Re: We Got Fun And Games
Posted: Tue Aug 30, 2016 4:52 am
Staring down into the shaft is not particularly encouraging. The cabin fits into the shaft almost perfectly. There's little footholds or other things one might expect in a shaft. Instead there are two lines on each side that, presumably, hold magnetic rails. A side-effect of this is that there's almost no light in there, the shaft just a gaping abyss of darkness, especially for someone as small as Vic is at the moment. It's hard to tell how many stories he falls in almost complete darkness but it feels like it stretches on for quite a while. Finally he hits the ground, relatively gently thanks to his minimized mass, and can feel his way around. There's a door down here but it looks old in comparison to the ones he saw further up, almost as if this part of the facility had been built significantly before the upper levels. There is no rust but there's a little bit of dust (something that was completely absent upstairs) and the door feels like it's of a different design.
It takes some prying but eventually it opens just enough to let some light through as well as allow him to slip out of the elevator shaft himself. There's not a lot of illumination, but enough to confirm his suspicions. This part is of the facility is definitely older by a couple decades and walking down the corridor he can spot the occasional faded words on the walls identifying this as some sort of US research facility. Super-conductor and extreme cold research from the looks of the occasional room he might peek into. All of it is long abandoned but some documentation is left in faded print-outs.
That's what it says on the first page of most of them, though the rest of it is scientific gibberish, reports, schematics of computer diagrams, performance reports on super-conductors and similar things. Research long finished or obsolete, though it looks like it was quite a bit ahead of it's time back then. As he's walking there's the faint hum of machinery still operating and he finally comes into a large room that has been cleared of it's previous things. Instead there is a large column in the middle made of the same gleaming metal found upstairs. It's several meters thick and spans the entire height of the room. Thick cables connect to the column all over and disappear into the walls, either through pre-existing ducts or newly drilled ones. It almost looks like a metal tree that has taken root in this room and spread out from it. The persistent hum is coming from this huge column and engraved on it in huge letters are the words PROJECT PANOPTICON.
It takes some prying but eventually it opens just enough to let some light through as well as allow him to slip out of the elevator shaft himself. There's not a lot of illumination, but enough to confirm his suspicions. This part is of the facility is definitely older by a couple decades and walking down the corridor he can spot the occasional faded words on the walls identifying this as some sort of US research facility. Super-conductor and extreme cold research from the looks of the occasional room he might peek into. All of it is long abandoned but some documentation is left in faded print-outs.
Experimental Neural Computer Chip Development
Project 031
Lead Scientist Dr. Hiroka Minamida
That's what it says on the first page of most of them, though the rest of it is scientific gibberish, reports, schematics of computer diagrams, performance reports on super-conductors and similar things. Research long finished or obsolete, though it looks like it was quite a bit ahead of it's time back then. As he's walking there's the faint hum of machinery still operating and he finally comes into a large room that has been cleared of it's previous things. Instead there is a large column in the middle made of the same gleaming metal found upstairs. It's several meters thick and spans the entire height of the room. Thick cables connect to the column all over and disappear into the walls, either through pre-existing ducts or newly drilled ones. It almost looks like a metal tree that has taken root in this room and spread out from it. The persistent hum is coming from this huge column and engraved on it in huge letters are the words PROJECT PANOPTICON.