A/N: Back into hell for this volume
- - -
The elevator doors opened onto silence.
Outis stood very still and let his eyes adjust. The light here was nothing like the System's soft white. It was the hard, flat light of tubes in a ceiling, the kind that hummed just loudly enough to notice and never loudly enough to complain about. It made everything look clean, and a little ill.
He looked down first. Old habit. Check your feet, check your hands, then check the room.
The plain shirt and slacks were gone. In their place was a black suit, cut close and sensible, the kind of thing you wore when you were expected to stand for a long time and not be looked at. A white shirt underneath. A black tie, already knotted, snug at his throat as if someone had done it for him while he wasn't paying attention. The shoes were polished. They didn't pinch. He couldn't remember the last time a pair of shoes hadn't pinched. Clipped to his belt, against his hip, was a short black baton with a rubber grip. He looked at it for a moment, decided he didn't want to know, and left it where it was.
Around his upper arm, just below the shoulder, was a band of stiff red fabric fastened with a snap. Stitched onto it, in clean white thread, was a single letter.
M.
Okay, he thought. So I have a job. And apparently a letter.
It was strange how calming that was.
He stepped out. The elevator closed behind him with a sigh and did not move. He waited a moment to see whether it would ding again, take him somewhere else, apologize. It didn't.
The hallway was long and painted a pale, washed-out gray. Every few meters there was a door with a small window set in it at head height, and each window was dark. The floor was some kind of polished composite that squeaked faintly under his new shoes. There was the smell he'd caught in the white, stronger now: disinfectant, and under it something metallic and old, like the inside of a coin jar.
He wasn't alone, quite.
A man came around the far corner pushing a cart stacked with folders. He wore a suit too, but not like Outis's: his was brown, with a yellow tie, and it hung on him the way clothes hang on people who have stopped noticing what they're wearing. He passed close enough for Outis to smell coffee, and he didn't look up. A moment later a woman in the same brown suit and yellow tie crossed the far end of the hall with a clipboard against her chest, walking fast, eyes on the floor.
Neither of them said anything. Neither of them looked at the stranger in the black suit and the red armband. They moved through the hallway the way fish move around a rock.
Different uniform, Outis noted. Different job.
He knew that walk, too. He'd done it himself, a hundred shifts in a row. It was the walk of people who had decided a long time ago that the safest thing was to keep moving and not ask questions.
He walked. It seemed better than standing.
At the end of the hall, the corridor opened into the largest room he'd seen yet. It was tall and wide, with doorways leading off in several directions and benches along the walls, the kind of space meant for people to gather and wait. The far wall was covered by a huge illustration: ten circles linked by straight lines, arranged in three columns, like a family tree drawn by a mathematician. Or a subway map for a city that didn't exist.
Monitors hung around the room at odd angles. Every one of them showed the same image, frozen: a dark silhouette of a person standing in the wreck of an elevator, surrounded by shapes that weren't quite people, all of it washed in a sick, glowing green.
Outis looked at that for a while. Then he looked away, because he got the feeling it was the kind of picture that looked back.
Above the doorway he'd come through, in clean, confident letters bolted to the wall, was a line of text.
FACE THE FEAR, BUILD THE FUTURE.
Outis read it twice.
That, he thought, is not something a normal company puts on a wall.
Another man in a brown suit drifted through the room, set a stack of papers on a bench, picked up a different stack, and drifted out again without ever lifting his eyes.
Outis stood in the middle of the room with his hands in his pockets and did the thing he'd always done in a new place: he made himself small, quiet and useful-looking, and he waited to be told what to do.
Nobody told him anything.
After a full minute of the hum, he cleared his throat.
"Hey," he said, quietly, to the air. "You still there?"
A pale blue window slid open at the edge of his vision, careful not to get in the way of anything.
[ I'm here! Sorry. I didn't want to interrupt your first look around. :) ]
He let out a breath he hadn't known he was holding.
"Appreciated," he said. "So. Where is here?"
[ Would you like the short version or the honest version? ]
"Is there a difference?"
The text hesitated, which he was beginning to understand meant yes.
