2008 November 01

I've always been one of the little people, and I don't mean that in the sense of Hobbits, Halflings or Dwarves either. Don't get me wrong, I don't stand six feet tall and tower over everyone I know, getting right down to it most of my friends were taller than me from well before we started getting facial hair and all the other things that happen at that stage of life. But neither am I so short that I'm particularly noticeable for my height. What I do mean is that I've never been important in the grand scheme of things, if I'd died at the age of 15 it seems unlikely that anyone besides my family and close friends would really have been affected.

My parents worked simple, reasonably well paid jobs as I was growing up and my sisters and I had all the things we needed but only some of those we wanted. Getting to the end of school it was obvious that I was competent but far from exceptional and I was lucky to have been preceded by only one of my sisters, as it prevented comparisons with most of thm, each of whom did quite well in a particular subject. I still got the occasional question about why I had trouble with remembering dates during social studies but I gave up on that when I could so I only had to deal with the question for the first half of my time at high school.

Once done with school it didn't seem worthwhile bothering with University, I knew what I wanted to do and Uni wasn't going to help with that at all. That probably did help set me up for missing out on the excesses I saw my peers experiencing. When they managed to arrange their schedules so that noon was an early start there was no reason for them to keep 'respectable' hours and they'd routinely find themselves hunggover in the mornings. I experienced that only once, at the beginning of the week long holiday I took to celebrate my 18th birthday, and almost crawled through the rest of the week. While I may not be a genius I rarely make the same mistake more than once, since that week I've avoided alcohol in significant quantities.

One big negative however was the fact I missed out on meeting that 'special' someone for most of the year. Looking back we've worked out that she was at almost every single gathering I turned down invitations to attend and seems to have missed only a few besides those that I did attend, usuallly for only a couple of hours.

But none of this is getting us to how I ended up three worlds away from my home is it...


It all began at the end of my second year of work, the other office staff and I began to notice rumbling if we were at work outside the hours we were required to be, usually because we'd remembered something important (or that we knew our supervisor would think was important) and wanted to ensure it was taken care of before she got in that morning. After a few months it became clear that it was only happening if the researchers thought they had the facility to themselves, there wasn't a single Friday night that we felt anything but that was the night half of us stayed and made use of a couple of tables in the work canteen for board games. One or two of the researchers actually joined us once a month so they were more than aware of how late we tended to be.

After a couple of months three of us began to realise that it was happening and started asking around, no-one that wasn't at work outside 'normal' hours (besides those that present during games) had any idea what was happening and even the two of us that lived very near by (I walk less than 10 minutes each way and Sara was a little closer than me) had never noticed anything away from work. I still don't know how I was arranged to be the one sent to ask up the heirachy but I did, and got told, after a few days (of "looking into the matter") that from that point on the office staff were not to be in the buildings outside of scheduled hours. We were allowed to continue using the canteen faciliites on a Friday night but anything else was now not permitted.

Now, obviously, I'm a responsible member of society and obey the instructions of those in authority over me. (And I was afraid of losing my job.) So instead of being at work when I wasn't supposed to be, I asked Charlize (my youngest sister) to rig a simple motion detector that I could leave in a desk drawer. Unsurprisingly she wanted to know why and because keeping it in a drawer would obviously end up knocking it about when I checked it she ended up making me something that looked like a very bulky photo frame, that might have been made by a child. No doubt planned as my nephew was at the age he'd be making things and wanting his aunts and uncle to keep them.

At least a week went by before there was any indication there had been rumbling when I returned to work and I had been given enough instruction from my sister to realise that cleaners going be the desk could cause what I was seeing. All up I think it was three weeks before the readings were abnormal and another week and a half went by before the second large readings came up. I let Sara and Fiona know that there had been a couple more nights of abnormal rumbling as was fairly promptly told I shouldn't be worried about it, they'd forgot about the whole thing since no longer experiencing it themselves and it was none of our business what the researchers did in our off hours.

After that I kept my findings to myself, apart from letting Charlize know that the pseudo-photoframe was working as she'd made it to. It seemed obvious that I was the only one in any way concerned with what might be happening to cause an entire building to rumble and yet require secrecy. It's a shame I was never good at reading people, over the next few Fridays I made an attempt to befriend the researchers coming to the game nights. Apart from Benjamin thinking I was trying to find out his sexuality I didn't seem to accomplish anything. And that's not really an accomplishment.

It seems obvious now that the three of them (Ben, Dan and Kris) talked to each other at some point over that month and came to the conclusion I was asking to many questions. I came in one Monday morning to find my desk not quite as it ought to have been and most significantly the photo frame was on the wrong side of my desk. When I went to move it back I found a piece of paper and unfolded it to find an invitation to meet the 2IC researcher that lunch time.

If I had thought about it more I'd have just gone about my day normally. (Well, no, actually I wouldn't have, regardless of how much time I thought about what the note meant I'd have gone to that meeting.) Getting there was a little confusing for me, the research section of the complex I worked at was at least ten times larger than the office area I'd been liimited to for the prior year, and I'd barely made my way 20 feet into the factory on the few occasions I'd had reasonable cause to go there. This time I went throught the connecting doors and after asking their receptionist where to find Kevin got a handful of directions that I hoped I could make sense of.

My lack of proficiency at science while at school was probably a good thing during that walk, if I had been able to understand any of what I was seeing I wouldn't have made it past the third door in the time I had allocated to the meeting. My curiousity was still tested with each new thing but when I could tell that none of it would make sense I wasn't drawn to watch the way I might have been.

Kevin had a personal office that didn't seem any different to the others I'd seen in the main office area when you walked into it. What I saw when I turned my head though shocked me to the point I froze in place. One of the walls of his office had at least 100 monitors on it, each seemingly showing a different lab. Again I had no idea what I was seeing but the sheer number of different experiments that were obviously going on was well beyond what I'd expected that I needed to be told twice to sit.

Everyone was polite during the meeting, but I got the bizzare impression that Kris was there as 'muscle' and not for any other reason. Ben and Dan actually interjected on a few occasions, clarifying what Kevin seemed to be reading. It seems that my questions about the 'rumbling' had been noticed even before I went to my supervisor.