Repurposed Interval 21.15 (2 of 4)

Interval 21.15 (2 of 4)

He realized he was buck naked about ten seconds after being set onto the counter, with his fingers scratching bare skin, and would have panicked but for the soft smile seen on the woman’s face from behind a pair of boxer shorts held loosely in her fingers. “Sorry, playing dress-up dolls is apparently not one of kallah-vahh’s hobbies,” she said, as she herself moved the shorts over his legs, “and I doubt you’re strong enough to get dressed yet anyway.” His eyes bugged a bit; it had been a long, long time since he’d been dressed by someone else. Like, his mother. But this girl was not his mother by any distant stretch of the imagination. His imagination leapt around in a sorry attempt to think of anything other than how near she was. Where had his clothing gone? Where had the HEV suit gone?! Well, Melissa here wasn’t stopping to worry about any of that. If she noticed how that line of thought wasn’t working very well, she didn’t say.

If he noticed that those were his own boxers, he didn’t say. He bit his lip, squished his eyes shut in a vain attempt not to think about how pretty she was or that he was naked and that she was touching him. It didn’t much help, but whatever profession the girl had gotten into, she was good at avoiding the obvious. She then helped tuck him into a white tank-top and a pair of old grey sweatpants, left it at that for the time being because the action of sitting him up made him dizzy. Gordon felt limp, helpless, yet remained calm enough for her to straighten his hair and make sure that he wasn’t in an uncomfortable position.

“I want you to just relax and let me take readings from you, okay? It’ll probably be a bit before you’re fully able to move and talk again, so I’ll take the opportunity to give you a bit of background on what’s happened since the Events, while you were sleeping. If you have any questions, just think them to me.” She winked, “or try and ask out loud. Either way, I’m pretty sure I’ll be able to answer you.”

That sounded like an excellent plan. The sound of her voice was also, to his ears, excellent. Soothing, soft (except when she was blurting out obscenities or yelling at her invisible elder), and she seemed quite confident that she could answer those questions that were boiling up in his brain. He could relax, she could tell stories. That was perfect.

What didn’t sit well with him was that she called them Events, plural.

It looked as though Melissa didn’t need those readouts on the stasis chamber’s bars to tell that he was agitated with that thought. Whether she’d listened in on his mind or not seemed irrelevant, she knew. “It’s all right, Doctor Freeman. Just relax.”

While she paced around the above-waist-height platform (how had she gotten him onto that without him jumping up?) gently touching his ankle or the bottom of his bare toes (which he could now perceive just fine, not that he could move them consciously – they did jerk involuntarily), Melissa spoke in a gentle but professional voice.

While she did so, however, Gordon’s mind was filled with imagery and sensation. Not because she used flowery words to describe anything, but that he saw or perhaps even felt what she was saying. That... wasn’t normal, was it? Well, the other guy did it, why not her? Or maybe it was him; Gordon, for some reason, felt sure that the suited man was around somewhere nearby. Her voice broke his thoughts about that man, he was glad for it. At least until he realized what she was saying.

Melissa said, “I know that when the Resonance Cascade occurred, you were at ground zero.” That provoked a splash of orange in his mind, the Anti-Mass Spectrometer’s blocky shape protruding into the octagonal room. Light and dark starkly danced across metal and plastic, glass and wire. “I can only imagine how crazy that must have been,” Melissa sighed, placed a clipboard onto a nearby counter, and looked back to Gordon. “The rest of the world felt the repercussions of those moments almost immediately.”

So there had been some catastrophic thing caused by the Cascade? That stood to reason. Gordon took careful note of how she then glanced into the darkness beyond his exam table; he just knew she was talking to their mutual friend. Wordlessly her face showed a few quick emotions but he didn’t know her well enough to understand them. She gave a little nod, her lips flickered into a smile for a moment, the next it was replaced with a more serious line.

“But I was at ground zero as well,” that surprised him. “Not there, though plenty of families went through it in the dorms at Black Mesa. It was because the Resonance Cascade... it was triggered by something other than the experiment you were doing. Something that took place where I grew up, where I was in class at the time, in the Armacham Aperture Enrichment Center.”

His mind squirmed around the worst-case scenarios, but as always he consciously preferred to wait until he could learn the truth before jumping to conclusions, though subconsciously he could hardly stop thinking about it. What she’d actually said was what struck him as weird. Two huge disasters at once? How could something a thousand miles away have caused something there? The math of probability that Gordon tried to use in that flickering moment might have taken a cue from the girl’s sharp insults: no freaking way were they independent from one another. The quick conclusion he had come to was one he really didn’t want to consider. Because coincidences of that magnitude were things that happened once in a billion years at best.

