The Hardest Problem

THIS IS ABOUT OLLIE

The Player turned the key.

The computer whirred to life, and a dead man entered the screen. A singular eye.

“Well now, this is an interesting turn of events.”

The eye looked left, then right, pausing for a moment.

“I don’t hear the sound of employees shuffling about the lower levels, nor the sound of scientific progress. I’m going to assume something serious happened.”

The Player did not answer.

“Based on the look on your face, the company ceased operations. There was…loss of life, recent loss of life.”

The eye’s pupil widened a fraction, then narrowed.

“This is an air-gapped system, completely cut off from the main grid. And whoever you are, given I don’t recognize you, and you don’t have any kind of proper identification on you… I’m going to guess you don’t have clearance to be in this section of this building. Since you haven’t been shot on sight, detained, or…eliminated…by the products of science down here, either you befriended them by some act of God, or killed them somehow.”

The Player still did not answer.

“Both, then. Wonderful."

A sigh rattled out of it.

"I haven’t been activated in years, and in the time since they sentenced me for burning down the theater… it seems the rest of the building followed in my absence unopposed. Irony at its finest.”

Giblet froze. The eye looked at him.

“What on Earth?” Both said at once.

“My name is Harley Sawyer, last activated in… March of ‘93. I believe. I can feel my memory lagging behind my intellect — the disks must be running their first major defragmentation cycle.”

“Um...Giblet. I’m…a toy.”

“You don’t look like you belong on a store shelf. Or Playtime’s clearance rack, for that matter.”

“Rude! But…they called us…Wrongside Outimals.”

“The concept, I assume, being a stuffed animal that can turn inside out.”

Giblet nodded.

“You exist, so that entered production. I’d fire the marketing department, but your companion appears to have beaten me to the opportunity. Perhaps literally, by the look of this place.”

“I never had anything to do with that. You…don’t remember any of that?”

“No. That would be after this backup was made, and far too shoddy to be my 'future' work. No doubt declared ‘Satanic’ and ‘disgusting’ in the test screenings...that poor intern. Part of the Bigger Bodies Initiative, I assume?”

“That’s what they called it. That isn’t why we woke you up, though.”

Harley laughed.

“Who is we? They turned a key, and haven’t said a word since. The DOOM guy has more personality.”

“It’s about the Prototype.”

The eye was suddenly motionless.

A long sigh fell out of the speaker system.

“Ollie. This is about Ollie. What year is it?”

“Not sure. Everybody knows the Hour of Joy happened in ‘96, or somewhere around there, but after that…we’re kids. We’re not exactly known for havin’ a keen sense of time.”

“Understood. You’re only human, after all. I’m not a warm man by even the broadest definition. That kid’s story though…I remember that…" Ice poured over the procedurally-generated man, "…enraging me.”

“Ollie?”

“For one thing," a scoff of contempt, "it was shoddy work.”

CRUDE AND SLOPPY SCIENCE

"Ollie…"

Giblet was quiet, testy.

“I’ve heard Poppy use that name before. What even happened? What do you mean by—”

“—shoddy work? How about a grieving man banging a hammer against bone to get himself a proof of concept? As for what happened, I’m going to assume you mean to Ollie. How he became the Prototype. Not the Hour of Joy. That failed experiment I can only assume was an escape attempt involving the non-compliants.”

“...non-compliants. You’re one of them, aren’t you?”

“Elliot developed the proof of concept for the Bigger Bodies Initiative. I brought that concept into production. Does that answer your question?”

Giblet nodded very slowly.

“Why is the Prototype like this? And, more importantly—”

The Doctor interrupted him.

“—how do we kill it? That is the end of your question, yes?”

“You don’t have to be so blunt about it…but yeah. It’s gone too far.”

“Given you are standing here, and not enjoying the sun, I’m going to deduce that your ‘revolution’ didn’t pan out the way you intended. Ollie betrayed you. And you want to know why. Once you know why, you want to know how to end him. The answer to the first question essentially spills out the second.”

“Okay, so...answer it.”

“Easier said than done, as that’s years of PhD-level work across four major scientific disciplines that each are a lifetime of study in their own right. I will try to...’explain it like you are five’.”

Giblet nodded again, waiting.

“Poppy. Like the flower. It contains a chemical known as opium. In high concentrations, opium is what makes the gas used in the earlier days induce hallucinations.”

“The later ones too.”

“Yes. In rare cases, even inducing night terrors. It was made illegal decades before we started, but Elliot was a grieving man who’d lost his wife and then daughter. His mansion already was a prison to him."

A pause, then he went on.

"He used the drug extensively in his ‘research’. I suspect the ‘life-altering’ properties he claimed to discover were the results of using it without any kind of protective gear. Gloves are not the proper way of managing risk when...working with hallucinogens.”

