Bzt! Bzt!
The alarm clock goes off at a volume clearly designed by someone who has never had to wake up.
Gerald opens his eyes. The ceiling fan is still turning. It has, as far as he can tell, been turning the entire time.
He got two hours.
He knows he got two hours because he spent the other six lying on his back cataloguing everything he does not know about himself, which turned out to be a comprehensive list, and then falling asleep out of sheer administrative exhaustion.
He gets up. He changes. He drags himself into the bathroom and brushes his teeth and looks at a face he has now seen four times.
Still doesn't recognize it.
— — —
The break room on the Control Team floor is empty at this hour except for the machines.
Gerald stands in front of the coffee maker and watches it work.
Man. I don't think I can function off of two hours of sleep.
I don't even know if I'm a person who functions on two hours of sleep. Maybe I am. Maybe past-me ran on two hours a night and a deep sense of purpose.
Doubt it.
"Hey Gerald! You're up early, that's surprising."
Regretfully so, yes.
"Haha. Yeah."
Lisa starts her own batch and hums something while it runs. It's a nice tune. It has no words that he knows.
"So, Gerald. I heard the manager called you in yesterday."
"Oh, that? Yeah, he did." Gerald fits the lid onto his cup. "Why do you ask?"
Lisa's face does something cautious.
"Haven't you heard the rumors?"
"...Was I supposed to?"
"Well." She lowers her voice, which is unnecessary, because there is nobody else in the room. "From the clerks I've talked to. The manager's a madman."
"Right."
She stops, finger to her chin, and reconsiders. "Although I'm not sure if they were being serious or just gossiping."
Gerald thinks about the wine glass sitting on the desk at whatever hour that had been. The cactus. The way the assistant hadn't made a sound coming up behind him.
"I dunno." He picks up his coffee. "Whatever the case, he's our manager, and there's not much we can do to change that."
He's already walking when he says it.
"We'll talk more later."
— — —
The armory is a long room of steel lockers with nameplates. His has his name on it, which is starting to feel like an accusation.
Inside, on a rack, is a staff.
It's about four feet of dark polished wood ending in a heavy iron cross, and set into the join between the crossbeam and the shaft is a human skull, small, yellowed, its jaw wired shut.
Beside it hangs a suit. Brown. Thick. Reinforced at the chest and forearms in a way that suggests the designers had opinions about which parts of a person get hit.
What the hell is this.
He puts it on. It's uncomfortable in eleven separate places, and the moment the last clasp closes he feels — stronger. Not dramatically. Like someone quietly took a third of his own weight off him.
He lifts the staff out of the rack.
It's heavier than it looks and it pulses once against his palm, a faint white glow crawling up the shaft and dying somewhere near the cross, and before Gerald has finished deciding whether he saw that, he knows how to use it.
Not "has an idea." Knows. Grip, stance, the arc, where the weight wants to go. It arrives in his hands fully formed, like a memory that isn't his and doesn't care.
So this is E.G.O.
He turns the cross over in the light. The little skull looks back at him with its jaw wired shut, and does not clack.
Seems pretty handy to me.
Beep. Beep.
[GERALD — COMMENCE WORK: T-09-78]
Right. Let's go.
— — —
The containment unit for T-09-78 is smaller than the others and mostly taken up by a stasis pillar in the center — a column of grey metal with a glass face, humming.
Inside it, floating an inch off the base plate, is a notepad.
That's it. That's the whole Abnormality. A notepad, spiral-bound, water-stained, maybe eighty pages.
This is the new one?
There's no work-type ping on his wrist. Just the room, and the pillar, and a slot in the glass wide enough for a hand.
Gerald reaches in and takes the notepad.
Born Again.
The words land in the middle of his skull and something opens behind them.
It isn't pain. It's worse than pain, in a way he does not have the vocabulary for yet, it's appetite. A vast, radiant, screaming need to work, to find out, to take something apart and write down what was inside it, and it does not feel like it came from outside. It feels like it has always been his most important quality and he has been criminally negligent about it until this exact second.
Gerald paces the room twice before he notices he's pacing.
He lifts his wrist.
"Manager. Can you assign me some work."
