Six Faces
rating: +16+x

☦An irrelevant tale about cubes.☦                                                                                                                            
The personnel director sat alone in his office fiddling with his new gloves. He’d been sitting there running his fingers along the leather edges and admiring the tailor work for a time that he’d lost track off. It was a slow day at the site, an overcast and uneventful day. The mood was stoic and gray, and he could feel the relaxing pitter patter of rain on the windowpane every now and then.

In other chambers 173 was busy being 173, staring vacantly at a wall with its big vacant eyes. 682 was currently purple and small, soaking in its tank of hate, no more horrifying than usual.

The personnel director heard a dull clink on his window, and the sound of something splashing down in the mud. He stopped inspecting his new hands and got up to take a look. Through the foggy glass he could see what looked like a small black cube sitting in a puddle outside. The hell is this? Someone playing a game with me on their smoke break? He looked around but he couldn’t see anyone out there. The break area was on the other side of the facility, and there was nothing but miles of desert and a small black line that was the first perimeter near the horizon.

As strange as this was he didn’t think at all to call someone about it, except for the janitor to check about the mess outside. He was about to grab the receiver when he heard another chichunk followed by the faint sound of splashing water outside the window. The fuck is this now?

Through the now slightly cracked glass he found that there was a pink cube shaped object hovering slightly above the ground.

“Alright, I’m going to the Site Director.”

He briskly walked down the hall out of his office to the far room to speak with the woman in charge of things. He walked through the threshold of her sparse office and told her that some sort of silliness was going on outside.

“No one is on grounds at the moment, but I’ll send someone to go take a look if –“

She was cut off by a rapid succession of thudding drumming on the roof, the sound of metal, plastic, and hollow wood (if they would have had time to think) clattering in spurts over the space of a few seconds. The thing that captured their attention the most being a flaming cube falling through the roof, through the desk, and through the floor before they could blink at it. The Site Director looked at him through the now trickling rain between them with her mouth ajar.

The Site Director shakes her head, picks up her phone and sits down, looking at the newly installed waterfall that was soaking all of her routine reports. “Low storage? Yes, there’s a hole in my roof. What? You sure? That’s eight levels down! That heavy! Bag it if you can, we’re going to turn the flashers on.”

“Go ahead and signal an alert, Grey-2.” She told him cooly, whipping her papers through the air to dry them off.

The personnel director squints and heads toward the door in a hurry, more pattering on the roof as he reached the doorway. “Hurry it up!” she told him, spurring him an inch quicker.

The director spotted large and small objects outside of the window raining down from the sky, and the noise of these things hitting the roof was deafening. He could make out the shapes, cubes. Cubes of all different shapes and sizes and colors. The ground outside was littered with them. Every now and then he would hear a hard thud and look up to see a dent in the ceiling, or a new hole. He could have sworn he saw something fall through the ceiling and pass through him, but he didn’t have much time to take it in.

He breezed through the atrium to the comm center; this area was connected to the rec room, a large dome with industrial glass ceilings. The chinking, whopping, and crashing sounds of the objects hitting the glass was overwhelming.

Cubes of all shapes and sizes that had fallen through the roof littered the area, and it was quite a trick to avoid the potential fallers and the things already littering the ground. He near stumbled over a large black glowing cube that was quite hot, and nearly stepped on a smaller orange cube that was menacing with spikes, I mean, hell, he was almost compelled to step on it.

Three agents were huddled around the archway leading into the comm room. One of them had a cube on the side of his face, which for some reason seemed strange to Mr. Director. He asks them what’s going on.

“This thing on my face? It’s stuck; it won’t come off no matter how much I pull!” He whined.

“No dammit, Ron, why isn’t anyone sounding the alert.”

“There’s a big cube in the comm room, smashed the equipment, fell through the ceiling. It looks like it’s messing with the electronics in the area too, although that might be a different cube.”

