Real-Life

Gordon Freeman ran down one of the thousands of subterranean corridors of the Black Mesa Research Facility, his rapid footsteps echoing from the surrounding walls. He had reddish brown hair, a smartly trimmed goatee and wore the kind of horn-rim glasses that accentuated the seriousness of his face. While his body was quite thin, he had the knotty muscles of a runner which could keep him moving for as long as it took to get out of this place. It wasn't easy going, either, considering both the weight of the hazard suit he was wearing and that of the many weapons he carried. He wouldn't have done without them, though. Couldn't, really. His hazard suit was sometimes the only thing protecting him from instant death from any of the dozens of horrors he'd already met and he'd almost sooner do without the suit than without his guns.

Speaking of horrors, there was one of the evil little buggers now. It was one of the things Gordon called head-crabs—which actually looked more like Butterball turkeys, with four claw-tipped legs and hinged mouths full of sharp teeth, than they did your typical crab. Gordon hated them. They hid around corners and in air-ducts, chirping contentedly to themselves while they waited for an unsuspecting soul to pass by so they could leap out and kill them. Once dead, their victims were treated to having their heads enveloped by the creature's mouth while their body's nervous system was reprogrammed for crab-control. They then became stalking, claw-slashing, but fortunately slow, monstrosities. It was a fate that Gordon Freeman wished to avoid at all costs.

The particular head-crab he was looking at had scuttled from behind a pile of crates and had apparently spied, him for it immediately began scuttling toward him. Gordon stopped running—no use helping it kill him by closing the gap—and traded the shotgun he had been carrying for his 9mm pistol. He took aim and fired three times. The head-crab fell over on its back, emitting a death rattle.

Gordon smiled. He supposed that killing alien invaders wasn’t exactly in the official job description for working at Black Mesa, but it was certainly a helpful skill to have. He reloaded his pistol and then put it away, taking out his trusty crowbar next, with which he began smashing at the crate next to the head-crab carcass until it splintered. Inside was a smallish white energy pod, which emitted a bluish glow from within. With a practiced motion, Gordon plugged into the pod and felt its energy begin flowing into the veins of his orange hazardous environment suit.

“Power level to seventy five percent,” the hazard suit’s feminine computer voice said in his helmet’s ear-piece. Very nice, he thought. Hopefully, he would soon find another pod or a HEV Suit Recharge station and be able to increase power even more. Wouldn’t do to meet any nasties without full-suit protection.

Gordon swung the shotgun down off his shoulder, then paused to sip some coffee. It was still good and hot in his black and silver Star Trek: Voyager mug. He had another sip then set the mug back down on its coaster and resumed running. He still had an extremely long journey to get to the surface, but he'd been through it so many times that he knew this place like the back of his orange and black-gloved hand.

The Black Mesa facility really was an enormous feat of engineering; a miles long, self-contained network of laboratories, monorail tunnels, corridors, catwalks, storage rooms, stairwells, elevators, offices, employee housing facilities, habitat chambers, cafeterias, ventilation ducts, machinery and bottomless pits, all stacked in layers beneath the New Mexico desert. It must have taken the government decades to dig it all out and cost the taxpayers a huge chunk of change.

Currently, Gordon was moving through one of Black Mesa's office complexes. A handful of his scientist colleagues were holed up in various rooms there. Some of them had already been head-crabbed. He had arrived in time to see others slurped up and devoured by one of the teethy, extensor-tongued creatures that clung to the ceiling tiles, or by one of the things that now lived in the air-ducts. There were a few researchers hiding, though, and they often held valuable information to aid him in his quest for survival. Gordon had a strong feeling he was about to happen upon one of them, hiding within a nearby office. As he approached the door in question, he was careful to keep his ears peeled for chirping head-crabs or the irritated grumbling of the lightning-spewing greenies. Instead of aliens, though, he heard something far worse.

"Travis? What are you doing?"

Gordon's jaw clinched. It was Melinda, downstairs. She always called him Travis and always prefaced any multi-floor communication by asking him what he was doing. It infuriated him because the question contained the implication that he must be doing something other than what he should be doing. She always asked it. Every single time!

"What do you need?" he said.

