MAIN » ARTICLESThe Iain (Rawson) Experience, part 9
Extract from ‘The Diary of Dr. Rog’: Week 602, Day 4212
It has been 2 days since my last diary entry; I accuse myself of the following mistakes.
Failing to notice the strange occurrences happening right under my nose. Most notably the moustache that had grown in the last few days, indeed, right under my very nose.
Not reacting as fast as I could to these occurrences. As a result the very fabric of institute-time is under threat and if the building stood any higher above ground than the small wooden shack we enter through, I am confident it would have collapsed by now.
Underestimating my colleagues. Whilst I merrily assumed that they were off doing business like collecting cartridge pens, conducting research in Antarctica and whatever else they had penciled onto the task sheet, they had in fact been doing something so much more valuable and so much more life-threatening than that.
The moustache was one of the first things I was able to explain. It was simply one more thing that hadn’t quite seemed normal to me – the same things that initially aroused my suspicions enough into looking deeper. After doing some tests on myself in the medical labs in the East Wing - Operations Deck A – I was able to determine an extremely large quantity of methamphetamines in my bloodstream.
The Geiger counter was showing between 8,000 and 9,000 micro-R/hour meaning that I would be dead in little over 8 hours if I didn’t reach a contamination chamber in one of the quarantine bays on the 214th Floor. I knew instantly there was no way to get there since the elevators were out of order past the 60th and somebody had removed the steps about 3 months ago in order to erect a
giant sculpture in one of the surrounding fields. However, I also knew that none of this mattered since the Seismic ratings on the Monitor showed the whole Institute would collapse internally within 45-minutes thanks to three separate earthquakes combining directly under the complex in an almost preposterous coincidence.
Walls around me began to shudder slightly, which was concerning until I looked around and I realized I was standing in one of the vibrating pleasure rooms talking into a Dictaphone. I quickly reached down and pulled up my trousers before sprinting out of the room towards the elevators and Operations Deck B.
As it turned out, the vibrating room may have in fact been a primary warning the earthquakes were getting nearer, as when I reached Deck B the scene was one of utter-chaos. Paper, filing cabinets, empty liquor bottles and thousands of other items littered the corridor as I stepped out of the lift. A wind was passing through at quite a pace which suggested the air-conditioning units had ruptured. This meant we only had 20 minutes until every floor heated up to ‘Room Temperature’. The ice-portraits of Richard Nixon hanging on the walls had already begun to drip, and I knew it wouldn’t be long until Bill Clinton went the same way. I made my way along towards the Observation Boxes where I would have access to every CCTV camera in the building, as well as all the secret phone taps, bugs and hidden cameras in every office, laboratory and toilet cubicle from here to the 50th floor.
The scene that greeted me as I stood staring at these live feeds was enough to leave me standing in awe for up to 10-minutes, had I not known that time was not on my side. Everything was on Red Alert, or would have been if somebody had found time to buy some new bulbs. As it was, we were now stuck on Blue Alert which meant that all the AI service robots were only 65% concerned with the problem.
The gravity of the situation was far too apparent now, so I knew what needed to be done. I needed to rescue the specimen and move him to a safe location -- whatever had happened here over the last few days, and whatever was happening now was almost certainly an experiment gone wrong - the next stage of the experiment going horribly awry. I started to move towards the subject's quarters, and that was when all the lights in the complex suddenly switched off. Silence.
Written by J. King
It has been 2 days since my last diary entry; I accuse myself of the following mistakes.
The moustache was one of the first things I was able to explain. It was simply one more thing that hadn’t quite seemed normal to me – the same things that initially aroused my suspicions enough into looking deeper. After doing some tests on myself in the medical labs in the East Wing - Operations Deck A – I was able to determine an extremely large quantity of methamphetamines in my bloodstream.
The Geiger counter was showing between 8,000 and 9,000 micro-R/hour meaning that I would be dead in little over 8 hours if I didn’t reach a contamination chamber in one of the quarantine bays on the 214th Floor. I knew instantly there was no way to get there since the elevators were out of order past the 60th and somebody had removed the steps about 3 months ago in order to erect a
giant sculpture in one of the surrounding fields. However, I also knew that none of this mattered since the Seismic ratings on the Monitor showed the whole Institute would collapse internally within 45-minutes thanks to three separate earthquakes combining directly under the complex in an almost preposterous coincidence.
Walls around me began to shudder slightly, which was concerning until I looked around and I realized I was standing in one of the vibrating pleasure rooms talking into a Dictaphone. I quickly reached down and pulled up my trousers before sprinting out of the room towards the elevators and Operations Deck B.
As it turned out, the vibrating room may have in fact been a primary warning the earthquakes were getting nearer, as when I reached Deck B the scene was one of utter-chaos. Paper, filing cabinets, empty liquor bottles and thousands of other items littered the corridor as I stepped out of the lift. A wind was passing through at quite a pace which suggested the air-conditioning units had ruptured. This meant we only had 20 minutes until every floor heated up to ‘Room Temperature’. The ice-portraits of Richard Nixon hanging on the walls had already begun to drip, and I knew it wouldn’t be long until Bill Clinton went the same way. I made my way along towards the Observation Boxes where I would have access to every CCTV camera in the building, as well as all the secret phone taps, bugs and hidden cameras in every office, laboratory and toilet cubicle from here to the 50th floor.
The scene that greeted me as I stood staring at these live feeds was enough to leave me standing in awe for up to 10-minutes, had I not known that time was not on my side. Everything was on Red Alert, or would have been if somebody had found time to buy some new bulbs. As it was, we were now stuck on Blue Alert which meant that all the AI service robots were only 65% concerned with the problem.
The gravity of the situation was far too apparent now, so I knew what needed to be done. I needed to rescue the specimen and move him to a safe location -- whatever had happened here over the last few days, and whatever was happening now was almost certainly an experiment gone wrong - the next stage of the experiment going horribly awry. I started to move towards the subject's quarters, and that was when all the lights in the complex suddenly switched off. Silence.
Written by J. King