Mod Superhero

Chapter 1.1.2 - The Lab

After class, Emmett walked quickly out of the C Building and across campus to catch the two o'clock bus to the edge of Eastside.

The far East side of the city was barren compared to the rest of the research district. Where earlier it was impossible to walk the block without being bombarded by billboards of electronic ads, here they were almost non-existent. The only two billboards were for Gnosis. Each one hung from a parking garage and covered the entire front of it. They changed throughout the day, but always showed some combination of their health and beauty products.

In contrast, the Gnosis headquarters across the street looked more like a military compound than a billion-dollar corporation. The buildings were pristine white and barren of anything except the Gnosis logo—a white square with a simple, blurry face staring back. And the entire place was ringed with razor wire and guards armed with military hardware.

Emmett walked past the first parking garage and the giant tub of facial cream on display

The entrance to Dr. Venture's lab was sandwiched between two parking garages for Gnosis. It was a nondescript metal door that looked more like a custodian's closet.

Emmett stepped up to the door, pulled back his hood, and waited.

A second later, the eye scan registered and a robotic female voice crackled with static. "Thank you for verification. Please step through, Emmett Laraway." Even after these months of working for the doctor, Emmett wasn't sure where the scan or the voice came from—there was no camera or speaker visible.

He shivered as the door creaked open, but for another reason: There was something about an inhuman intelligence watching him that Emmett still hadn't gotten used to.

~

If Gnosis across the street resembled a military compound, Dr. Venture's laboratory resembled a nuclear bunker.

Emmett descended the long stairwell, with only tiny lights on each of the steps to push away the darkness. Even from all the way up here, eerie clangs and hisses echoed from the lab. He ignored them and descended over a hundred steps to reach the bottom.

He followed the concrete hallway, passing half a dozen doors of reinforced steel and access hatches for the pipes and wiring that ran alongside the hallway like bundles of nerves. None of the doors were labeled—only numbered—and Emmett had only ever been in one of them. Each of them had a small camera and display next to it, no bigger than his palm, and each looked to be several decades old.

It puzzled Emmett why there was such a mix of old and new technology in the lab, but the doctor had never given him a straight answer. Emmett couldn't say why, but it felt like it wasn't an issue of funding... There were other things Venture pinched pennies on, but those were things like frozen meals instead of takeout or a clunky car instead of something new. Instead, it felt like some parts of the underground had been purposefully kept the same.

Emmett stopped at the door painted 003, and waited for the lab's artificial assistant, TINA, to scan him. After a moment, the door split along the seams and parted for him.

"Dr. Venture is expecting you," TINA said, appearing on the old display as a voice waveform.

Emmett stepped through into a small locker room. At some point, the number plates had been removed from all the lockers except those on the left wall and the rest of them had been welded shut. He stuffed his phone, wallet, and backpack into the first available one.

A short hallway and another set of reinforced doors separated the locker room from the lab three's main room.

The walls of the testing hub were covered in display screens and readouts, and the center of the room was taken up by a metal platform that both served as a table and as a holographic display. Most of them were powered down, save for a small cluster of screens in the back of the room. That was where Dr. Venture stood. It would've given the impression of someone huddling around a campfire at night, except that his hands clasped behind his back, watching the screens intently.