[YOU ALREADY HAVE INSTRUCTIONS. WORK WITH T-09-78.]
"I already did."
His own voice comes out wrong. Too fast. Too much of it.
"Just give me some damn work."
A pause on the line. Long enough to be a decision.
[COMMENCE INSIGHT WORK: O-02-56.]
Gerald is out the door before the message finishes rendering.
— — —
(Pov: Manager)
The manager watches him go on four screens in sequence, each handing him off to the next like a relay.
His finger taps the desk. It has been tapping for some time.
"Angela. Give me a report on his sanity level."
The assistant's eyes flicker as she pulls it.
"His overall mind is at eighty-nine percent. It isn't decreasing from there."
"Eighty-nine."
"Correct."
The manager switches cameras again, trying to get a clean angle on a man moving down a corridor at a pace that is not quite running and is definitely not walking.
"What the hell is going on with him."
Angela steps forward.
"It may be due to the anomalous nature of the Abnormality, Manager."
"Do you have any guesses as to what it could be?"
She opens her mouth. She stops. It's such a small hesitation that a person not looking directly at her would miss it, and the manager is looking directly at her.
"I'm afraid not, Manager."
He sits back and looks at the wall of screens, half of them dark, a small padlock icon in the corner of each.
"What sort of sick joke is this."
He straightens his cuffs. Then he turns to her, and his voice is level again.
"Angela. Prepare the agents for a worst case scenario."
"Understood, Manager."
— — —
(Pov: Gerald)
The corridor is too long. Everything in the facility is too long.
Gerald's head hurts in a bright and specific way, right behind the eyes, and underneath it the appetite keeps talking.
Damn. My head hurts.
After I do a bit of research, I'm sure I'll be better.
One foot after the other. O-02-56 on the door.
He opens it.
There's a perch in the room.
A black log, bolted at both ends, set at chest height in the middle of the floor. It wasn't there yesterday. Somebody requisitioned it, and cut it, and installed it, in less than a day, because Gerald asked.
Huh.
The bird looks at him from the top of it with something Gerald would call interest, if it were on a face.
He takes out the notepad. A pen is already in his other hand. He does not remember picking up a pen.
"Hey, little guy. Don't mind me. Just gonna observe you for a bit, okay?"
The bird resumes preening. Gerald starts writing, and writing is wonderful, writing is the best thing that has happened to him since he woke up in that corridor, and after a page and a half he notices something he did not notice yesterday.
The red patch on the bird's belly is moving.
Not with the breathing. Independently. Slow, and out of rhythm with everything else about it, and now that he's looking he can see the divisions in the skin — four of them, faint, radiating out from the center like the seams on a fruit.
Huh. That's a bit weird.
Maybe if I just—
He reaches out and pushes it with one finger.
The bird wobbles. Rights itself. Looks at him.
And then it comes off the perch in a fury and starts pecking at his head.
"Ow. Ow. Sorry, sorry—"
And the anger arrives.
It comes up from underneath, hot and a totally completely reasonable-feeling
this little shit dared to interrupt the work.
This little shit dared to fight back. While I'm in the middle of research.
Maybe I should teach it a lesson. So it'll keep still next time.
Gerald takes the staff off his hip. The white light runs up the shaft.
Punishment shall begin to rain down.
Punishment. Yes. Punishment for this little bird who doesn't know its place.
He swings.
The cross catches the bird square across its tiny skull and drives it into the floor with a sound like a dropped plate. Its wings hit the concrete and stop moving. Something starts up inside its body, a low, wet, articulated noise, like a hinge that has been waiting a long time.
"That'll teach you to-"
The bird comes up off the floor.
The white goes out of it. The skin floods red, dark red, arterial, and veins stand out along a frame far too small to contain them, and it rises to eye level and hangs there, and Gerald has one full second in which to understand that he has made a mistake.
Then its stomach opens.
Four sections, hinging outward on the seams he found so interesting, and inside is a mouth eight times larger than the animal it came out of, ringed with teeth, and it is already closing.
He throws his whole body sideways.