There was a pause. She was probably deciding whether or not to be pissed off that he had sounded pissed off. He couldn't help it, though. How many times was it going to take for her to realize that asking that automatically pissed him off? After twenty seconds, she still hadn't responded.

"What do you need?" he repeated louder, as though she hadn't heard him the first time.

"Are you doing anything important?" she asked. Melinda had never understood the importance of Gordon's job. He was only saving the whole damn world from invasion by aliens from Dimension Xen. It was Saturday, dammit. He could save the world on Saturday if he wanted.

"Not really," he replied. She was probably after him to help her put up shelving in the laundry room, or wanted him to finally take a crack at that old lamp she'd been hounding him to fix for weeks. She remained silent.

"What do you need?" he repeated for a third time. Why wouldn't she just answer his question, dammit? Was it that hard?

"Nevermind," she said. It was clear from her tone that even though she might have wanted him for something she was no longer in the mood to contend with him if he was going to be pissy. She had said as much in the past and it made Gordon angry. Why interrupt what he was doing and then refuse to tell him what she wanted? If she had just answered his question when he had asked it there would have been no need for hurt feelings. Now the whole afternoon would be ruined. She would be mad at him for at least half an hour and he would feel strange about going downstairs at all. Why did it always have to be this way?

Gordon stepped through the office door and nearly ran over the little scientist who was hiding inside. He was an older gentleman with wild tufts of white hair jutting from the sides and back of his otherwise bald head.

"Freeman! Whoever thought you would still be ali..."

Gordon fired both barrels of his shotgun into the man's face. There was a flash and a loud boom, then a little blood splattered on the wall and the scientist threw up his arms and fell over, dead. It was very satisfying, but Gordon hardly even smiled. Shooting the scientists always made him feel a little guilty—not that they probably didn't deserve it, being the ones who caused all this mess in the first place. Gordon liked to think of himself as the good guy, though. He really tried to stick to that role and often put himself at risk to save the lives of the security guards and his fellow scientists. Occasionally, though, he got fed up with the hassles facing him and just had to shoot someone. It wasn't anything personal.

Guilt got the better of him, and Gordon pressed the F7 key on his suit's arm-mounted console. The word LOADING flashed on his helmet's Heads Up Display screen and after a few seconds Gordon found himself standing back in the checkered hallway of the office complex, next to the body of a dead greenie he'd killed earlier. Like much of what went on at Black Mesa, the technology that allowed this mini-time jump was a mystery to Gordon. It worked, and that was all that mattered. He had set this spot as a fallback position in case he got into trouble and needed to rectify any mistakes. He ran past the greenie's carcass and along several corridors, being careful to remember to shoot the head-crab behind the crates and get the energy pod again afterwards. As he ran, he wondered if Melinda would pipe up again and ask him what he was doing and how their argument would play out this time. This time he would tell her to leave him alone. It was a perfectly good Saturday afternoon and she had her planting or macramé or whatever to attend to. Would it kill her to let him fry a few aliens? However, Melinda didn't say anything at all and Gordon was left to run on through the corridors until he was once again stepping through the office door, nearly colliding with the scientist inside. Gordon pressed F6 on his console, to reset his fallback position.

"Freeman! Whoever thou..."

Gordon fired both barrels of his shotgun into the man's face again. There was the flash, the boom, the blood, the arms flailing and the scientist lying dead on the checkered floor. This time it wasn't quite as satisfying, but the guilt too was less. He pressed F7 again and, after a few seconds of loading, the scientist reappeared, intact.

"Freeman! Whoever thought you would still be alive?" the man finally finished. "I hope those people in the Lambda Lab can get this under control." He was, of course, referring to The Incident that occurred this morning which had unleashed the creatures from dimension Xen into our world. Gordon had been given a front row seat for it. As a research associate in Black Mesa's Anomalous Materials Lab, it was his job to put on his hazardous environment suit and insert samples of strange glowing matter into an energy chamber so his fellow scientists could study what happened. He didn't know what they were trying to achieve by it all, but he sure knew what it felt like to be at ground zero when it all blew up. He remembered an explosion and being dropped into an inky void where he saw and heard some very disturbing things before blacking out entirely. When he regained consciousness, he found most of his coworkers dead and was left to head toward the surface to get help for the few survivors.

