Meridith would like to think that she was a fairly fit person, but she was finding herself wholly out of breath as she clambered over the wreckage of her old workplace.

She had sprinted the rest of the way here, expecting beyond reason to see Aydinlatma standing as it always did - clean, smooth stone and arched windows, some with intricate stained glass and everything vivid under the sun. Instead, the facility had a similar pallor to the city behind her. The majority of the windows were cracked or broken, and some of the building had collapsed under a giant oak tree that had toppled inwards.

The inside wasn't much better. Desks were overturned and there were piles of rubble blocking off offices and closets, but the hallway to the lab was still clear. Mostly. She paused to catch her breath, ducking her face inside the collar of the shirt she was wearing to try and filter out the dust she was kicking up. The skylights emitted a diffuse glow because of the dust covering them, and there was a faint light at the end of the hallway where she knew it opened up into a wide, beautiful space before the main laboratories. It was very, very quiet inside the facility. Meridith tugged on the old work gloves on her hands to make sure they were secure and continued grimly onwards. 

INITIATING LIGHT SEQUENCE: FOLLOW ME...
[ILLUSION OF CONTINUITY LEADING TO AN UNCERTAIN GOAL]
ANALYSING SITUATION...
WARNING: LIMITED/INCOMPLETE DATA
PROCEED?
Y
ANALYSING SITUATION...
ANALYSIS COMPLETE
[INFRASTRUCTURE DAMAGED PERSONNEL ABSENT OPERATOR ABSENT ALERT ALERT ALERT]

All of a sudden, there was the low, familiar hum of electricity. Meredith froze where she was, carefully scanning her surroundings. There was a small zapping sound and she whipped her head around just in time to catch the afterimage of a spark from a damaged wire. In the next instant the emergency light above her head flickered on, but after a moment it blinked back off again. She waited, scanning the corridor and listening for any other movement. The light shuddered back to life, buzzing lowly, but again with an audible "click" it flicked off. Turning her head, Meredith caught an answering blink down the corridor, and another even farther down. After a few more seconds the pattern repeated itself - the emergency lights were blinking in circuit. 

She waited, carefully counting in her head as she listened to the "buzz, click!" of the lights. After a definite minute of no other sound, Meredith carefully continued down the corridor, following the lights. 

It was slow going, as this time she was trying to be at least somewhat mindful of the sound she was making. Someone had to of turned on those lights, and that Someone wanted her to go somewhere. Overall though, she was largely unfazed by this development. The employees of Aydinlatma were often just as eccentric as they were brilliant - it wasn't outside the question that instead of calling out to her they wanted to bring her somewhere instead. Perhaps there was a bunker she didn't know about? The intercom system was most certainly down, so there was no communication that way. She hummed thoughtfully to herself (she choked the sound as it echoed slightly - bad habit and she was trying to be quiet) as she picked her way around shattered glass. The rubble was beginning to clear up now - the main labs were heavily reinforced and so they had largely survived the overall damage that the rest of the facility had sustained. 

Meredith stopped short as the lights turned a corner away from where she was originally going, instead heading down a very dark hallway. She recognized the path as one that went towards the private laboratories and the more "delicate" projects. The red emergency glow cast eerie shadows. Carefully pushing down the growing anxiety in her chest, Meredith unslung her shovel she had pushed inside a juryrigged 'holster' on her back. Her hands tightened around the neck of the shovel as, using the sporadic light and the wooden handle, she found her way forward deeper into the bowels of the facility. 

LIGHT SEQUENCE COMPLETE
EMPLOYEE “MEREDITH” IN POSITION
ACTIVATING DOOR...
ACTIVATION COMPLETE
ACTIVATING LIGHT SEQUENCE: WELCOME
ACTIVATION COMPLETE
[WALL ILLUMINATED WITH SINGLE WORD MORE LIGHTS OPTIMAL BUT OPERATOR DELAYED NOW THERE WILL NEVER BE MORE LIGHTS]

About five minutes had passed in the vaguely lit hall as Meredith shuffled past dark offices and laboratories. The lights reflected dimly off the glass in the windowed doors, catching her shadowed form as she passed by. 

Meredith kept walking, following the blinking lights as they pulsed steadily. The anxiety was a steady hum the back of her throat. The familiar setting did calm her a little - it was a path she found herself taking relatively often, called in by the project lead to talk over the current research on poisonous plants and toxins. His office was just a few doors down from where she was now actually, fumbling along in the near-dark. She paused by the door, the red light casting into relief the edges of the glass, his nameplate, and the pair of googly-eyes stuck perpetually above the door handle, causing it to make a silly face. The sight made her heart sink in her chest - who knew where he was now? If he had even survived the initial chaos? What about the others? She shook off the thoughts as best she could and continued on. 

Clunk shuffle tap. Clunk shuffle tap. The pattern of the shovel hitting the ground and her footsteps quickly grew monotonous. She had followed the lights around several corners and hallway intersections, with only brief pools of light from the skylights to break up the vivid red darkness. 

Suddenly, there was a click and the emergency lights failed entirely, sputtering out and leaving her in pitch black. She froze where she was, jerking the shovel into a pseudo-defensive position. Not that it would do anything, she thought frantically, as Someone probably would have night vision goggles or something to see her. She shouldn't of assumed that it was a friend, that it was someone she knew--!

