Inner Workings

Inner Workings - Part 35

The road no longer bounced, but it was still slick with drying mud. It was against her nerves to switch cars again, but Sandra had known better than to keep the jeep. She had switched to riding shotgun in Mark's van while one of his crew huddled in the back, keeping busy amongst crates. Her bag lay at her cramped feet, and the gun box in her lap covered with her jacket.

But Sandra had refused to lock her seatbelt until it shone like new from one of her sanitary wipes. After an hour of silence, and three wipes on the dashboard, her curiosity got the best of her.

"Where are the rest of them?" she said to Mark, jerking her hand towards the sullen man in the back.

Mark bristled under the question, his short gray beard spiking out like a hedgehog. "The other three went back to the props workshop up north last night. Better for them to rest up there after what they'd been through. One of my guys nearly had a ruptured nut. Do you have any idea the amount of pain he was in?"

"I wouldn't know, I don't have any," said Sandra, fingering the lid on the wipe box. "And I don't see how that is relevant."

Mark and the lone crewman glared at her, as if wanting to throw her out of the van while it was moving. But they wouldn't. She hadn't paid them yet.

"It's relevant because my price has tripled due to medical costs."

"Fine." Money didn't matter to her. Only results.

***

How much was Watch Mission Control paying him to be lost? Milton had never asked. It wasn't a particularly important thing to know at the moment, but many people based their self-worth on how much money they made and Milton was curious as to the nature of it. Perhaps the setting made him think such thoughts. A long white hallway same as the other white hallways in Watch Two. Just looking at them made Milton feel washed out. Perhaps they could color code the walls so people could know which wing they were in. Blue for Med Tech, red for Main Tech, green for the break room and cafeteria... orange for Surveillance Tech. Definitely orange.

Maybe then he would remember where Rachel's office was. Better yet, a big neon sign, "the Doctor is IN".

A man with glasses and a tissue sticking out his nose rolled out of a doorway on his chair. He looked singed around the edges, and smelled of ozone and fireworks. "Yo. You lost?"

"That obvious?"

"Well, you've walked past my office three times now."

"Ah." Milton pointed to the man's nose. "Got a cold?"

"That obvious?"

"That or a very subtle nose bleed."

"Heh, not until allergy season. Better now then it was yesterday." The man plucked the tissue out of his nose and rim shot it to a trash can.

Introducing himself as Nate, the man walked Milton to the BT lab, chatting along the way.

"Rachel's been recalibrating them since early morning," said Nate. "I swear she treats them like her babies."

"They're important pieces of equipment. It's reasonable that she take care of them."

"There's "taking care of them" and then there's "maternal surrogacy"." Nate gestured to the lab door before leaving. "Have fun. And knock before entering."

Milton paused for a moment. Maternal surrogacy? That would explain a few things.

He knocked and cracked the door open. "Dr. Sampson?"

"What?!"

Milton jumped back. And that would explain other things. Should he go in? Retreat? No. Better yet...

He stuck the bag of organic dried pineapple through the door like an olive branch. Actions apparently spoke louder than words. Rachel took the bag and opened the lab door.

"Have a seat," she said tiredly, closing it behind him. "I'm in the middle of a density diagnostic."

One small stool remained upright in the corner of the lab, and room for almost nothing else. The control room door hung open, the screens blinking blue with diagnostic graphs. The large BT-10 hummed, pulsing with faint light. Beside it sat three more compact BTs, the same size as tanning beds, but with wire knotted panels open, cords leading to the control room. On a table sat handheld BTs. On each BT scanning bed rested a set of chrome, wood, plastic, glass, and porcelain spheres.

Milton had only seen BTs in passing on a Watch base tour. When he first saw a BT-10 he fancifully thought it a transporter prototype. The less than brief explanation by the guide was enough to make him appreciate the complexity of the machines, yet he remained blissfully ignorant of their inner workings.

"Long morning?" Milton asked, trying to smile. Smiles generally made people feel more at ease.

"No more than usual." Rachel plucked another cord from a BT and led it to the control room, labeling it with color coded electrical tape as she went. She didn't look at him as she fiddled with the controls in the tiny, screen filled room. "I'm grateful for the pineapple, Dr. Balcuwitz, but is there a reason why you're here?"

Milton's smile shriveled to a patient pursing of lips. "The pineapple, mostly. I didn't know you liked health food."

"I don't. It's for a friend of mine."

"Oh." Hard to pace while on a stool, so Milton cleaned his glasses on his jacket sleeve. If he could talk authoritatively to one blonde ex-girlfriend, than he could talk to a blonde colleague. Bad comparison, they weren't alike at all, and he didn't have a mental defect concerning blondes, but it gave him a smidge of confidence. "Actually, your question was going to be my question."

Rachel stuck her head out. "What was?"

Milton put his glasses back on. "Why am I here?"

"To give an evaluation of the agents and the Watch Base."

Milton shook his head. "People in a stable workplace are usually curious about newcomers. My curiosity was to a minimum, unless you count an occurrence of wallet lifting."

"Your wallet?" Rachel's head hung low as she hissed. "Reese."

"No harm done," said Milton. "My point is you've had more than one shrink come through Watch Two; by my guess, on an almost weekly basis. How many have come before me?"

"I can't say." Rachel retreated to the control room and turned on the BTs simultaneously. The machines whirred into life, pulsing until a vibration shook through the room.

Milton raised his voice as he fumbled around the machines to the "safety" of the control room door, managing to lose his footing twice on the marked cords. "Can't because you don't know, or can't because I shouldn't know? You are looking for something specific, and it's not in the agents I've been assigned to observe. It's in the psychologists you've had come through here."

Rachel ignored him, tapping at the screens.

"What am I doing here, Dr. Sampson?" Milton asked again.

"Your job. Good day, Dr. Balcuwitz."

Dismissed Milton wandered back to Main Tech with his small notepad at the ready, and a lessened sense of purpose. After fifteen minutes of observing the remaining agents, he meandered to the Med Lab and shared a banana with Bella. This time he remembered to mark it in the chimp's food intake log.