Power reroutes through the laboratory with a deep electrical thrum. A service door unlocks and opens onto an environmental control gallery, its dark panels waking one by one.
Small maintenance units roll from recessed docks, each carrying a sealed sample case. They cross the gallery in formation and descend toward a lower access shaft without waiting for local instructions.
Archive Echo
The units are not acknowledging my queries. Their program predates the current laboratory network and is routing around my permissions.
Tessa moves beside the open doorway while Lokier studies the units’ tracks. The cases emit intermittent biological telemetry, weak but patterned, as if something below is drawing them onward.
Tessa Orin
Those cases are being delivered, not discarded. Whatever is under the laboratory may be using the old environmental network to reach the machinery operators.
Lokier
The movement below changed after the units departed. Something is responding to their route, or directing it.
At the shaft, one unit pauses and turns its sensor array toward the gallery. Its case unlocks halfway, releasing a brief pulse that makes the buried machinery answer through the floor.
✓ Quest Accepted
Prevent the sealed sample cases from reaching the buried system