Wilford Warfstache (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
cottoncandypink) wrote2017-04-16 01:26 pm
cottoncandypink) wrote2017-04-16 01:26 pm
Precisely how many times did you brutally murder your patient today?
Someone kept resetting. He felt like he'd transcribed the same sentence eight hundred times – and he probably had. He just couldn't remember actually doing it. He'd only got back from lunch a half hour ago, according to the clock, but a niggling sensation at the back of his mind was telling him otherwise. His ears ached from the headphones crammed into them, not quite drowning out the sounds of everyone else in the other nearby cubes getting vocally angry with the persistent feeling of déjà vu. Just knowing that he’d been sitting there, practically unmoving for hours, made his back ache as if he had actually been sitting there all day.
And it was all made worse by the fact that he wasn't even supposed to be transcribing poorly-recorded scene interviews. It wasn't what he was hired to do, but apparently the words "junior reporter" meant something else entirely at AFC.
Minutes dragged on as hours as the entire building was stuck in the reset loop. Nobody could tell when it was starting, or when the reset kept happening, but everyone could feel it. Once or twice was normal. Everyone indulged from time to time, to keep that coffee from spilling on the keyboard, or to make it to that meeting on time. That wasn’t what resets were for, but nobody cared. What they absolutely were not for was endlessly starting over every time something didn't quite go exactly to plan. The more it happened, the more everyone else could feel it. The clocks may have all but stopped, but clocks didn't get tired and sore after sitting in the same chair for hours. They didn't get eye strain from looking at a flickering monitor while trying to listen to someone mumble underneath wind noise. They didn't feel the extra time of repeated resets. A person could literally grow old and die from resetting the same five minutes again and again.
"Warfstache," a stern voice barked from above as a folder fell on the keyboard.
Wilford jumped sharply and bit hard on his tongue to keep from saying anything he might want to reset from. He wondered if this had happened already, or if it was new, and the reset was finally over.
"Congratulations. Your first assignment," the senior editor said before walking away quickly.
Wilford moved quickly, not sure if the reset loop was actually over, or if this was just a cruel trick. He pulled off his headphones and threw open a drawer where he kept a couple of neckties just in case he actually, finally was given an assignment. He remembered getting the one on top, as some sort of mean-spirited joke. At the time, he hated it, which is why it wound up crammed in the drawer in the first place. Looking at it now — black, with pink racing stripes — he found he actually rather liked the look of it. Maybe this time around, he’d hold onto it. He snatched it out of the drawer and quickly rushed out of the room, hoping to get away from whoever had decided to put the entire station in a choke hold.
He wondered if he'd done this before as well.
The pool of camera operators hung out closer to the newsroom. They looked just as miserable down there as everyone upstairs had. That couldn’t have been a good sign. Wilford found the man he wanted playing some loud Flash game on a computer, and gave him a nudge.
“Come on. We got work to do.”
Billy looked up at him with confusion and relief quickly trading places across his face. “Thank god,” he said, quickly getting up to fetch his gear. “I haven’t seen you down here before. Are you new?”
“Not exactly.” Wilford didn’t waste any time in getting out of the building, and neither did Billy. They made quick tracks out to the garage and into a waiting van. As Billy tore out of the garage a little too quickly, Wilford put on his tie and used the visor mirror to try to flatten his hair to something a little more professional-looking than a mohawk.
It wasn't until they were a few blocks away, and Wilford was properly in his seat and not in danger of falling out onto the floor, that they finally resumed a semblance of calm after their mad dash for freedom. Clocks were moving again, and the air didn't feel stale and heavy, as it had inside. No longer within the sphere of influence of the unknown resetting bastard, everything was once again back to normal.
"So, where are we going?" Billy asked as he cut off a Prius.
Wilford finally opened the folder, already knowing exactly what was inside. "Let's find out, shall we?" he said slowly, reading over the brief sheet in front. "Holby Medical Centre," he read aloud. "To interview one Doctor Nigel Burke, and someone upstairs thinks they’re real fucking funny.”
