Nora Collins and the AI Building

Please note: This story contains descriptions of mild mutilation and body horror.

Nora Collins had always been fascinated with industrial horrors. When real world buildings or technology imploded, disfigured, and rotted itself away to create a monstrosity of metal, plastic, and ash that looked like something out of a science fiction movie. The way the front of an exploded steam engine freight train looks like disembodied arms reaching out from the darkness to snatch away their next unsuspecting victim or the way the half-melted pipes in an old abandoned factory looks like industrial veins leading a too-curious innocent, unaware that they had already been swallowed, to the heart of some beast always took her breath away.

When she was young she just thought the pictures were cool. She still does. But now there's the additional infatuation with how the lines between reality and fiction, especially science fiction, aren't really so well defined after all.

Then there was the way the man-made disasters that created these creatures became incorporated in the place's mythos. Places were deemed haunted, oral cautionary tales were told, unspoken lessons were learned by everyone in the surrounding area.

Images of metal carcasses followed her all her life. By the time she was ten, she was able to tell with a glance what kind of disaster, if there was one, caused the disfigurement, where it originated, and how it was caused. By the time she was 14 she could distinguish accidents from intentional destruction at a glance and had gained a reputation in her neighborhood for poking around abandoned buildings and subway stations.

Which is exactly how she'd landed herself in her current predicament.

The one of the local tech labs had exploded. It was one of those companies that specialized in advanced computer technology and chemical engineering or something of the sort - Nora wasn't really scientifically-minded, so she didn't understand the intricacies of it all. But she had seen the pictures and footage on the news the next day and she knew instantly that the police had it wrong.

Seven people were dead. More were injured. The building itself was lucky to not have come crashing down. Metal beams were splintered like broken fingers grasping at their last breaths of air before succumbing to the smothering head of the chemical fire that had raged. Most of the equipment had melted together in a way that could pass as an abstract-inspired sculpture representing the embodiment of human suffering. The news reported that the Police Department believed it to be an accident.

Nora knew it wasn't.

She'd skipped her seminar in favor of exploring the new ruins and had made it just far enough to find the origin of the disaster before the police caught up with her. They had reprimanded her, thrown her in the back of the police car and dropped her at the station where she had been shoved into a holding cell. She'd spent the last twenty minutes with no success trying to flag down anyone who would listen so she could tell them that the explosion had been premeditated, and therefore counted as murder.

"I'm telling you, you've got it wrong!" she screamed into the void of blue shirts and shiny badges. "You need to be calling the Homicide Unit, there's a killer out there!"

"Oh, yeah? Tell me, how exactly would you know that, little missy," grumbled a voice from the other side of the bars.

Nora stood dumbstruck at the bulky officer that now stood before her. She urged herself to speak, this is what she wanted after all, but nothing came. It was as if her vocal chords had chosen that exact moment to go on vacation.

"Could it be," continued the officer, Richardson according to his badge, "that you are who we have to thank for this mess?"

"Excuse me?" she balked.

"Well, there's a common understanding, you see, that perps always return to the scene of the crime."

"Am I being charged with something? Because if so I want to talk to a lawyer."

"No charge," Richardson said, putting his hands up in a mock surrender. "Not yet, at least."

"I'm not a killer."

"Then what makes you think you know more than we do, huh?"

"I don't think you can handle an honest answer to that question," she remarked, looking him up and down. His pants were rumpled, shirt sloppily tucked with powdered sugar stains running up and down the short, uneven sleeves, and badge lopsided. He didn't look to be very intelligent at all, probably wasn't even working the case. He just wanted someone he could bully.  

"I want my phone call," she continued before the man-child could respond.

Richardson stalked away. An hour later she was given access to a phone and she dialed the one number she had promised herself she wasn't going to dial again from a phone that wasn't hers.

"Hiiii, Mom... So. Funny story."

Thirty minutes and a scolding later, Nora strutted out of the police center, mind racing with all the possible causes of the tech company's disaster. There had clearly been a fire, but what had started the fire was unknown, and if the police had any information they weren't sharing. She wasn't going to be able to get into the police files, so if she wanted answers, the only place she could go was back to ground zero.

Nora stopped by her dorm just long enough to snatch her photo album of industrial horrors, silently thanking whoever was listening that she'd been able to convince her parents to pay the extra tuition so she could live in a single. After last year's... incident... she never wanted to live with a roommate again.

It was late afternoon by the time the arrived back at the crime scene. There was no tape, but police cars still lingered. Nora sat down at an open cafe table across the street from the ruins and opened her album to a blank page.

