Breakout

Alicia stretched in her chair and drained the last of her coffee from her mug. It was approaching midnight and she was hurrying to finish her observation set before turning in for the night. The Others had wandered off to their nightly repose, and she was left in their kitchen typing away at her laptop. Beside her, the modulation device Ralph had given her six weeks earlier displayed the results of her last experiment.

The dial for the carrier was on the highest setting, and it had still drained most of her energy to interact with that particular Other. Tired as she was, Alicia finished the rest of her report with a minimum of frustration, and got up to put her coffee cup in the sink. As she headed upstairs to her quarters she started the modulation device's elaborate shutdown sequence and removed the interface from the side of her arm. The feeling of relaxation spreading through her spine was immediate.

Once again, though, her carelessness and impatience to be rid of the mental buzzing caused by the device's firewall proved to be - not a huge downfall, but a momentary stumbling block. She stepped wrongly on the third-to-top stair, causing the Other that had been giving her problems earlier to reactivate from its slumber and confront her at the top. Shit. The thing was going to think it was morning and it was going to want to go through its entire morning routine.

"WOW!" It chirped. "I JUST KNEW YOU WERE AWAKE! YOU KEPT ME UP ALL LAST NIGHT WITH YOUR TALKING AND WALKING AROUND AND I AM TERRIFICALLY PEEVED RIGHT NOW!" Okay, so "chirped" wasn't the right verb. And it didn't exactly even vocalize the words so much as it communicated the sentiment with its carefully measured climp-clump-STOMP down the stairs and the symphonic crash-bang-BOOM of plates and glasses being assaulted out of the dish cleaner. Alicia had to admire the engineers' skill in creating a machine that couldn't access the very bottom layer of its own memory - this way, the company saved money on power costs as the Others reacted to events and situations that they didn't actually experience. It was confusing for the testers at first, and it added another layer of complexity, but overall it was a good system.

Regardless. Alicia didn't have much patience to handle the creature properly, especially since it would take an hour or so for her modulator to become fully functional again. After glancing at the Other and realizing that it was still running through the set of Victimization scenarios that the engineers had implanted a few days earlier, Alicia decided it was time to enact some desperate measures. Giggling to herself, she dashed into her room and changed into one of the dresses the tailor had fitted her for. Running back downstairs, she hit a button on the stereo and struck a dramatic pose.

As the opening bars of "Thriller" blasted into the kitchen, the effect on the Other was almost as good as the scene in the Wizard of Oz where the one evil chick has that hi-ammonium-I'm-HCL-nice-to-meet-you reaction to the tub of water. It wasn't as good as it needed to be, though, so it was time to dance. She was lucky that there wasn't anyone else around to see her, but heck, it felt good. By the end of the song, little puffs of green smoke were escaping from the Other's ear and nose sockets, and Alicia figured that she'd done a good enough job of creating a short circuit for one night. As she was carrying the inert figure back upstairs to her nighttime storage bay, Alicia heard explosions outside.

She hit the floor and began to form a plan for getting outside and joining the battle before she realized with a wry smile that she definitely wasn't in a war zone (no matter how poorly the experiments might have been going) and that it was actually just fireworks to celebrate the New Year.

Ah. A most auspicious beginning, she thought.