The Factory

After the first conflict, The Liberty Lions raided several Kurdizov hospitals, stockpiling drugs and medical supplies. And in their raids, they stumbled upon experimental bio-printers. A revolutionary piece of technology, especially during wartime. They started small, printing fingers that’d been blown off, or grafting skin. They tried printing more complex things, like organs, but they shriveled and died before the print finished. It became clear that for a print to take, it must be printed directly onto the recipient.
But, they weren’t limited to human biology. They could print anything. Short on arms and ammunition, someone had the bright idea to print a gun right onto their hand. It was a messy clump of meat and metal, and the recipient couldn’t pull the trigger without dislocating several fingers, but in this mangled creation, the Lion’s saw opportunity. Sure, the printers needed raw biological material, but there was no shortage of meat, blood, and bone. They scavenged bodies and broken weapons from the battlefield. They made ammunition from bone fragments, and concrete. Barrels and firing pins from rebar and ligaments.

The men and women interwoven with their weapons were simply known as The Grafted.

Miranda hated the MK-89s. They weren’t as boxy, or stiff as the hazmat suits her coworkers in the swamps had to wear, but it was weighed down with a random assortment of sensors. Everything from a heart rate monitor, and barometer to a Geiger counter. There were half a dozen tubes running in and out of her rubber suit, and a heavy backpack complete with more sensors, and a D tank of oxygen, which should last her about eight hours.

As much as she pitied herself, she pitied her two escorts even more. In addition to their own heavy suits, they each carried rifles and a heavy suitcase with even more sensors. But that was fine. Today’s expedition was supposed to be a short one. They were investigating an abandoned factory at the edge of the Old Docks. Supposedly it had been untouched by the conflict, and should yield the desired samples. Miranda was to take a handful of samples, test their air, and swab surfaces for trace amounts of chemical residue. Once that was done, one of her escorts would radio someone, and a car would come to drive them back out of the city, through the swamp, and to the safe confines of Kurdizov’s campus. It’d been six months since the cordon came down, and while Miranda wasn’t thrilled with the prospect of venturing into Palmyra, she was excited by the change of scenery. Her life had fallen into something of a routine. Waking up, breakfast in the messhall with the same five people, workout in the communal gyms, research and reports, lunch in the messhall, a short walk around the campus, more reports, dinner in the messhall, and then two hours of leisure time where she mostly stared at the ceiling, waiting for an appropriate time to fall asleep. Though, sleep never came quickly. Miranda would often lie in her bunk, listening to the hum of the HVAC, or the buzz of fluorescent lights outside her dormitory door. When sleep did come, it was fraught with dreams of desolate landscapes, and a creeping lichen. The sleep was always short. And the routine always waited.

But ever since she’d been handed this assignment, it felt like the world was full of novelty again. Food tasted better, colors were brighter, and she felt lighter - until she’d gotten in the armored truck and driven across the city like a bag full of cash on its way to a bank. She couldn’t see much of the city through the grated windows on the back of the truck, but what she could see matched the rumors she heard. Ongoing fighting has shredded most of the city. The pockets that were largely undamaged, were desolate. Her hometown had been turned into something of a liminal space. Even the birds had flown away.

Miranda’s escourts climbed out of the truck. She waited for one of them to offer a hand and help her down, but neither moved to do so. Instead, they swept gaze across the docks, looking for movement. But all was still. The air was quiet, save for the water lapping against the docks. Miranda climbed down, and took a small leap to the ground. She felt her harness raise momentarily, before pressing down on her shoulders as her feet hit the ground. She became cognizant of a dull ache starting to rise in her back. No matter, the faster they got in and did the job, the faster they could leave. The escort on Miranda’s left closed the trucks door, and knocked on it twice. Without hesitation, the driver pulled away, and disappeared around a corner. And just like that, Miranda was in the middle of a warzone, and suddenly very far from the comfort she’d known almost her whole life.

She thought this might be when one of the soldiers she was with would make some quippy comment, or welcome her to the “other side,” but they were steadfast in their silence. She could barely make out their faces behind the tinted visors, and snug gas masks they wore. Miranda stepped towards the factory, and wordlessly the escorts fell into position ahead of, and behind her. Something about their formation, her orange hazmat suit, and their blue uniforms made her feel less like a distinguished scientist at the top of her field, and more like a prisoner on their way to death row. Miranda tried to suppress a shudder as the escort in front of her pulled open a heavy rusted door. The metal grated against the concrete, screeching and alerting everyone and everything to their whereabouts. Miranda jumped back at the noise, suddenly aware of her heavy breathing and elevated heart rate. She waited for some response to the noise, but the only response was a distant echo off the water. The escort in front of her nodded his head towards the door. She swallowed the bile rising in her throat, and walked past him, into the factory.

