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“Alright, so… Guess this’ll be the start of the orientation, no?” The woman laughed, scratched the back of her head, acting as if she hadn’t just entered the room, forty-three minutes late, leaving grease footprints behind her every step. She’s done this before, and yet it always goes wrong.
“Well, uh, I ain’t exactly good at this kinda thing, but uh- Name’s Katherine Ponzi, and I’m here to talk to you about the Anomalous Weapons Development Department. Think everyone here’s because of the AWD, so let’s just start, yeah?”
Kat waited a few seconds for any sort of reaction before continuing. “Well, here at the AWD, we do what it says on the tin: We develop anomalous weapons. Now, you must be familiarized with the concept, but just for the sake of the visualization… Er… Lemme see… Where’s… Where’s the-”
Kat fumbled about, checking her pockets until she finally found it. She quickly pulled out a gun from her pocket.
“Alright, first question: Anyone know which type of handgun this is?”
Someone quickly answered, as if they had been waiting their whole life for it: Desert Eagle.
“Yeah, that’s right: This here’s a Deagle. A Mark 19 in dot-50 AE. A simple gun, yeah? Now, new question: How many bullets can this bad boy hold?”
Seven was the answer.
“Seven, yes! Course, you can go up to nine with dot-357, and even more if you’re into airsoft, but yeah, seven’s the right answer. How about we test that?”
Kat pointed the gun at the back of the room, where a set of convenient shooting targets had been piled up. She told everyone to move and cover their ears then
One shot, then a second, then a third… Five… Seven… Nine… Eleven, twelve…
Kat shot twenty times before lowering the gun.
“So this is an anomalous weapon. It can hold up to three hundred thousand and some bullets. Can shoot dot-50, dot-44, dot-357, you can shove in some dot-50 BMG if you feel like it. 12-gauge? Flechettes? We’ve tested it and it can shoot ‘em, although not as efficiently as using other weapons.”
Kat then attempted to take off the magazine, to no avail. “You can’t remove the mag though, so you gotta disassemble the entire thing, and it has about as good a chance of blowing you up as it has of never working again. If you don’t know what you’re doing, that is.”
She put it down. “Either way, this here’s an anomalous weapon. We make this- Or develop ‘em, if you will. Now, what does that entail again? Well, it’s simple, really.”
“See the Deagle here? It used to fire, what, about a thousand bullets? Some guy out there can tell you the right number. It used to fire a fraction of what it used to, only one type’a bullet, would heat up and even break at around- What, five-six hundred? Now you don’t even need to clean it, ever. ‘Course, we had to remove that last part because then agents started developing undesired habits.”
Kat smiled. “What we do here is, we take those anomalies we keep under lock and key, we give ‘em a good old upgrade, and we point them the other way. If we’re lucky, we learn enough to make more of ‘em, and… Well, whatever happens next is up to whoever asked us to tinker with the anomalous in the first place.”
Kat finished, looking around the room, at every unfamiliar face; every unsurprised face. None of them needed this orientation shit. She frowned, before clapping her hands twice, getting everyone’s attention.
“Alright, well, why don’t we continue this on the other side of these doors? You’ll all be working here so you’re gonna have to familiarize yourself with the whole place.”
The girl rushed, leaving black ooze behind her, the orientation group moving past one, two, three doors, into the workstation area, a massive open space with machines of all kinds, hammering and whistling and making all kinds of noises. It smelled of oil and gas and dust and mold and who knows what else.
“Oh yeah, you’re gonna need some ear protection.” Kat moved to the adjacent room, giving each member of the group ear, eye and head protective gear. “And now we go.”
Down three flights of stairs, they reached the ground floor, leading straight into some sort of refinery, pipes leading into the ceiling, losing themselves amidst another piping system that resembled a rat’s nest, a giant incoherent structure of old tubes that looked like it was about to collapse any minute now.
“This here’s the Engineering and Testing area, where all the dreams are pummeled and refined into reality. Here we get the good ideas from the Design division, and figure out how to make them work. We have testing facilities, entire refineries, intraspatial and outa-spatial portals and a machine that ages materials hundreds of millions of years if the need arises. Basically, here you can do whatever the hell you want as long as you’re cleared for it.”
She points towards the far end of the room. “Over there there’s a tramcar: It leads to the Aerospatial and Vehicular Development divisions, which is exactly what the name says. Same as here, but on a bigger scale, and with wheels. Er, or rockets. Sometimes both.”
She pointed down. “Several floors down there’s the secret stuff- Er, the more secret stuff, I guess: Death rays, cloning machines, aliens, all of the X-files stuff. Can’t talk about it though. Not yet anyways.”
Kat turned to the group, their faces disintegrating into chalk, pointless expressions of prosopagnosic boredom. She continued regardless. “And now, let’s go to the Design division.”
Kat went up three flights of stairs, then down three flights of stairs, and gave the group following her ear, eye and head protective gear. “And now we go.”
The door in front of her led into a hub room leading towards ten corridors, each in turn leading to smaller studies other rooms. “This here’s the administrative wing. We have the archives over here, conference rooms there, security and the Area’s library down that corridor. From that side you can access the quarter rooms, and over here… Over here’s both the Design and Occult Studies Divisions.”