He headed in anyway. The three of them following behind a little. What he saw was cubes, fucking cubes everywhere. The area in the comm room was waist deep in cubes, a small avalanche tumbled out when he had opened the door. It was an absolute rainbow, a candy shop assortment of cubes, and if he had time to look over them all, he’d notice each of them was behaving a bit strange.

Despite the sensory overload, he started to wade through to the electric box and looked for the failsafe switch.

“You’re crazy, you don’t know what those things’ll do to ya!” the cubefaced man named Ron exclaimed.

This exclamation seemed to be perfectly timed, as the Personnel Director began laughing, crying, screaming, and wetting himself all at once. He had also lost all of his hair, and unbeknownst to him now had three different kinds of cancer. The agent leaned in and yanked him back, sending them both flying backwards on the ground. Luckily they land on a squishy cube that shielded falls no matter what the magnitude of force. It also cured cancer and was indestructible.

“God damming big cube is making more cubes.” The man said.

He looked over to him and noticed that this man’s hand was now cubes.

“What the fuck is happening to me!” the man screamed, wiggling back to standing position and bracing himself against a wall.

“Fucking cubes!”

The director noticed a small family of fluffy brown cubes rolling around in the corner before it was attacked by a group of small, viscous, polka-dotted black and red cubes.

“That’s it, I’m headed to Level 4 to sort this out.” He said, getting to his feet and running toward the elevator.

Unbeknownst to him, level 4 was destroyed by a cube that removed anything from existence that had the number four in its name. It also played Symphony No. 9 whenever it destroyed something. It too, was indestructible.

He had reached the door past the murder of flying crow-cubes that made him feel a bit sad, and began jamming the elevator door button labeled… there was no 4. Where had the 4 gone? It simply was not there. He punched other buttons, the button for level 5. He waited a while, batting away the cawing cubes with his gloved hand. In a few second the door dings, but there is no elevator. The doors opened to a vacant shaft.

He was stumped. Those were his only two options and they were now gone… but the Site Director would know what to do, he would head back there as she probably already had something up her sleeve to sort this out. They had been through worse.

EeeeeeeuuuuuUUUUUnghKUnnCHUH something that sounded like a squishy machine howled from the halls to higher-ups office.

"Fucking cubes!" he could hear her shouting, more angry than scared from down the hall. The horrible noise continued all the while he was running down the hallway dodging rhombus.

He arrived at the Site Directors door and saw that a mass of interconnected black cubes was funneling up through the hole in the floor from before. Each of the segments had little mouths, they were howling that horrible noise. The Site Director was on the other side of the room in the corner, holding her computer monitor over her head, looking like she was planning on murdering the thing with it.

"This is just what we need! More cubes!"

"What should we do?" Mr. Director said tensely as the thing continued pulsing through the hole in awful procession.

"I'm going to toss my computer at it and try to make it over to you!"

She hurls her computer at the base of the hole, it connects impotently and falls to the floor with a thud, the screen cracking. It was indestructible or at least immune to plastic. Nevertheless she made her sprint over to the doorway, the alien mass did not seem agitated at all.

"We're going to round up everyone on level one and evacuate." she said, wasting no time and continuing on to the rec room.

"What the fuck is this?" he asked her, knowing she most likely was as confused as he was.

"Could be anything, could be the result of cross testing somewhere, could be a new entity. No idea." They turned a corner.

They found Ron, blocking the doorway to the rec area off. He was leaning into to a mass of cubes that seemed to be trying to make their way through. Ron was completely cubes, twelve interconnected orange cube segments making up the body, and a mass of cubes around the face mimicking facial features. He was horribly pixelated in three dimensions.

"Ron?" the Personnel Director inquired in unsure tone.

"It's already too late, I know!" he said in a perfectly synched voice.

"What?"

"The site is in a much larger cube, the earth even! Soon the universe!"

"How do you know that?"

"I am cubes like them."

"What should we do?" she urged as Ron continued to push back the assault.

"Nothing, look at your hand."

She looked down and her hand was covered in cubes.

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