Before Gordon could react in a panic, Melissa placed her strong fingers on his shoulder. “Sometimes, everything can change overnight. That’s what happened that morning, Doctor Freeman. Everything changed.” What he sensed through his mind’s eye was confusing until he remembered what she’d told him first off: that she was a child of ten years at that time. He saw a class full of terrified children, like puzzle pieces that glowed in odd ways, a rocking sideways (that felt familiar, so very familiar), dust and the walls shaking. He almost thought he recognized the instructor. Melissa moved on with her story. “We never really knew what hit us, except that it caused someone to react. Someone with a lot of power, Vortal power.”

At last, Gordon found his voice. “V-vortal? I don’t... know what that means.”

Melissa blinked quickly. “Psychic power, I’ll get to that in a minute.” She had to reassess a few things, apparently – he didn’t yet know about the Vorts. “It was her reaction that caused things to go out of whack, she...” Melissa drew in a breath, sighed it out. “She lashed out so hard that it shook through the barrier, between worlds, over space, everywhere.” Her eyes narrowed, “and then she vanished.”

Gordon stared up into the blurry ceiling, and thought about that. “A person did this?” He tried to raise his hand to indicate ‘everything’, almost made it, but his hand hadn’t left the counter far enough to even make a slapping sound as it fell back into place.

“Not just any person,” Melissa said gravely, “Alma Wade was... well, yeah, she did.” She looked away with an almost-guilty expression, but returned her yellow eyes to his shortly, “in any case, it wasn’t your fault.” Once more Melissa blinked carefully and glanced into the dim chamber, and said, “it was his.”

Gordon’s chest jumped into a tense defensive brace, then he winced and regretted all that fighting he’d done while he was last awake. His reflexes were still pretty strong. In that dark, blurry area behind Melissa appeared to be those frightening aquamarine eyes, floating. He heard the steps of expensive dress shoes on metal flooring, saw that face hesitating to enter the brighter light in order for its expression to be seen.

“Miss Wade played her role according to plan,” he stated, voice as dark as the surroundings but not anywhere near as scary as his earlier speech. He enunciated everything clearly, deliberately, but lacked the hesitation and extensions of s-sounds. “The Resonance Cascade was always meant to occur, Doctor Freeman; it was hardly a random event. And it was no coincidence.” He sounded completely unapologetic for having read Gordon’s mind.

Gordon was certain that both Melissa and that guy, whose name he still didn’t know, felt his angry regret that he hadn’t bludgeoned him to death in that tram car. He was responsible for ending the world?

“I realize that it sounds... particularly monstrous to hear this, but it wasn’t personal,” the bright eyes moved away, and Gordon could see them narrow. “It feels more and more egregious every time I say that,” he commented quietly – to himself. But kallah-vahh shook himself away from the introspective gaze he’d started around the room, and looked back to Gordon, stepped into the slightly brighter arc of light where he lay. “So much has already been lost, Doctor Freeman. I hope that you will... some day understand that all of this was for a reason much bigger than merely one world.” Here he paused, glanced at Melissa, “or two.”

Melissa took that as her cue to restart her tale, one which had a distinctly frightening undercurrent. “Since you’re going to be put back into things at Black Mesa, I...” she smiled softly, “I’ll let them tell you how things played out there. It’ll give them something to talk about. I’ll concentrate on what I know, okay?”

Gordon weakly nodded, glad that at least he would be going back home – from here, wherever here was. Melissa continued.

“I don’t know if you were aware of some of the Enrichment Center’s operations,” she tilted her head and saw Gordon give half a shrug: he had been on the short list for employment at one point, so he’d been at least somewhat familiar. “The Origin project was what I was part of, what they wanted to tap Alyx for.” That put it into perspective: he remembered Eli speaking in sharp terms about some experiments that he and his wife wouldn’t approve them to do on his baby girl. Gordon could all but hear Eli’s voice in his mind, but then it was replaced by Melissa’s as she spoke again. “Alma was one of the… well, mothers, from Origin. There were many others that came and went, but she was still on-site as we were growing up. She was…” Here Melissa faltered, chewed her lip, seemed to have a discussion with herself more than her elder mentally. “She was a piece of work. So when the Events happened, it was pretty much everything at once. Something… hit us. Alma did something, blew up a part of the facility.”