There was a slight hiss to her right and she jerked sideways, her shoulder hitting the opposite wall. There was a pause, then the slow clank of metal and then-

Bright, electric light burned her eyes and she threw up the shovel in a useless defense. Meredith blinked rapidly, trying to clear the spots from her eyes, listening for anyone, anything, a familiar voice? An attack?

Nothing happened, and slowly her eyes adjusted and revealed that the sound was produced by an absurdly armored metal door that had been swung back into a concrete room. The initial hiss, she realized, was produced by the hydraulics that were attached to a very normal looking wooden door that must of been camouflaging the metal one. It was a vault, she realized as she carefully stepped inside. The room was effectively a concrete box, with the most obvious feature being the computer monitors covering one wall. Boxes of labelled supplies were stacked in one corner. There was some sort of shelving on the opposite wall, containing something she couldn't identify at first glance. 

The monitors flickered online, displaying a single word across all of them in plain white letters. 

[Welcome]

Meredith looked curiously at the screens, wondering just what had she gotten herself into. 

ANALYSING RESPONSE...
ANALYSIS COMPLETE
[FEAR CONFUSION HOPE DREAD]
OUTPUTTING TEXT...
OUTPUT COMPLETE
[BE NOT AFRAID :) WORKING ON SOUND SORRY]
SYNTHESIZING RADIO SIGNAL...
PROJECTED COMPLETION: 4M39S
OUTPUTTING TEXT...
OUTPUT COMPLETE
[GIVE ME 5 MIN]

The text on the screen blinked and changed. 

[BE NOT AFRAID : )  WORKING ON SOUND SORRY]

Meredith blinked, the tense line of her shoulders smoothing out. The message changed again.

[GIVE ME 5 MIN]

She breathed a huff of quiet laughter, the barest smile playing at her lips. Sure, she could give the Someone five minutes. 

Meredith turned away from the monitors and began to examine the bunker. There were two corridors branching off of the initial room, she realized, one straight in front of her and the other to her right hand wall in the corner. The main room was mostly bare, with the stack of boxes and other supplies as she had seen before. The room was lit with fluorescent fixtures suspended from the ceiling, and the smell of dust eked in from the still-open door of the hallway to her left. Both of the corridors were well lit in the same manner as the main room, but at the end of the first hallway Meredith could see the edge of something. Curious, she decided to explore. 

Meredith walked down the short hall (ignoring a secondary passage she passed in the hall) and found herself in a wide, low ceilinged room. A sudden smile broke through - this room was set up as a laboratory. There were lab tables, set ups for a bunsen burner, two fume hoods, and some more technical equipment that she didn't recognize. Beakers were in wooden drawers along with test tubes. Lab coats were in another closet that she looked in. Shelves were on the walls with varied chemicals that she didn't recognize, outside of what she might of seen in fertilizers and other fungicides. An emergency shower and eye wash station sat with a fire extinguisher and blanket. There was a corner with a few computers and mechanical equipment fit for working on any tasks from large metalwork pieces to circuitry. There were also quite a few instruments in this room that she didn't recognize and attempted to puzzle over, but there was another door that led to somewhere deeper in this vault. She moved on.

The next room she encountered was centered around physical fitness. There was a small adjustable dumbbell weight set, resistance bands, pull up bars, a treadmill, mats, a bench, and a closet back in the corner of which she was sure held more items of similar nature. The majority of the floor was lightly padded, and it looked like the equipment could be moved to use the floor for stretches and martial type practice. 

The next room was a sort of showers area - still the same concrete floor and lighting, though this floor was sloped to a drain. It was quite small, and when she tested the water it came out ice cold. 

She quickly walked through the next hallway, doing her best to be mindful of the time. One more room, she promised herself, and then she would turn back. But as soon as she emerged into the next one she thought that it might be hard to keep that promise. 
The lighting here was different - using spectrum lighting that was similar to the sun. It fell on a sort of psuedo greenhouse - nothing growing, but there were rich plots of dirt and an irrigation system. In the corner there was a potting station, tools for working the soil and there had to be seeds somewhere that she was dying to get her hands on, but she resisted as best she could. It had to of been five minutes by now, but she decided to glance quickly down the next corridor. To her surprise she could see a girder like the ones that supported the hallways she had been going through. 

"How long does this thing go?" she muttered, but quickly turned around and threaded back through the rooms until she was in the main one again. The monitors still displayed the request for 5 minutes in white text, but now that she was looking she noticed the very thin sheen of dust. No one had been here for a bit. 

"Hello?" her voice echoed slightly. "How are things going?"

3
2
1
SYNTHESIS COMPLETE
OPTIONS [OCULUSv06 | DEFAULT_F | DEFAULT_N | DEFAULT_M | HAL_9000 | WALL-E]
SELECTING VOICE: OCULUSv06...
WARNING: POTENTIAL EMOTIONAL RESPONSE
SELECTING VOICE: OCULUSv03...
VOICE SELECTED
OUTPUTTING AUDIO...
[HELLO MEREDITH]

There was a long pause, and just as she was about to speak again there was a crackle and a staticky, modulated, familiar voice filtered from the ceiling. 

--HELLO MEREDITH--

She jumped in surprise, looking up. 

"Hi there! Who are you?"

PARSING AUDIO...
PARSE COMPLETE
OUTPUTTING AUDIO...
[DESIGNATION APERTURE CREATOR OCULUS QUERY WORLD DESTRUCTION]