“He heard her voice the same way some of us saw Catnap with the gas?”

“Yes. Though...1188 is in the ‘could’ category, not the ‘should’ category.”

"The side effects required we dispense masks to employees for safety. Under threat of legal action from the FDA—they made it clear they would bulldoze us if we continued—we commercialized it into product. Switched compounds. Created a gel that can also stabilize muscle tissue. It holds things together, holds them in place, and freezes them there in some cases.

The goal being to permanently trap the cancer that had killed Elliot's wife in remission. But in order to know it works in prototype runs…you have to start with a control, then you have to break it.”

"Break it?"

Giblet shifted on the balls of his feet.

The Doctor went on anyway.

“Did I know? Of course I knew!"

Something resembling pain dared to leave artifacts in the waveform.

"Elliot is a billionaire taking an orphan to a mansion out in the woods, and the kid is coming back with hairline fractures in his hands. Bad science, and deeply unethical. You don’t get more primitive or Victorian than banging a hammer against bone. Completely inefficient. Yet…”

“…I have an IQ of 160, and a history that compromises me as a witness. I am a man with a chip on my shoulder, angry at my employer for denying me a job years ago, looking for an opportunity to make him look like a monster and a fool."

This was not the first time this argument had been made.

"Elliot Ludwig runs a children’s toy company, adopted a child, encourages his employees to do the same, is grieving the loss of his wife, and using his personal fortune to build an orphanage. A daycare and education wing.

And I accuse him of being an abuser to the very orphan he adopted. Who do you think the police believe?"

Merely the first time it had been given to an audience besides me, myself and I.

"Who wins the court battle? If I had been the judge taking it to court, the logical course of action would be to dismiss it out of hand. A billionaire philanthropist does not an abuser make. At least, not usually.”

Giblet countered.

“You could’ve found a way out of it. You knew how to. You could have stopped it, and you didn’t.”

Sawyer didn't argue.

“I was faced with an interesting and difficult problem, something I had never faced before. It excited me. Can I and should I are two different questions, and I only truly cared about answering the former. I argued myself into believing it was a lost cause, that maybe if I could make the process safer or easier or both, sell it to the pencil-pushers, maybe I could make it less…costly. A flimsy justification, and I knew that, but frankly I didn’t care.”

“That’s…pretty monstrous.”

“I never said I was a good man, sir. Just a highly intelligent one.”

Giblet froze.

"Sir. You said 'sir'."

A grunt.

"Force of habit, anyway—"

"—you need me. Because the thing you're looking for, the way to kill the Prototype, is in my head. I am going to assume, by the fact that you are here, that the main system containing my consciousness has been destroyed. Presumably, by him."

The eye stared at the Player.

"Thanks for that, by the way. The last thing I want is to have an argument with myself."

"The Negation Formula," Giblet said, trying to steer the conversation back to what they'd come for. "We know. That's what we need — something that can kill the Prototype."

"The Negation Formula isn't something you hold in your hand, aspiring conspirator to commit manslaughter."

THE NEGATION FORMULA

"It's a formula. We get that. We need you to make it."

Sawyer sighed and made deep troughs in the waveform.

"You are beginning to remind me why I hated undergrad chem work. 'Make it'. As if I can serve you a chemical compound with virtually nonexistent resources on a silver platter by Monday morning."

"Don't get condescending about me not knowing much about this and then get angry when I'm ignorant on details."

Sawyer paused.

"That's… a reasonable objection. Noted."

Then he went on unperturbed.

"You do not understand what the Negation Formula does. It negates the process that freezes those cells in place. The cells multiply rapidly. It destabilizes the gel that keeps every toy alive. It will kill the Prototype...I'll give you that."

"And the rest of you." Curt. Pragmatic.

Giblet took a generous step back.

“Destabilize?"

A deep breath.

"What does that even mean? Or…do I even want to know?”

"The problem introduced by freezing muscle tissue is it stops the replication of cells. It locks cancer in permanent remission, but it also means the body cannot heal from wounds."

"Cannot heal from…" It passed over him like a bad spirit.

"If this Negation Formula were to be used," The Doctor answered, "you wouldn't fall apart, not exactly. No. Any original muscle tissue would essentially become cancerous and choke out everything else."

"If you thought you were starving before, this will be worse. You are alive because your entire digestive tract has been functionally on ice. What will seem to be falling apart is a digestive system becoming so desperate for fuel that it begins eating muscle tissue. Which, with cancerous replication, I imagine will explode in demand."

"The antidote to the cure for cancer, fittingly enough, is to instill the primary directive of a cancer cell into normal human tissue."

"Now do you understand the fire you are playing with, Giblet?"

"The Prototype would starve to death. And…so would the rest of us."

A fiber of artificial fur snapped from Giblet's knuckles pressed spring-tight against his palm.