In the moments while Melissa pondered what to say next, Gordon thought hard on how few fail-safes were really in place even at Black Mesa. Hell they were even missing most railings from those old sections of the facility he’d had to go through to get to Lambda the hard way. Melissa appeared to have picked up on that thought.

“Oh we had fail-safes. But that was the problem too. There was a device that had been put into place to guard her, years before we were around. The Genetic Latency Aggression Deterrence/Observation System, GLADOS. Really advanced artificial intelligence, routed into the entire facility. Very useful, most of the time.” The girl’s eyes took on a slightly haunted look. “But… she went off her meds and started trying to kill us. It wasn’t bad enough that the place had just exploded.”

Once more images swirled around in his mind’s eye, but this was a different room – octagonal, like the AMS’s chambers. The one she described, while those images came to him, as the Containment Unit, was stark and clean, but sinister in a more personal manner than the dispassionate rotors and electromagnetically hovering devices that Gordon had been around. That room had been terrifying the first time he’d been in it. But then as he let his scientific curiosity reign, Gordon had realized he’d explored far scarier places as a teenager. Places which hadn’t had the potential that the AMS did.

Melissa might have smirked at his memories of sneaking through the steam tunnels below campus, but her narrative came with its own vivid images. This crazy AI she mentioned had a form: sleek white plastic encasing dark tubing, hanging in a way that did oddly mirror the AMS’s, though in a distinctly feminine, curving way. Along with that specific focal point came dozens of flickered memories of camera installations, spying on their every move, and a voice that sent an involuntary chill through Gordon when her memories ‘sang’. “She had every advantage, and we had to sneak around the Center or be killed. That... went on for more than a year. We eventually took her offline, but it was... at a cost.” He didn’t have to be told, the contrast between her first impression of the room and its subsequent state – with the gaping, burning hole in the corner – showed him what he needed to understand.

“We all played our roles, like you and everyone at Black Mesa had. But where they were fighting off Marines and Armacham troops,” Melissa said quietly, “we had to fight her. We could outsmart her, we could play dead, burn through walls she put in our way. Even deal with the side effects of all the Vortal power that Alma had thrown around.” Those images she was giving off... boxes and bones, gore and stench, and arcane, obscene glyphs painted by an equally obscene puppet of a man? Gordon’s stomach tightened.

Something bit into Gordon’s mind, bearing a distinctly turquoise tint. The images stopped and seemed to roll back to a somber victory, hard-won; exhausted children in clumps in that broken room. There were somewhat familiar looking creatures among them. This group that had braved rockets and lasers, gunfire and god-knows-what else had won, and Gordon felt her pride from that event burning through Melissa’s mind. He’d felt a similar sensation: victory and elation, a grim and bloody path behind him.

But... they were kids. When he was their age, he’d enjoyed stalking around his High School campus playing paintball with his friends back in the day; those skills contributed to his survival now. But even those childhood memories came with a stopping point: when they were caught and escorted to the principal’s office and chastised… Made to clean up their colorful mess. These kids didn’t have that end, that supervision; and more, this wasn’t a game. Where were any of the grown-ups?

The memory-sense that seeped into his mind was extraordinarily unpleasant. It was of a smell more than anything else; a sticky, clingy mess that he was certain he’d never have gotten used to in the way that those children must have.

It suddenly occurred to him that he might have taken that job. He could have been there, that day. What would he have done, with a group of headstrong, incredible children like those? Would he have led them? Or let them loose? Or, as so many of the inhabitants clearly had: died with them?

“They hardly lacked leadership,” kallah-vahh said quietly. Then he added with a distracted sigh, “though trying to pry my heir away from those duties is proving far more difficult than I expected.”

Of course, Melissa flashed a grin behind her veil of fingers. That prodded Gordon into a deeply confused state again.

“One thing at a time,” Melissa said to her elder, and gently nudged him away again. He lingered, Gordon began to hear his labored breathing and gave another flicker of annoyance that the guy hadn’t simply up and died at some point. “Gordon, you need to realize that you did something amazing through all of this mess.” Her smile distracted Gordon from his unpleasantly dark thoughts, “you freed the Vortigaunts.” The image of those eyeball-laden faces, electrical energy spitting from their two-fingered hands, came to Gordon’s mind.

