I decided to walk back to what was likely to be ground zero of our bloody, phlegm-choked deaths, to survey progress on delaying death by EPA violation. I'd seen how Allison had treated Doctor Prendick while he was cooperating with her interrogation, and I didn't want to be around for what happened next, lest I be accused of being an accessory to elder abuse.
There were maybe a half dozen workers in the refrigerator itself, and another half dozen on the outside, shining flashlights onto the machine and waving small devices about and looking serious.
"Peterson." Arthur said, standing by the control panel at the back of the machine, "Could you give us a hand here."
"Patterson,” I corrected, but still approached, "What do you need?"
"Honestly, just someone to be standing next to me while I talk so no one thinks I'm talking to them and interrupts me while trying to sound smart.”
"Oh, okay, sure." I said, I felt like I should have been annoyed, but it didn't sound like this job was likely to result in me being put into physical danger.
"We've been wracking our brains for the past three hours on how to move heat away from the unit. We’ve got as many fans running as the generator will allow, trying to move the air out away from the unit, and now we're running hot gas through the other coolers, but that’s having the opposite effect, now we're heating up the cold gas faster than we're cooling the hot gas."
A thought occurred.
"How common was this stuff before it was banned?"
"Oh, it was fucking everywhere." Arthur said "We probably pumped enough of it into the atmosphere to cost us twenty years in the fight against climate change. Home refrigerators, car AC systems."
"Why was it so common?"
Arthur shrugged.
"Cheap, stable, good marketing, who knows."
"But that's what I'm getting at." I said "If it's historically been so stable, why isn't it acting stable now?"
Arthur, who'd been tapping his finger against his chin, stopped, and turned to look at me, but said nothing.
"It's just, it seems like there's a lot of heat that you're struggling to deal with, but does this gas generate its own heat? Is it decaying?"
"No..." Arthur said "R12 doesn't decay by itself, that's why it's such a potent greenhouse gas."
"So, where are you drawing extra heat from? I'd suspect that the temperature would just level off with the ambient temperature, but It's warmer here than anywhere else in the store."
Arthur looked up at the machine, then to its two neighbors, and finally the generator.
"Son of a bitch." He whispered.
"What, what is it?"
"I just thought the whole store was warming up, but you're right, there's no reason for it to be getting this hot over here, sure, the machines draw heat out of the system and pump it elsewhere, but not this much.
"Wait, where is elsewhere?" I asked.
"Outside," Arthur said "There's a duct system that just blasts out air to the outside, probably by the loading dock."
"Oh," I said, "Well, mystery solved, that was blocked off when the store went into shutdown mode."
Arthur's eyes widened, and then narrowed, finally closing as he took a deep breath.
"We've been trying to pump hot air through those ducts for hours." He said.
"Oh," I whispered, "Are there other places to send the heat?" I asked.
"Sure," He said, "Plenty."
"Oh, well, that's good right?"
Arthur sighed.
"All the chemistry, all the science, all the engineering I've picked up from these guys over the years, and the problem was that a door was closed that no one told us about."
"Yeah," I said, "Pretty sure that did them in at Three Mile Island as well."
"Lucas, Jerome!" Arthur said, shouting past me, "Ditch the primary outflow, let’s see if we can move the heat through another duct."
"Like the AC?" One of the workers asked.
"Sure, let's spread the love around."
"Got it." They said,
I stood there, beside Arthur, who placed his hands on his hips looking over diagrams and schematics. He closed his eyes, leaned forward, and banged his head on the panel.
"Fuck." He said "Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck."
I stood beside him, rocking back and forth on my heels.
"Well, hey good news, we're probably not going to die because of the refrigerator, right?"
"We could have done this three hours ago." Arthur said "We could have spent this time focusing on something else, like getting out of here."
"Well, that's what Allison and I are working on." I said.
"And how is that coming along?" Arthur said.
"Good," I nodded, "Good, we're almost to the utilities room."
A thought occurred.
"You've been here for three hours?" I asked.
"Yes, Peterson."
"How'd you get here so fast?" I asked "We have to fight through sporting goods, seasonal, that monster has been chasing us the whole time."
"Really?" Arthur said, "We just radioed the Western tower and asked if they could help escort us, they were very helpful." He said, "A lot of the folks from grocery have been putting together small meals for the workers. They even salvaged us some cold compresses from the pharmacy."
"What." I said, dumbfounded.
"The sporting goods guys hunted you?" Arthur said.
"They're trying to get a key to the gunracks." I said "And the managers in the south tower tried to sacrifice me to the monster."
"Typical middle managers." Arthur said. clicking his tongue, "You know all those guys work dayshift, and strut around like they own the place."
"Aren't you a dayshift manager?" I asked "And you were strutting around like you owned the place earlier."
Arthur sighed and hung his head.
"Look, I may not be as young as I used to be..."
"You're eighteen," I interjected.
"But I'm still trying to establish myself, you know, blend in, be one of the guys."
"Sure." I said, not fully following.
"Mom says I need to be management material if I'm ever going to run the company, but management sucks. It's all politics and position, we never get any actual work done, but this?" He held out his arms to the machines "This is work, problem solving, the machine is like a big puzzle, like a mystery. 'Why can't we get rid of the heat?', becomes 'oh, the heat outtake is closed, vent it somewhere else.' And you're working with a machine that's two stories tall and filled with potentially toxic gas, how cool is that?"
I genuinely couldn't help but smile. I remembered being younger and marveling at tractors and grain elevators, there is just something deeply soothing about watching a machine do what it was built for.
"So what are you going to do now?" I asked.
"Monitor heat levels, continue to check for leaks, send someone up into the vents to move the fans around so they're aimed in the right direction, I might just do it myself, it's going to be stupid hot up there."
