That came from the hallway. She steps outside her office to see where this noise is coming from. Everyone else had already gone home already and she was about to leave as well so this is weird.
The sound is clearer, she is close to it. Annie walks down the stairs and turns on the lights. She was only down here once before. Rows of shelves hold lots of documents, some standing up vertically in folders and boxes, others as horizontal stacks of paper. The room is dimly lit by a few light fixtures on the walls.
She walks past the shelves. The noise is now very close. Behind the last shelf, sectioned off from the rest of the room, she finds a corner that looks like a small office. There is a large desk with a comfortable-looking though well-worn leather chair in front of it. Next to the chair is a floor lamp that was apparently placed there in the absence of a desk lamp. The desk itself is a mess (apart from a row of books that is neatly standing in front of the wall). Front and center is a terminal.
The terminal is a device that looks like kind of a weird TV... It has a small screen to display text, a couple adjustment knobs, and a flat section with a bunch of rows of buttons that have letters and symbols on them - and, apparently, it’s the source of the beep sound. The reception desk has one of these things; they always use it to order new office supplies and for other important-sounding work...
*An image of a dumb terminal with an integrated keyboard here would be nice here.*
*Might need to drive the point home even harder that the "rows of buttons" are a keyboard. Annie may or may not know that word (after all, there would have been plenty of opportunities to pick it up in the reception desk area), but she is unfamiliar with it.*
She sits down on the chair in front of it and switches the lamp on. Her eyes fall on the rows of buttons with letters - should be easy enough. Annie starts looking for the right letters...
Click, click, click, click, click. The buttons click with a very satisfying feeling and sound. Unlike the beeping noise which is ... now gone. It was kinda loud and getting annoying.
*It appears, Pineapple doesn’t like the word "kinda"... Well... It does kinda happen to be kinda one of my favorite words kinda >:)*
That took a while to... type?... Is that the word? The rows of buttons are arranged in a strange order... Annie looks around. A pile of papers, an empty cup, some pens and pencils, a screwdriver and other tools, a rubber duck - what an odd place to find a rubber duck... A phone! She picks it up - no signal. Weird. Maybe it’s disconnected. She looks on the floor and, sure enough, there is the plug - not for much longer as she finds a phone socket and plugs it in. Strange electrical noises. She tries to dial a number but nothing happens. A couple random characters appear on the terminal. She drops the receiver back on the cradle and types into the terminal again:
Annie picks up the phone again - but who to call? Her coworkers would probably make fun of her or be annoyed. Also, this place, ‘Cryo Facility 53’, she had never heard of it. The only one who might know more about that place is her grandpa, as he had thoroughly studied the plans of the city in his spare time back in the day. So she dials his number...
"Uhhh..." She makes a short pause. "This might be a little bit weird but someone contacted me from a location called ‘Cryo Facility 53’. I wondered if you happen to know where that is."
"Cryo Facility? Haven’t heard anyone talk about these in a while... Are you sure?"
Slowly, she sets the receiver back on the cradle. What would she tell Jack? What could she do for him? And the outside world was real? A whole world, much bigger than the city, that she had never heard anything but rumors about? She looks at the terminal but nothing had changed.
Annie ponders over what she had just learned for a moment, then she gets up to grab some snacks. A cup of juice and a cookie later, she returns, holding two additional cookies. She leans against the wall while nibbling at one of them. The second cookie is almost gone when she hears it again:
I think I might be able to improvise some tools down here. If I had a repair manual for the door, I think, I could get out. Do you think you can get your hands on one?
i dont know where would i find it
You are in the city under the mountain, right? The dome city?
If memory serves right, there is a library in the city center. They should have it. I need the repair manual for a Neotek Dynamics B33FY-AF Bunker Door.
They should have a digital version of it... You are not very familiar with computers, are you?
no
Are there any computer people you could ask to send me one?
not sure they would do that my grandpa might but he doesnt work here
Any computer hooked up to a modem and a phone line should do. If he knows his way around computers - and has access to one - he will be able to do this.
whats a modem
A modem is typically a small device that allows a computer to connect to the telephone network so that two computers that are far away from each other can be connected - like the computers we are using right now.
*Note to self: This makes little sense given her unfamiliarity with computers. She knows that her grandpa is reasonably familiar with computers and that he has one, but that’s about it.*
Great! Could you please ask him if he can establish a connection to <phonenumber> at 300 baud?
i think he would love to do that its his sort of thing but it will take a few days
Thank you - I never asked your name...
annie
Thank you, Annie!
I can hold out down here for quite a while, don’t worry about a couple days. I’ll check back on Friday evening if I don’t hear from you or your grandpa before then. Is that okay?
are you safe down there
Yes, the bunker seems to be holding up well and I have plenty of food for now. I just wish I could get out of that damned door and see the light of day.
ok thats good
```
"The light of day", Annie thinks to herself, "what does it look like?"
```
I have to go now, the bunker’s daily phone usage quota is running out. Thank you again and looking forward to talk to you and your grandpa.
"Is that a yes or a no?", Annie wonders, still slightly puzzled by the whole situation. She starts reading all that's still on the screen. "The light of day", she quietly says to herself.
As she reads the section with the bunker door and the phone number, she reaches for a pen and some paper and writes them down - whoever works here hopefully won’t mind. As Annie continues reading, she hears a quiet clicking noise and the terminal turns off. The screen flashes and quickly turns to black. A tiny red light on the side comes on to illuminate the letters "RDY".
Annie closes the door behind herself and locks it. As she takes a breath of the slightly humid air, she takes a step back onto the sidewalk to look at the clock above the entrance... 8:35 PM - the realization of how much time had passed hits: Normally she’d be home by now. She starts walking towards the metro station at the corner. The buildings here are similar to the ones in other parts of the city - three to four story houses painted in different colors - but they are lacking balconies and, instead of being homes, they mostly house offices. On the other side of the street is an embankment that holds the rails for the metro and beyond that is the outer wall of the dome. The street lights illuminating the area had already switched to their low-brightness mode for the night. She had only seen it like this a couple of times, it made the area look eerie.
Annie reaches the corner. She looks left and right before crossing the street but not a single car is in sight. As she enters the station and walks up the stairs, she glances at the display - 21 minutes until the next train arrives, that’s a long wait... The station is completely devoid of life, nobody else is out here this late. Annie walks up to the vending machine at the upper end of the staircase - "OUT OF ORDER"... Hrm. Mildly frustrated, she sits down on one of the benches and and starts rummaging in her bag. She finds her headphones and puts them on. At the end of the cable is her walkman. She presses play and starts listening. *Yes, spell-checker, I know that Walkman is a name and should be capitalized. "Portable cassette player" just doesn’t sound nearly as elegant and I don't want it to be a Sony Walkman.*