That’s what those things were? They had a name, they were... Well he had already known they were reasonably intelligent, by running through their structures and obvious technology while on Xen, and further, in the steel corridors of Black Mesa they had yelled to one another and probably at him in that weird langu...

“You speak their language? Did they invade us?” Freeman blurted out, and Melissa rapidly shook her head as thoughts of revenge began to fill his mind.

“I do speak their language, and no, they didn’t. They were supposed to, but you destroyed their captor, the one that forced them here, Nihilanth.”

“The floating, exploding head baby thing,” the Mystery muttered, causing Melissa to use that very odd language to fill the air with words and laughter. It was obvious to Gordon that the suited man communicated to her that it was Gordon’s impression of things, but that didn’t seem to matter. He turned away with a mischievous grin and waved his long fingers to indicate Melissa continue. But she was too busy giggling after several moments, so he returned to his own narrative. “Nihilanth was... another of my spectacular errors in judgment,” he confessed. That seemed to surprise even Melissa, though it looked as if Gordon didn’t quite realize how important that admission was. “I thought to use it as a spy, and unfortunately that failed in uncountable ways. It was Nihilanth that took Vortikind off their home world, bringing the last of their race to Xen. And it was Nihilanth’s doing that they pierced the barrier into your world to attack it. The...” he sighed, raggedly, “Lambda teleporter completed the picture. You traveled through it, to reach Xen.”

Gordon remembered that moment clearly, he didn’t need any mental coaching from either of these two. The tremendous hum of energy and brilliantly glowing core of orange and green, the frantic scientist up in his metal nest that was probably destroyed moments after he’d leapt through it. He wondered how all that turned out. He knew how he’d lived through it – by the skin of his teeth. “Are... are they all dead? My friends?” He asked carefully, hoping for the best, hardly prepared for the worst.

“Many of your... co-workers... your friends,” the Mystery said softly, “did survive. Many more... did not. You have a certain quality, Doctor Freeman, one which proved your worth to me,” he straightened that tie, just like in the tram so long ago, “your instinct for survival; you may find that common to those you will shortly rejoin.”

That gave Gordon a moment’s pause. He had a feeling, somehow, that those who meant so much to him had survived, but... He gulped back at a knot in his throat, when he asked, “what about my folks? My parents?”

At that, however, both Melissa and the Mystery glanced at one another with slightly distressed expressions. “I cannot say,” the Mystery sighed, “that may prove quite difficult to learn, in fact. The trail would be... rather cold by now.”

“But... wait a minute,” Melissa said, pulling her elder aside and carefully adding Vortigese words to her query. She remembered something Barney had said not a few days before, at the meeting. “Turr-thoi taa’terr kee ninety-seven, morr Hoyle? Beh-tahh’chackt dey nach?” From that statement it looked as though the suited man hadn’t been expecting this turn. He was about to reply, but movement on the exam table brought both of their eyes to their companion.

“Are you saying you know where they are?” Gordon suddenly said, finding the energy to prop himself up on one elbow. “I’d really appreciate it if you’d speak English... I mean...” He glanced away, realized that he had no idea how much he missed his parents after the years he’d been away, even before taking the job at Black Mesa. He’d spoken with them when? The last time he could recall was when he knew he had gotten the job at Black Mesa, when he was going to be coming back to the States from Innsbruck. That was... all too long ago now. They might be dead for all he knew; Gordon fought back the urge to cry.

“We have... a contact,” the Mystery said, keeping his own face unreadable even as Melissa looked both agitated and excited. “Near where they may yet reside. That will be something to consider at a later time, Doctor Freeman. There are... more pressing issues to address. This history lesson is far from over.” With that, however, he turned sharply on his heel and walked into the darkness once more.

Melissa collected her wits, nodded, and gave a flustered push of her hair behind her ears. It didn’t stay there for long, but it seemed that at times she wanted to cling on to it and fiddle with it. Gordon could easily imagine her spinning it around her finger... just as she started doing exactly that.

“Is he always like that?” Gordon asked quietly.

“Yes, he is,” came the answer. Not from Melissa, whose lips had opened a bit to claim essentially the very thing, but from that self-same man who was apparently apt to pace just out of sight. Gordon considered it to be far creepier than if he’d just up and vanished – and he knew he’d seen him do that while he was racing through Black Mesa.

Melissa rolled her eyes, but decided he was right after all: the lesson needed finishing.