When Miranda was younger, she‘d been obsessed with the idea of urban exploring- Urban X the kids had called it. She’d watched countless hours of Ghost Adventures, and ogled the strange and esoteric buildings they’d explore. Her favorite episodes were always the abandoned asylums. She could almost imagine the daily commotion of doctors rushing about, treating patients with antiquated medicines. And to see, now, the aftermath of all that activity - It sent a thrilling chill down her spine. As if the impressions of people, the daily rituals they went about, would have carved their presence into the halls of the asylums like water through a canyon. She wondered if some day, in the far future of 50 years, if someone would walk across the Kurdizov campus with night vision, looking for the echos of her presence.

She focused her mind on the campus, on the surprisingly mediocre food that awaited her after this expedition - because if she let her concentration slip for even a second, she worried her mind would turn to the factory around her. Worried it would conjure stories from the long dead about the history of this place. She tried to take in her surroundings as objectively as she could. It was a large empty room, a box really. She could see the whole of the factory floor from her vantage point in the doorway. Heavy machinery, as rusted as the door she entered, lay scattered about. A fragile catwalk loomed over her. And all around, big iron girders held everything up. Graffiti coated the brick and plaster walls, tributes to those who’d passed through here more recently. But none of the amateur art looked fresher than a couple years. Which was good, it meant that this place likely had been untouched by the events of the last six months.

Miranda made her way into the middle of the factory floor. There, her escorts set down the two heavy silver suitcases they carried, and she opened them up. She uncovered a small centrifuge, over four dozen vials, and a couple bottles of chemical agents that would react in the presence of the right contaminants. Miranda instantly felt calmer, having a task at hand. After sorting everything into its proper place, she grabbed a handful of vials and individually wrapped cotton swabs. She wandered around the factory, looking for a variety of different surfaces that she could test. In her first lap, she picked half a dozen. Most were the same surface, plaster, brick, or steel beams, but each was closer or further from the windows. Some were behind walls, in unfinished offices that clung to one side of the factory floor. Even as she set about collecting her first handful of samples, she eyed the dark hallway at the back of the factory. She knew eventually she’d need to venture into there too to collect more samples, but she wanted to avoid it for now. The air felt heavy back there, and too cool. She’d stepped into its shade briefly, and shrieked when one of her escort’s boots crunched on some rubble. She turned to him, relieved and slightly embarrassed, and was met only with a nonchalant shrug.

Miranda got into a comfortable habit with her samples. Open cotton swabs, discard wrapped (really who’d care about a little extra trash in this place?), swab surface, and then deposit sample into vial. She labeled each tube as she went, and mumbled the sample number and location to herself, just loud enough that the suit’s built in voice recorder would capture it for later. Maybe the MK-89 wasn’t all bad. Her escorts watched on, unhelping, as she cataloged one dozen, and then two dozen samples.

Finally, it was time to venture into the dark hallway at the back of the room. This small feat, and then she could return home and boast of her adventure to the five colleagues she talked to everyday. None of them had stepped outside of the campus yet. Surely they’d all herald her as a brave adventurer, putting her very own life on the line for science!

Okay, maybe not. But it was a pleasant enough fantasy, and it gave Miranda just enough courage to step into the shadowy hallway once more. This time she didn’t shriek when she heard the footfalls of her escort’s boots crunched behind her. She pressed further into the hall, as it was a lot longer than she thought it was when she canvassed it earlier. She walked. And walked. And then stopped.

This was too long. She’d seen the factory building from outside, had measured it’s relative length before she stepped in. And then compared that mental image to the floor she saw before her when she first entered. And this hallway was too long. One of the escorts, the one who’d followed her while the other kept watch near the front door, spoke for the first time. He asked her what the hold up was. There was an edge to his voice, like he was compensating for something. Maybe he was scared too. Miranda held up a hand, and stared down the hallway. It continued for another couple yards, before terminating in a T junction. She turned around, and looked back the way she’d came. The entrance was right there, just a couple feet away. But she’d been walking for maybe a minute.

She walked back towards the entrance, past her escort. She told him to stay put while she checked on something. She took a couple steps. Then a couple more. And when she finally reached the edge of the hallway, she turned around.

