Welcome to Tesladyne! Science while you wait.

[tesla_bot]

The door is a free standing frame on a small plywood dais at the focus of a tremendous amount of cabling and particle emitters. The whole area smells of ozone.

"Watch the step. The platform's cheaper to replace than the floor if the focus wanders."

Tesladyne's high energy (dimensional) physics area is done in early twenty first century institutional - white walls, semi-random grid of light, but varied floor tile colors. The framework is from a school of design that favors being able to clean an area with a pressure washer, The drains are a hint. Decorations are spotty. Beyond the collection of calendars with scribbled notes and the cork board spotted with envelopes and scraps of paper it's still mostly bare. The warning signs are clear, bright, unobstructed and supplemented with signs like 'Do not look in laser with remaining eye.'

There are no windows and only one door to the rest of the facility.

"Welcome to Tesladyne."

Comments

[evilontheloose]

Oh, SHIT!

To-do list (in reverse importance order):

- Revise the structure of the AI hardware;

- Rewrite the AI code;

- Install failproof safe-locks on all automata (small explosive charge for instant kill);

- Kick the ass of whoever is responsible for this mess, thus making the universe a bit smarter;

- Survive this mess!

"We are going to need some heavy artillery FAST!" Because her arm needs more 25 seconds to cool down and charge up, and impressive as it is... there's a LOT of hostiles.

And she is not wearing her armored HE suit.

[tesla_bot]

Robo's list is different in some features.

- Cancel BBC America access. This won't stop anyone, but it will slow them down.

- Fire who ever though Daleks should be added to disaster relief equipment, even as an Easter Egg.

- Throw the construction equipment at each other in an attempt to keep them clear of Jordan and the others.

-Keep an eye on Jenkins as he demolishes his opponents.

"You are so fired who ever did that. INCOMING!"

THROW - Throw - throw.

[evilontheloose]

He's fired if Robo gets to him first.

While this, Jordsn is taking off after cover, ducking behind debris and wrecks.

Drat, still twelve seconds.

[tesla_bot]

Fired at, fired on. Picky's for after the fight.

"I want this back after," says one of the Tesladyne workers who's holed up behind the sparking remains of a dozer that Jordan just used to break line of sight with the spider things as he produces something that might be a phasers angrier cousin, "Sidearms come out of my pocket."

Limited charge without the battery belt packs, but it'll have ten or twelve shots in a pinch. More like twelve with the amount of energy being thrown around for the accumulators to tap into.

[evilontheloose]

"I will build you a better one." Jordan snags the gun, and grins at the beep and low ominous hum of her arm having cooled. "Bad news all around for the team 'Kill Humans'..."

WHROOM! Another dozer-bowling, then she opens fire with the phaser aiming for joints, connections, couplings and moving parts.

[tesla_bot]

The phaser cracks with the short discharge and the double kick that the Science Rifle had earlier. The grip is quickly noticeably, but not uncomfortably, warm. Less mass to dump any extra heat into.

Still punches holes like the big ones though. There are priorities. Spider tanks go down like a domino stacking demo.

Robo's rant - "So god awful fired they'll never work as an Action Scientist again-" is punctuated by the sounds of high speed metal sculpture work.

"I think that's most of them," says a young woman in the ubiquitous overalls (the decorative patch is a wrench - support maybe), "Who can see any more?"

[evilontheloose]

Jordan makes note of that double-kick again, to work on later. As the battle dies down, she sweeps the area, arm and blaster t the ready.

"It seems clear."

[tesla_bot]

Vroo-
The dramatically necessary spurt of motion from one of the dozers is cut off by Jenkins spearing it with a steel pole. Jenkins recognizes no dramitc cues but his own.

"Still willing to work here?" checks Robo as he pats out a small fire on his pants, "After I get rid of the latest round of dangerous Doctor Who fans anyway?"

[evilontheloose]

Jordan takes a deep breath... then grins. "Are you kidding me? This is the most fun I had in YEARS!"

"Can I talk to the guys who made this mess? I bet I can make them shit themselves with nothing but a phrase and a wave of a power tool."