"I suspected this could happen," the terrified little man said, "but the Administrator just would not listen."

That's probably because the Administrator intended for The Incident to occur, Gordon thought. He had always been suspicious of that guy. The Administrator was a dark-suited man with a personality to match. Gordon had seen him arguing with one of the senior researchers shortly before The Incident, and since then had spied him lurking in the catwalks, surveying the damage with his cold, cold eyes and happily watching as Gordon fought his way through the chaos. If given the opportunity, Gordon planned to shoot him.

"I'm not sure I want to go to the surface," the scientist confided. "What if the world finds out what we've been doing down here?"

"It's your ass, I guess," Gordon said, stepping back into the corridor.

"Why are you leaving me here?" the scientist cried. Gordon ignored him. Let him see how he does against the greenies and head-crabs on his own.

Unfortunately, Gordon had greenies of his own to fight. While heading for the next stairwell that would take him at least one level closer to the surface, he stumbled onto a greenie hiding behind a soft-drink machine.

Greenies were probably the second most plentiful Xen species in Black Mesa. They were roughly human-sized, bipedal creatures with greenish, armor-plated hides, the standard sharp claws, and a giant glowing red eye that took up most of their facial area. Actually, there were several smaller glowing red structures that Gordon assumed might be eyes as well. And at the moment, the greenie by the vending machine had turned all its red structures in his direction and immediately began crackling with energy as it powered up to blast him.

Gordon fired his shotgun at it, but missed, hitting the drink machine instead. The illuminated plastic face of the machine exploded sending soft-drink cans spilling out onto the floor, but the noise wasn't enough to distract the greenie. From its claws it spat a bolt of bio-electricity into Gordon's chest. The Heads Up Display dropped Gordon's HEV suit power from seventy-five percent to sixty-three. Gordon swung his shotgun over and blasted the greenie directly in its red eye. It wailed in anguish and fell over. Gordon wasn't through yet, though. He heard more greenie grumbling from the next room just before two more bolts of energy slammed into him, knocking his suit's power level down to 39. The pair of greenies were staring redly at him from just beyond the open doorway.

Stupid, so stupid, Gordon thought. He'd known they were in there, of course, but had hoped to take them out with a grenade this time. However, the beauty of time-jump technology was that you could always go back and do things differently. Gordon could either jump back to his hold position, or jump back several hours, at his merest whim. If he wanted to, he could jump back to the very beginning, before The Incident had even occurred, and start over-he had already done so, dozens of times. In fact, with the jump-tech's automatic help, not even death itself could stop Gordon Freeman. To prove the point, Gordon didn't fire at the greenies, but stood his ground allowing them to approach and begin tearing shreds from him with their claws. It didn't hurt much; his hazard suit had already pumped him so full of morphine, he hardly noticed at all. After a few claw-swipes, both his HEV suit power and health-level monitors had gone to zero and Gordon fell over, his face resting on the checkerboard floor, his life energy waning.The jump-tech automatically kicked in and reality re-loaded a few seconds later.

"Freeman! Whoever thought you would still be alive?" the scientist said as Gordon reappeared, alive and well. Once again, Gordon Freeman had triumphed over death. He was like a god, at work. No need for sleep. No need for food. No need for... Well, actually, he did need to pee. Too much coffee, he figured. He dropped a live grenade at the scientist's feet and got up to go to the bathroom.

Standing at the toilet, Gordon discovered an ugly truth: He might have been a crack shot with a 9 mm, but he was apparently no good at all with a penis. His stream absent-mindedly wandered over and hit the rim of the bowl, splashing out onto the side of the bathtub and floor. He considered leaving it there as urinary graffiti to anger Melinda, who would, of course, notice it immediately. Instead, he wiped it up with some tissue. A kind of guilty haze had begun to settle on him over the last few minutes. He was starting to suspect that he might have over-reacted a little when he got upset with Melinda earlier. Even admitting that served to bring up the anger again, though. He was supposed to be the good guy here and it absolutely appalled him when he reached the end of an argument with her only to discover that he'd been the asshole all along. Just once he wanted to be justifiably angry with her and be able to stay that way. However, though she might not understand or appreciate his job, Melinda was a good girlfriend and she took care of him. He should be grateful to have her, even if she didn't approve of what he did. In fact, he should be even more grateful because she had been responsible for helping him land the job, last December. She had been the one who first noticed the Help Wanted ads listing this job as rated Job Of The Year by over 50 major publications. And sure, Gordon had taken other jobs since then—Special Ops soldier and Jedi Master, to name two—but he always returned to his first love as Research Associate at Black Mesa. He had Melinda to thank for it.