"What do you mean?"
Wilford slammed the folder shut and tossed it into the foot-well. "Who have you pissed off lately? It seems someone at Holby is leaning on the reset button."
The drive from that point on was a quiet one, but it was far from peaceful. Billy drove like a maniac through busy streets, using the size of the news van to muscle into spaces he couldn’t fit into, while Wilford tried to think back to the first time he’d done this. People like to say that you don’t forget your first assignment, but you do. You forget everything about it, because it’s usually this sort of hazing bullshit meant to make you quit before they have to start giving you real stories. But Wilford couldn’t actually remember any of the real details. Anything he thought he remembered could have just been implanted from the brief he’d just read. He’d just have to wing it, like he did the first time. And he did remember the outcome, so winging it had worked.
As he worked through scenarios in the passenger seat of a speeding news van, Wilford became increasingly aware of the sideways glances he was getting from Billy. He was able to ignore it at first, but it soon became a needling sensation that bored straight through him.
"Keep it to yourself, Billy," Wilford warned.
"I–" The cameraman was suddenly focused intently on the road straight ahead of him. "My name's not Billy."
"Of course it is," Wilford said, reaching up to straighten his moustache. Not that it needed it with the amount of forming cream he used, but this was going to be his first impression to the people who made the real decisions. He had to look good.
As soon as they reached the hospital, Wilford left the van to pace around the parking lot for a few moments. He straightened his tie, and and made sure his glasses were clean, hoping he didn't look like he'd spent all day stuck in an endless reset loop. But the air felt heavy here, too. It was a hospital, after all, so the sphere of influence would be much bigger than some moron somewhere in a news building. If it were one of the doctors resetting, dozens of people would be directly affected every time. And that affect would ripple outward, like rings from a boulder being dropped into a very large lake. Eventually, they'd settle and fade, but not until they got far enough away.
Wilford turned around to make sure Billy hadn't just taken off and left him there. Even the smallest differences could change everything, making Wilford extra conscious of everything he did. Almost surprisingly, Billy had the camera on his shoulder and was ready to go, taking step after step backwards to try to get Wilford in frame.
“Knock it off, I’m not that short,” Wilford scolded. Eventually, cameras would get smaller and be mounted on gimbals, making Billy’s absurd height less of a problem. For now, there was the hood of the van. Wilford pointed at it and stepped in front of the van while Billy framed his shot. “You need to learn to shoot from the hip.”
“This thing weighs half a ton,” Billy argued as he set up the shot for the intro segment.
Wilford got through it quickly, ignoring the niggling feeling that he’d done it a dozen times before. As soon as he finished, Billy packed up the camera and they trudged across the parking lot like they were facing Everest, determined to make it inside before they were blipped back out to the van. The vague worry that it had already been happening hung on Wilford's mind, even as they walked through the entrance and up to the reception desk. The blue-haired woman who looked up to greet them did so with a cheer so false, it was clear she'd been there at least sixteen hours. Probably more.
"Are you who I think you are?" she asked in a squeaky voice.
Wilford unclipped his press pass from his belt and slid it across the counter with his index finger. "Wilford Warfstache," he confirmed, before cocking a thumb over his shoulder. "And my cameraman, Billy."
"My name's not Billy," Billy said again.
Wilford ignored him completely, and smiled the same falsely cheerful smile down at the receptionist.
"Doctor Burke should be out of surgery any minute now," she said flatly as she pointed down the hall on her left. "His office is down there. Take the elevator to the third floor. Follow the signs after that."