The hallway was impossibly long now. She could barely make out the shape of her escort in the dim corridor. She yelled at him to come back, probably louder than she needed to as their suits were all connected via walkie-talkie. He started to say something, but distortion broke up his words into errant syllables. She told him to come back to her now. She saw movement in the distance, a silhoutte bobbing in the shadows. But it was like an optical illusion, with every step the escort took, he seemed to grow further away, like he was walking backwards into the darkness.

She called for the other escort - Embarrassingly she’d gotten both the escort’s names but didn’t know which one was Kurt and which one was John. It didn’t matter, she summoned the other one to come help her. Immediately.

She didn’t want to take her eyes off the shrinking silhoutte in the distance, but John/Kurt was taking too long, and Kurt/John needed help now. She tore off her eyes for one second, only to see that she was now deeper in the hall. No longer at the entrance like she thought, as if the hall itself had stretched itself thin just to pull her in. Panic rose in her chest, and she bounded towards the light, but with each step, the floor beneath her feet seemed to bounce like rubber, only pushing her backwards, further into the hall. She watched as John/Kurt reached out into the hall, and became further with each of her strides, until he too was reduced to nothing but a pinprick of light.

Now, in the darkness of an impossibly long hallway, Miranda stopped her ascent. She’d known she was trapped long before the light ran out. She turned back to the T junction, wondering where Kurt/John might have gone. Was this hallway some sort of blackhole? Had it spaghettified him? Was she nothing but a pinprick of orange for an observer on the outside?

Seeing no other way out, than in, Miranda started walking towards the end of the hall. It seemed far, but she was surprised to find herself there in just seven short steps. Unfortunately, the entrance behind her was still impossibly far away. The light from the factory floor barely a pinprick in the dark. This left only Miranda with only two choices: Left, or Right.

Peering down either hall was fruitless, in the dim light from her suit’s flashlight- another built in feature- she could only make out a few feet in either direction. Miranda chose the left hall. And after taking a couple short steps, quickly verified that it was a one way trip. As soon as she’d turned around, the junction started growing more distant. And rather than fighting against the grain of reality in this place, she decided to go with it.

Much to her chagrin, her thoughts turned back to those old episodes of Ghost Adventures. Her flashlight‘s beam was weak, and in it’s dim light everything seemed desaturated. The red bricks just looked like shades of black, and the occasional workplace safety posters (which seemed to repeat every dozen yards) were equally drab. Miranda wondered idlely if maybe this wasn’t a blackhole, but instead some horrible hell she‘d wandered into. Well, if push came to shove, she’d run out of oxygen in about 5 hours, and could just leave herself to suffocate in her suit- A realization jumped at her. Miranda stopped in her tracks and started pulling at the sensors and knobs embedded into her suit’s torso. She checked everything she could, praying for some hint to help her out. The geiger counter was nominal, and the O2 sensors seemed in the right position (so even if she did run out of air, she could always just pull off her helmet), in fact across a dozen or so features, the only one that gave any inclination that something had changed- was the barometer. It was dropping, slowly.

A human, it turns out, can live mostly comfortably between 950 and 1050 millibars of atmospheric pressure. The most comfortable range, right around sea level is usually 1000 millibars. Palmyra being set on the great lakes usually sits at 1020. At least, that was the pressure when Miranda checked on her way in. Now, her suit was telling her it was 1010 millibars. On any other day, Miranda might assume that a storm was rolling in, but on any other day Miranda wouldn’t be walking in an endless hallway. Well, not a paranormally endless hallway. The Kurdizov campus felt endless sometimes, but Miranda knew how to get out eventually. Here, she was less certain.

Miranda walked for awhile, longer than she’d expected. Maybe an hour. She’d stopped a couple times, tried her radio, or turning around, but as each of those options gave no results, she returned to following the hallway towards its intended destination. She thought that this walk would be faster, that the liminal space wanted to deliver her to the eventual end, like it had at the junction. Now, she hypothesized that perhaps it was about duration. The first hall had been short, and she fought against it for almost 15 minutes. Perhaps the corridor she currently walked down was just longer. Miranda felt an uneasy nervousness settle in her gut as she eyes the barometer, slowly dropping just below 1000 millibars. Still well within acceptable ranges, almost perfect actually. But if it continued to drop, she'd start experiencing headaches, nausea, joint pain, dizziness, and fatigue. She was fine for now. Or at least, so she had hoped.

After more countless minutes of walking, full of uncertainty, but successful, Miranda was finally brought to the end of the hall, which terminated in a doorway.

This better not be locked… Miranda muttered to herself. The door, fortunately, opened. Inside, Miranda faced (basement? sewers? backrooms?)