Gordon went down the brown carpeted stairs into the living room and down the short hallway into their kitchen. Melinda was at the dining table, eating a bowl of soup and a slice of homemade bread. It smelled wonderful. She looked up at him, moving a strand of her long brown hair out of her face with the handle of her spoon. There didn't seem to be any anger in her eyes, but there was definitely something else there. Gordon couldn't place it.

"Want some soup?" she asked.

Gordon nodded. He waited a moment to see if she was going to get it for him, but she made no such move, so he took a bowl from the cupboard and ladled some soup into it himself. It looked like her potato soup that she made with leeks. One of his favorites. He took a column of crackers from the open box on the table and lowered his bulk into the chair across from her.

"This is good," Gordon said after a minute of eating. He was hoping to test the waters of her mood, but her nod of acknowledgment didn't tell him much.

"What did you need me for, earlier?" he asked, between bites.

"Nothing."

"No, really," he said, trying to sound good-natured and not at all irritated. "What did you want?"

"It's nothing. It's just..." Melinda paused for a moment and seemed to have a silent debate with herself. "It's just that, I asked you not to put my red PJ's in the washer and... you did."

Oops, Gordon thought. This would make his fifth laundry snafu in as many weeks.

"Were they hurt" he asked.

"No. The PJ's are fine, but you're now the proud owner of two pink dress shirts and five pairs of tighty-pinkies."

"Oh," Gordon said. He cringed at the revelation, for he despised pink. Didn't mind it on Melinda, so much, which was fortunate because until now he'd only managed to ruin her clothing. He supposed it had been his own fault, though. After all the months they had lived together, he was the one who still disregarded the warnings on the detergent about separating colors. Now he'd have to endure pretty in pink jokes from her whenever he wore any of it. He decided to let it go. "I'd thought you wanted me to fix the lamp," he told her.

"No. I knocked it over again the other day and heard something crunch in the housing. I'm pretty sure it's broken for good this time."

They ate in silence for a few minutes, allowing Gordon time to fume to himself over his new pink undies. When next she spoke, Melinda's line of conversation surprised him.

"Travis, I think you're addicted to that game."

Gordon blinked at her. "What are you talking about?"

"You were playing Half-Life, earlier, right?"

Gordon started to respond, then stopped, unsure of the best way to proceed. He could feel anger and something akin to fear bubbling up inside of him. She had accused him of being a workaholic in the past, but this time she actually seemed serious. There in the kitchen, with the sun setting through the sliding glass door behind her, Melinda's face looked decidedly darker—her eyes, colder—than usual.

"Mel, that's... that's just silly," he told her, trying to sound calm and collected.

"Is it silly, Travis?"

"Yes. It's extremely silly."

"Well what else should I call it, other than addiction? Obsession? Infatuation?"

"Just because I like to play computer games does not make me an addict."

"Not all computer games," Melinda corrected. "Just Half-Life. It's the only one you ever play anymore."

"Tell me you're joking."

"I'm not joking, Travis. I'm worried about you."

"You're worried that I like to play a video game? Can you even hear what you're saying?"

"I'm serious. I don't think it's healthy for you to spend so much time playing violent video games like that. Those two kids from Columbine were video game addicts too and look what they did."

"Oh, that's really nice. Not only are you accusing me of being addicted to a game, now you're also comparing me to murderers."

"All right. Maybe it's an extreme example..."

"Maybe?" Gordon interrupted. "It's the most ridiculous thing I've ever heard!"

"Regardless, it doesn't change the fact that you spend more time with that computer than you do with me."

