(This is more amusing if you understand how things work around my job. I'll try to provide some of the context.)
So I got this job offer at work from the "other half" of the company-- Hardware. I work in Software currently, but I know lots of people in Hardware and they'd love to convince me to jump to their half of the company. So I get this offer from them, but it's not exactly clear what the position is that they're offering me. In fact, I appear to have already accepted the job, but I'm not even sure if I'm actually working for Hardware, or if I'm still working for Software in a role where I act as a consultant to Hardware.
All I know is, I go over to Hardware for my first day on the new job without really knowing what I am supposed to be doing there.
So, in the dream, Apple Computer is not housed in the big white glass R&D complex in Cupertino. It occupies a portion of an enormous labyrinthine complex that was equal parts high school and hospital. The whole thing was many stories tall and spread for miles and miles-- and it was old. Ancient and abandoned, built and used for centuries and then left to decay for centuries more before Apple moved into one corner of its enormous space.
Software occupied the upper halls; that's where I had been. The way we worked was everyone had their own desk (these were classroom desks, mind you, not cubes or anything-- we all sat at high school kid desks) and we turned in our homework and were given assignments in class, which we did-- sometimes working together, or checking each others' answers-- and then at the end of class we would turn in the class assignment, get our homework assignment, and go to the next class. Very organized. The classrooms, being on the upper floors, had large (albeit dirt-encrusted, because of the age and abandoned-ness of the whole labyrinth) windows that let some sunlight in, and there were skylights in the halls.
Hardware was down on the ground floor, and down there it was a whole different story. I found the team I was supposed to be helping out; they were in a storeroom. It was, like, the band room or a prop room for the drama department or something. It was FULL of junk-- moose heads, skiis, old clocks, car engine parts. In short, it was full of basically everything you could imagine except for computers... you know, HARDWARE.
They said it was one of their labs.
I asked what I was supposed to be doing; all nine or so of the people in the lab told me they had been tasked with orienting me on the job, and then each of them started doing something totally different, explaining to me what they were doing as they did so. Some moved junk around, stacking and arranging it. Others dug through the junk as if looking for something. Still others ran in and out of the room. It became apparent to me that pretty much nobody was in charge of delegating each piece of work out (and I couldn't see how they could do that work with all this junk and no computers, not even admin machines to receive and send email). They were all leaping to do every task as another crisis came up; it was a perpetually panicked fire drill, and apparently I was expected to join in the madness.
So I asked where their managers were, so I could ask one of the managers what my specific tasks were. They all looked at each other, baffled.
"We don't know," I was told.
"You mean, your managers are never in their offices for you to talk to them?" I asked, horrified, because in Software you knew when your teacher had their office hours and you could drop in for help with the assignments.
"No," they replied. "We don't know where their offices are. They come here to talk to us, in the lab, and then when they leave we don't know where they go-- they just disappear into the labyrinthe." It was obvious from the way they were whispering that this was a subject they did not want to delve into further, but I pressed for more:
"How the hell do you give them your test results, then?"
They brightened up at this, and informed that they called their results in on the phone. This seemed at least a little more reasonable to me until they told me that there was only one phone, and it was pretty far away, through the labyrinthe. "But don't worry," I was assured, "we know a shortcut!" And as if to demonstrate how important and useful this procedure of theirs was, two of the testers bolted out the door to call in some results.
I was becoming pretty dismayed, so I told them I was going to go find the damn managers myself, and I left over their shouts and pleas. I wandered into the halls and stairwells of the labyrinthe, and was treated to an extended montage of the twisted architectural design of this place. It was, quite literally, a blend of indoor big city high school and sinister old-style hospital-- across the hall from a surgical theater was a library; then a nurse's station, then a locker bank, then more operating rooms and classrooms, and old faded "GO TEAM" banners hanging above pharmaceutical storage racks... and it went on for miles, huge and echoey and empty of life, and Apple occupied just a tiny corner of it. The rest was huge and uninhabited and untouched for decades, or maybe even centuries. And I wandered farther and farther away from Apple's portion.
Eventually I come the end of a hallway-- and it stops at a cinderblock wall, in which there was set a large steel fire door. The door was locked, but through the grimy small window in it I could see that there was more on the other side. I searched along the cinderblock wall, trying to find another door through that wasn't locked, but there were no other doors in that wall.
While searching, though, I found the long-mummified corpse of a guard, or a night watchman, sitting in a chair at one of the nurse's stations. He had a key on his belt, so I took it, but for whatever reason I didn't think about the steel door in the wall at that time. Instead, I headed back into Apple's section of the huge labyrinth, returning to the cluttered junk lab.
There, I was grabbed by one of the other testers, a girl named Jerr, who told me that the two of us had to go report some results on the phone. She was in that same state of frantic panic that everyone in Hardware seemed to always be in, so I went with her just to keep her stress level down. So we ran to the shortcut they had mentioned earlier.
