ep11 - Thomas A. Grind

A robotic cycle ends, and a meeting takes place. 

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SPEAKER_00 0:18

Hey there. This is Johan. I'm the facility manager at the Deep Earth Anomaly Department, located on the coastal strip in East Antarctica. I'm signing in for yet another cold shift. So I woke up this evening feeling rather anxious. Perhaps anxious isn't the right word, but there was this feeling that something was not how it's supposed to be. You know, and not in a regular way, like oh it is snowing outside. I I thought it would be sunny. This was uh deeper, like something in this world was not in its natural state. It's hard to explain to be honest. In Norway we have a saying uh which is de Ugloch imusen, which translates to there are owls in the bog, as it were. It just means that something strange is afoot. So perhaps owls in the snow would be more fitting down here. Anyways, what I'm trying to say is that I I woke up to there being owls in the snow and I didn't really like how these owls were looking at me, you know, so I so I got out of bed, I wrapped myself in a blanket, and I ran into the common room to get myself a nice cup of warm coffee to to start the old machinery. At first sip is where it struck me, why I had been feeling weird, because I had overslept and thereby missed my appointment with uh uh Thomas A. Grind, who I was supposed to meet with a couple of hours earlier. You know, and he he sent me a letter and a note, and a note he wanted to meet me, and he he was very specific about not being late, so I put my coffee down and I ran into my room and I got properly dressed. And I think if if Joshua had seen me at this point, he would have thought that I had solved the mechanisms behind his device on faster-than-light travel. You know, I I was fast. The pictures on the walls shook in my turbulence. So fully dressed, I called on Ingrid, but she didn't reply, which is very unusual for Ingrid. Her her robotic hearing is impeccable to say the least. Now, if the architects who who designed the comet, as it were, above us, if they actually came down here and and studied Ingrid's design, I'm confident that they would be baffled by how well made she is. Then they will either obliterate us or make friends. I I still don't know which. So anyways, I I didn't like the fact that I couldn't reach my favorite station unit, so I I went looking for her, of course. And she was not in the common room, she was not in the hallway, and not in the bathrooms or wardrobes, not in the basement where the fluorescent spider lives, not in the telescope tower, not in any of the sleeping quarters made for the crew that still hasn't arrived. Not in Joshua's laboratory. I I even asked Joshua if he had seen her, and he just said not since last night. You know, Inge was nowhere to be seen. So I fell down into a chair in the hallway, trying to think, uh which is when I heard a familiar voice. Frederick, I asked, Well where have you been? I asked him, because Frederick has been away from his mirror for quite some time. He hasn't been in any of them for a long time now. I think last time I saw him was when he warned me about the overseer, the man that I just missed my appointment with, so. Now Frederick wasn't really in the mood for chit-chat, he just said you have to go beyond the red door. Then he sat back down in his chair, laid his chin on his fist, and went back to his old thinking position where he where he has been for sixteen years at least. Now, I know from experience that in Frederick's position, when he sits down with his face on his fist, there's no need to try and have a conversation with him. He he might as well could have been a painting from the Renaissance, you know. Anyways, my heart at this point started racing, you know. The red door is it open? You know, that has been open for 16 years at least. There isn't even a doorknob on it, it just looks like a red rectangle painted on a concrete wall. Now at this point, confusion was like a well-tailored suit, and I didn't really like how the fabric felt on my skin, so I ran down to the basement and into the room where the red door is. And the door was, just like Frederick had said, wide open. Presenting behind it a pitch black darkness. However, at this point I didn't really mind the darkness or the door, or the door being open, because in front of me was Ingrid. Or what was left of Ingrid. Now what remained of her was a pile of metal scraps, a pile of steel bolts, a heap of aluminum screws, a bundle of copper wires, and a stack of plastic circuit cards. And towering above Ingrid's ruins stood this figure cloaked by the lights from the ceiling. You have been negligent. Thomas A. Grinn boomed and pierced his eyes into me. The same Thomas Grinn described by some as the devil himself. Now, I think the scene in front of me made me faint. I think I fainted without falling or closing my eyes. I just froze solid like a pillar of salt looking back at Sodom and Gomorrah. And when I managed to move again, Thomas Grind had sat down in a chair next to the robotic ruins, patiently waiting. He said, There you are, he said. You killed Ingrid, I said. Don't be dramatic, he replied. It's a humanoid construct. I merely decommissioned it briefly, he said. Or something along those lines. And I told him I thought that that sounds like a nice way of saying you broke my favorite station unit. Now, I'm not a courageous person, you know, but seeing Ingrid made me a bit careless. You know, Ingrid in pieces was a heavier burden than the frightening sight of Thomas Grind. And he said, broke, he began, and it was almost tasting the word broke. And he said, broke would have been the destination this unit reached had I not dismantled it. He said, This unit this unit was on the brink of technological madness had I not intervened. Taken apart, he said, I can clearly see this is not how I built her in the first place. Now two things. The first thing was that the man in front of me, Thomas Grind, did not look like the man described by Joshua after the tents at all. You know, the man crawling up MS Svalbaugh or the man standing in the blizzard. He didn't look like him, not one bit. Joshua described him as a man in a suit with black, sunken eyes, yellow teeth and skin like that of the dead, but this was not that. This was not the man even I saw through Joshua's binoculars either. The Thomas, you know, I I saw this figure by the door in the blizzard, but the Thomas Grind who sat in front of me outside the red door, he wore no suit. His eyes were not black, they were they were cold and intense blue, definitely not sunken. And uh he wore this grey wool sweater with a turtleneck, and he had short white hair and a slick moustache above his upper lip, and round glasses in front