Chapter Text
Gordon tapped his foot nervously in the tram. He was standing and staring at the window, glancing at his watch every couple of seconds. His hands felt clammy and his chest felt a little tight. He was late, again. He had gone out with Barney again, and, Barney had bought him a couple drinks. This had led to Gordon sleeping through his alarm, and now he had a pounding headache.
He was nervous. If Breen found out he was late again, or that he was drinking when he had work the next day… He liked this job. He didn’t want to lose it! He got in on Kleiner's request, so if he lost his job, he’d be failing Kleiner, and he didn’t want to do that! He didn’t feel too bad about the rest of the department. Wait, no! Eli! He liked Eli too! He couldn’t let either of them down. And… not seeing Barney as often would be sad too, but probably less so.
“If your intended destination is a high-security area beyond Sector C, you will need to return to the central transit hub,” the tram PSA system rattled on. He started pacing back and forth. He wished he could somehow speed up the car, get to work faster, do something – anything – to get to the Anomalous Materials department any quicker.
Lost in his thoughts, pacing still, he almost fell over when the tram stopped. He looked out the glass doors to see a security guard walking up to it. He got to it, opened the glass doors of the tram, and looked at Gordon’s ID.
“Hey, Gordon. Late for work again?”
Gordon resisted the urge to shoot the guard a glare. He didn’t –he never did– but he did huff a little.
The guard–his nametag read Ryker– snickered and walked over to the control panel to open the large security doors to sector C.
Gordon just nodded at Ryker and ducked under the door as it was still opening. Prick.
He ignored everyone as he worked his way to his locker. He could hear people, but all their voices just dissolved into buzzing in his ears. He didn’t need to listen to anyone right now; he just needed to get to the test chamber. Dropping some stuff off in his locker, he took a moment to stop and think. He heard someone complaining about “ridiculous ties” and almost laughed. The company-mandated ties did look a little goofy if he thought about it.
After a quick stop in the bathroom to splash some cold water on his face to try and wake himself up more, Gordon went into the HEV suit storage room to get his suit on. The HEV suits on either side of his were gone, Dr. Green and Dr. Cross must already be ready for the test. Gordon suited up as quickly as he could. He hated to think of what either of the two would have to say about him being so late for such a big test.
Walking through the hallways, everything seemed to be normal, just another day in Sector C. The only thing possibly out of the ordinary was a man pacing a room, checking the clock incessantly. The moment he noticed Gordon, however, he rushed over to the window and closed the blinds. Weird. Then again, he was scheduled to experiment on a huge sample, sample GG-3883, today, so he had no room to talk.
A melodic chime played over the announcement system, followed by: “Dr. Freeman to Anomalous Materials test laboratory immediately.” Gordon quickened his pace.
Running into his good friend Dr. Kleiner on his way to the chamber, Gordon couldn’t help himself from stopping to talk to him. The anti-mass spectrometer was visible from the window to his left, and Gordon kept taking glances at the huge machine that the dull rust-colored chamber housed. When he stopped to think about it, it was incredible what they were doing, and that he got to help build that crazy contraption in there, and he still couldn’t believe he got to run an experiment where he was working directly with it. He zoned out so much, however, that what Kleiner said blurred in his mind. He cursed himself silently for not paying attention but just smiled and nodded as Kleiner ushered him to the test chamber.
Both of them ran into Eli on the way there, but Kleiner tried to keep the conversation short, even though the two were ordinarily rather chatty. Very chatty compared to Gordon.
A computer in the back of the room sparked and made a wretched noise, and the two other scientists rushed over to it. Gordon took a quick look at the sparking computer but then looked at his watch. 43 minutes after when he was supposed to be in the chamber . His eyes widened at the realization that he was now super late for the test, so he just quietly went off into the chamber, letting Kleiner and Eli deal with that.
Inside the chamber, Gordon immediately got to work. He crossed the chamber, around the large anti-mass spectrometer, to the ladder that led to the control panel of the machine.