November 17, 2023 - A Tech/Chemical factory, ironically called Ignite Innovations Inc. blew up yesterday. The building's shell looks incredible. Like the agonized face of a person facing terrors we cannot begin to comprehend! Kind of like Picasso's The Scream? Or maybe like some ghost from the future reaching through time and space to warn us of coming destruction. Anyway, the police are still here, which is pretty sus, considering the "accident" happened over 24 hours ago. Pictures to come!!!

The sun was setting by the time the last police car finally rolled away. Nora chugged the last of her various beverages, threw a $20 on the table and dashed off across the street. She ducked into an ally, intending to go in through the back to avoid being seen. Instead, she found a small, unnatural opening in the deteriorating wall and shimmied her way through.

The scent of burnt metal and chemicals permeated the air as she climbed through the rubble of what was once the first floor ceiling. She wandered aimlessly for a while, taking in the molten surroundings. Every creak and groan harmonized an eerie tune. Ash clung to the debris like black moss reclaiming its ground, sucking industry into the earth. Nora loved it.

Eventually, she found a familiar room and followed the path she had mapped for herself to the epicenter of destruction. She hadn't gotten a good look around the octagonal chamber before she was shoved away by the officers. It looked like an exposed chest cavity, with metal beams jutting out at every angle split like broken ribs. Plastic chairs and glass beakers clung together like displaced, liquefied internal organs.

Nora took pictures of it all, unable to help the awed grin that found its way to her face.

The smell of chemicals assaulted her nose through the mask she wore - the K-95 was all she had, though she had been doing research on appropriate masks for inevitable future... adventures. They were just out of the price range for a working class college sophomore.

Pictures taken, Nora meticulously picked her way around the chamber - presumably a lab of some kind, given the equipment. She'd done some research while waiting for the police cars to vacate the building. Apparently, Ignite had recently been involved with a number of lawsuits, but were never convicted of anything. Only accused. The accusations included malpractice and unethical experimentation of some sort, though it was then that the articles Nora had read fell into technical jargon that she didn't understand. Whatever it was, she had gotten the sense that the computer company was looking to expand its reach beyond just computers. Something about merging AI robots with human brains.

There had been protests, there had been arrests of protesters, boycotts of Ignite's products and all other kinds of unrest and publicly voiced discomfort with it all, but still the company had evidently persisted. The accident yesterday morning had occurred after a security guard had called an alert to the local authorities when he heard screaming over the intercom. The cops had come, then the building imploded. Nobody knew what had happened in between. The security camera footage had been damaged in the fire. All of the cops that had responded to the initial call had been listed on list of dead and injured.

Nora's shoe collided with something and it clanked away from we with a dull thunk. She bent down, casting the beam from her forehead lamp in the direction the thing had rolled. What she found looked to be a disembodied, disfigured, metal arm of some kind.

Something groaned behind her.

Nora froze. She didn't dare even breath. That sound... She had to be mistaken.

It groaned again.

For the first time in her life, Nora's heart leapt up into her throat. Blood rushed in a deafening cacophony through her ears.

A third groan, pained.

It sounded almost human.

"No way they just left somebody here?" Nora thought.  "...Unless. They just didn't find them..."

She swallowed down the bile that had risen in her throat and took a cautious step towards the sound. Mutilated buildings she could handle. Mutilated bodies were another thing entirely.

Silence echoed around the chamber now as Nora took another step towards the melted cocoon that she absently thought resembled a human brain. She picked up a metal rod as she approached, bidding a silent thanks that she remembered to put on the gloves she had brought and also that her mother had convinced her to play softball growing up.

A glint at the base of the brain caught her eye, a small shard that shined in a way the other metal in the room didn't. She nudged it with her foot, the rod hefted up like a softball bat just in case. When nothing happened, she leaned down and picked it up. Grime and soot coated the thing, despite its shine, but when Nora thumbed it away the shard read like a name tag. A familiar kind of name tag. She'd seen plenty of its kind at the police station that morning.

Officer Josh Wittenburg it read.

Nora pocketed the thing and continued on, rod raised high.

She'd almost completely circled the brain when she saw it. A little ways off was a mangled skeleton.

"Oh," she said aloud, letting her guard fall. "That's not so bad."

Her brain was whirring. If this was the body of Josh Wittenburg, how could his body have decomposed so quickly that mere hours after the incident he was nothing but a pile of bones?

Ten seconds later she wallowed in shame and embarrassment upon finding that the skeleton was one of those plastic models that high school anatomy teachers hang in their classrooms.

"You..." a warbled, agonized voice echoed. Nora screamed.

Five seconds passed with nothing but the pounding thrum of her heart beating against her ribs.

Ten seconds.

