Flicker mumbled something.
"What was that?" I asked.
"I said you don't appreciate how much this place means exactly that to me."
"You have Jesus now honey. You're not going down there alone."
Flicker nodded, but I could still feel her reservations about the task at hand.
The buildings on the surface were ghostly still and devoid of any life. It was as if everything had been left in a hurry. They hadn't even bothered to conceal the entrance to the underground laboratories. The blast doors to it were clearly visible from behind an opened false fronted wall.
The blast doors themselves were slightly ajar. Flicker and I glanced at each other and then together we approached the doors.
The scene within the laboratory was still lit by emergency lighting running off some backup power supply, even after a year and a half had gone by. It was eerie to say the least with the blue and yellow lights and the red flashing ones here and there going off and on repeatedly.
Whatever power the lights were on must've been separate from the rest of the facility, because all the equipment and the many screens and displays were all dead. The only sound was that of the tick tick of the lights, as they flicked from one color to the next. Perhaps the ticking wasn't the lights, but instead a bomb. The place was supposedly rigged to explode. So why hadn't it?
We didn't talk into the silence, but we kept our conversation confined to our thoughts, as we sought to remain as quiet as the space around us was.
"So what do you suppose happened?" I asked.
Flicker shook her head, "The Code had fallen, but that would've been no reason to leave this place so suddenly."
I followed her through a maze like array of corridors, until we came to a closed door.
"What's behind here?"
"Where I was made." Flicker said bitterly.
I touched her shoulder, "Correction, the place where someone messed around with someone who was simply already perfect and still is."
She gave me a look and I could feel her in my mind seeing whether I was sincere or not. "You still doubt me?" I said somewhat hurt.
Her gaze fell and she said, "I'm sorry."
I shrugged it aside and asked, "What we need, do you think it could be behind these doors?"
"Yes, if not in this room beyond, than in some of the chambers further on for sure."
The door was a bulkhead of sorts and it was locked from our side. I started to undo the lock mechanism, when I noticed the dents in the door. A little frisson of alarm went through me at the finding of such dents in a door of such sturdy construction.