Colonel Warren Kepler (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
questionsonly) wrote2021-09-08 02:54 am
questionsonly) wrote2021-09-08 02:54 am
Kepler's File
It's all in audio files, all in conversations that explain the man he is through who he's been and how he's been and what he's been.
He starts as a grandson, a child left by parents who didn't want the responsibility of him and who died before they could change their minds. Instead, an old man tattered and broken by two wars proves himself strong enough to raise a child one more time, a boy who idolizes everything he is from his slow, thoughtful speech to the burn of scotch he's too young to drink even if it gives the old man a laugh. And despite this, despite a small boy and an old man, there is a warmth, a joy, a family made of two in a broken down house just outside of Chicago.
At least there is for a while. Until the boy breaks a limb and cuts up his face and his voice gains a lisp and the bills pile up. And the old man gets sick and they pile up more. There's no one, no one to help, no one to turn to, and the child learns from breathy, half-awake conversations that maybe there is a way to help his grandfather but they certainly can't afford it. Even though he gets scholarships, even though he has friends, even though he has a bright future ahead of him, all of it poised to die on corner of a hospital bed.
Which is when the old man dies and the boy plays a dangerous game that starts with a lonely burial in the backyard of their little home, the sound of rain and the sound of tears almost the same. The sniffling broken with a promise he makes to a corpse that the spirit that'd lived all those years inside of it would have never asked him to make. Thankfully, he's handsome and brilliant and his charm opens hearts and deafens ears and blinds eyes. He can replicate his grandfather's signature and his voice. He can get the life insurance money and he can keep collecting his veteran's benefits. He can keep their home. He can pay their bills. It's tight. And it's unsteady. And it's lonely, a sad young voice reminding himself of his grandfather's words, of his promise, even if the words sound wet. They get drier. And he can go to the Academy. He can make a good life if he works hard and gives up everything and lets no one get anywhere near him so the lies lay undisturbed.
It will be worth it some day, he reminds himself. Suffer now, and one day, it'll be worth it.
Except someone finds out. Except graduation is a triumph, valedictorian, a promising career in law that gets a knife pressed to it's throat by a man with a terrible nasal voice and a chipper tone and nothing but violence dripping out of his promises. His name is Cutter, Marcus Cutter, and Kepler is to be his man. His personal pick. His ace in the hole. Cutter recognizes talent, but more than that, he recognizes drive. He recognizes anger. He recognizes hunger.
He promises the boy that they'll change it. They'll change the world. They'll make it so that bills aren't the difference between a good man's life and his death. They'll make it so that no one has to fight to be their best. That cowards won't be rewarded for their small minds and their smaller hearts. That the brave and the brilliant, the best of them, people like him, will be his priority. Their priority.
He has to start at the bottom, prove himself. That's just how these things go. But even with his mistakes, he proves his courage, his drive, his willingness to do and be and make himself what his mission requires. He bends and twists and becomes whatever he needs to be, learns a dozen different talents, a hundred different personalities. Any skill, any trade, any group, anything? The boy can take his hand to it, figure it out in a fraction of the time of anyone else, convince people that he's been doing it for years and that makes him utterly impossible to catch. Impossible to beat. The voice twists and bends and becomes dozens of different people, all of them complete with stories, each one sounding like someone else except to a practiced ear. An ear that can pick out Warren at the center of each one.
He soon takes command, though, always under Cutter. Always Cutter's creature. Always a part of Cutter's plans for the world, the bigger picture. She'll hear the promises he makes with every mission, the ways this death and that destruction all play into a long game that will make sure that even if Warren has to be the worst of the worst? It's for the very best reasons.
He gets clearance for a subordinate, a partner for his missions. She knows that voice. She's met him. That soon expands to include a third as the mission becomes clearer and the means becomes murkier. But that's all right, that's fine. He can snip off a piece of himself here and tear out a bit of himself there, more conversations with himself that sound more and more stilted, more and more disjointed, less and less... whole. And when he doesn't do what Cutter wants exactly how he wants, bits of him will be taken out for him, like a year of his life. A year with his grandfather. One of the last.
Failure is not an option. He learns that too.