"Oh?" I said, "How hot?"
...
I walked back to where I'd last left Allison and Doctor Wells. Five minutes had passed, then ten, and I feared that if I let us reach fifteen, Doctor Wells would be reduced to a greasy smear next to a sarcastically positioned wet floor sign.
I arrived at the spot, only to find it vacant, save for the worker who'd escorted us in the first place, he pointed towards the western wall, where a small plastic shed was set up, advertising-free delivery and assembly. I walked over to the slightly ajar door and was about to knock, when I could overhear voices.
“...buggy software, Jesus, AI can barely draw a picture of a person with only ten fingers."
"And yet you gave it power over life and death."
"I did what I was paid to do." Wells said.
"By who?" Allison stated flatly.
"Oh, who do you think?" Wells said, "How about the same company that lobbied to reclassify child labor as 'vocational based educational enrichment' so they could write off the minuscule wages they do pay."
Allison stewed on this.
"I don't believe you." She finally said, adding "About the AI bug, not the child labor thing."
"Doubt me all you want." Wells said, "But all you have so far is a hunch."
"I have more than that." She said,
Wells was silent.
"Right outside this door," she said "I have a dozen case studies of your AI not targeting individuals who were not wearing employee work vests."
My jaw dropped as I glanced back, it was true, and looking around, I couldn't see and sign of bullet holes or blood.
"Meanwhile," Allison said, "Arthur confirms he found two bodies on his way here. I opted to search the western half of the store, I passed three more bodies, all wearing work vests with QR codes, no pins, no customization, the only outstanding thing about them is that the system had targeted the vest, and no other part of the person wearing it."
Wells glanced at the floor.
"These vests don't mark us as safe when the shooting starts, Doctor Wells," Allison said "They mark us for death, and you're going to tell me why."
Wells sat silently for a moment.
"You know," He said, "If you hadn't tied up my hands, I'd start slow clapping now."
"I don't need you to confirm that I'm right, Doctor Wells." Allison sneered, "Tell me what I don't know."
"I know plenty that you don't."
"Then spill it." Allison said.
"Okay," Wells said "How about this, The American Association of Retail Sciences has a student debt forgiveness program."
I'd been leaning in towards the gap in the door, but this made me stand up and scrunch my face in confusion.
"Doctor Wells, I'll remind you that you still have one unbroken ankle that I can use as leverage if you don't get serious."
"I am serious." Wells said, "That's why you're here, right? I read your file, we all passed it around the office. 'Doctor Rodriguez' The most talented and brilliant college dropout in the Midwest. Walton's parent company is your student debt servicer, and once Walton's has your debt, they have you."
Allison remained silent.
"AARS is a publicly funded research lab, you would qualify for debt cancellation in five years. We also have tuition reimbursements, you could go back to school part time, maybe even graduate this time."
Wells seemed to shuffle forward in his seat.
"And wouldn't you know it, a senior researcher position just opened up. Sure, you're entry level, but you spent so much time with us during debriefings after the last incident, that's basically an unpaid internship."
Allison stopped tapping her cane.
"Five years, Allison, in five years, you really could be Doctor Rodriguez. Do the sort of work you want to do."
"I've seen the work you do." Allison said "I have no interest in your blood money."
"Oh grow the fuck up!" Wells said "You live in American Capitalism, it's all blood money, you think you're so clean because what, you stick your nose up in the air when you come in to work? Hell, your college has a chemistry lab paid for by BP and an Esports team sponsored by Raytheon."
Allison was silent.
"You've done a lot of rationalizing during your tenure, haven't you?" she finally said.
"Sure," Wells said sarcastically, "I stay up late into the night, thinking about what hell is gonna feel like when I die. Oh wait, I don't have to, cause I bought a big comfortable bed and enough prescription grade sleep medication to knock out a horse that worries about disappointing its Dad. "
"Unlike you, Allison, I know that I'm not making the world a better place, but you know, there are people actively working to make it worse, so why don't you go stomp on their dicks instead of mine."
Allison tapped her cane, then turned towards the door.
"Patterson," She said, "I assume we're ready to head to the utilities room?"
I froze, but then meekly stuck my head through the crack in the door.
"Uh, yeah, think so."
"I don't think this man has anything useful left to share."
"Okay." I said.
"We'll lock him in here until we can hand him over to the proper authorities."
"Phft, whatever." He said.
Allison stepped over the threshold and began to close the door.
"Oh," Allison said, "One last thing."
"Great." Wells said.
"When you were looking into the three victims of the incident in November, did you ever find a link between the three?"
Wells looked up.
"Worked at the same store, all had shit luck?"
Allison nodded.
"All three had worked to unionize their prior workplaces." Allison said.
Wells cocked his head, the gears turning.
"You really thought it was bad luck this whole time?"
Wells looked down.
"You..." he stammered. "It was a targeted hit?"
Allison opened the door again.
"How could that be?" She said, feigning surprise, "Manuel overrides of the system would be traceable, correct?"
Wells looked uncomfortable.
"Unless someone had a backdoor into the system that could be used at any time."
Wells rocked his head back and forth, then opened his eyes and gasped.
"Okay! Fine!" He said "Yes, while building the system, we would need to go into the debug console to monitor the commands being generated by the AI and then read by the hardware. To test certain fringe cases, we would write our own command orders and paste them into the command chain through the debug interface."
"Meaning man-made commands would be indistinguishable from those that'd been generated from the AI."
"Yes." Wells said.
"And this wasn't removed after the incident?"
"We never thought it'd be used maliciously." Wells said "We figured we'd always be the ones in control of it."
"That's the funny thing about bootlickers." Allison said "You assume you'll always be the one wearing the boot."
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