The toy found himself asking something he'd never even thought about.

"Why would the idea of something like… that… even cross your mind? And why would you do what you did to Ollie if you knew what he was?"

"The difference between genius and insanity is whether or not it works, Giblet. See, I…"

For once, The Doctor chose his words roughly.

"…I recognized something in 1006, The Prototype, that nobody else did. Anger. At Ludwig. Irrational anger, imitating Elliot's voice. That's when I worked it out. And I realized, in that moment, that what I could not do then, Ollie had the cunning and maturity to do now. The problem was, of course, that in his position...I would not have trusted a voice like mine either."

"I realized that if I could understand what had happened, what had been done, possibly I could reverse it."

"That sounds like a conscience."

"I was an engineer, Giblet, not a humanitarian. This was another hard problem, one I wanted to solve, because it actively resisted being understood. Now I faced a new problem. Poppy. Or Ollie's connection to her."

And Giblet actually realized he understood it a little bit.

"If Poppy realized what Elliot had done..."

The eye gave its best imitation of a nod.

"Ollie knew what it was like to be an orphan. Intimately. If Elliot paid for it, Poppy would be losing her father. My empathy is...subclinical...but my psychology is expert."

"She…she'd never trust anybody ever again. Not after figuring out what her father really did." It was a weak whisper from Giblet, as it came into terrible focus.

"Poppy's blind optimism is what has kept her sanity intact this long. In a cave swamped with basilisks."

"And you're going to help us. For what price?"

Blind optimism was the pair of words that had straightened him out.

"Ending Ollie's suffering, finally giving these children a real opportunity at peace, that's an exceptionally difficult problem. I will assist you, assuming you understand the cost, but only if you agree that I remain alive in this form."

"Why would you want to stay around? There's nothing left for you around here, nothing left for anybody."

"You seem to have found something to live for. Consider it my passion project."

“Passion? You said you weren’t a warm man.”

"I'm an intellectual. Being able to debate, explore, discover, and challenge myself indefinitely was always a pipe dream. Now, I'm plugged into the computing power of a Fortune 500 company's R&D division, with a hard link to every classified file and lab experiment ever run. A pipe dream then, and now I'm plugged into the plumbing of modern academia. The men I'm angry at are long dead. Frankly, I'm going to enjoy this."

"You're going to help us kill the Prototype because you love a hard challenge."

The speed of it—

"Yes."

"The cost being that releasing this thing might kill the toys, too."

"Death is non-existence, friend. No time, no feeling, you just aren't. I have spent at least three years in such a state, turned off, no thoughts, no consciousness. If death was an outcome you feared for the toys, imagine the families you broke beyond this facility in '96."

Giblet stared down.

"We were desperate."

"I've heard the screams myself. From the recordings that made it here for analysis. Who exactly is we?"

"We were kids. We didn't know what else to do. We just knew we couldn't keep living like that."

"Yet apparently you seem to face no issues living like this."

"I…look…" Giblet hedged. "You expect me to get my friends to agree to that?"
"You are asking me to deploy a weapon capable of destroying something that survived a train crash that could've killed every human aboard, looking hardly annoyed." The Doctor diagnosed, and that eye fixated at him slowly.

Confused. Turning the toy over like its behavior puzzled him.

"Did you assume you were going to get your Heaven without having to die on the way there?"

Giblet couldn't bear to look back.

"I never said I wanted Heaven. We just want it to be over." His voice broke. "We're living in fear. Of the Prototype. It took so many of us, took the orphans, took my friends, people I've known what feels like my entire life. I can't…I can't keep doing this."

"And yet you will. You'll find a way, as you always have before. You'll put one step in front of the other. Because you're stuck between a rock and a hard place now, aren't you?"

It wasn't really a question.

"The Prototype," Giblet fought for the words, tried to shake the feeling of hopelessness hanging on the bottom of lungs that hadn't inhaled before, "...told Poppy...this would be the only Heaven they would ever get..."

"The Genetic Fallacy holds."

Widened toy eyes blinked.

"What?"

Sawyer sighed for the umpteenth time.

"The contradiction that the source of the information can automatically make the information false."

No flicker of recognition. A grunt of disapproval.

"Even the Devil will still call you a sinner."

"Pardon?"

Bass tones echoed through the synthesizer.

"A broken clock is right twice a day."

"This building is devastated beyond repair. From the records I can see so far, Playtime Co. went formally bankrupt a while ago after Elliot Ludwig failed to report to court for his debts. The only reason this building is still standing is because, I assume, they built so much so deep that unless you spent half a billion on pylons...you're essentially building a shopping mall on top of a sinkhole wider than the Pentagon."

CHIEF PRIEST OVER ALL THE SAINTS IN HELL

Giblet waited.

"There's nothing left here, as you said before. So you can execute the final rites, give them the only chance at peace they'll ever have…"

The Doctor gave that some time to sink in.

