Tiger's Short Stories

19 June 2016: A Day of Stress

A Day of Stress

Today was just not Allison's day.

The computer screens were all flashing red, the alarm was making her go deaf, and she knew this stress just had to be ruining her hair. Oh, and there was that whole potential national security breach too, but at the moment, it wasn't high on her list of things to worry about.

She paced the walls of the small room screaming as loud as she could, just hoping that wearing out her own lungs would be enough to drown out the most annoying alarm she had ever heard. Whoever decided to have the walls covered with metal obviously hadn't considered how much noise the echo they caused would add.

She went back to her computer, trying to click through the various menus and messages to silence the screeching alarm while Andy ran off to deal with whatever this situation was. At least he seemed to be somewhat competent unlike the colonel who started yelling about Indonesia as soon as the sirens went off. Allison really had no idea where he went, which was probably for the best.

"Agent Allison, I have a status report," she heard the voice come from her ear-piece.

"What's going on Agent Andy?" she asked.

"It appears that the intruder managed to get in by setting the hinges of the door on fire until they gave in, and then knocked the door down. From the damage, I would guess it was a small team, about 10 to 20 people, highly dangerous it looks like."

"You should probably wait for backup to apprehend them," Allison replied. If Andy was right, this was the biggest breach the FBI had ever had. This base wasn't supposed to exist according to any government records. Not even the NSA knew about this one. A fact that she wished she could bring up when she met one of their agents who seemed to be so arrogant that they knew everything.

"You underestimate me," Andy said, and Allison knew that he was enjoying this too much. This really wasn't the time to be having fun though, this was serious business. "I am good at what I do after all."

"And what is that that you do here?"

"Hell if I know."

"Just be careful."

"Aw, you do care about me."

"No, it's just I don't want to fill out the paperwork if you end up needing to go to the hospital." Maybe she did care a little bit. Of course she could never tell him that.

But then, a miracle happened. Allison finally got through all the menus, typed 22 different passwords correctly, and shut down the alarms. She really wondered about how paranoid they were about security for the little things, but then they have people break into the facility.

"It looks like the intruders have made their way to the experimental computing facility," Andy said.

Yeah, this day just kept getting worse and worse. First of all, General Woon ended up being 5 hours late for that briefing, and the people who were supposed to brief him had to leave, so then she was stuck explaining how the FBI was inserting nano probes into the water supply to spy on suspected terrorists, something she didn't even know was a thing until about 7 minutes before they showed up. And then they asked like one question and moved on to their next stop.

And all that was before the air conditioner ended up going crazy and making it feel like Antarctica despite it being the middle of the summer. And then when the maintenance guy showed up, he just hit it with a hammer that made it blow out heat until it felt like the middle of the sun, and then a couple hours later when they came back they got the temperature right, but it somehow then started to play Nickelback music, and she really didn't want to look at any photographs after being so fed up with Instagram.

She was just thankful Robert wasn't making tea again, they couldn't afford to have power go out for the tristate area today.

"Have you encountered them yet?"

"No, but I'm on the right path. The introducers knocked three of our scientists out. Doesn't look like permanent damage but we'll need to get to the hospital."

"Just don't do anything stupid," Allison said. This really wasn't something a sole agent should handle. She wanted to go help him, but she had had to be here at the command center to monitor the situation. Then again, since the IT department put Windows 10 on her computer when she asked them to fix her printer, she wasn't much good here.

"I see one of the intruders in the quantum computer lab!" Andy said. "I'm going in."

Before Allison could tell him that was a bad idea, she heard the sound of objects being thrown, what sounded like Andy flying through the air and crashing on something hard, the sound of fire raining down from the sky before the connection between them was dropped.

Did Andy get in over his head again? She yelled at her computer to try to bring up the security feeds faster, but it wasn't doing any good since Adobe somehow popped up and caused the whole computer to freeze. "Of course, you tell me I need to spend tens of thousands dollars in the next week, but I'm not allowed to upgrade this piece of crap!" Deciding she didn't have time to wait for the computer to load, she grabbed the gun out of her desk and sprinted out of the room. This might be going against the rules, but she wasn't going to let Andy get himself hurt or worse because of a stupid PDF reader.

...

After running for a solid five minutes, she was finally approaching the quantum computing lab, afraid that she might be too late. Real battles weren't like the movies where they went on for an hour with amazing cinematography, they were over in seconds. And against a team of highly skilled intruders, there was no telling what could have happened to Andy. Allison held her gun tight as she rounded the corner of the lab, ready to jump in and give him whatever cover he needed if it wasn't already too late.

But instead of seeing a battle, she just saw Andy standing there with his back against the wall and arms crossed looking down at his cell phone.

"I wondered when you'd get here," he said before Allison could think of any comment to make.

"Wait...didn't you, weren't you, how did you?"

"Turns out there was only one introducer. She wanted to use our experimental quantum computer to play World of Warcraft."

Allison could only stand mouth agape at that. This person managed to break into a top secret facility, take down several guards, just to play a video game. Some people really were too obsessed with certain things. "When I took her into custody, her official statement to us was, 'Sah dude. My dps is lit fam."

"I will never understand teenagers and their lingo."

"Um...she's not a teenager," Andy said, and then Allison put the pieces together.

"Wait, you don't mean?"

"Yep."

At this, Allison turned and started to walk away from Andy. "I need to talk with Abby. She's the only one around here that actually acts her age."

...

A/N: Many events were inspired by events that happened in real life. I'll let you guess which ones.