T-012 Quiet room

Threshold Institute · Case file T-012

Number

T-012 in the catalogue

Kind

Room

Class

Class I: harmless while it is left alone

Found

Year 17, month 1, day 30

Where found

The old pump room of the sealed level

Status

Unchanged since the breach; it does nothing to anyone who stays out

Now

At the lab and in the rift

Part

Part II: The rooms turn

Containment procedures

The pump room is sealed and numbered. The Institute's rule after T-005, that no one answers a voice until they see who made it, was extended after T-012: no one enters a room on the sealed level without a second guard who can see them. A guard who goes into a room and stops answering is gone after by sight, never by sound. The alarm in the corridor outside T-012 has a flashing lamp beside its bell.

Description

A room that lets no sound in or out. A gun fired inside it is silent to anyone outside, even at the open door; the alarm on the corridor wall cannot be heard from inside. Inside, sound carries as usual. T-005, carried to its door, played nothing back.

Discovery

Since T-005 the Institute had built soundproofed cells at great cost. On the thirtieth day of the first month of year 17 the guard Nils Ostrow followed a stalker (see T-002) into the pump room and fired at it there. Mara Okafor's team stood four metres from him at the open door and heard nothing. They found Ostrow alive, the stalker down and three spent cases on the floor. Ostrow had not heard Okafor call him. The Institute learnt that a room could do for free what it had paid for in soundproofing, and that the same room was a trap for its own staff. A guard can die in T-012 a few steps from a team that would have come at once, had it heard. Ostrow put it plainly in his statement: he had called for help twice, at the top of his voice, and seen the team at the door looking past him.

Addenda

Addendum T-012-A

test log, J. Berg and Dr S. Kader, Year 17, month 2, day 9

Berg asked to test the room with T-005 itself. T-005's cell carried on its frame to the pump room door. Cell door opened toward the room. Berg called inside the room, in his own voice, the words T-005 had used in year 5.

T-005 played nothing back. It played nothing back for the full hour. Carried back to its block, it played Berg's call of twelve years ago within the first minute.

Berg's remark for the record: "It has heard me every night for twelve years. That is the first room it could not hear me in."

Addendum T-012-B

note

Okafor wrote in her report that a team in a room like T-012 could fight without bringing anything else down on it. The note was filed. Years later, beyond T-001, a team learnt the opposite, on ground that made every shot louder (see T-023). Before then, the next room the Institute found killed its heat (see T-013).

Previous fileT-011 Bigger insidePart II: The rooms turn Next fileT-013 Cold roomPart II: The rooms turn

In the file

• People: Mara Okafor, Jonas Berg, Dr Selma Kader and Nils Ostrow.
• Places: The sealed level and The cells.

In the game

The note you find in the game:

Year 17, month 1, day 30. Found in the old pump room of the sealed level, when the guard Nils Ostrow followed a rift stalker into it and fired three rounds there. Mara Okafor's team stood four metres off at the open door and heard nothing, not the shots and not his two calls for help: a room did for free what we had paid for in soundproofing since the echo.

A sealed room on the lab's lower level that no sound goes into or comes out of. Inside it nothing is heard at all: not one's own steps, not the corridor a step away.

A gun fired inside makes no sound. Nothing outside hears a fight in it, and what is in it is only seen. Its doorway is not part of it. Found behind a warning plate that bears its code and a speaker with a slash through it.

Status: unchanged since the breach; it does nothing to anyone who stays out.

Today it is found at the lab and in the rift.

Watch T-012 Quiet room on YouTube