It isn't enough. It isn't close to enough. The teeth take him through the reinforced chestplate like the plate is a suggestion, and there is a moment of enormous pressure across his middle and then the pressure resolves, and the top half of him goes one way.
IT HURTS
IT HURTS IT HURTS IT HURTS
He is inside it. It is red in here, red walls, red ceiling, an enormous cavern that could not possibly fit in that room and does, and he falls out of the roof of it and lands in something warm.
It's not water.
He can feel it start at the exposed edges first, which are extensive, and work inward. He screams for a while. His voice goes before the rest of him does, shreds itself somewhere in the middle of the second minute, and after that there is only the sensation, and the sensation does not hurry, and it takes what feels like several hours before his brain finally, mercifully, gives up.
— — —
Bzt! Bzt!
MY FACE IS MELTING—
FUCK—
Gerald comes off the mattress with both hands over his face, clawing at skin that is intact, in a room that is dry, and stays there on his hands and knees on the bed, breathing like a man who has just surfaced.
The ceiling fan turns.
...
What just happened.
That was—
I think that was a nightmare.
Yeah. That was a nightmare.
Bzt! Bzt!
He brings his fist down on the alarm clock hard enough that it makes a noise like a swallowed insect and stops.
Shit. Well, that's great.
In the bathroom he brushes his teeth on autopilot. Same face. Same eyebags. New addition: both eyes bloodshot, the whites gone pink at the corners.
He spits.
The water in the basin is threaded with red.
What the fuck.
He swabs the roof of his mouth with a finger and brings it out and there is blood on it, thin and bright, from nowhere.
Man.
Why can't anything go right.
He decides not to think about it, which works for approximately ninety seconds.
— — —
The break room is empty except for the machines.
Gerald stands in front of the coffee maker and feels the floor tilt very slightly under him. He knows this. He knows the sound the machine makes at the end. He knows what's about to—
"Hey Gerald! You're up early, that's surprising."
Yep. Definitely not a coincidence.
"...Yeah."
Lisa starts her own batch and hums the tune. The same tune. The exact same tune, the same four bars, the same little rise on the third.
"So, Gerald. I heard the manager called you in yesterday."
He stares at the coffee maker.
"Uh. Yeah. He, uh. He did."
This time Lisa doesn't get to the rumors. She turns around and actually looks at him, and whatever she sees stops her.
"Hey. You don't look like you're doing all that good." Her brow creases. "You okay? Did something happen?"
I'm glad she cares.
I don't know how to answer any part of that.
"No, nothing like that. Just a bit tired is all." He picks up his cup and finds his hands aren't quite steady on it. "And the thing with the manager. Nothing much happened."
Lisa opens her mouth. He watches her decide not to, and turn back to her own batch, and the four bars don't resume.
After a few minutes she takes her coffee off the plate and hesitates in the doorway.
"W-well. I wish you good luck today, Gerald." A beat. "We'll talk more later."
And she goes.
Was I being too obvious?
...
Man. This makes me sick to my stomach.
He sits down on the sofa with a coffee he doesn't want.
Okay. Okay, think about it properly.
The day is repeating. After I died.
That's the sentence. That's the actual sentence. I died, and the day started again, and Lisa hummed the same four bars.
Maybe it's that Wing experiment thing she joked about yesterday? Something they did to me before I got here?
Nah. That's a bit farfetched.
He looks at the wall for a while.
Whatever. Not much I can do sitting here thinking about it.
It's not like my situation's going to change.
— — —
The armory has a few faces in it this time, which he only notices because he's looking at everything now, a tall man buckling a chestplate two rows down, someone else asleep sitting up on the bench.
His locker has his name on it. Inside: the brown suit, the staff with the cross and the wired-shut skull.
Not a single thing out of place.
He puts the suit on. The strength arrives. He lifts the staff and the instructions arrive with it, whole, uninvited.
Sweet. Although the armor didn't do much to stop me getting eaten.
To be fair, it came off a Zayin. I don't think anyone promised me anything.
He turns the weapon over. Runs a thumb along the crossbeam.
Maybe there's some kind of special function on this thing.
He grazes his thumb across the cross.