She slid Wilford's pass back across the counter to him, along with a clipboard. He took his pass, signed his name, and turned to find the man he was supposed to interview. As he and Billy made it to the elevator, Wilford began to wonder why it felt like he'd been on his feet all day. As he pressed the button to call the car down, he was hit with a sudden feeling of stupidity. If the hospital was Everest, Dr Burke's office was the summit. And it was going to take days to get there. Wilford looked over at Billy, and saw that he had come to the same conclusion. Then, he wondered how many times he'd come to the same conclusion. A quick glance to his watch told him that it was a perfectly reasonable hour in the middle of the afternoon, but every fibre of Wilford's being was telling him that it was well past midnight.
But instead of giving up and going home, like he suspected he was expected to, Wilford stepped onto the elevator as soon as the doors opened, and mashed the button for the third floor, powered by pure fuck-you determination to get this right. By the time they finally reached Burke's office, it felt like it had taken a week to get there. But amazingly, they needed only wait a few minutes before the completely unassuming man in blue scrubs walked cheerily up towards them. Wilford hated him immediately.
"Wilford Warfstache," he introduced with all the false candour he could muster, holding his hand out.
Dr Burke took his hand, shaking a little too vigorously. "Nigel. Come. Have a seat," he said, his accent implacable, other than stereotypically English.
As soon as Dr Burke turned to unlock his office door, Wilford turned round to look at Billy, mouthing the words 'Roll it'. Billy was just as fast and smooth as he’d always been. He reached up to turn on his camera, holding it nonchalantly on his shoulder as if to just carry its massive weight. By the time Dr Burke's office was unlocked and the three of them were inside, Wilford's false charm was plastered over his face, obvious to anyone who didn't have their head completely up their ass.
"Is this about the space station?" Burke asked as he sat down behind the huge desk.
Wilford hadn't got that far into the file, but he nodded all the same. "Of course," he said slowly. "It was your idea, wasn’t it?"
He played along, asking vague questions and letting Dr Burke ramble on about this new project. Slowly, Wilford transitioned the interview to more terrestrial topics, asking questions about the hospital itself.
“Just one more question, before we go,” Wilford said after a believable amount of time had passed.
Burke held his hands out, opening himself up in either complete ignorance, or utterly false innocence. "Go ahead," he said.
"Precisely how many times did you brutally murder your patient today?" Wilford asked.
Burke's entire demeanour changed. He sat up stiffly, gawping like a big mouth bass in blue scrubs. "I–I–I mean–"
"Because if I had to guess, going off of the rings around your otherwise lovely receptionist's eyes, not to mention the amount of time it took to make it up to the third floor, I'd say you've been going at it at least eighteen hours."
Burke shook his head frantically. "No, you don't understand–"
"And presumably, you've left someone else to close, so you could be here for your big interview about this alleged space station, am I right?" Wilford continued. "Eighteen hours is awfully long for something routine, especially when you're only halfway done. Wouldn't you agree?"
Burke continued to gawp and stutter, until he looked over at Billy. "Is that on? Is he recording?"
Burke lunged for the telephone on his desk, but before he could even dial the first number, Wilford was rushing Billy out the door and back down to the elevator. They zipped right past the dozing receptionist, breaking into a full run as soon as they were back outside. But instead of getting back into the van to make their escape, Wilford stopped, and made sure Billy had the lens trained on him.
"And there you have it, folks. Doctor Nigel Burke, world renowned surgeon here at Holby, isn't all he's cracked up to be. Unless you want to spend twenty hours on your next tonsillectomy, you might want to consider finding a new medial provider. This has been Wilford Warfstache–"
A banging and a chorus of shouts behind him cut him off abruptly. Turning, he saw a trio of security guards pouring out of the hospital's front doors. It took them only a moment to spot Wilford and Billy, but they had the advantage of their van. Before the security guards could get to them, Billy was already peeling out of the parking lot, once again leaving Wilford to hang on for his life as he tried to get settled in his seat.
Even as they took sharp corners back out onto the street, Wilford wondered why Burke had called security at all, instead of just resetting to avoid the meeting. Watching the security guards give up their chase through the wing mirror, Wilford realised exactly why.
"All that, and he didn't even remember to save when he was done," he said.