of his eyes, see. Rather classy looking, actually, but he bore no resemblance to anything I'd mistake for for Lucifer. Not that I'm saying that Lucifer isn't classy, of course, I mean who am I to know these things, right? Second of all, Thomas Grindl built Ingrid What You built Ingrid? I asked. What? I asked. I created Ingrid, he replied. You did? And I I I I was flabbergasted, you know. When I asked He didn't say anything though, he just shuddered. Like the question wasn't of any significance. So I changed my tone. I asked him why. Realizing I think I know the answer to that question, you know. Every reliable research facility, especially the anomaly ones, needs a facility unit, you know, able to operate without pause. I just thought common practice was to get one factory made, not tinkered together by an overseer. So but now that this is all based on the assumption that whatever Thomas Gin told me was the truth, of course. And I don't know a lot about the devil, but I I know that he is a trickster. So I needed to make sure that Thomas Ginn wasn't really the devil, and I I had a few questions to ask him to figure this out. The first question I had was, which direction is north? His reply was every direction is north. So he's he's sharp indeed, I thought. Then I asked, or I said, Define evil. And he replied, evil is the act or pursuit and ability of performing harm purely for one's own gratification, he said. Good answer. I I told him that. Good answer, I said. Thank you, he replied. And I had a hard time figuring out what else to ask him, you know, to uncover his true nature, so I decided, for the time being, to trust him. Instead I asked the question again, why did you build Ingrid? A facility without a facility unit? He asked. But they're usually factory made, I said. In Norway alone, there are fourteen major factories working relentlessly on the manufacturing of facility units, you know, home units, service units, care units, office units, hospital units, radioactive contamination cleaning units, units to make units, all kinds of units. We have units everywhere. And his answer came before I managed to blink. He was quick, he said, because I wanted a good one, he said. Also, he said, because I wanted a dance partner. Now I I've started to really believe that Thomas Grind perhaps wasn't the devil after all. I still had questions though. I'm not letting him off the hook that easy, so I asked him why did you dismantle her? He said, because she has been tampered with. And I suspect, he said, and removing his glasses, he was looking very serious. He said that I suspect that this is a work performed by no other than you. Ingrid's eyes are cameras, after all. So I told him the truth. I said, Well, she went haywire, I said, multiple times, more than once did she try to cut her own wires with a scissor. Then Thomas Grin told me that he suspected that that was because the mainframe didn't approve of the tampering that I had did. That you know, he said he he noticed the new O-ring for every slot of her filters, so I might have started it. Because I I installed those O-rings so I could be able to install different kinds of filters, you know. I don't have tens of millions and thousands of filters down here, you know, I have to adapt. And I just said, ah. And Thomas said, aha, indeed, he said. Great band, I said. Next he taught me that that Ingrid was her actual name, but that it was an acronym for integrated nanotechnology, genetic robotics, interlinked directory. What that means, I have no idea. I probably need a sharp pencil moustache on my upper lip too to come up with something like that and have it make sense. And I suspect though that he first called her Ingrid, then tried to come up with words to fit every letter of the word, so don't tell him that I said that. Oh, great divers. But uh if that task had landed on my desk, that I were to name it, I th I'd say that Ingrid was an acronym for invaluably nice, genuinely rigid, incredibly diligent. Perhaps a bit too sweet even for my taste, but you know whatever. Ingrid is, after all, the goat. Then we spent the next eight hours probably putting her back together. And after we had put her back together, she she got up and she hummed like a flute in the echo chambers of Himalaya. Now she will last for centuries more, Thomas Gaine said. Then she ran off to make us a hot chocolate brandy, which is when I asked Thomas Gain another thing that had been lurking in my mind. I told him straight out. There have been talks about your arrival, I told him. And he didn't reply to this either, he just looked at me. So I got stressed and I continued. Some say I told him that they have seen you already, you know, hanging outside in the blizzard, that you have been visiting my friend Joshua on the research vessel, MS Svalbach, and you have been hanging outside the main door. Now Thomas Grind is a very detailed oriented man, and because my questions weren't really questions, they were statements, there was no need for him to reply, you know. So I rephrased, have you been hanging outside the main door? I asked. And he then removed his spectacles, and I noticed a shift in his voice as he as he said this. He said, Do not ever let that being in, he said. And i i i it wasn't you, I asked. And he asked me, have you heard the term frozen to death? And I have. I even told him that. I have, I told him. And am I frozen to death? Thomas Grind asked. At which point I had to admit he wasn't. No, you're not, I said. Then I shall repeat my remark. Do not let that being in, he said. Do not open, do not engage, he said. And he asked me a question. He asked me, Am I making myself clear? At this point I was all of a sudden a schoolboy again, you know. Yes, Mr. Overseer, I said. Call me Thomas, he said. Then we went up to the common room and sat down and relaxed for a bit. Now, the funny thing about this strict, rigorous gentleman was that he got pretty tipsy after a couple of sips of hot chocolate brandy. He loosened up, he had a dance with Ingrid, sang a song, read a poem, tied his shoes, and fell asleep in the chair. At this point I came to the conclusion Thomas A. Grind is not the devil. Which begs the question who, what, where and when is that thing seen outside in the blizzard? What is it? Who who who crawled up the side of Emma's Swalbach? What is this being that Thomas Grind doesn't want me to let in? I was really hoping that meeting Thomas Grind would give me an answer to what that was or is, but uh after I met him I know less. So yeah. There's only one way to find out, I guess, and which is wait. I think I can already spot sunlight swapping places with the auroras, so I think it's time for me to to log off. Oh great divers from the far future. So yeah, this is Jan signing off yet another cold shift.