So he keeps the pieces of himself that he has left in others, where he can protect them properly. The man from the bar who likes icy booze becomes the owner of his heart, and that heart is tucked away where even he might not notice it, certainly not where anyone might find it troublesome or distracting. His more platonic affections, something like a family feeling for someone who's started to forget what 'family' even feels like, goes in the woman he shared a glass of scotch with, the one he had to beg to save from the doldrums of being held back for other people's fears. They are all that's left of who he was, of the boy, of the graduate, of the dream for him. Everything else, every other part, is sacrificed, willingly, for the big picture. For a better world. This all comes out in music, recordings of a bass guitar, a piano, a few conversations where the fondness is clear when you're not the one talking.
But those sacrifices aren't always kind. Oh no, sometimes they involve torture or murder or blackmail or a dozen other terrible things. He doesn't relish the destruction any more than the sun relishes melting the icicles off of house's roof. It's simply necessary to move things along, move things ahead. He does what he can to do the least harm, to cause the least suffering, but if harm or suffering are needed, he brings them to bear with colder and colder efficiency. An assassin and a spy and a torturer and a field commander, those are roles he learns to play as well, learns to excel at them. And all the while he keeps his heart inside the two with him and he guards them like a rabid dog, from threats inside and out.
There's a conversation with Cutter, a mention of a woman, Pryce, who's eyeing the scotch-drinking woman. But there's an option for a mission that sends them into deep space to clean up a mess and that is indeed a mess: the space station, Hephaestus, around the star, Wolf 359. Everyone is dead there except for a scientist with an accent she might recognize the way she recognizes the frustration in Kepler's tone at having to give this man another chance. At the waste of what he'd done with the experiment he ran on the now-dead people here who were all brilliant and good and had so much potential. But the scientist believes he can change the world. A few eggs for the omelette, then, though he doesn't like it more than usual.
More back on Earth, a holiday party that he insists on bringing his subordinates to. One they have fun at, once they're there, though one sounds like an angry cat the whole time (Jacobi) and the other seems to enjoy herself mostly by out-sciencing anyone she talks to. And then, then, they're back on the space station, insisting that some rejects do their damn job, that they don't pack up and go home. That there's advancement, success, the big picture itself on the line! And he's not about to brook any arguments.
They aren't nice. Kepler, Jacobi, and Maxwell: SI-5. There's plenty of conversations there, lots to go on. Lots of Kepler and Jacobi and Maxwell, a perfectly oiled machine, a trio in perfect harmony, every piece equal and balanced and covering their specific niche. Sometimes they manipulate the original crew. Sometimes they force them into things. There's always a threat but it's just as clear that Kepler does not want to have to kill anyone. He opens his heart in places, shows his leadership in places, admits to one of them-
What, you think when I was young I dreamt about this? About being stuck up here? Of course not. I had things I wanted to do, places I wanted to see, people I wanted to be with, and that's all... that's all gone. Because this job has asked everything of me. It has demanded that I give it every inch of my life. You think you know me? That you’ve met me? No. You’ve met the Artist Formerly Known as Warren Kepler. You’ve met my job. Aside from that, there’s no one left for you to know. I’m gone. I’ve been goddamn canceled. Show’s over, and there will be no encores. All that’s left is this. Sitting here, waiting for a phone call.
But there's also Jacobi's voice, speaking:
He knows potential when he sees it. And he knows how to push.
And:
At any given moment, Colonel Kepler has about... eighteen ulterior motives. Half the time even I don't know why he's doing something.
Another voice, Douglas Eiffel, who is... whiny. Playful. But mostly whiny: But you still trust him?
Jacobi again: With my life.
There's a few close calls, a few unfortunate situations, but Kepler is actually an exceptional leader, and he knows how and when to push people to be their best. They're planning on trying to make contact with alien creatures, beings of untold power and the strange ability to make duplicates of people. One is made of Daniel, dies when one of the original crew, a woman named Lovelace, decides to let him die out in space during a solar flare. Kepler holds a grudge against her for that. That's the first of them.
But the event comes, and with it comes a mutiny: the original crew does not want to follow the plan, and that leads to captives being taken: Lovelace and Eiffel on one side, Maxwell on the other. Kepler tries to force the hand of the opposing leader, tries to make her give in, even shoots Lovelace to make it clear that this will fail. But Minkowski, said leader, chooses to shoot Maxwell in retaliation. And that's when everything falls apart.