Billy laughed as he checked the mirrors for any remaining security guards, but they were all doubled over in breathless agony far behind them.
"If I'd spent all day fucking something up, saving would be the first thing I'd do," Billy said.
Wilford had to laugh at the whole thing. It had been absurd from start to finish, but he let himself relax into his seat as they made their way back to the station, knowing he'd be getting something out of pulling off the impossible.
And it was all made worse by the fact that he wasn't even supposed to be transcribing poorly-recorded scene interviews. It wasn't what he was hired to do, but apparently the words "junior reporter" meant something else entirely at AFC.
Minutes dragged on as hours as the entire building was stuck in the reset loop. Nobody could tell when it was starting, or when the reset kept happening, but everyone could feel it. Once or twice was normal. Everyone indulged from time to time, to keep that coffee from spilling on the keyboard, or to make it to that meeting on time. That wasn’t what resets were for, but nobody cared. What they absolutely were not for was endlessly starting over every time something didn't quite go exactly to plan. The more it happened, the more everyone else could feel it. The clocks may have all but stopped, but clocks didn't get tired and sore after sitting in the same chair for hours. They didn't get eye strain from looking at a flickering monitor while trying to listen to someone mumble underneath wind noise. They didn't feel the extra time of repeated resets. A person could literally grow old and die from resetting the same five minutes again and again.
"Warfstache," a stern voice barked from above as a folder fell on the keyboard.
Wilford jumped sharply and bit hard on his tongue to keep from saying anything he might want to reset from. He wondered if this had happened already, or if it was new, and the reset was finally over.
"Congratulations. Your first assignment," the senior editor said before walking away quickly.
Wilford moved quickly, not sure if the reset loop was actually over, or if this was just a cruel trick. He pulled off his headphones and threw open a drawer where he kept a couple of neckties just in case he actually, finally was given an assignment. He remembered getting the one on top, as some sort of mean-spirited joke. At the time, he hated it, which is why it wound up crammed in the drawer in the first place. Looking at it now — black, with pink racing stripes — he found he actually rather liked the look of it. Maybe this time around, he’d hold onto it. He snatched it out of the drawer and quickly rushed out of the room, hoping to get away from whoever had decided to put the entire station in a choke hold.
He wondered if he'd done this before as well.
The pool of camera operators hung out closer to the newsroom. They looked just as miserable down there as everyone upstairs had. That couldn’t have been a good sign. Wilford found the man he wanted playing some loud Flash game on a computer, and gave him a nudge.
“Come on. We got work to do.”
Billy looked up at him with confusion and relief quickly trading places across his face. “Thank god,” he said, quickly getting up to fetch his gear. “I haven’t seen you down here before. Are you new?”
“Not exactly.” Wilford didn’t waste any time in getting out of the building, and neither did Billy. They made quick tracks out to the garage and into a waiting van. As Billy tore out of the garage a little too quickly, Wilford put on his tie and used the visor mirror to try to flatten his hair to something a little more professional-looking than a mohawk.
It wasn't until they were a few blocks away, and Wilford was properly in his seat and not in danger of falling out onto the floor, that they finally resumed a semblance of calm after their mad dash for freedom. Clocks were moving again, and the air didn't feel stale and heavy, as it had inside. No longer within the sphere of influence of the unknown resetting bastard, everything was once again back to normal.
"So, where are we going?" Billy asked as he cut off a Prius.
Wilford finally opened the folder, already knowing exactly what was inside. "Let's find out, shall we?" he said slowly, reading over the brief sheet in front. "Holby Medical Centre," he read aloud. "To interview one Doctor Nigel Burke, and someone upstairs thinks they’re real fucking funny.”
"What do you mean?"
Wilford slammed the folder shut and tossed it into the foot-well. "Who have you pissed off lately? It seems someone at Holby is leaning on the reset button."
