CHAPTER TWO

Mike escaped the crawlspace with wires and webs clinging to him, trying to pull him back in. By the time he’d brushed off everything that was clinging to him, mentally recentered himself, and started actively repressing the whole incident in the crawlspace, he’d made it back to Karen's tech room. Her workspace was a living museum of what people had thought the future was supposed to look like. There were layers of dust over chrome components and cobwebs over bright flashing lights. Every shine and wonder dulled by time and neglect. It's like looking at all the first place trophies you had as a kid and wondering where it all went wrong.

Everything that wasn't chrome or a flashing light was some level shade of rusted silver or blurry glass. Machines whirred and there was a constant beeping coming from, Mike looked around, where the hell is that coming from? In a cleaner room on a better world, the beeping could have sounded curious, maybe even cheerful. In this decaying room and broken world it came off haunted and unsettling.

Karen was facing away from Mike, further down the room. She typed on a projected keypad in front of her. Her cubicle was stuffed with motivational pictures, far away places and tropical paradises. Anything that could make her forget where she was or what she was doing for even a second. Most of her screen was occupied by a video of a cat playing the piano. The cat was doing an alright job if you didn’t have an ear for music, but to be honest it was playing in the wrong key. Sectioned off in the lower left corner of her screen was a square of pixels dedicated to monitoring the hardware surrounding her. The square was mostly red with a spattering of black.

Mike walked over to one of the blinking terminals right before Karen's desk, and pressed a few buttons that left fingerprints of dust. The machine spat out a sheet of paper stuffed with a dense script. It was a jumbled mix of letters, numbers and what Mike could only assume were hieroglyphs. They were the results of his work down below, a complex and nuanced experiment that only a rare and singular series of machinery has been or would ever be capable of producing. I wonder if any of these… squiggles account for me being in there while the machine was running? They did. The machine was a special combination of; sophisticated enough to understand a person was inside of it, and compromised enough through years of tampering to operate anyway. Its internal failsafes and adjustments was the sole reason Mike survived the ordeal instead of ending up a fried pincushion, but he would never know that.

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Mike flexed the brittle and yellowed parchment in his hand, half curious to see if it would fall apart, half hoping it didn't so he could turn it in without any problems. The paper passed his test well enough for something that had been stuffed inside a machine for who knows how long, so he decided not to worry too much about it. He was a little disappointed though, almost like he wanted another problem to solve.

Mike turned to leave and stopped. He had what he needed, but wanted to say something to Karen. He’d dealt with so many absent minded techs, and let so much slide. This time he wanted to say what he felt before he left this small tech room, next to a tiny crevice, under a mountain of concrete, surrounded by a mass of buildings, nowhere near where he’d be ever again. He wanted to be mad at her, for her to know he was mad, and for her to know she was at fault. The negligent woman almost gotten him killed. He felt really uncomfortable letting her get away without knowing that.

I have detected that your mental state is rapidly deteriorating in a downward spiral.

Fun Fact: 100% of the verbal statements you have made within five minutes of entering this state have all ended in ways that you constantly remember and deeply regret.

Silence alarms. Everything Mike wanted to say stayed unsaid. He knew it wasn't just her. Every lost soul that worked in the labyrinth of departments and hidden cubicles lost themselves in one form of distraction or another. It was basically a requirement. They were already running from something to be here, and now that they were, they were running from here as well. They were the kind of people who were never really anywhere.

So instead of everything else, Mike just said, “Thanks for the help.”

“Sure,” Karen replied without turning around or looking up, or probably really hearing what she was responding to.

Mike went to stuff the parchment into his utility belt. After fumbling his hand around for a few awkward seconds, he realized it wasn't on him. His belt was in the clutches of the machine, that to the best of his knowledge, had nearly taken his life. You're gone but not forgotten old friend.

Carefully, Mike folded the paper into smaller squares a few times, still curious to see it break and a mix of happy and disappointed when it didn't. He shoved the square in his pocket and was off towards his office. Karen wouldn't notice, he was gone for at least another half hour, or at least she would have if she’d remembered Mike had been there in the first place.

Mike would come back often to the bowels of the machine. In his nightmares he would keep trying and failing to reach his tool belt. Every time he would get close, Mike would be met with a mess of arcing lightning, a press of concrete to his back and protruding components to his front. The only thing he could hear in those dreams over the buzzing, grinding, and scraping of metal was Karen's echoey voice, ”I pressed it.”