Climbing the ladder in the HEV suit was always difficult. These gloves didn’t have any grip, so he almost slipped every time he grabbed a rung of the ladder. The suit was also heavy, which didn’t help, but he was used to the weight, after quite some time training with the suit on. Feedback whining throughout the chamber caught his attention.
“Testing, testing.” The scientist on the mic coughed. “Everything seems to be in order.”
“All right, Gordon,” he continued. “Your suit should keep you comfortable through all this. The specimen will be delivered to you in a few moments. If you would be so good as to climb up and start the rotors, we can bring the anti-mass spectrometer to 80 percent and hold it there until the carrier arrives.”
He already knew all these things, but he followed the directions anyway. It was protocol, after all. Pressing the button to start up the machine, watching the anti-mass spectrometer start up. It was always so fascinating to watch this machine come to life. It was like an animal –in its own right, an old creature made of metal and fueled by energy, ripping a hole in the universe with its teeth at his beck and call. It might have been the energy that shot through it, creating a bright beam from the machine, or the loud mechanical whirring, but the hairs on the back of his neck stood up on end.
Gordon slid down the ladder, not wanting to expend the extra effort to climb down rung by rung.
“Good job Gordon. Now push the sample into the beam, slowly .” Dr. Kleiner said over the intercom.
As he walked around to the other end of the chamber again, Gordon could’ve sworn he heard one of the younger scientists muttering, “Slower than molasses drips off a spoon-” He shrugged it off, however, as he reached the cart with the sample in it.
Gordon pushed the cart into the anti-mass spectrometer as slowly as humanly possible. The cart creaked and groaned as he pushed it, the weight of the large crystal sample making it rather difficult to push. So difficult, in fact, that the cart got stuck on the rail at one point. He tried to give it a little kick to dislodge it, to no avail, so he gave it a shove, throwing most of his body weight against the cart. The metal of the cart scraped ever-so-slightly against the metal of the HEV suit, and the screech of metal on metal combined with the groaning of the cart as it dislodged from where it was stuck. The cart lurched forward so quickly that Gordon stumbled, almost falling flat on his face. He hated when it was his turn to do the manual labor in th– Oh wait. That’s not good.
“Gordon, what’s going on down there?”
The sounds coming out of the machine were not pretty, not at all. And not right. It started to spark and whirr in all the wrong ways. Stepping away from the anti-mass spectrometer, Gordon threw his hands up in a gesture of surrender. It had never done this before! Why was it doing this now , of all times?
The scientists in the control booth were panicking, and Gordon could hear it. He couldn’t understand a word of the muddled voices, but he could hear the sheer panic in their tone. Everything was going wrong now. Everything .
“Gordon! Gordon, you have to get out of there!” someone shouted over the intercom, and the other voices agreed.
Gordon tried to get to the doors, but the heavy blast exit seemed to be stuck shut. Frantically, he started banging on the doors, trying to get someone, anyone , to hear him and let him out. There seemed to be someone on the other side, but the door just twitched and whined.
He turned around to face his impending doom. The energy arced out away from the anti-mass spectrometer, blinding him temporarily after a bolt of electricity struck next to his head. He recoiled as the heat of the energy scorched the hair on the side of his face. He started running across the chamber, trying desperately to get to somewhere that was even a little bit safer. He wasn’t stupid enough to go for the ladder, since, if he did get shocked, the ladder would make it much worse.
As everything went to shit around him, he scrambled towards the edges of the chamber, trying to stay away from the electrical bolts. The mix of the sounds of the scientists freaking out, the machine on the fritz, and the arcs of energy punching dents into the metal lining in the chamber’s walls all culminated into a painfully loud buzzing noise that overtook his thoughts, causing his movements to become more erratic and irrational. Gordon danced with the deadly energy in a terrifying display of confused luck, surviving for several terrifying seconds– that is, until he paused to avoid a bolt of energy, and one struck him square in the chest, right on the lambda logo.
This is it. This is where I die. I still wanted to do so much in my life. There are so many places I wanted to see, to go, to experience…
Thoughts and memories flashed through his mind in the instant between when he was struck and when he hit the back wall. The last thing he heard before he went out was the sickening snapping of bones. His bones. As his head hit the rusty orange walls, he blacked out.