Violet Odyssey: Chapter 9

A choking sound was all I could come up with in response to the curling wisps of white smoke. I stumbled back into the protruding alarm panel, jabbing my shoulder blade painfully against its sharp corner.

My eyes went wide, darting around the annex, searching for unfriendly company.

“H… hey! Hello?” I finally managed to croak.

As if in response, the alarm panel beeped three times, signaling its return to WALK TEST. This unfortunately meant the system was ignoring the very real danger unfolding beneath its compromised sensors in the server room.

I rushed forward, stumbling over a coil of data cable. Hugging the corner, I kept my distance from the smoking server room door, which remained tightly shut, tendrils of smoke rising and pooling at the ceiling.

I crossed the floor of the main office space and tried the front security door. The handle turned, but the door wouldn’t budge. I threw my weight against it with a grunt. The shoulder I had jammed into the fire panel throbbed angrily.

The door wobbled but held fast.

Something was jammed against it, preventing it from opening outward. I cursed the architect who had decided to have a door open onto such a narrow landing, the bottom stair merely four feet away.

Pressing my face to the tiny crack I could produce, I shouted for help, my voice echoing down the hall. Waiting a few moments, I repeated the attempt, adding furious kicks to the bottom of the door.

I turned to the annex, now thinly veiled with pale smoke.

I’m going to suffocate, I despaired silently.

I slowly moved forward, my eyes pinned to the server room door, mind racing through ideas.

It’s 2028, I thought. There’s no way this room is a dead end.

Not even a government project like this was immune to safety oversight. And a dead-end lab at the end of a long hallway with one exit had liability written all over it.

With my luck, the emergency exit is in the server room, I thought grimly.

I had never been inside, having no real reason to, and the door only admitted IT and Maintenance personnel. All door locks went green during a walk test—as well as an actual fire—but that was hardly helpful when the fire was between me and possible escape.

I paced the lab space, covering my mouth with my coat sleeve. I coughed on the thickening smoke, panic slowly sinking in, and frantically searched the lab for anything that could help.

I shoved a tower of hard drives out of the way, exposing a fire extinguisher cabinet.

Oh, give me a break.

The usual stout red extinguisher was missing, a small, thin canister in its place with a bright yellow LOANER tag clipped to its pin. I twisted hard on the latch, breaking the emergency mechanism, and opened the cabinet.

Then I took the meager extinguisher.

I looked down at it doubtfully. It looked like one of those small units you might find next to someone’s bedside table.

I glanced at the server room. Thick gray smoke now poured from the crack beneath the door.

I backed up, trying to steady my breathing.

My throbbing shoulder pinged in alarm as I bumped into the towering acoustics synthesizer that dominated the lab and office room. It was a huge cabinet full of factory-linked computers, speakers, and audio equipment meant to analyze, reproduce, and synthesize all sorts of audio.

I kicked at the base of the synthesizer, tears stinging the corners of my eyes from a combination of smoke and frustration.

I froze.

Frowning, I looked at the sides of the cabinet.

One solid piece, I thought, intrigued.

How did they get this in here?

I looked closely at the cabinet and the front door in turn, making hasty measurements in my head. It was way too big to fit through the door, let alone past the short wall just inside it. And I was fairly certain it couldn’t be disassembled easily. I squinted at the complex of cables and bolted-in racks of equipment, lights blinking jovially.

I coughed, trying vainly to wipe the smoke from my eyes.

Back in undergrad, I had worked a summer with the Maintenance team at a retirement community. The air-handler rooms had double metal doors without knobs or levers halfway up the wall, built for bringing in massive heating and cooling units piece by sizable piece. After commissioning, the doors were bolted closed and painted over, but they were always available for use when the day came to replace the air handler.

My mind wandered to the server room itself. Towering single-unit servers, as well as cooling units, likely lined the room next to rack upon rack of smaller servers.

I scanned the walls of the lab with renewed focus. Doubt and hopelessness hung over my new hope like the sword of Damocles.

Like I wouldn’t have noticed a huge double door? I wondered glumly.

I shoved the refrigerator out of the way, pausing to cough half my lungs onto the tiled floor. I could barely see the walls now, and breathing was getting harder.

The hall alarms will pick up the smoke eventually, but I’ll be toast by then, I thought, wiping my face.

Just then, I noticed a white hinge poking from behind the refrigerator.

My breath caught in my throat.

I tilted the fridge onto its side and let it smash to the floor, then climbed on top of it. I felt along the wall, tracing the outline of a wide door, split in the middle, disappearing behind a standing organizer loaded with folders and equipment.

