he was going to put in overtime, at least the Auditor was now stuck staying just as late as he was. And if nothing else, any notes she shared would help him improve the details of his own report.

Following the still-lit headlights of the car, William and Four made their way over the broken asphalt to the ornate double doors of the front entrance. The automatic sensor was dead, and the hinge oil seemed to have been neglected, so it took bit of heaving to open the heavy brass doors. They also didn’t close properly behind them, leaving a small crack of light from the car spilling into the dark, unlit lobby. While it certainly wasn’t as impressive as the extravagant lobbies of the Central District’s skyscrapers, there had still obviously been some effort expended to make the space inviting, from the ornate wall trims to the well-padded chairs. However much care had been shown in the room’s original configuration, though, was mostly lost, as nearly half the room was now occupied by unceremoniously dumped garbage bags. The reception desk was almost entirely submerged, as were several of the ornate, well-padded chairs. Shining a flashlight over the mass of bags, Four seemed perplexed, “Do they not have cleaning androids here?”

William, after confirming with relief that there was a decently clear path through the garbage to the frosted-glass main doors, responded. “Oh, they definitely have cleaning androids. This garbage would still be sitting in the labs and blocking the hallways otherwise.” He’d seen enough of these sorts of research dens by now to recognize the pattern.

Past the reception area, inviting ornament quickly gave way to stark, drab business, with smooth concrete hallways interspersed with flat steel doors connecting the building’s various labs and offices. In contrast to the completely dark entrance, there was lighting here, but it was meagre – most lights were dim, and many were burnt out entirely. William wondered if the light bulbs here had ever been replaced, or if these were the originals left from the building’s construction. From this point, Four led the way, following the downloaded floorplan to the private studies and records rooms.

They didn’t have far to go to find the first stop, a small records room tucked behind the lobby’s reception, labelled ‘Receivi… Reco…’. The label was partially worn and peeling, and the condition of the room wasn’t much better. All manner of packing slips, receipts, and invoices had been jammed into over-full filing cabinets, with seemingly no attention paid to chronology. Given the dust, it was also clear the auditor hadn’t been here yet. William once again pushed away his curiosity about what Audits was really looking for here – after all, the receiving records were the bread and butter of any standard financial audit.

“What a bloody mess,” William grumbled quietly, grateful that all he needed to do was flip through each page so it could be isolated from Four’s 2000-frames-per-second video recording. A dedicated sorting AI would do the rest. He remembered the year he had started working in Office 87, one of his first jobs had been manually entering receipts from a similarly disorganized research lead. It had been slow, mind-numbing work. Back then, the sorting AI was still new, and quite prone to mistakes, so a full manual review was needed to make sure its figures were correct. These days it was far more trustworthy, and the days of meticulously sorting physical paper were largely behind them. Even so, it still took a good half-hour to flip through the various papers to make sure they were all captured in the video feed.

The second room was Eingopher’s office at the far end of the building. Although less dusty than the Receiving Records room, it was no neater. Instead of filing cabinets, journals, logbooks, and loose paper had been crammed into a large bookshelf along one wall. More papers were strewn about the desk, many of which were splotched with dark stains – probably just coffee drips or old food splatter. William supposed the garbage bags in the lobby should have been enough of a tip-off, but he really should have brought gloves for this work. Mercifully, one of the two light strips was still working more or less properly, doing its level best to fill the office with warm yellow light, but the other was on the fritz, flickering on and off in a pale blue hue. William felt a headache coming on. Theoretically the material here had already been submitted for William’s first report, so theoretically there was nothing new to learn here, but it was still best to catalogue the room in full. Given the condition of the records and the clear lack of diligence in keeping things properly stored and sorted, William was certain something had been missed, but given the lack of lucidity in the writings that had been submitted, he very much doubted whatever was missed would do anyone any good.

After once again meticulously scanning through every piece of documentation in the room, William and Four were off the next room on their list, lab records in level B1. Whatever the Auditor was doing, she was sure taking her time with it. Just as well, as she’d seemed particularly unpleasant and William had no desire to pretend to be chummy with her. The elevator was still lit, but William didn’t trust it and elected to take the stairs down instead. There were 13 labs registered to the building, and all but one of them were found in the basement levels. Each of these labs would have their own, dedicated records room, usually just a small closet tucked in a corner, but fortunately only three labs were on William’s list.