So that was it, Gordon realized. She really was jealous of his job. He had known she hated it, but this was bordering on delusion. Gordon considered for a moment the possibility that Melinda was suffering from some kind of emotional need to be jealous. Seemed like he'd read something about such a condition on the internet. Maybe he somehow wasn't fulfilling her need to be jealous so she was projecting it onto his job. This was still outlandish, though. He'd always been faithful to her and never even flirted with women at work. Of course, now that he thought about it, he didn't actually recall ever seeing any female employees at Black Mesa. Other than the deadly, government, ninja-babe, snipers, who would be trying to kill him later in his workday, he never saw any females there at all. Well, next time, he decided, he would try and flirt with a ninja-babe, just to show Melinda up.

"I spend lots of time with you," Gordon said.

"Only when you're eating or watching TV," she said, nodding toward his soup bowl. "How many hours do you spend on the computer, when I'm home?" Melinda waited for his response, but he didn't have one. He didn't exactly punch a time card. "On weeknights, at least four unless any of your shows are on. Don't argue. I've counted," she said. "How many hours do you spend on it when I'm at work? You know, during the daytime, when you're supposed to be looking for a job yourself?"

Gordon swallowed. She was starting to cut deep. Sure he was supposed to be searching for other employment during the day, but he already liked the job he had. He didn't think she would buy that, though.

"No answer?" Melinda continued. "Funny, I don't know either. I just know I can never get through to you during the day because you've got the phones tied up. Playing on-line, would be my guess, but I try to give you the benefit of the doubt. And when I come home, I can't so much as ask you how your day went without getting attitude."

"This is about this afternoon, isn't it?" Gordon asked. He was starting to wish he had pissed all over the bathroom.

"No. It's about every day, Travis! I can't even brush my teeth upstairs without tripping over one of the extension cords or phone lines you've got running all over the place up there. And God forbid if anything gets unplugged when you're playing."

"Now Mel," Gordon began, trying to sound like the sensible one. "I've already called Mr. Jackson about the bad plugs up there. He says he's trying to get an electrician in to look at them. If we can just wait a few more..."

"Maybe you should call him back and tell him not to bother. At least when I unplug one, it gets your attention."

"Now what are you talking about?"

"You still don't even know?" Melinda said. "Travis, do you remember when I came up and stood beside you Tuesday night? I asked you if you would please come to bed and you didn't even look at me. Do you even remember that?"

Gordon vaguely recalled something like that. He was pretty sure he had been trying to save a security guard from one of the head-crabbed scientists but he kept messing it up and having to time jump back because of her interruptions. "Yeah, I remember," he said. "And I told you I wasn't sleepy yet."

"Travis, I was naked."

Gordon blinked for a few seconds. "No...no you weren't."

"Oh, yes I was."

"You couldn't have been! I would have noticed if you were naked."

"Well you didn't. I was naked and ready to go, but you blew it. You didn't even look at me."

Gordon felt a twinge at this. It had been a while since they had been together. By the time he usually came to bed, though, she was already asleep and was able to sleep through all attempts to wake her just as well as she slept through the sounds of him launching grenades at greenies. Gordon frowned. He may as well put such thoughts out of his head, because she was hardly in a mood for it now. He just stared blankly back at Melinda.

Melinda looked very sad. "You don't believe me," she said. "You don't believe any of it, do you?"

"What I don't believe is that I'm actually sitting here listening to this," Gordon said. He got up and left the kitchen, walking swiftly toward the stairs.

"Travis, you need stop to think about what you're about to do," Melinda said. "You need to do some hard thinking about what it could mean as far as we're concerned."

Gordon paused, considering his options carefully but he didn't look at her. Behind him, in the kitchen, was an angry, delusional woman and a bowl of cold soup. Ahead, up the stairs, the sound of chirping head-crabs just waiting to be blown to bits. It was no choice, really. He mounted the stairs and began climbing.

"Gordon..."

"What?" he answered, stopping on the second step and staring around the banister at her. She met his gaze with her own now glassy eyes.

"Do you even realize you just answered to that character's name?"