I shoved the organizer over too, its contents tumbling across the lab.

I stepped down.

Before me stood the outline of a pair of double doors.

Grabbing a box knife from the floor, I climbed back onto the fridge and sliced through the paint, clarifying the outline of the doors. At the center, where the doors met, a metal plate joined the two together. No knob or lever was present.

I shoved the doors experimentally, coughing.

They did not budge.

They probably open inward, I realized.

I scrabbled at the outline of the door, but the crack was too narrow to find purchase. My vision blurred as I coughed violently. I dropped to the floor, sucking in what little fresher air I could find.

Rubbing at my stinging eyes, I rifled through the spilled equipment. I was beginning to feel dizzy, and my fingertips tingled.

Finally, my hand closed around a cold piece of steel.

I pulled it close to my face and looked at it. It was the small crowbar we used to lift up the synthesizer and unlock the casters so we could access the back and reconfigure the unit.

With a wheezing chuckle, I climbed back atop the fridge, which was vibrating and groaning in protest at being laid flat while still plugged in.

Jamming the bar into the crack at the bottom, I put all my weight on it, trying to wrench the doors free. They shifted, sending spiderweb cracks through the paint away from the hinges.

The world turned over itself, and I grabbed onto the crowbar for balance, coughing uncontrollably.

I was completely blinded by smoke now.

Barely able to hold the bar, I repositioned it behind the center plate between the doors. With one last groan of effort, I pried them open with a satisfying thunk.

Free of the paint and the center plate locking them together, the doors swung inward under their own weight, knocking me onto my back. Smoke swirled and rushed into the new space.

Trembling, I pulled myself back onto my feet and climbed up onto the new ledge.

The room beyond was a wide concrete hallway, quickly filling with smoke as fresh air rushed into the lab. Dim LED lights in the ceiling flickered to life, triggered by my motion as I crawled on all fours into the safety of the hall.

Sucking in clean air, I thought about closing the doors, but decided I would have no way to keep them closed. So I moved along the hall, coughing.

Thick pipes wrapped in white insulation ran along the ceiling and walls, marked with direction arrows and designations such as POTABLE WATER and BOILER RETURN. A track ran along the middle of the floor, with a metal platform at the end by the doors to ACH.

Coughing, I stumbled down the hallway, which politely illuminated itself for me as I went.

Eventually, I came to an unmarked metal door on the right. Just as I reached for the handle, an ear-shattering alarm rang out through the hallway, white strobes filling the dim space. The fire alarm had triggered, either from the maintenance hallway I was in or because smoke had finally gotten out of the main ACH doors and into that hall.

I opened the door, which gave way without a fight thanks to draconian fire codes against preventing egress, and stepped out into the hallway just up the stairs from ACH.

I rubbed my head, its persistent ache not improved by recent events.

Hearing numerous boot-covered footsteps rushing this way from up the hall, I quickly ran to the door across from me leading into Gravitics. The reader was solid green, the alarms still blaring throughout lab access.

I entered and shut the door behind me.

Lights flicked on automatically.

Unlike in ACH.

Fancy, I thought.

Still, I silently wished things were a bit less unequal at that moment as I cussed under my breath at the damning light.

The thunder of boots passed my door, with a voice following close behind.

“Shut it up. Shut it up now.”

A muffled reply was cut off.

“I don’t give a shit. Disable the walk test and let the suppressors do their job. The servers are gone—”

The voices passed out of earshot.

I waited a moment longer before opening the door a crack and peeking outside. When I was sure the coast was clear, I ran back up the hall toward the main lobby and the group labs, my mind racing as fast as my feet.

Someone had either tried to kill me, kill the ACH research, or both.

The only question was why.

Why now, on the verge of the first real discovery about the Violet Incursion?

If they only wanted me dead, there are way easier ways to go about it than setting the server room on fire, I reasoned as I climbed the stairs, passing the CR.-LING. FILE ANNEX door.

I slowed to a walk.

They had gone to the trouble of tampering with the alarm. They knew how to enable the walk test. And they had clearance, because the alarm panels were all locked except for general alarm.

I rubbed my head.

The alarm silenced, the strobes going dark.

A female voice crackled over the P.A.

“Attention: false alarm confirmed. Please return to your stations. Repeat, false alarm confirmed. Please—”

I coughed as I tried not to laugh.

False, my blackened ass cheeks.

I was still processing the adrenaline from the terrifying things I had just experienced, but a single thought kept me focused as I approached the door leading to the lobby.

If someone had tried to get rid of me and my research, I was absolutely onto something.

Now to find out what.