Chapter Text
The year was 1975.
A crucial year for many people, perhaps, in ways that each and every one of them could recount. War stories, scandals, a casual fling with a one time lover that would eventually become the story to recount to future generations. The one who got away. A flame that nostalgia and the shitty marriage you’ve found yourself stuck in leaves you hoping to maybe, just maybe, rekindle. You wouldn’t get it, you say to your nieces, nephews, kids, grandkids, even your spouse before he or she leaves for good this time. You weren’t there.
For one man, who absolutely was there, it was the start of a career that would jettison him into notoriety. The fact he knew. The extent he did not.
An applied science and research facility, especially as prestigious as Black Mesa, would immortalize him, at least in some fields. Watch any documentary about the next Einstein, open up a textbook about the first man on Mars, and there was a good chance the name Wallace Breen would have appeared outside of the footnotes once or twice. Maybe they’d even interview him.
No one could have predicted how ubiquitous his name would have become, not even him. And yet, although deep down, had somebody come back with, say, a time travelling boat, and told him just how he would save the world and unite the human species with its benefactors, a part of him would have believed it. Imagined the escapades he would have gone through to get there.
For now though, Wallace Breen was on the path to greatness. He’d just become the new administrator of Black Mesa, and he was ready to clean house. Standard safety regulations that kept Black Mesa out of the news more than once had proven to be more of a nuisance than anything. There was no such thing as bad press, provided you can drown it out with achievements. Scientists frequently insisted that their equipment had limits. Limits that couldn’t be stretched or tested, lest they break something. Lest they accidentally create something.
Breen understood that limits were meant to be broken. If the technicians were unhappy with the machines they had, they could simply do what he was paying them to do and build a better one. Would people complain? Of course. Right up until the very end they complained. But they could not argue with his results. The Hazardous Environment Suit, before he’d arrived, was nothing more than a modified spacesuit, useless without a clunky power cable that was perfect for tripping on. Neither jack-of-all-trades, nor a master of one.
But Breen saw potential. Standardization of the parts, emphasis on compactness and multi-use. People objected of course, we need this component, they shouted, but they quickly shut up when they realized just how comfortable, mobile, and applicable the brand new Mark II suit was.
But as always, this was no time to celebrate. The cable had been reduced already, but the next iteration of the suit needed its own internal power supply. Humanity’s worst base instinct, aside from the urge to reproduce, that old tyrant, was complacency. It needed to be forced into action in order to survive.
The underground nature of Black Mesa had made him think a great deal about fossils. Calcified impressions of remains of beasts that, had they known what came before, would have thought themselves the pinnacle of evolution, the end of geological history. If only they had bothered to look to the stars.
Humanity could not make the same mistake.