Lower

I've been taken down to the lower level. I went to the Chief Administrator's office in the morning; two soldiers came and led me to a lift in a part of the facility I hadn't seen before. They rode down with me.

The lower facility looks the same as the upper level, but the atmosphere is different. There are more soldiers here, some guarding certain corridors, others roaming the halls. There are black and yellow signs showing restricted areas, and I saw a few heavy-duty doors with what looked like fingerprint scanners. The researchers seemed different, too: more serious, slightly older, and always rushing. Upstairs was much more laid back. I was met at the lift by a man in a lab coat. He told me to call him Finn.

Finn took me to a large, dark lab, illuminated only by the flickering of an enormous electronic map. It took me a while to figure out what I was seeing: the furrow, and at the end of it, Victoria. Different colours overlaid the terrain; a line of very pale yellow spattered with blobs of green followed the furrow. Victoria was a much darker yellow at first, bleeding into orange, and then red at the far end. I stared at the map with my mouth hanging open and Finn laughed. He told me most of the model was a projection, as they hadn't had time to get the data from nearer Victoria, but they were confident it was a lower-bound on the true extent of the mal in that area.

I'm being briefed tomorrow. I'm excited.