[ The short version is: this is your first mission. ]
[ The honest version is that this place is called Lobotomy Corporation. It is a company that produces energy, a great deal of it, for the City it belongs to. And the way it produces that energy is... unusual. ]
"The city?"
[ The City. That's what everyone there calls it. Just "the City." You'll understand why once you've seen more of it. ]
Lobotomy Corporation.
The name snagged on something. He frowned and chased it. A late night, a library computer, a search about a character who happened to wear his face. A wiki page he'd skimmed and mostly not understood. Down at the bottom, in a sidebar of related titles, a name he'd glanced at once and scrolled past.
"I've seen that before," he said slowly. "I think. Somewhere near the stuff about... her." He touched his own jaw. "The other Outis."
[ That's right! It's from the same world. Different time, different building, same City. ]
"Do I need to know anything about it?"
[ You'll learn. That's sort of the point. :? ]
"That's not reassuring."
[ I know. I'm sorry. I'm trying to be honest instead of reassuring today. ]
He couldn't argue with that.
The window cleared itself. A new one unfolded beneath it, a little larger and a little more formal, with a thin border around its edges as if it wanted to be taken seriously.
[ MISSION ]
[ Grow stronger for future missions. ]
[ SUCCESS CONDITION: Reach Day 50. ]
He read it twice, the way he'd read the words on the wall.
"That's it?"
[ That's it. No one to save. No fate to change. Just you, getting stronger. ]
[ It's a tutorial, remember? ]
"Fifty days."
[ Fifty days. ]
"And what happens on day fifty?"
The formal window closed politely, as if it had said its piece. The smaller one stayed.
[ You'll find out when you get there. :) ]
"You know," Outis said, "for something that apologizes this much, you're really good at not answering questions."
[ ...Thank you? ]
"It wasn't a compliment."
[ I'm going to take it as one anyway. :D ]
. . .
The voice arrived from everywhere at once.
It came out of speakers somewhere high in the room, smooth and even and very calm, the kind of voice that had never once raised itself because it had never once needed to.
"Good morning, Manager. Welcome to your first day at Lobotomy Corporation."
Outis went still.
It wasn't talking to him. He knew that at once, the way you know a phone call in the next room isn't for you. The voice was aimed somewhere above him, at someone he couldn't see, and it went on in that same steady tone.
"I am Angela, your advisor and secretary. I will be assisting you with the facility's operations. Please let me know if you require anything."
There was a pause. The kind of pause where someone answers.
He heard no answer.
"Understood. The first department is ready. Its head will be with you shortly."
The speaker clicked off.
Outis looked up at the ceiling for a long moment.
"Manager," he said under his breath. "So someone's in charge."
[ Someone is always in charge. ]
That wasn't an answer either, but something in the way it was typed made him leave it alone.
. . .
Exactly one minute later, every monitor in the room changed at once.
The green image vanished. In its place, on every screen, was a girl.
Or the picture of one. She was drawn more than filmed, clean lines and flat colors, framed in a soft light yellow that made the whole gray room seem slightly less gray. Short hair, brown fading into yellow, held back by a bright red hairband. A business suit like his, but with a red tie, and on her arm the same red band with the same white M. She was holding a clipboard against her chest with a pen clipped to it, both of them so worn at the edges they looked like they'd been carried through a war.
Her eyes were the strangest part. They were brown and warm and had no pupils at all, and a dark shadow lay across the top half of each one, like a curtain drawn halfway down. It made her look tired. It made her look like she was smiling from somewhere a little further back than her face.
"Good morning!"
The new voice was nothing like the first. It was young, bright and a little breathless, as if its owner had run the whole way here.
"I'm so sorry, I'm just a teensy bit late! About a minute? A minute is fine. A minute is practically on time." On every screen, she fumbled the clipboard, nearly dropped it, and caught it against her chest. "Okay! Okay. Congratulations on joining Lobotomy Corporation, Manager! I'm Malkuth, the head of the Control Team!"
On every screen at once, she turned her head, as if looking around the room.
"Oh! And you must be the new employee!"
Outis straightened before he could stop himself.
"Yes, ma'am."
"Ma'am!" On the screens, her smile got even wider, if that were possible. "Nobody's ever called me ma'am. I like it. You can keep doing that."