Kepler and Jacobi are taken. Kepler frees himself and takes Eiffel hostage, only to have Lovelace resurrect, one of the alien clones in truth, and literally make his hand grow itself back into his wrist, claiming he'll 'never hurt anyone again'. When it turns out that Kepler knew about Lovelace, Jacobi rounds on him, screaming about keeping secrets and keeping him on the outside and treating him like one of 'them' while Kepler acts angrier and angrier, harder and harder. He won't explain himself, won't justify himself. He knows why he did what he did.
There are other days, other events, but it all comes to a head on the day that Jacobi uses a reboot cycle on the ship's AI to seize control of the station. And instead of it being part of their plan, instead of it being what they'd intended if they had to get control back, instead of getting things back on track? Jacobi puts a gun in Minkowski's hand and tells her to shoot Kepler.
And Kepler, for the first time on the tapes? Is utterly silent. She can see the man, has heard him, knows enough about this moment now that she can probably hear the sound of him breaking even if it isn't there. Jacobi rails at him about how Maxwell's death was his fault and how he clearly didn't care about any of them. And Kepler points out that acting like an asshole was part of the plan they decided on before even coming here, but none of that matters in this moment. The whole thing only ends when Minkowski refuses to shoot him.
Which is when the trouble really starts. Because that's when Marcus Cutter and Miranda Pryce show up, along with a gruff-sounding man named Riemann and a snooty sounding woman named Young. All of them are put under the mind control device that Kepler told her about, all except Kepler. He does his best to try and protect Jacobi but his comments are ignored in the face of his 'failure', which is why, apparently, they came. They give Kepler a new mechanical hand, all the while having a zombified Daniel take notes about it, and the threat inherent in the proceedure is clear: fuck up and we send him out an airlock with a smile on his face. So Kepler behaves, even though he's clearly been demoted in their eyes.
The mind control lasts for almost a month until Eiffel eventually breaks free, and Kepler doesn't say a word when he encounters him no longer acting like a zombie. It allows him to find and free Jacobi and the others and that is when the dominoes start falling and things start taking shape. It turns out that all those dreams and wishes that Kepler had had about his work, that his goals, everything he'd ripped himself to pieces for?
Was bullshit.
There was no bigger picture. There was no better world. Not really. Not what anyone would consider one. The ultimate goal was immortality for Cutter and for Pryce and ultimate dominion over everyone on Earth. In fact, they'd built a device that through one command could kill the entire human race, everyone on the planet, and they ended up using it to ransom the human race, a race that the aliens are interested in, in order to get the secret to making perfect, seemingly-immortal clones. Nearly twenty five years of work, twenty five years of dreaming, twenty five years of 'necessary evil' that had ripped him to pieces...
He'd been helping a madman who was ready to throw him away in a heartbeat.
There's some back and forth, death defying situations, one where Jacobi saves Kepler's life along with some of the others with an amazing shot in an impossible situation. More importantly, there's a moment, right in front of the snooty woman where Daniel asks Kepler if he'll join them, if he'll fight on their side. He refuses. But before they walk off? Kepler says, something in him already dead:
"Thank you, Daniel. And goodbye."
It's the last time they speak. But not the last time for Kepler, oh no. Cutter and Pryce make their deal with the alien, get the information they want albeit in a form they can't stand since it's all downloaded into Eiffel's brain of all places, and Kepler and Young are tasked with taking care of a spare body. It's here where they come to the end of the file, to the end of Kepler's life. Because as they're working-
The pulse beacon. It’s…almost at half power. At that- would our signal have made it back to Earth?
No, probably not.
Jesus. We have to tell Mr. Cutter-
Do we?
Of course we do, something’s wrong with the system.
No, nothing’s -wrong-. The power is just being rerouted from the pulse beacon to the AI processor.
What? Why the hell would it-
The sound of silenced gunshots.
Because that’s what -I- programmed it to do four hours ago.
She whimpers.
Yes? Of course I am. You really thought I was going to let Cutter go through with this? With all of humanity on the line?
But- but you said-
What I had to, Miss Young. To be where I could make a difference. After all...I? Am still a person. And that means I'm on Jacobi and Minkowski's side. Even if they don't think I am. Goodbye, Rachel. It was a pleasure doin-
And that's when the woman roars and there's the sounds of clanking. The sounds of the airlocks moving. He tries to convince her not to kill him. It doesn't work. And once that's settled?
