GFP 027: Le Loyon

Kerry hadn’t slept for over 72 hours. Not since the Le Loyon project massacred the entire staff of Miruku-Tek’s Einsiedeln base. She was on the run from a test robot gone bad.

She felt like she was standing on a razor-thin blade being slowly cleaved in two. Her worn body fluctuated between heightened awareness and dreamlike hallucinations. She couldn’t trust herself anymore. She couldn’t trust Nate Meier either. They were the only survivors left from a former R&D team of thirty-three scientist and over a hundred in other personnel.

Faces of colleagues would sporadically flash and flicker in Kerry’s mind. A synapse would stutter, but whatever normal human emotions she was supposed to feel didn’t trigger. It was like she was drained clean of the essential chemicals that made feelings.

She was numb, jacked up and ached all over all at the same time. Sometimes Nate’s voice reached an unbearable decibel level. Sometimes Kerry couldn’t hear him at all, as if someone had hit the mute button on Nate.

But she knew logically Nate spoke in the same gravelly hushed whisper tones he had always, including the first day they met in the lab when he very awkwardly told her he liked the color of her eyes.

That was not the beginning of a beautiful friendship.

It has now been eight months of weird silences, stilted conversation and the constant uncomfortable suspicion Nate was creeping behind her watching her work.

It’s a good thing Le Loyon killed this project. She thought. Ha ha, she laughed ironically inside, realizing her sense of humor was dead too. Maybe I’ll miss him when I’m back home in Raleigh, sleeping for the rest of my life on my father’s old couch.

“We’re here,” Nate said, interrupting Kerry’s daydream. “The second floor panic room. It’s the only one with radio communications to the outside world. We can call for help here.”

The Einsiedeln base was a massive 30-story silo burrowed deep into the ground beneath the Finsterwald, the Dark Forest. The robotics work Kerry and Nate worked on was at the very bottom of the column.

The first thing Le Loyon did was shut down the elevators. Kerry was in one with Nate at the time. He somehow instinctively knew it wasn’t a malfunction and had to climb up through the emergency panel into the shaft. Nate was eccentric that way. He talked about the base as if it were a living female organism. Once, Kerry caught Nate talking to the base, stroking its white metal walls.

“Her vocal cords are getting cut,” Nate had said three days ago inside that elevator car. “The nervous system will be next. Nasty virus we built. Nasty, nasty. We’ll be trapped if we don’t move.”

A confused “what?” was all Kerry could muster up.

And for the past three days, Kerry followed Nate, as he continued to mutter half to her, half to the Einsiedeln base, half to himself. They had threaded through the base’s labyrinthine corridors, elevator shafts and sterile rooms, stepping over dead bodies, desensitized to blood, gore and detached limbs. They somehow stayed three steps ahead of Le Loyon at all times. It was uncanny.

Like Kerry, Nate didn’t sleep the entire odyssey up the Einsiedeln silo. But unlike Kerry, Nate never seemed to wear down, break down nor shift to another reality.

Even before this whole robot killing spree though, Nate had kept strange sleep patterns. His hero was chaos mathematician Mitchell Feigenbaum, who would work for days without sleep. That much Kerry knew. He’d stuck a copy of Gleick’s Chaos into her face the second day they started working together. With very little else to do in her downtime, Kerry read the book and found it enjoyable.

The irony of the present moment in relation to what Gleick wrote about was not lost on her. She wanted to scream out, “Hubris. We’ve committed hubris!” all of a sudden, but kept her mouth shut.

She was wavering into another daydream tangent… hot summer evenings on the porch with a tall glass of homemade iced tea. The condensation dripping off in random patterns. Dammit. Chaos. Can’t escape it.

Nate punched in his access code and stepped into the panic room. Kerry quickly followed while Nate sealed the vault-like door again. “Exclusive ventilation,” he pointed absent-mindedly at a random spot in the ceiling. “Self-contained generator, HVAC, fridge, amenities,” he fluttered his palms, waving through the room. “We can survive here for two weeks at least. Nasty virus can’t get at us. Six feet of steel-reinforced concrete below, around and above us.”

For the first time in three days, Kerry felt the weight of her shoulders truly bear down, crushing her. The dull paralyzing pain wrapped her up like thick blankets. She fell to her hands and knees on the hard floor.

Nate held her up. “Not here, Fischer. Not here.” He never called Kerry by her first name either. He was just strange. So strange, as she faded in and out of consciousness. She could feel her legs walking involuntarily as Nate led this lump of an unstrung marionette to a cot.

Her last memory was Nate’s dark, blue eyes hovering over her face, as he tucked her in, covering her in warm military-grade wool sheets. “Good night, Fischer. Everything’s going to be alright.”

She blacked out and was swept off into the dark current of sleep. And in the midst of it all, she heard a gentle, rhythmic thumping from outside the walls. Thump, thump. Thump, thump. ☣