Kat walked past the corridor, and down three flights of stairs. There they reached the ground floor, which led into some sort of refinery, pipes leading into the ceiling, in turn lost into another piping system, dripping black and yellow substances into the heads of anyone working underneath. She turned to the group, chalk people with no faces. She passed them ear, eyes and head protection before continuing.
“This here’s the Occult Studies Division, and over here people read a lot; and I mean a lot. Any book or text that can help us figure out how something works? Already living rent-free on the heads of every scribe and polymath at our service.”
Kat walked inside the room, meeting with a lathe. She kept walking despite the machine being there, stopping her progress. She smiled, then opened the door to the Occult Studies Division's office.
“This here’s-”
One shot, then a second, then a third… Five… Seven… Nine… Eleven, twelve…
Kat shot twenty times before putting the gun down. The group following her was no more, chalk outlines covered in the black ooze trailing behind her. She smiled.
“So this is an anomalous weapon. It can hold up to three hundred thousand and some bullets. Dot-50. Flechettes? We’ve tested it and it works.”
Kat melted through the ground, into the Area’s entrails.
“Alright, so… Guess this’ll be the start of the orientation, no?” She bled grease and oil, leaving black imprints along the walls of the administrative division. She smiled.
She’s done this before, and yet it always goes wrong.
How long has this been going on for?
“Seven, yes! Course, you can go up to nine with dot-357, and even more if- you can shove in some dot-50 BMG if you feel like it. How about we test that?”
The Deagle was pointed at her head. She could hear it breathe. She smiled, looking into the barrel of the beast.
“Oh yeah, you’re gonna need some ear protection.”
Kat walked into the adjacent room, where she gave the Deagle ear, eyes and head protection before continuing.
“And now we go.”
BANG
Kat opened her eyes, looking around at her work desk with the calm of someone who’d just been shot in the head, which is to say ‘frantically’, trying to piece this mystery back together. She noticed the small artifact haphazardly attached to a testing stand, connected to her laptop, a video having just finished saving. She checked the video, a fifteen-hours file. It seemed to be her memories.
Right, the device for enhanced interrogations, she was testing it and… Yeah, ok, case closed.
Kat shook her head, a migraine starting to set in. She moved her hand to her nostrils. No nosebleeds. Good. She carefully removed the interrogation device from its stand and put it down, away from her head or any other part of her body. Almost instinctively, she moved her hand to the experiment timer, stopping it. Sixteen minutes and seven seconds.She stared at it for a second before turning to her laptop. Without thinking it much, Kat opened the device’s collected data, then a notepad, and began typing.
Anomalous Weapons Development Test
Project Satori
Area 34 - Katherine Ponzi, Engineering Division
Test #: 8
Results: Satori-Type Recollection Recollector (RR device) was successful in accessing the memories of the target. However, the memories obtained suffered the following issues:
- The memories were not exact, with events either occurring unfaithfully or non-sequentially.
- The memories were partially corrupted, causing damage to the obtained file, and subsequent data. Corruption could be perceived by the target; whether damage to the target has been caused is yet to be confirmed.
- Calibration of the RR device’s memory selector is unreliable, not displaying the memories selected by the user. The data compiled shows the selector to have failed by a period of over 2 years.
- The RR device stopped working halfway through the experiment, failing within 15 minutes of activation. Whether the corruption was caused by this has yet to be seen.
Despite these immense issues, the RR device is still capable of:
- Accessing the memories of the target without causing external injuries or death.
- Accessing the memories of the target without causing psychological damage
- Accessing the memories of the target without altering or destroying said memories on the target.
- Accessing the memories of the target effectively, transforming them into video and audio, being able to display them.
- Take into account the difference from standard time passage and time passage inside the target’s mind, rendering adequately.
Taking this into consideration, we believe the RR device is ready to move into testing phase 2, focusing on refining and calibrating functionality issues. With this, and if no further issues are encountered, we believe Project Satori will meet its appropriate deadlines and be ready for use by the start of the next fiscal year.
Kat finished typing the convenient lies, quickly printing the file to see how it’d look, running her other hand through her hair. She was sweating, cold beads running down her face. That experience was less than pleasant. She hadn’t felt anything like this in a while.
Maybe James was right; maybe she needed to stop testing these trinkets on herself. Of course, then someone else would have to test them, which was the problem to begin with, no?
“… Why the hell do I even care.” She was working on an interrogation device, which was the politically correct way to talk about a torture device. An «ethical» torture device, but a torture device nonetheless. Not injuring people wasn’t exactly on the list of considerations she’d been handled. 'Whatever happens next is up to whoever asked us to tinker with the anomalous in the first place'.
Yeah, so she needed to stop worrying 'bout this crap, and worry 'bout the deadline she needed to meet instead.
With that in mind, or out her mind or whatever, she read the report several times before pressing the send button. The fax machine did its work (Because of course the Development Department still sends faxes) and, as far as she knew, this was out of her hands for at least a week. Now to get it out of her mind for real.
She opened the drawer to her left, pulling out a bottle of whiskey and cigarettes. She was done with her job.
Ping!
Another request immediately arrives. Kat looks at her just-untapped drink before clicking on the message, looking over the important bits. Counter-measures… Eigenweapon… As soon as possible…
A sigh escaped her mouth.
“A worker never really stops working, huh…”
Kat took a long swig of whiskey, put the bottle back in its place, then began typing a reply.