[tesla_bot]

Asking is the equivalent of checking that the gun is unloaded when it's handed to you: Basic safety. Plus, you know, manners.

"If he hasn't taken off yet," says Robo, "I'll see what I can do."

Also, Jordan you now what that smells like. You really just want them to whimper and jibber.

[evilontheloose]

"If he did take off, I can put together a tracker to." Jordan is giggling madly, ready to follow Robo.

[tesla_bot]

Robo heads out past the fire fighting crews with a wave and some random spot checks.

"We're on an island," points out Robo, "First we make sure he's not still here and I reduce BBC privileges. Cutting Doctor Who from the immediate airings might help. Top Gear at least acknowledges that everything they do ends in motorhomes on fire."

The wreckage is very cyberpunk. Maybe the footage will sell to a set designer?

"I'm going to need to reschedule the demo here too."

[evilontheloose]

She nods and follows, skipping after Robo... oh, Jordan never imagined a 'regular' job would be so much fun.

[tesla_bot]

...This isn't normal Jordan. This is what happens when the Green Hornet goes corporate. Or what ever the term is for folding everything into think tanks.

"Having fun?" says Robo in response to the skipping.

"Try not to break the support staff by acting to cheerful, please. They're useful."

[evilontheloose]

"No promises. If they can not take a little scare..." Or a little, scary girl... "...they should not be messing with Science."

Mentally she is preparing to give the guys responsible for the whole mess the fight of their lives.

[tesla_bot]

"Support is more like engineering," says Robo, "It's better when the showers work, the taxes get files, those sorts of things are what support is for."

Robo heads for one of the wall phones again. This should only take a minute or two.

[evilontheloose]

"I have non-intelligent service bots for that." Just she does not pay taxes, and can replace desk-meat jobbers with a Turing dynamo, an Eliza helix, and a white noise generator.

Jordan will find a spot of wall to lean on, and wait.

[tesla_bot]

"I'm waiting for the Roombas to unionize," says Robo darkly.

The phone gets picked up on the other end. Finally.

"Hey Jim, we've got a potential runner. Yeah. Yeah the mess down at the demo field. No, that's not why they call it that."

A longer pause here.

"Yup. Standard watch points and bring the first guy who rabbits down to conference 'C'. There's people who'd like to have a talk with him."

[evilontheloose]

Jordan just smirks, listening to this half of the conversation: she is hopeful about scaring the britches off someone.

[tesla_bot]

Conference Room 'C' is offensively plain. The walls are featureless white. The table is white plastic. The floor is a single width of white linoleum. Even the chairs are white painted metal and unpadded. There is no distraction besides what you have in your own head and the other people in the room.

The available external distractions then are: Jordan, Robo, and Bob, who used to be part of the hardware team. Bob turned himself in, being as he had the sense not to run. Or the terror of Jenkins. It might have been that.

"That shouldn't have ever happened. I don't know what went wrong!"

[evilontheloose]

Oh, good. It makes for speedy interrogation debriefing when people have to focus on a smaller number of things.

"How many simulations you ran before releasing the system for use?" Jordan is smiling.

In a most disturbing way...

[tesla_bot]

Ack! Teeth!

"None! I mean-"

"Go on Bob and it better be good."

"That was a joke compile! It shouldn't have even left my personal partition Boss."

"So how'd it get to the field?"

[evilontheloose]

"It was quite a joke, but it did not cause that much laughing in the end, you know?" Jordan taps her cybernetic fingers on the table.

[tesla_bot]

Bob's eyes dart back and forth between Jordan and Robo.

"Bob. You aren't helping here."

"The only way it could have managed to get out is if someone else did a restore from my files and didn't follow the README."

"So you're claiming that someone broke in and ruined your code with something you'd already written."

"Um. Yes?"

Bob jerks from the sound of a PDA being slid from Robo to Jordan.

"Think you can run down if it happened or not?"

[evilontheloose]

"Piece of cake." And she's not kidding: Jordan turns it on, and metaphorically dives into the computer system, looking for traces of such intrusion, checking net traffic, sniffing login signatures and tracking any clues.

It should not take long...