Gordon's jaw tightened, but for once he was not going to dignify her with a response. He turned away and began climbing the steps, breaking into a run as he reached the top. He ran past the charred, bloody mess that remained of the scientist Gordon had bestowed a grenade upon earlier. He took two more grenades from his belt while running through the corridors, then threw them as he reached the vending machines. The first one landed on top of the greenie hiding beside the last machine while the second one sailed into the room beyond and bounced off the far wall. Twin explosions erupted, shattering the vending machines and sending a new spray of drink cans onto the checkered floor. Gordon dashed through them and into the next room, where he had to leap to avoid tripping on the smoking remains of the two greenies who had clawed him to death before. Another wide doorway, a short distance further, lead to the stairwell Gordon had been seeking for hours.

Ignoring another lone scientist, who was cowering behind the trash can at the foot of the stairs, Gordon began climbing the steps two at a time, until he reached the first landing. There, he stopped and listened. Sure enough, it sounded like a whole heckle of head-crabs was lying in ambush for him, just out of sight, on the next level. Some ambush, Gordon thought. You could always hear the damn things cooing and chittering away long before you got near them. He considered lobbing another grenade into their midst, but found he was fresh out. It was just as well; he was far too pissed off from his argument with Melinda not to play a more personal role in their demise. He pulled out his pistol, pressed F6 on his console, then climbed until he could see all six of the head-crabs. They could see him too, and immediately launched themselves at him. Gordon was able to pick two of them off with a few wild shots from his pistol, but they were all over him before he could get the rest. Gordon took a couple of hard bites, but this didn't slow him down in the slightest. He dropped his pistol, whipped out his crowbar and knocked the head-crabs off of him, then crouched and proceeded to whack them all into mucus-colored paste. He thought he'd gotten them all, but found he could still hear more chirping, this time from behind him. One of the head-crabs had evidently slipped past and was uncharacteristically ignoring him in favor of scuttling down the stairs. Gordon snatched up his pistol, but by then head-crab had crawled around the corner of the landing and out of sight. He ran down the stairs after it, but when he reached the lower level it was nowhere to be seen.

The scientist behind the trash can stood up. He was a thin man with glasses and a receding patch of gray hair, which Gordon could clearly see as the man's head had not been crabbed. "I just overheard a secure access transmission," he said. "Soldiers have arrived and they're coming to rescue us. Of course, I have my doubts that we'll live long enough to greet them."

"No. You won't," Gordon said. He shot the man in the forehead and the scientist threw up his arms and fell over. Stupid man, Gordon thought. The soldiers had been sent in to kill all the scientists as well as the Xen invaders.

Gordon scanned the area for the head-crab and was just about to run back through the adjoining hallway where the greenie corpses were when he heard an odd thunk from downstairs. At first he was confused, as he thought these stairs only lead up. On second glance, though, he could that just beyond the door to the room was a carpeted staircase, leading down into the darkness That's where head-crab must have gone.

Well fine, Gordon thought. Let Melinda deal with it. Let her see the importance of his job first hand. Then he imagined what he would feel like if, a few minutes from now, Melinda's reanimated corpse came stalking up the stairs under the control of a head-crab. He'd seen his share of horrors, but Gordon didn't think he would be able to handle that, no matter how angry might have been with her. He would now have to go and risk his life to save hers.

Maybe she would be grateful and let him work in peace.

Maybe she would give him sex.

He doubted it.

Gordon brought out his crow-bar again and ran down the stairs into the darkness. It was difficult to see anything in the dark. The sun had completely set and now the only illumination was coming from the small light above the stove in the kitchen. Thanks to its 1973 architecture, there were no ceiling lights to turn on in the living room of their apartment; apparently people in the 70s had no need to see at night. The flashlight in Gordon's hazard suit didn't seem to be working either. He pressed F key on his arm console repeatedly, then noticed that the console itself seemed to have slipped off somewhere. The room was left a mass of shadows, but at least none of them were actually moving.

"Melinda?" he said. There was no response. Gordon listened for the head-crab's tell-tale chirping, but could hear neither it nor any indication that Melinda was there at all. He tried not to think about the fact that head-crabs were only silent after a kill, when they were too busy stuffing their mouths with head to chitter, chirp or coo.