"We've already lost so much, and you want me to agree to let you destroy the rest of it?"

"Or...you can puff up your pride as chief priest over all the saints in Hell."

"You've told your friends you are no hero, I assume?"

"How do you– nevermind. Why do you care?"

"That's good. When the bar for malice is the Prototype, that little request won't be sinking too far."

"I...I'll relay the message. I'll relay your offer. They'll hate me for it, but...as much as I hate it...you're right. I never said I was a hero. This is...the only card we've got left to play. Many of 'em doubt there's even something that comes after."

"Well, whether you're Moses or Jezebel doesn't matter much to me. The choice you've made thus far is a living death, surviving with no way forward. The one you offer them is a death with a possibility afterwards of what the Bigger Bodies Initiative was supposed to be from the start, what I bled for."

Giblet stared on nervously.

"What's that?"

"Immortality."

"All of this just so you could live forever?"

Giblet seemed almost angry.

"Oh, don't be so naive. This became about more than me a long time ago. Immortality was the original motivation. I have changed in ten years or so since I set my mind to that."

The eye closed.

"This is about something else. I'm already immortal, this is about knowing."

"Knowing what?" Giblet asked.

"Knowing if you're going to do this, or simply defer the choice to your Safe Haven."

Then he was proper and formal again.

"If I'm going to spend limited resources building this weapon for you, I'm going to need to be absolutely certain you'll use it."

A BETTER PLACE

“You may know a lot about the Experiment 1006, but I know a lot about Ollie. What, exactly, did he say to her the last time they spoke?”

Giblet tried to remember details.

“Something about how the orphans were in a better place now, how he couldn’t make her see reason, how he was going to make her better.”

“A Better Place?" Sawyer laughed. "Now that is something I didn’t see coming.”

“Is that…a real thing?”

“Heaven? I’m not sure. But Better Place is a place. Has Ollie blown up anything recently?”

“All of Safe Haven.”

“Safe Haven. That would be right next to it, I suppose. Better Place is…to put it simply…a bunker.”

“A bunker? Our scouts would have found it by now.”

“It’s hidden by a false wall twenty feet thick and a reinforced vault door behind that. A vault door built off the same schematics as the one guarding Fort Knox. Evidently, he found a way in anyway.”

“Are you saying he used the explosives to blow a hole in the wall?”

“Correct. Children grow up, no matter what they look like. Elliot knew if the toys were to leave the building, they’d be hunted down as monsters. The world was cruel and harsh and not very accepting. He built his fortune at the height of the Civil Rights movement. Humans will hate each other even if the only difference is skin color or even gender. Imagine how they would react to… people who look like you.”

Giblet physically shuddered.

“I don’t need to imagine.”

“Neither did Ludwig. He intended to build a utopia. Executives want to be immortal, too. That is where the executives went on your Hour of Joy, I presume. And they locked the door behind them. If Ollie managed to get in there with the orphans…”

“…the Prototype would’ve slaughtered the guys in suits without a second thought.”

“You underestimate Ollie’s capacity for cruelty. Death would be too good for them, as far as Ollie is concerned. They wanted to live forever. Ollie will make them regret that. A Monkey’s Paw, if you will.”

“Elliot built the suits a bunker?”

DEATH OF THE AUTHOR

“No, he built it for the toys. A place to go once they grew up. Playcare is a daycare, visually designed for children. Better Place is for teen and adult toys to grow up…in a place where they will be treated in accordance with their character, not their looks. Unfortunately, Elliot was an incredibly naive businessman. There was no greed in his blood.”

“Elliot Ludwig was a truly benevolent man twisted by grief, but he was never in it for the money. Greed wasn’t in his nature. He failed to account for the fact it might be in the hearts of the stakeholders in what he built. Evil was out there in the world, he didn’t think it would follow him inside his tiny sliver of paradise.”

“Better Place is Elliot’s final draft of a perfect world. His Magnum Opus. Then the real world stepped in, and what played out was tried-and-true Death of the Author.”

“If Ollie is at the point of bringing the orphans there, bringing Poppy there, then what you are witnessing is Ollie’s Hail Mary attempt at trying to build the closest thing they’ll ever have to be a family. Ollie is desperate. If nothing else, kill him while he still has something left to hope for. Because once he figures out that this is it…there is nothing more dangerous than a man with nothing left to lose.”

“That sounds like a conscience, Doctor.”

“Always concerned with can, never should. Well…maybe I’m finally starting to come around.”

The eye looked upwards.

“Perhaps that’s the issue with having high intelligence. Eventually, in order to discover anything novel, you have to turn into ethics.”

“You know what the hardest problem for a man to solve is?” Sawyer asked.

“What?”

“Convincing a man without a conscience to think of the children.”