"Yes, ma'am."
"Wonderful. Let me just check my list." On every screen, she flipped a page on the clipboard and ran the pen down it. "Control Team... employees... one. One employee! Employee 001." A pause. "You're the whole team!"
Employee 001, Outis thought. Not his name. A number.
Somehow, that felt like the least surprising thing that had happened all day.
"Is that... normal?"
"It's the first day!" she said, as if that explained everything. And maybe it did. "Every team starts somewhere. Ours starts with you. That makes you very important. You'll be the one everyone else learns from, once they arrive. Isn't that exciting?"
He thought about that. A team of one. He'd been a team of one his whole life. Nobody had ever called it important before.
"Sure," he said. "Exciting."
"I used to be a problem Sephirah, you know," Malkuth added, in a confiding tone, as if they were old friends. "Buttons sewn on the wrong way. Salt where the sugar goes. That kind of thing. But I've gotten much better! So don't you worry. Every day here is a delight for me!"
He didn't know what a Sephirah was. He didn't know whether he was talking to a person, or a program, or something in between that just happened to be drawn like a girl and very excited about buttons. The red armband was the only thing that made sense now: M, for Malkuth. He was wearing her letter.
But he knew this tone. He'd heard it from shift supervisors on their first week, from volunteers on their first day at the orphanage. People who desperately wanted the thing they were in charge of to go well.
"I'll try not to give you a reason to worry, ma'am," he said.
On every screen, she went very still for a moment. Then the yellow frame around her brightened, a whole shade warmer.
"Oh," Malkuth said, quieter. "That's... thank you. That's a very nice thing to say."
A small window opened at the corner of his vision.
[ :) ]
He ignored it, mostly.
. . .
The containment unit was down a short hall and behind a heavy door with a sign beside it, printed in neat, clinical letters.
O-03-03
"Your first assignment!" Malkuth's voice followed him through a small speaker set into the wall. "The Manager has ordered Attachment work. That means you go in, and you, um... keep it company. Talk to it. It's a very quiet one. It's harmless! Mostly! It's classified as the lowest risk level we have, so you don't need to be scared at all."
"What does it do?"
"It listens."
He waited for more. There wasn't any more.
"Right," he said. "Okay."
He put his hand on the door. It was cold.
[ Outis. ]
He paused.
[ You don't have to be brave in there. Just honest. ]
"Is that a hint?"
[ It's a hint. ]
He opened the door.
The room inside was small and white and lit from above by a single panel. It was empty except for one thing, and that thing was floating.
It was a skull.
A huge one, many times the size of a human head, smooth and pale as old ivory. It hung in the air about two meters off the floor, fixed to a plain wooden cross that hung with it as if they'd never been separate. Around its crown was a ring of thorns, dark and tangled, pressed into the bone. Its eye sockets were empty. Not dark. Empty, the way a well is empty, the way a room is empty after everyone has gone home.
It did not move. It did not make a sound.
Outis stood in the doorway for a long time.
Okay, he thought. That's a giant floating skull.
Okay.
He'd expected to be afraid. He waited for it, the way he'd waited for pain in the dark. It didn't come. There was something about the thing in front of him that wasn't frightening at all. It just felt very, very patient. It felt like the janitor's nod. Like the System dimming its window to give him room.
He stepped inside. The door eased shut behind him.
"Hi," he said, and then felt stupid. "Sorry. I'm supposed to keep you company."
The skull did not answer. The empty sockets stayed pointed at the far wall, or at him, or at nothing.
He didn't know what else to do, so he did what he would have done anywhere else. He found a spot on the floor, sat down with his back against the wall and his elbows on his knees, and looked up at it.
"I'm Outis," he said. "I'm new. Like, extremely new. I died yesterday. Or today. I'm not really sure how time works right now."
Silence.
"That's not a complaint. It's been a weird day."
Silence. But it was a listening kind of silence. He knew the difference. He'd spent his whole life on the wrong side of the other kind.
It listens, Malkuth had said.
Just honest, the System had said.
He looked at his hands, at the faded calluses.
"I'm guessing," he said slowly, "you're not here for small talk."