Gordon was about to step into the kitchen when something caught his eye. Lying atop one of the end-tables by the couch was a familiar squat shape. It was smaller than a head-crab, but it wasn't until Gordon was nearly upon it that he see what it was for certain. It was a Star Trek note-paper cube, its sides printed to look like one of the villainous Borg cube-ships. He'd given it to Melinda back before they started dating, when they were merely junior college classmates. The note-cube usually sat atop one of his CD shelves as decoration, so it was very odd to find it on the end-table. He touched it and realized that not only had she removed its original shrink-wrapping, but she had further destroyed its collectability by actually writing on it. It was still too dark to make out the words, though, so Gordon reached under the shade of the end-table's lamp and turned the switch. Nothing happened. Gordon turned it several more clicks, then noticed that the lamp's power cord was lying in a shadowy coil next to the note-paper cube. He picked up the plug and, after poking it along the base of the wall for nearly half a minute, managed to insert it into the electrical outlet. Immediately, there was an intense surge of electricity and Gordon smelled ozone and smoke. He didn't realize what was happening right away, until the light from the kitchen began to dim and flicker. It was the broken lamp she'd been bothering him about for weeks! He yanked the plug out of the wall, but it was too late. The lights from upstairs and the one in the kitchen had gone out completely. All was silent.

Cursing, Gordon tried his suit's flashlight again and, failing that, stumbled into the kitchen to find the utility closet. No head-crabs attacked him during his journey, though it would have been just his luck if they had. He felt and fumbled along the wall until he found the circuit breaker box and then began flipping switches back and forth until the oven hood light came on. He then flipped the remaining switches until he was sure that all the apartment's rooms had power. He walked back to the living room and had just laid a hand on the top page of the note-cube when he heard a succession of beeps from upstairs: one long beep followed by three short ones. He recognized it as the sound his computer made when its video card was not properly inserted. That didn't make any sense, though. It was working fine earlier, until...

Gordon flew up the stairs in a mad rush. The scientist's body was no longer lying beside the trash can. There was no trash can. There were no dead head-crabs, nor live ones for that matter. There was only the same brown carpet, broken up by the bright orange extension cords and silvery telephone wires running along the baseboards from the bedroom to Gordon's computer room. He followed their trail, terrified of what he would find waiting for him in the cluttered, movie-poster-lined confines of that room. Just as he feared, the monitor of his computer was completely black. Instead of the usual green power light on its front, the light was a dirty yellow.

"Oh hell," Gordon said. He could hear the cooling fans whirring within his CPU, but there was certainly nothing on the screen to suggest the computer was working. He turned the computer off and then back on again, not even waiting the full recommended 20 seconds. Other than the four beeps, there was no indication of any computing activity. In fact, the cooling fans now seemed to be having difficulty finding their proper speed and were beginning to spin slower and slower as he listened. Gordon could just imagine his over-clocked, over-priced and over-worked Pentium III chip beginning to over-heat within the casing.

"No! No, no, no, no, no!" he screamed, stabbing at the F7 button on the keyboard. It had no effect at all. The jump-tech was definitely off-line.

He kicked at his filing cabinet, denting the front of one of the drawers and creasing the Xena: Warrior Princess sticker he'd stuck on it. He cursed the lamp. He cursed the faulty outlets. He cursed the fact that of all the cables and wires running to and from this room, none of them was plugged into a surge protector. You could bet Melinda's electric tooth-brush was, though!

Gordon emitted a wail, not unlike that of a dying greenie. How could this be happening? How could his computer have been fried like this?!! How was he supposed to get to work, now?!!

He slammed his fists repeatedly into the surface of the desk, knocking over his Voyager mug, spilling cold coffee into the keyboard in the process. At this he ripped the keyboard drawer out of the desk entirely and hurled it into the life-size Mr. Spock cardboard standup in the corner. He then began slamming his fists on the desk with renewed vigor. It took him several slams before he realized that one of his fists still clutched the top sheet of the note-cube from downstairs.

Gordon stopped hitting the desk. He unfolded the crumpled sheet and had to wipe the tears of anguish from his eyes before reading it. On the sheet, atop the Star Trek insignia watermark, in Melinda's neat cursive script were the words: "Game Over."

the end