Humming fluorescent lights reflect off of off-white linoleum flooring streaked in black marks scuffed from the heels of innumerable pairs of shoes and boots. The voices of site personnel drone, ricocheting through the twenty foot drywall and plaster lined steel walls and bouncing off the large ventilation tubes snaking the ceiling like gargantuan earthworms. The air is cool and stale as individuals force down cafeteria food of a slight better quality than prison and public school lunches or form sprawling lines at the three vending machines within the cafeteria in hopes of securing something that will rest easier in their stomachs than what those braver have chosen to consume. They sit on benches at tables with tops where water stains mark splotches of cleaning fluid left unwiped and chatter about all manner of things.
The kitchen was alive, hot from a half dozen ovens and just as many stoves all manned by a baker’s dozen of people. The bodies moved in a flowing hive of well organized chaos; every movement, erratic to eyes unfamiliar with the workings of the kitchen, had a rhyme and reason to it. The kitchen manager stood among it. If the kitchen was a hive, then this was its queen, giving orders to the drones that worked beneath it. Trays of small soggy, grey-scale salisbury steaks slathered in a thick translucent yellow sauce with the consistency of watery, dollar store quality slime were rushed in an out of ovens and left to sit on metal countertops next to trays of grainy lukewarm mashed potatoes and tough green beans. Food was produced at a rate unattainable by any other than those who were trained in the specific art of chaos only found in the kitchens of organizations as big as the Foundation. Trays were emptied minutes after being set out and were just as soon replaced to meet the demands of the lustful stomachs of research, medical, and security personnel alike.
Monotony was disturbed as warning lights spun beneath red caps to cast a hellish glow over the white walls and siren blared a warning of something running amok throughout the facility. There was no panic or screaming in the cafeteria; only a hive mind of workers carrying out protocols they’d memorized in classroom settings and first hand experience. The kitchen was frozen- a not-so-rare-yet-still-rare occurrence- and all eyes fell on the kitchen manager, whose attention was held by a small black pager. Looking up, the manager made a circular motion with a finger pointing upwards. With a rehearsed air aprons were removed and dropped to the floor, exchanged for thick jackets and face masks. The hive of worker bees transformed into a line of black ants that tracked dutifully into the walk in cooler. The thick metal door slammed and clicked locked behind them, built to withstand whatever they were prepared to wait out.