Nothing moved. But the air in the room seemed to settle, the way a crowd settles when someone steps up to a microphone.
Outis let out a breath.
"Okay," he said. "Okay."
He didn't kneel. It didn't feel like the kind of thing that needed kneeling. He just sat a little straighter, and he thought about what he'd never said out loud to anyone, mostly because there had never been anyone to say it to.
"When I was six," he said, "a woman came to the orphanage with a clipboard. Everybody knew what that meant. All the kids got loud and smiley. I tried it too, once. She walked right past me."
The light overhead flickered. Just once.
"After that, I stopped trying. I told myself it was because I was being practical. Nobody was coming, so I'd be the kind of person nobody needed to come for. Useful. Easy. Out of the way." He swallowed. "And I got really good at it. So good that I never asked anyone for anything. Not once. Not to stay for dinner. Not to come to graduation. Nothing."
He looked up at the empty sockets.
"I used to think that was strength," he said. "I think it was just... safer. If you never ask anyone to stay, nobody can ever say no."
The words hung in the white room.
"I think that's my sin," Outis said quietly. "Not that nobody came. That I never let anyone have the chance."
For a moment, nothing at all happened.
Then something did.
It wasn't a sound. It wasn't a light, exactly. It was more like the feeling of a window opening in a stuffy room, a thin, cool draft finding its way into his chest and moving something that had been sitting there so long he'd stopped noticing its weight. It didn't take the memory away. It didn't make it hurt less. It just made it a little lighter to hold.
Outis sat there and breathed.
Near the skull, in the empty air beneath it, something small and bright had appeared: a glowing cube, no bigger than a sugar cube, hanging in place like a held breath. Then another one beside it. Then another. They drifted up, one after another, and vanished into a vent in the ceiling with a soft, satisfied hiss.
Energy, he realized. That's the energy.
It ate my... confession, and that's what came out.
He wasn't sure how he felt about that. Then again, he wasn't sure he minded.
"Thanks," he said to the skull. "For listening."
The skull did not answer. But when he stood up and brushed off his trousers, he could have sworn the empty sockets had turned, just slightly, to follow him to the door.
A small window opened.
[ You did well. ]
[ Really well. ]
"I talked to a skull about my childhood," Outis muttered.
[ Yes. And it listened. ]
He couldn't argue with that either.
. . .
"Work result: good!"
Malkuth was waiting for him on the monitor in the hallway, clipboard raised, beaming so brightly the yellow frame was practically glowing.
"That's a very good result for a first day! The Manager's pleased. I'm pleased! I'm writing it down." The pen scratched across the clipboard. "Employee 001... first work... good. There! It's official. It's on my list, so it's forever." She paused, tapping the pen against her chin. "Oh, and the lights on our floor flickered for a second while you were in there. Nothing to worry about! Just a tiny hiccup."
Outis thought of the single blink of the panel above the skull, right as he'd told it about the woman with the clipboard. He didn't say anything.
"Thank you, ma'am."
"No, thank you! See, I knew Control would be the best team. We're the top of everything, you know. Like the central nervous system! If we fail, then eventually everything else will too. So it's very important that we do well."
"I'll keep that in mind."
"Good, good." She hummed happily. "Oh! I almost forgot. There's one rule. It's my rule, and it's very simple, and I tell everyone on my team."
"Okay."
"Once someone says they 'can't handle it,'" Malkuth said, in exactly the same bright, cheerful voice she'd used for everything else, "they are no longer part of my Control Team."
The hallway hummed.
Outis looked at the smiling face on the screen for a long moment. Somewhere behind the bright words, he heard something else. Not cruelty. Something worse than cruelty, because it didn't know it was cruel. A rule repeated so many times that its owner had stopped hearing what it meant.
No longer part of my team.
He thought about the dark windows in every door. The people in brown suits who never once looked up. The smell under the disinfectant, metallic and old.
He thought about the word Lobotomy.
"Ma'am," he said carefully. "What happens to the people who aren't part of your team anymore?"
The face on the monitor blinked.
"Oh," said Malkuth brightly. "They resign."
And Outis, who had spent twenty-two years learning to hear what people meant beneath what they said, understood her perfectly.