The first of which was Lab 1, which was the largest lab of the building. Once through the heavy steel doors and glass airlock, William found himself in a gruesome menagerie of blood and body parts. Limbs and organs hung from the ceiling, several of which were still dripping. Four had instinctively stepped back in shock – William noted it as a curious but understandable emotive reaction from the android, but he was more preoccupied by practical concerns. Most of the assorted viscera had thoughtfully had drip-trays placed under them, but several of those trays were full to overflowing, and several more apparently had been missed altogether and looked as though they’d never had a tray in the first place. The floor was a hazard of stagnant puddles and streams meandering towards the floor’s drains, and William stood there silently puzzling how to get to the records room without getting blood on his shoes.

The contents of the room were hardly surprising, given Eingopher’s field of research. Like most of the research carried out by the corporation, it was focused on the field of immortality, and more specifically on the problem of bodily decay. Immortality of a sort had already been solved, but the problem was that the condition of the immortal would continue to degrade over time. Mentally, their memories, skills, and knowledge would gradually wear away. Physically their heart and lungs would stop, their muscles would atrophy, and their nerves would struggle to carry commands to the body. Getting the heart and lungs working was easy enough with mechanical pumps, atrophied muscles could be rebuilt, or augmented with exoskeletal supports, and the red halo system could amplify the weakened brainwaves and carry them through the body as needed. However, over time, the machinery of the body’s very cells would gradually grind to a halt, which proved a more difficult problem to address. The tiny, scattered scraps and fragments of demon consciousness that blew through to Earth on the interstellar wind could hold the spark of life firmly attached to the body, but the body would inevitably become an increasingly inhospitable home for that spark. The oldest specimens held by the corporation were well over 200 years old, and by that age there was little to do with them but leave them in suspended animation – the promise of immortality still a distant dream, while their immediate reality was a waking nightmare.

Research across the corporation touched on every aspect of this problem: the mental decline, the physical decline, the implantation process of the demon fragment, absolutely anything and everything that could possibly advance the project. Eingopher’s focus was the preservation of the body, hence the rather excessive study of anatomy found here in Lab 1. The options to get to his records room at the far end of the lab weren’t great, but William figured he had found the least messy path possible. “I figure we hug the far edge of the room, then we may have to climb the desk to avoid that puddle at the far end, there,” he gestured.

“…” Four’s mouth moved, but William heard nothing. Puzzled, he wondered if it was a mechanical fault. Then a moment later he realized it wasn’t a fault with Four - HE couldn’t hear any sound at all. Not the dripping from the blood hitting the drain-pans, nor the dull hum of distant ventilation fans, nor the low buzz of the faulty lights. With a chill of realization, he also realized that despite the bloody mess of the room, he wasn’t smelling anything. Casting his mind back, why hadn’t he been more bothered by the piles of garbage at the entrance? Had his smell failed that far back? He fought back the urge to panic. Something was still here, in the lab. And if his smell had stopped in the lobby, and sound had only deserted him in the basement, it could only mean they were getting closer to that something. As if to confirm his worst suspicions, William noticed a creeping darkness working its way inward from the corner of his vision. Was his sight next? William didn’t know what to do. Blast and damn, he was a records clerk, not a security commando!

A touch on his arm let him know Four was still beside him - she was still speaking silently, a look of concern on her face. He looked at her to steady himself, and to his relief the darkness at the edge of his vision began to retreat. Presently, he began to hear a distant drip, drip in the background, and then Four’s voice came through, quiet as though she was speaking from another room, “Mr. Stocks, can you hear me? Are you unwell?”

‘It’s William, not Mr. anything,’ he mentally retorted, but it was only when the horrid, metallic scent of blood finally tickled his nostrils that he felt he could trust his voice to stay steady. He took a shallow breath and turned to Four. “We need to make a call. Who’s on-call tonight?”

A smile of relief crossed Four’s face before she replied, “Mr. Davis Cooper-Bullet is currently up in the rotation.”

‘God-dammit’ William swore internally. His phone screen lit up, and Davis’s chiseled features leapt onto the screen. “Eyyy, Will! What’s happening?” Behind the familiar backdrop of Davis’s favourite pool hall, William couldn’t help but notice a scantily-clad android that hadn’t quite escaped off the edge of the call screen.

“Evnin’ Will, hope you’ve got an easy one for me this time.”

‘If it was easy, I wouldn’t be calling you.’  Williams garnished his mental rebuke with a cascade of silent profanity.