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He had seen a box like this before.
Sterile white lights, white panel walls lined up so tightly you would be hard-pressed to draw a scalpel through the seams, if you somehow found one. Floor tiles that were easy to clean, buttons to press. And somewhere out of sight: a set of gears and levers, inscrutable mechanisms of reward and punishment.
He'd been a child, back then, not even a medical student. The box had been small enough to fit on their coffee table — a small box with a grim name whose etymology was lost to obscurity along with Earth-That-Was. The assignment had been deceptively simple: Explain the design and theoretical background of operant conditioning and summarize key advances of the 25th century in behavioral neurobiology. Expand the design to answer an experimental question of your choosing and justify the relevance. Finally, complete a full dissection and annotated anatomy schematic of the test subject.
It was the only homework assignment he had handed in with a failing grade: you could only do so much when your baby sister abducted the test subject and refused to give the little creature back. Father had been livid, of course. But all Simon could think of now was Mei-mei's face, so comically serious as she held a tiny white rodent in her small plump hands, not unlike a captured Browncoat refusing to reveal their secret base location to the enemy…
"WE WOULD LIKE TO REMIND YOU THAT LOITERING BETWEEN TEST AREAS FOR A DURATION EXCEEDING TWO HUNDRED AND TWENTY-TWO SECONDS IS STRICTLY PROHIBITED. FOR YOUR SAFETY. PLEASE PROCEED THROUGH THE AUTOMATIC DOOR TO THE NEXT TESTING AREA."
That was enough to snap him out of it. Simon stepped through and the door hissed shut behind him.
This puzzle, too, was simple. Comically large buttons, moving platforms, a deadly laser that sizzled when he got too close. Not difficult to solve, but awkward to complete. Like there was a tool he was missing — something that would have given him a fresh approach, or perhaps a way to cross from one side of the room to the other in a second without risking fractured bones.
He couldn't shake the feeling that he was part of the control group.
"CONGRATULATIONS ON COMPLETING ANOTHER TEST CHAMBER WITH ONLY MINIMAL LETHARGY. YOU ARE PERFORMING ON THE LEVEL OF THE AVERAGE BASAL VERTEBRATE. YOU ARE AN EXCEEDINGLY AVERAGE TEST SUBJECT. PLEASE PROCEED THROUGH THE ELEVATOR TO ENJOY YOUR COMPLIMENTARY CHARCUTERIE BOARD."
"Charcuterie board?" Simon echoed disbelievingly; a lapse in his stubborn silence.
"A SELECTION OF CURED MEETS, DRIED FRUIT, AND CHEESE CUBES."
Just when he would convince himself the voice was automated, it would say something that threw him — a hitch to the delivery, a stutter to the logic. Taunting him with cheese cubes was a little on the nose. He could only hope the others were having better luck.
The elevator was another box. Simon stared at it, in no hurry to proceed to what was beginning to feel like certain doom. Control group or not, he knew exactly how these things ended when the time came to crunch the data.
Inevitably, pointedly, the panels of deadly lasers in the test chamber behind him were now flickering back on. The message was clear.
His dilemma was resolved for him by an odd scuffling sound he couldn't place. He turned to look. Rats in the walls — the thought was brief and comical, before he made out voices. And was that Jayne's voice?
His own hard-earned operant conditioning took over. Simon dived for cover; covered his eyes and ears, the works. That was the ingrained response to a man-ape-gone-wrong-thing uttering the word 'grenade'.
The rest of it was getting to be worryingly familiar: dust spraying everywhere; a smell of burned plastic and melted wiring. When his ears finally stopped ringing, Simon peered over the mildly scorched Companion Cube he'd used for cover to a sight for sore eyes, whatever that said about him these days.
The white walls had peeled open like singed petals. Familiar figures peered through the newly forged non-regulation entrance.
"Looks like we've found the doctor," Captain Malcolm Reynolds was saying as he peered through the hole in the wall and squinted at the white walls with obvious distaste. Jayne was right behind him, hefting another grenade.
"River's not with you?" Simon said, not even bothering with 'thank you', not just yet. Somehow, the jobs turning out like this was too routine.
The captain didn't hide his wince. "Was hoping' she would be with you, doc. You comin'?"
The laser grids were flickering. The automated voice was silent — perhaps the frayed wiring had something to do with that.
Simon paused to look around uneasily, then climbed out through the hole. Beyond the peeling edges of deformed white paneling, the facility was rusted and filthy: not like the engine room of the Serenity, held together by old parts and duct tape, but rather something decrepit and decomposed, where dying things had crawled between the gears and had been left to rot.
His eyes met Mal's, and he almost asked if they were thinking the same thing:
A queasy contrast to the sanitised interior. A fitting metaphor for the Alliance.
"Alright, let's keep on movin'," the captain said instead, as they proceeded single file through the space between the walls. Beneath their feet, a rusting catwalk creaked precariously. "Still need to find your sis, not to mention the score."
Jayne snorted. "No gorram way that thing is real. A gun that blows holes that big?" He scowled at their faces and shrugged with his entire belt of unused grenades. "You know what I mean. Should never have taken on another job like this, not after that fiasco with the Lassiter—"
"Hey now, the job with the Lassiter went perfectly smooth—" Mal started.
But for once, Simon had to silently agree with Jayne. A handheld device with the ability to form interspatial portals had sounded like the stuff of science fiction, and if reverse-engineered, the potential to overturn space travel alone would be…
The kind of technology wars are fought over. The kind the Alliance would kill to keep secret, to make sure no-one else could have it.
"They used to call her 'little mouse'," Simon blurted out loud, to give himself something else to think about. "Before the Academy. She must be in the walls by now." Mal gave him an old look, like he was worried Simon was losing it. Maybe he was. This place was bringing back unpleasant memories he wasn't even sure were his. Snapshots of the Academy gleaned through River's words, perhaps, constructed in his mind's eye.
She had always been better than him at this kind of puzzle. Especially the kind that had unwritten rules.
They dropped down another catwalk, and with some more creative application of explosives, into an older, half-decaying test chamber. The white panels were cracked and blackened and run through with ivy. Pipes dripped from far above. Simon looked up. Were they still scurrying between the walls, or had they found a different maze, something abandoned?
Before they could fully get their bearings, there was a thwip up on a platform far above them, and they turned to look.
A ring of flickering energy flared on the slanted surface of a wall, and stayed there, plasma flexing like a blowtorch. The space beyond it was all wrong, distorted, like his eyes were playing tricks on him, but there was someone on the other side. A slender figure with stringy dark hair, wielding a bulky white gun…
River stepped through the portal and smiled down at him. Simon stared up. The others shifted. By now, the complicated relief of finding River safe and sound and mixed up in something she shouldn't be was all too familiar.
Next to Simon, the captain swore quietly under his breath. He too was eyeing the device in River's hands, and the apparently functioning interspatial portal behind her. The portal that would change everything, now that it had shown them the sheer stubborn inconvenience of being real. Mal exchanged a look with him, just quick enough for Simon to catch one of his half-scowling, agonised grins. "Yeah, I'd say that counts as good news and bad news…"
Jayne only whistled. His expression was somewhere between being impressed and being one twitch away from running for cover. The geopolitical implications of ancient Earth-That-Was portaling technology were clearly far from his mind, at least for the moment. Ignorance and bliss, and all that.
"Gorramit," Jayne said with feeling. "Lil' mouse has got herself a big gun."