Well, in that case. A much more manual sound of metal on metal, small. His flask. Good scotch should never go to waste.
And the file ends with the sound of the vacuum.
He starts as a grandson, a child left by parents who didn't want the responsibility of him and who died before they could change their minds. Instead, an old man tattered and broken by two wars proves himself strong enough to raise a child one more time, a boy who idolizes everything he is from his slow, thoughtful speech to the burn of scotch he's too young to drink even if it gives the old man a laugh. And despite this, despite a small boy and an old man, there is a warmth, a joy, a family made of two in a broken down house just outside of Chicago.
At least there is for a while. Until the boy breaks a limb and cuts up his face and his voice gains a lisp and the bills pile up. And the old man gets sick and they pile up more. There's no one, no one to help, no one to turn to, and the child learns from breathy, half-awake conversations that maybe there is a way to help his grandfather but they certainly can't afford it. Even though he gets scholarships, even though he has friends, even though he has a bright future ahead of him, all of it poised to die on corner of a hospital bed.
Which is when the old man dies and the boy plays a dangerous game that starts with a lonely burial in the backyard of their little home, the sound of rain and the sound of tears almost the same. The sniffling broken with a promise he makes to a corpse that the spirit that'd lived all those years inside of it would have never asked him to make. Thankfully, he's handsome and brilliant and his charm opens hearts and deafens ears and blinds eyes. He can replicate his grandfather's signature and his voice. He can get the life insurance money and he can keep collecting his veteran's benefits. He can keep their home. He can pay their bills. It's tight. And it's unsteady. And it's lonely, a sad young voice reminding himself of his grandfather's words, of his promise, even if the words sound wet. They get drier. And he can go to the Academy. He can make a good life if he works hard and gives up everything and lets no one get anywhere near him so the lies lay undisturbed.
It will be worth it some day, he reminds himself. Suffer now, and one day, it'll be worth it.
Except someone finds out. Except graduation is a triumph, valedictorian, a promising career in law that gets a knife pressed to it's throat by a man with a terrible nasal voice and a chipper tone and nothing but violence dripping out of his promises. His name is Cutter, Marcus Cutter, and Kepler is to be his man. His personal pick. His ace in the hole. Cutter recognizes talent, but more than that, he recognizes drive. He recognizes anger. He recognizes hunger.
He promises the boy that they'll change it. They'll change the world. They'll make it so that bills aren't the difference between a good man's life and his death. They'll make it so that no one has to fight to be their best. That cowards won't be rewarded for their small minds and their smaller hearts. That the brave and the brilliant, the best of them, people like him, will be his priority. Their priority.
He has to start at the bottom, prove himself. That's just how these things go. But even with his mistakes, he proves his courage, his drive, his willingness to do and be and make himself what his mission requires. He bends and twists and becomes whatever he needs to be, learns a dozen different talents, a hundred different personalities. Any skill, any trade, any group, anything? The boy can take his hand to it, figure it out in a fraction of the time of anyone else, convince people that he's been doing it for years and that makes him utterly impossible to catch. Impossible to beat. The voice twists and bends and becomes dozens of different people, all of them complete with stories, each one sounding like someone else except to a practiced ear. An ear that can pick out Warren at the center of each one.
He soon takes command, though, always under Cutter. Always Cutter's creature. Always a part of Cutter's plans for the world, the bigger picture. She'll hear the promises he makes with every mission, the ways this death and that destruction all play into a long game that will make sure that even if Warren has to be the worst of the worst? It's for the very best reasons.
He gets clearance for a subordinate, a partner for his missions. She knows that voice. She's met him. That soon expands to include a third as the mission becomes clearer and the means becomes murkier. But that's all right, that's fine. He can snip off a piece of himself here and tear out a bit of himself there, more conversations with himself that sound more and more stilted, more and more disjointed, less and less... whole. And when he doesn't do what Cutter wants exactly how he wants, bits of him will be taken out for him, like a year of his life. A year with his grandfather. One of the last.
Failure is not an option. He learns that too.