The white light comes up under his skin and goes through him, and for about a second and a half his head is scrubbed, every grain of the two-hour sleep and the bad coffee and the low static of dread swept clean out of it, like a hand across a fogged window.
Whoa.
He looks at the cross. Then at the door. Then at the cross.
...This gives me an idea.
— — —
Beep. Beep.
[GERALD — COMMENCE WORK: T-09-78]
And there it is.
He retraces his steps to the small room with the pillar in it and stands in front of the glass, looking at eighty pages of water-stained notepaper.
Huh. Doesn't look like anything's wrong with it.
Then again, everything is deceiving in this place.
Man. I really don't want to pick this thing up.
Beep. Beep.
[COMMENCE WORK: T-09-78.]
Fine.
He reaches in and takes it and waits, one hand already going to his hip—
Born Again.
—and the appetite blows the top off his head, radiant, absolute, the most important thing in the world is to find out—
Gerald shuts his eyes.
These are not my emotions.
It doesn't help. Knowing it doesn't help at all; the wanting is exactly as loud with a label on it. He is already walking out the door and lifting his wrist and hearing his own voice go out too fast.
"Work's done, Manager. Assign me the next Abnormality."
...
[...COMMENCE INSIGHT WORK: O-02-56.]
He makes it all the way to the door of the containment unit before he stops himself, hand flat against it.
Shit. I almost got swept up again.
He takes the staff off his hip and holds it in front of his face in both hands and looks at the little wired-shut skull for a moment, the way you look at a thing you're about to ask a favor of.
I hope this works.
CRACK.
The white goes off in his skull like a flashbulb. His legs stop being involved. He hits the wall and slides down it, and the staff clangs off the floor beside him and rolls.
Fuck.
Somewhere down the corridor a clerk has both hands over her mouth. She turns around and darts off.
Gerald closes his eyes and checks.
The appetite is gone. Not quieted. Gone, the room in his head where it was standing is empty, and the emptiness is glorious.
Great. Okay. I've got a bit of time.
He gets up. Presses two fingers to the spot above his ear where he hit himself and finds nothing there. No swelling. No split. Not even tenderness.
The headache is real, though.
Noted.
He picks up the staff and opens the door.
— — —
Punishing Bird is on its perch.
It looks at him with the same small innocent face it had before it took him apart, and Gerald's body reacts before his mind gets a vote, a full-length shudder that starts at the shoulders and goes down.
Alright. Focus, Gerald.
You might not have long before that thing comes back.
He gets the broom. He sweeps.
He does it properly this time, corners first, then the long sweep down the middle, and he does not look at the red patch on its belly, not once, not even when it turns its back on him.
Some minutes in, the bird drops off the perch and lands on his forearm, claws hooking through the reinforced sleeve.
He goes very still.
"...What do you want?"
The bird says nothing. Obviously. It tilts its head, and pecks his arm once, and looks at him.
Not knowing what else to do, Gerald puts his free hand on top of its head and rubs.
The bird lowers its body and closes its eyes.
Huh.
It just wanted headpats?
After a while it decides the transaction is complete, shoots off his arm, and settles back onto the perch he asked the manager for.
Gerald becomes aware that there is something in his hand.
He raises it to look. It's a feather, long, and red, deep red, the red of the patch on its belly, and it is warm and it is very faintly pulsing in time with nothing.
Looks like it's got some kind of property to it.
He tucks it behind his ear, because that's where it wants to go, and the difference is immediate.
He is strong. Not braced-and-supported like the suit. physically stronger, his muscles feel more raw, and explosive.
Nice.
Well. I guess there were some bonuses for getting eaten alive.
He steps out and checks the panel.
Green face. 25.
There's a small marker at the top of the green bar he never noticed before, with 12 printed beside it.
I wonder why my performance is always so high.
I mean, that's literally twice the ceiling.
Beep. Beep.
[GOOD WORK. RETURN T-09-78 TO ITS CONTAINMENT UNIT.]
Finally. I can put the stupid thing back.
— — —
He walks back to the small room, opens the slot, and drops the notepad into the pillar.
It settles an inch above the base plate and hangs there, water-stained and inert.
Scratch. Scratch.
Huh. Why do I suddenly feel itchy.
