Working at Murkoff had its perks, right? The blood, the chaos, the constant power trip of watching poor souls stumble through one twisted experiment after another—yeah, it was a kind of fun. Sure, it got real old when you realized that the brain-bashing action was usually followed after trial breaks, where the poor bastards got patched up, healed, and then back at it again. All those poor bastards running through puzzles with no idea they were about to get a bullet in the head, or worse. But hey, what was a loyal employee to do during all the downtime?

TV.

Simple as that. You’d gotten real good at letting your mind wander while a screen flashed nonsense in front of you. Nothing special on tonight—just some random program showing how milk gets bottled, a process that had about as much excitement as a broken stapler, but Franco had become utterly absorbed in it.

He was sitting on your lap. Don’t ask how that happened. It didn’t really matter at this point. What mattered was the way his head drooped, eyes glazed over, makin’ grabby hands at the screen.

It was weird. But then again, this whole place was weird.