Twenty.

"H-hello?" she called.

Silence.

"Is someone there?"

More silence. Then,

"Can't be... Here."

"There's no 'Keep Out' sign!" She said it more confidently than she had any right to. Nora hadn't cared enough to look if there was tape or a sign or anything telling people not to enter.

"Go," the speaker sucked in a wheezing breath, "away."

"Dude, whoever you are you better stop hiding!" Nora shouted, whirling around in an attempt to find the source of the voice. "If that's the cops here to arrest me again, it's my right to know who you are!"

No response came.

"I'll vlog about it!" she yelled into the void, phone already out and recording. "On Instagram live! Don't try me!"

"Killed... My partner..."

"Yo, what the fuck?" Nora muttered to herself.

"Bot... Revenge," the voice hissed.

The name tag in her pocket seemed to gain ten pounds. Her heart skipped a beat.

"Officer Wittenburg?" she asked hesitantly.

The metallic screech that echoed through the chamber grated Nora's ears and left them ringing.

"Where are you?" she called when her ears cleared up.

"Here..."

"What happened?"

"Murdered... Martin... Building...Exploded..."

"Helpful," Nora mumbled under her breath.

Okay, Collins, think, she urged herself.  What do we know about what happened here and who the fuck is Martin.

Her eyes fell to the metal arm she had kicked earlier. All at once the pieces started clicking into place. She quickly pulled up the articles she had read at the cafe and scanned the pages for names. Sure enough, two of the names listed as casualties were Officer Joshua Wittenburg and his partner Martin Peterson.

"Officer Wittenburg," Nora started already plugging her ears in anticipation for another scream, "did these scientists do something to Officer Peterson? Use him try to demonstrate their AI robot conversion thing, for instance?"

The screech did, in fact, leave her ears ringing once again, and Nora made mental note to pack noise-canceling headphones on her next expedition.

"They said... Safe..."

"But it wasn't and he died and then you enacted revenge by blowing up the building? Yeah, that sure sounds like some backwards, wack ass logic only a cop could come up with. No wonder the police are trying to keep this quiet, it's their fault and they know it. Officer Wittenburg, did you ever figure out where you are?"

"Am... Everywhere..."

"Bruh..." Nora said in awe. "Did you turn yourself into the building you exploded?"

It made sense, she supposed. If Wittenburg had been exposed to, or more likely caused the explosion of, technology that was meant to convert human brains into AI robots or whatever the project was, then why wouldn't he have been feasibly able to merge with the entire building.

There were probably a lot of reasons. Super specific scientific reasons, but Nora shrugged that off. She didn't know enough about engineering to dispute her theory and she didn't care anyway.

What she did care about was the fact that she had been right. She just needed to prove it.

Or at least. Prove it in a way that seemed plausible to the general populace. She doubted the recording she had been taking would suffice.

"Well, Officer, it's been real. I'm gonna go explore some more."

She took off without another thought, snapping pictures as she went of the gurgling water that spewed from burst pipes like blood from an open wound and the fractured bones of a monstrosity laid bare for the world to see. She scribbled down notes of comparisons of the building to myths and cryptids and marveled at how the carcass of something lifeless and man-made could bring life to horrifying legends and monsters that hide under the bed.

Eventually, she found the security room. She pushed her way inside and started fiddling with the machinery. If the police had intentionally lied about this all being an accident, then they could have also lied about the footage not surviving.

It took her some time to get the screens running. They cast an eerie glow about the room - it was the only light aside from Nora's forehead lamp. Everything played out in front of her: the unrelated experiment that caused the scream over the intercom, Wittenburg, Peterson, and the other cops arriving, the scientists assuring that everything was under control, Peterson getting reluctantly strapped to a machine and dying, and Wittenburg intentionally causing the disaster in a blind rage. The cameras had been destroyed so the footage went dark after that.

Nora played it again and recorded the whole thing on her phone.

She stayed for several more hours - the building had been seven stories tall - exploring, gawking in awe, and taking pictures for her photo album. She didn't speak to Wittenburg again. She didn't think he was worth it.

A week later, the media was alight with new images and footage that had been anonymously sent. The pictures had been printed, the video of the security footage left on a flash drive, and left in an envelope at the door of various news outlets.

Public outrage spiked. The police scrambled to defend themselves. Lawsuits moved forward. Ignite's building was scheduled for demolition. The company itself faced increased ridicule.

Nora sat happily in her dorm room with the radio on, organizing the new pictures and notes in her photo album. And if the footage containing a conversation with a certain Officer Wittenburg remained tucked away on a flash drive hidden in her pillowcase, well, nobody's business but her own.