So he keeps the pieces of himself that he has left in others, where he can protect them properly. The man from the bar who likes icy booze becomes the owner of his heart, and that heart is tucked away where even he might not notice it, certainly not where anyone might find it troublesome or distracting. His more platonic affections, something like a family feeling for someone who's started to forget what 'family' even feels like, goes in the woman he shared a glass of scotch with, the one he had to beg to save from the doldrums of being held back for other people's fears. They are all that's left of who he was, of the boy, of the graduate, of the dream for him. Everything else, every other part, is sacrificed, willingly, for the big picture. For a better world. This all comes out in music, recordings of a bass guitar, a piano, a few conversations where the fondness is clear when you're not the one talking.
But those sacrifices aren't always kind. Oh no, sometimes they involve torture or murder or blackmail or a dozen other terrible things. He doesn't relish the destruction any more than the sun relishes melting the icicles off of house's roof. It's simply necessary to move things along, move things ahead. He does what he can to do the least harm, to cause the least suffering, but if harm or suffering are needed, he brings them to bear with colder and colder efficiency. An assassin and a spy and a torturer and a field commander, those are roles he learns to play as well, learns to excel at them. And all the while he keeps his heart inside the two with him and he guards them like a rabid dog, from threats inside and out.
There's a conversation with Cutter, a mention of a woman, Pryce, who's eyeing the scotch-drinking woman. But there's an option for a mission that sends them into deep space to clean up a mess and that is indeed a mess: the space station, Hephaestus, around the star, Wolf 359. Everyone is dead there except for a scientist with an accent she might recognize the way she recognizes the frustration in Kepler's tone at having to give this man another chance. At the waste of what he'd done with the experiment he ran on the now-dead people here who were all brilliant and good and had so much potential. But the scientist believes he can change the world. A few eggs for the omelette, then, though he doesn't like it more than usual.
More back on Earth, a holiday party that he insists on bringing his subordinates to. One they have fun at, once they're there, though one sounds like an angry cat the whole time (Jacobi) and the other seems to enjoy herself mostly by out-sciencing anyone she talks to. And then, then, they're back on the space station, insisting that some rejects do their damn job, that they don't pack up and go home. That there's advancement, success, the big picture itself on the line! And he's not about to brook any arguments.
They aren't nice. Kepler, Jacobi, and Maxwell: SI-5. There's plenty of conversations there, lots to go on. Lots of Kepler and Jacobi and Maxwell, a perfectly oiled machine, a trio in perfect harmony, every piece equal and balanced and covering their specific niche. Sometimes they manipulate the original crew. Sometimes they force them into things. There's always a threat but it's just as clear that Kepler does not want to have to kill anyone. He opens his heart in places, shows his leadership in places, admits to one of them-
What, you think when I was young I dreamt about this? About being stuck up here? Of course not. I had things I wanted to do, places I wanted to see, people I wanted to be with, and that's all... that's all gone. Because this job has asked everything of me. It has demanded that I give it every inch of my life. You think you know me? That you’ve met me? No. You’ve met the Artist Formerly Known as Warren Kepler. You’ve met my job. Aside from that, there’s no one left for you to know. I’m gone. I’ve been goddamn canceled. Show’s over, and there will be no encores. All that’s left is this. Sitting here, waiting for a phone call.
But there's also Jacobi's voice, speaking:
He knows potential when he sees it. And he knows how to push.
And:
At any given moment, Colonel Kepler has about... eighteen ulterior motives. Half the time even I don't know why he's doing something.
Another voice, Douglas Eiffel, who is... whiny. Playful. But mostly whiny: But you still trust him?
Jacobi again: With my life.
There's a few close calls, a few unfortunate situations, but Kepler is actually an exceptional leader, and he knows how and when to push people to be their best. They're planning on trying to make contact with alien creatures, beings of untold power and the strange ability to make duplicates of people. One is made of Daniel, dies when one of the original crew, a woman named Lovelace, decides to let him die out in space during a solar flare. Kepler holds a grudge against her for that. That's the first of them.
But the event comes, and with it comes a mutiny: the original crew does not want to follow the plan, and that leads to captives being taken: Lovelace and Eiffel on one side, Maxwell on the other. Kepler tries to force the hand of the opposing leader, tries to make her give in, even shoots Lovelace to make it clear that this will fail. But Minkowski, said leader, chooses to shoot Maxwell in retaliation. And that's when everything falls apart.
