“Kiddies, it’s great you two get along and all…but could you lend me a hand?” Dr. Selkie called to us after getting all that crying out of her system.
Iris and I nodded to each other and walked over to the youthful researcher. Crying so much left Dr. Selkie’s eyes puffy. Her hair and clothes clung to her skin in patches due to the dried blood and tears. She looked like a train wreck, but her eyes still shone with a piercing light.
Her own careless actions led to the loss of her precious partner (If Dr. Selkie heard that description, she would probably have a cow… But when she told us about Dr. Goldman, her words were filled with affection.). I wouldn’t blame her if she flew into a hysterical panic.
Either she lacked the strength to go into a frenzy or she was a stronger woman than her childish appearance suggested. Her breathing pained, Dr. Selkie said, “Notice all of the stuff scattered throughout the room? I realize it’ll be rough, but I’d appreciate it if you gathered it up. As you can see, I don’t even have the strength to stand. I’m afraid I’ll have to ask you to do it for me.”
I’d forgotten about all the things arbitrarily strewn across the room until she mentioned them. There was no correlation between the primarily metallic piles of random stuff… What was the deal with all of it, anyway?
“Well, I must have completely lost my head after Dr. Goldman vanished. I took what appeared in the Output booth and put it back in the Intake booth, repeating the process over and over again,” Dr. Selkie said, forcing herself to answer our question.
“I thought that if I operated it just right, I could reverse-refine the materials back to Dr. Goldman. Yes, yes, I know good and well that the refinement process is usually irreversible. Even if you don’t like the end results, there is no going back,” she said, downcast, but I could fully understand the motive and sentiment that drove her to such drastic measures.
Dr. Goldman vanished. He was probably modified by The Clockworks… In which case, there was a sliver of hope reversing the process and modifying the materials over again might bring him back to his original state.
“But you can see how that ended. No matter what setting I put the Selection Panel on, it only betrayed my expectations with all that junk. Once it even ignored the law of conservation of mass to produce a massive pile of gold. It was a nightmare hauling all of that out of the booth.”
Ah, so throughout the course of repetitively winding up The Clockworks and refining the materials, she created this massive mess. It was a testament to all of the times she wound the key and waited with bated breath for five to ten minutes… Each time she opened the Output door, filled with hope that it finally worked, only to be met with bitter disappointment. She repeated that process over and over again…
Growing utterly exhausted, Dr. Selkie must have fallen into despair. If it were me, I would have curled into a ball out of frustration, but she didn’t give up. And evidently, she did the unthinkable.
“After repeating that for a good while, I came to the conclusion that normal methods wouldn’t cut it. No matter how much I refined these things, Dr. Goldman wasn’t coming back…” Dr. Selkie whispered, glaring spitefully at the junk scattered everywhere. “As such, I put myself in the Intake booth.”
“…That was suicide. Biological testing with The Clockworks was discontinued. It usually ended in tragic results,” Iris said, the blood draining from her face. “Did you feel an impulse to punish yourself due to the guilt over making Dr. Goldman disappear? Were you hoping The Clockworks would make you disappear like it did him? Or give you an even worse fate? That wouldn’t make anyone happy! It wouldn’t resolve anything.”
“Yes, of course I know that,” Dr. Selkie replied. She suddenly came across mature as she rubbed her abdomen. “I set the Selection Panel’s arrow on Very Fine before I stepped into the Intake booth. Do you know what that means?”
She waited for our reactions, pausing briefly like a school teacher waiting on students to answer a difficult question posed to the class, before continuing, “I tried to make it refine me into a much, much better me. I was hoping that if it gave me a brilliant mind, I might be able to find a way to bring Dr. Goldman back… That was my ray of hope.”
I…I understood how she felt, but that was insane. There was no way to predict the results rendered through SCP-914’s refinement process. It was an unstable, irrational contraption that mankind could never hope to fully control.
Yet that was the method Dr. Selkie chose. Did she feel that responsible for Dr. Goldman’s disappearance? I didn’t know if there were greater emotions—a deeper meaning—that drove her to such lengths. Something about her actions seemed very noble to me. Dr. Selkie acted boldly to save another despite the danger to herself. Such self-sacrifice was commonplace in manga and movies, but I didn’t know there were people capable of that in real life… It was rather touching.