He scratches his forearm. It doesn't help. It gets worse, spreads to his neck, then his back, then everywhere at once, a deep crawling wrongness under the skin like something is being inflated—
Fuck, what the h—
CRACK.
Every bone in his body dislocates at once and leaves it, at speed, in directions bones do not go. What's left swells for one long moment like something being filled, and then comes apart into a fine red mist that reaches all four walls.
— — —
Bzt! Bzt!
Gerald wakes with both arms clamped around his own ribs, holding himself together.
He does not move.
He sits on the edge of the bed with his arms crossed over his chest and his hands gripping his own shoulders and he does not move a single inch, because he does not know which movement did it, and the alarm clock keeps going and he lets it.
I don't want to be here.
I want to leave.
I want to leave now.
Eventually he stands. He doesn't wash. He pulls a uniform on wrong and doesn't fix it, and he walks out of the dormitories, and he does not stop walking.
— — —
(Pov: Manager)
He takes his hand off the button and sits back and works his fingers into his forehead.
"What the hell happened there."
He says it to the room. The room has screens in it and half of them are dark.
"He completed the work. Got another E.G.O gift that isn't in the system. He puts the damn notepad back—"
He gestures at the frozen frame.
"—and explodes."
He reaches for the wine bottle and drinks from it directly, which is a thing he has started doing recently and has not examined.
"Do you have any idea why this happened, Angela?"
She steps out from where she has been standing.
"It may relate to its anomalous ability and containment conditions." She pauses. "Have you reviewed the Abnormality's detail page in its entirety?"
The manager sighs and pulls the file up and reads it from the top.
He stops a third of the way down.
"Wait a second. Some of this information wasn't here before."
Angela closes her eyes.
"The manager is expected to perform their job even with a lack of critical information."
A beat.
"Each test you run on the Abnormalities will be automatically logged here for further review."
His fist comes down on the desk hard enough to move the cactus.
"What the fuck is this."
Angela does not react.
"I'm expected to do my job. Without knowing the things I should know."
He picks up the bottle, finds it lighter than he wants it to be, and takes what's left.
"Angela. Could you tell me what my purpose is here. Exactly."
"You are the manager." Perfunctory. Immediate. "You are tasked with leading the facility's energy production to an acceptable level each day, for fifty days."
"Fifty days."
"Correct."
"Then explain to me why I have such a lack of critical information that could assist me in doing that job."
Angela regards him for a moment.
"You are the manager. It is your job to get such things done yourself."
...
BANG. BANG.
Something hits the office door hard enough to be heard through it.
— — —
(Pov: Gerald)
"Manager! Can you please open the door?"
BANG.
"I need to talk to you about something important!"
He is still hitting it when the door opens and the assistant is standing there, entirely unhurried, one hand on the frame.
"Please take a seat."
Gerald walks in, drags the chair out, and drops into it.
"Manager. Can I please submit my resignation notice."
The man behind the desk looks at him the way you look at someone who has grown a third arm.
"Now why would you want to leave on your fourth day here." He sets the bottle down. "More specifically, your second day working as an agent."
Something in Gerald snaps clean off.
"Second day my ass. This has felt like a fucking eternity."
"Agent—"
"First, I got eaten. By an innocent little bird. In the most horrific way physically possible. Its stomach opened up. Do you understand what I'm telling you? Its stomach opened up and it swallowed me whole and I was still awake for most of it."
"Agent."
"And let's not even talk about how I exploded. From putting a shabby ass notepad back where it belongs. That's it. That's the whole crime. I did the job correctly and my bones left my body—"
He is standing. He doesn't remember standing.
"I hate working here."
The room goes quiet.
Gerald becomes aware, in stages, that the quality of the quiet has changed. That the assistant has not moved and is looking at him with an expression that has nothing behind it at all. That the temperature of the office seems to have dropped about ten degrees.
That the manager is no longer sitting the way he was sitting.
He has come forward over the desk. The arranged thing that his face was doing yesterday is not there anymore. What's underneath it is very awake.
"Agent," he says. "You can remember the loops...?"
...
Shit.
I fucked up.
.
.
.
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