Kepler and Jacobi are taken. Kepler frees himself and takes Eiffel hostage, only to have Lovelace resurrect, one of the alien clones in truth, and literally make his hand grow itself back into his wrist, claiming he'll 'never hurt anyone again'. When it turns out that Kepler knew about Lovelace, Jacobi rounds on him, screaming about keeping secrets and keeping him on the outside and treating him like one of 'them' while Kepler acts angrier and angrier, harder and harder. He won't explain himself, won't justify himself. He knows why he did what he did.
There are other days, other events, but it all comes to a head on the day that Jacobi uses a reboot cycle on the ship's AI to seize control of the station. And instead of it being part of their plan, instead of it being what they'd intended if they had to get control back, instead of getting things back on track? Jacobi puts a gun in Minkowski's hand and tells her to shoot Kepler.
And Kepler, for the first time on the tapes? Is utterly silent. She can see the man, has heard him, knows enough about this moment now that she can probably hear the sound of him breaking even if it isn't there. Jacobi rails at him about how Maxwell's death was his fault and how he clearly didn't care about any of them. And Kepler points out that acting like an asshole was part of the plan they decided on before even coming here, but none of that matters in this moment. The whole thing only ends when Minkowski refuses to shoot him.
Which is when the trouble really starts. Because that's when Marcus Cutter and Miranda Pryce show up, along with a gruff-sounding man named Riemann and a snooty sounding woman named Young. All of them are put under the mind control device that Kepler told her about, all except Kepler. He does his best to try and protect Jacobi but his comments are ignored in the face of his 'failure', which is why, apparently, they came. They give Kepler a new mechanical hand, all the while having a zombified Daniel take notes about it, and the threat inherent in the proceedure is clear: fuck up and we send him out an airlock with a smile on his face. So Kepler behaves, even though he's clearly been demoted in their eyes.
The mind control lasts for almost a month until Eiffel eventually breaks free, and Kepler doesn't say a word when he encounters him no longer acting like a zombie. It allows him to find and free Jacobi and the others and that is when the dominoes start falling and things start taking shape. It turns out that all those dreams and wishes that Kepler had had about his work, that his goals, everything he'd ripped himself to pieces for?
Was bullshit.
There was no bigger picture. There was no better world. Not really. Not what anyone would consider one. The ultimate goal was immortality for Cutter and for Pryce and ultimate dominion over everyone on Earth. In fact, they'd built a device that through one command could kill the entire human race, everyone on the planet, and they ended up using it to ransom the human race, a race that the aliens are interested in, in order to get the secret to making perfect, seemingly-immortal clones. Nearly twenty five years of work, twenty five years of dreaming, twenty five years of 'necessary evil' that had ripped him to pieces...
He'd been helping a madman who was ready to throw him away in a heartbeat.
There's some back and forth, death defying situations, one where Jacobi saves Kepler's life along with some of the others with an amazing shot in an impossible situation. More importantly, there's a moment, right in front of the snooty woman where Daniel asks Kepler if he'll join them, if he'll fight on their side. He refuses. But before they walk off? Kepler says, something in him already dead:
"Thank you, Daniel. And goodbye."
It's the last time they speak. But not the last time for Kepler, oh no. Cutter and Pryce make their deal with the alien, get the information they want albeit in a form they can't stand since it's all downloaded into Eiffel's brain of all places, and Kepler and Young are tasked with taking care of a spare body. It's here where they come to the end of the file, to the end of Kepler's life. Because as they're working-
The pulse beacon. It’s…almost at half power. At that- would our signal have made it back to Earth?
No, probably not.
Jesus. We have to tell Mr. Cutter-
Do we?
Of course we do, something’s wrong with the system.
No, nothing’s -wrong-. The power is just being rerouted from the pulse beacon to the AI processor.
What? Why the hell would it-
The sound of silenced gunshots.
Because that’s what -I- programmed it to do four hours ago.
She whimpers.
Yes? Of course I am. You really thought I was going to let Cutter go through with this? With all of humanity on the line?
But- but you said-
What I had to, Miss Young. To be where I could make a difference. After all...I? Am still a person. And that means I'm on Jacobi and Minkowski's side. Even if they don't think I am. Goodbye, Rachel. It was a pleasure doin-
And that's when the woman roars and there's the sounds of clanking. The sounds of the airlocks moving. He tries to convince her not to kill him. It doesn't work. And once that's settled?
Well, in that case. A much more manual sound of metal on metal, small. His flask. Good scotch should never go to waste.
And the file ends with the sound of the vacuum.