The drive from that point on was a quiet one, but it was far from peaceful. Billy drove like a maniac through busy streets, using the size of the news van to muscle into spaces he couldn’t fit into, while Wilford tried to think back to the first time he’d done this. People like to say that you don’t forget your first assignment, but you do. You forget everything about it, because it’s usually this sort of hazing bullshit meant to make you quit before they have to start giving you real stories. But Wilford couldn’t actually remember any of the real details. Anything he thought he remembered could have just been implanted from the brief he’d just read. He’d just have to wing it, like he did the first time. And he did remember the outcome, so winging it had worked.
As he worked through scenarios in the passenger seat of a speeding news van, Wilford became increasingly aware of the sideways glances he was getting from Billy. He was able to ignore it at first, but it soon became a needling sensation that bored straight through him.
"Keep it to yourself, Billy," Wilford warned.
"I–" The cameraman was suddenly focused intently on the road straight ahead of him. "My name's not Billy."
"Of course it is," Wilford said, reaching up to straighten his moustache. Not that it needed it with the amount of forming cream he used, but this was going to be his first impression to the people who made the real decisions. He had to look good.
As soon as they reached the hospital, Wilford left the van to pace around the parking lot for a few moments. He straightened his tie, and and made sure his glasses were clean, hoping he didn't look like he'd spent all day stuck in an endless reset loop. But the air felt heavy here, too. It was a hospital, after all, so the sphere of influence would be much bigger than some moron somewhere in a news building. If it were one of the doctors resetting, dozens of people would be directly affected every time. And that affect would ripple outward, like rings from a boulder being dropped into a very large lake. Eventually, they'd settle and fade, but not until they got far enough away.
Wilford turned around to make sure Billy hadn't just taken off and left him there. Even the smallest differences could change everything, making Wilford extra conscious of everything he did. Almost surprisingly, Billy had the camera on his shoulder and was ready to go, taking step after step backwards to try to get Wilford in frame.
“Knock it off, I’m not that short,” Wilford scolded. Eventually, cameras would get smaller and be mounted on gimbals, making Billy’s absurd height less of a problem. For now, there was the hood of the van. Wilford pointed at it and stepped in front of the van while Billy framed his shot. “You need to learn to shoot from the hip.”
“This thing weighs half a ton,” Billy argued as he set up the shot for the intro segment.
Wilford got through it quickly, ignoring the niggling feeling that he’d done it a dozen times before. As soon as he finished, Billy packed up the camera and they trudged across the parking lot like they were facing Everest, determined to make it inside before they were blipped back out to the van. The vague worry that it had already been happening hung on Wilford's mind, even as they walked through the entrance and up to the reception desk. The blue-haired woman who looked up to greet them did so with a cheer so false, it was clear she'd been there at least sixteen hours. Probably more.
"Are you who I think you are?" she asked in a squeaky voice.
Wilford unclipped his press pass from his belt and slid it across the counter with his index finger. "Wilford Warfstache," he confirmed, before cocking a thumb over his shoulder. "And my cameraman, Billy."
"My name's not Billy," Billy said again.
Wilford ignored him completely, and smiled the same falsely cheerful smile down at the receptionist.
"Doctor Burke should be out of surgery any minute now," she said flatly as she pointed down the hall on her left. "His office is down there. Take the elevator to the third floor. Follow the signs after that."
She slid Wilford's pass back across the counter to him, along with a clipboard. He took his pass, signed his name, and turned to find the man he was supposed to interview. As he and Billy made it to the elevator, Wilford began to wonder why it felt like he'd been on his feet all day. As he pressed the button to call the car down, he was hit with a sudden feeling of stupidity. If the hospital was Everest, Dr Burke's office was the summit. And it was going to take days to get there. Wilford looked over at Billy, and saw that he had come to the same conclusion. Then, he wondered how many times he'd come to the same conclusion. A quick glance to his watch told him that it was a perfectly reasonable hour in the middle of the afternoon, but every fibre of Wilford's being was telling him that it was well past midnight.
But instead of giving up and going home, like he suspected he was expected to, Wilford stepped onto the elevator as soon as the doors opened, and mashed the button for the third floor, powered by pure fuck-you determination to get this right. By the time they finally reached Burke's office, it felt like it had taken a week to get there. But amazingly, they needed only wait a few minutes before the completely unassuming man in blue scrubs walked cheerily up towards them. Wilford hated him immediately.
"Wilford Warfstache," he introduced with all the false candour he could muster, holding his hand out.
Dr Burke took his hand, shaking a little too vigorously. "Nigel. Come. Have a seat," he said, his accent implacable, other than stereotypically English.
As soon as Dr Burke turned to unlock his office door, Wilford turned round to look at Billy, mouthing the words 'Roll it'. Billy was just as fast and smooth as he’d always been. He reached up to turn on his camera, holding it nonchalantly on his shoulder as if to just carry its massive weight. By the time Dr Burke's office was unlocked and the three of them were inside, Wilford's false charm was plastered over his face, obvious to anyone who didn't have their head completely up their ass.
"Is this about the space station?" Burke asked as he sat down behind the huge desk.
Wilford hadn't got that far into the file, but he nodded all the same. "Of course," he said slowly. "It was your idea, wasn’t it?"
He played along, asking vague questions and letting Dr Burke ramble on about this new project. Slowly, Wilford transitioned the interview to more terrestrial topics, asking questions about the hospital itself.
“Just one more question, before we go,” Wilford said after a believable amount of time had passed.
Burke held his hands out, opening himself up in either complete ignorance, or utterly false innocence. "Go ahead," he said.
"Precisely how many times did you brutally murder your patient today?" Wilford asked.
Burke's entire demeanour changed. He sat up stiffly, gawping like a big mouth bass in blue scrubs. "I–I–I mean–"
"Because if I had to guess, going off of the rings around your otherwise lovely receptionist's eyes, not to mention the amount of time it took to make it up to the third floor, I'd say you've been going at it at least eighteen hours."
Burke shook his head frantically. "No, you don't understand–"
"And presumably, you've left someone else to close, so you could be here for your big interview about this alleged space station, am I right?" Wilford continued. "Eighteen hours is awfully long for something routine, especially when you're only halfway done. Wouldn't you agree?"
Burke continued to gawp and stutter, until he looked over at Billy. "Is that on? Is he recording?"
Burke lunged for the telephone on his desk, but before he could even dial the first number, Wilford was rushing Billy out the door and back down to the elevator. They zipped right past the dozing receptionist, breaking into a full run as soon as they were back outside. But instead of getting back into the van to make their escape, Wilford stopped, and made sure Billy had the lens trained on him.
"And there you have it, folks. Doctor Nigel Burke, world renowned surgeon here at Holby, isn't all he's cracked up to be. Unless you want to spend twenty hours on your next tonsillectomy, you might want to consider finding a new medial provider. This has been Wilford Warfstache–"
A banging and a chorus of shouts behind him cut him off abruptly. Turning, he saw a trio of security guards pouring out of the hospital's front doors. It took them only a moment to spot Wilford and Billy, but they had the advantage of their van. Before the security guards could get to them, Billy was already peeling out of the parking lot, once again leaving Wilford to hang on for his life as he tried to get settled in his seat.
Even as they took sharp corners back out onto the street, Wilford wondered why Burke had called security at all, instead of just resetting to avoid the meeting. Watching the security guards give up their chase through the wing mirror, Wilford realised exactly why.
"All that, and he didn't even remember to save when he was done," he said.
Billy laughed as he checked the mirrors for any remaining security guards, but they were all doubled over in breathless agony far behind them.
"If I'd spent all day fucking something up, saving would be the first thing I'd do," Billy said.
Wilford had to laugh at the whole thing. It had been absurd from start to finish, but he let himself relax into his seat as they made their way back to the station, knowing he'd be getting something out of pulling off the impossible.