Apparently, there was a doorway that exited the highschool/hospital labyrinth and entered the lobby of an old bijou cinema, this really old movie house that was even older and more abandoned and decrepit than the labyrinth itself, if that was possible. Everything was covered in thick piles of dust, except for the track in the floor made by testers going to and from the phone.
I was worried that someone outside might look in through the windows of the theater and see us skulking around, and wonder what we were doing, but it turned out that someone-- maybe someone at Apple, maybe someone farther back in history-- had cleverly screened the lobby from outside view by building all this little animatronic robot figures, about three feet tall, arranged in dioramic re-creations of famous movie scenes: Gone with the Wind, Singing in the Rain, I don't remember what all. They perpetually re-enacted these scenes over and over, and would surely distract anyone who looked in, preventing them from noticing our furtive movements in the dark shadows.
So we hurried through the ancient theater lobby and took a flight of stairs down to the theater's basement. At the bottom of the stairs there was a door, and I found out why they went to the phone in pairs: The door was on a strong hinge so it would close itself, and it only could be opened from the theater stairs side, not from inside the basement. So one person would hold the door open while the other would continue through to the phone.
But when Jerry and I got there, someone was already there holding the door open. It was my pal from Hardware, Erik, who I hadn't seen this whole time, yet. And I thought, damn, is THAT all he does all day? Stand here and hold the door open? What a fucking slacker! "Facilitator", my ass!
So Erik told Jerry that she needed to hold the door so that he and I could go through. They switched positions and Erik and I headed into the basement, and we were well on our way down into the theater basement before I remembered that it was Jerry who knew what the results were, not me. Oops! But it turns out Erik didn't care out phoning in the results anyway-- he wanted to explore the theater basement. So we skulked all through the abandoned theater, finding the cabinets where they kept all the old movie posters, trying to break into the projection room, standing in the fly space behind the main screen. And I was worrying that someone was going to miss us pretty soon, but Erik wasn't too concerned.
Then we ran into a cinderblock wall in which there was a huge steel fire door, locked. Erik scratched at the dirty window. "If only we could get back into that space," he said, and I remembered that I had that key! This wasn't the same exact door as the other one-- I realized somehow that this door and the other were on opposite sides of some additional part of the labyrinth, a part that had been locked and sealed all this time. And I had a key!
So we opened the door and went through. It was more of the same school/hospital architecture, but where the other parts were old and dusty and faded and empty, this part was actively damaged. There were broken furniture bits, water damage, glass, twisted metal, feathers... And also, it wasn't uninhabited. After we'd prowled around for a minute or two (well away from the door we'd come through), we heard some thumping and sliding upstairs... then, moments later, the sound of breaking glass just up the hall we had just passed. There were other living things... people-sounding things... and they weren't far away. Suddenly, the whole place took on a post-apocalyptic "mutant attack imminent" feel and I got really worried.
And just then, these two ancient-looking women hunched their way out of a nearby doorway, into the hall with us, about a hundred feet away. For a second, I felt something like relief-- "it's just some old people"-- but one of the women shrieked, "GET OUT OF OUR HOME! THERE'S SOMEONE IN OUR HOME!" and both of them moved towards us with a rapid predatory gait that wasn't old and enfeebled at all.
That's when the truth dawned on me, and I understood everything: The labyrinth was neither a school nor a hospital. It had been built as an insane asylum-- an asylum to house tens of thousands, maybe millions, of inmates. And somehow, over the long years, the rest of the asylum had fallen into disuse-- and the most dangerous section, the most violently ill patients, had been left where they were, locked into their section, and nobody had been allowed out. Not even the medical staff. The rest of the labyrinth was abandoned but this core section of absolute madness and terror had been sealed in and left to its own devices for centuries now. The inmates had eventually consumed, killed, or warped the trapped staff, and they'd been in here all this time, inter-breeding, feeding on each other, unable to escape or find new blood...
...until we showed up. We opened the door to the outside world and made them aware that there was something new. These two women weren't aged and decrepit, they were warped with insanity, and they were alerting all the others. All around us-- upstairs, in nearby rooms-- I could hear sounds of life stirring, as these horrifying people all started becoming excited at the same time. It was like ALIENS-- any second now, they'd be coming out of the goddamn walls.
We couldn't go back the way we came, we couldn't remember the way back to the fire door, and there were already sounds of mutant inmates in the hallways behind us. Ahead of us, there was a long long straight hallway leading away, deeper into this horrifying section of the asylum, but it was the only clear path we had. I started to shout "RUN! JESUS CHRIST, RUN!" and we started running. I was practically shouting OH SHIT OH SHIT OH SHIT the whole time but Erik wasn't taking it very seriously-- like he hadn't realized how screwed we were, or perhaps he'd already gone insane just like them and hadn't realized it yet. But he was running with me, going "Man, this is pretty fucked up!" as if it was an episode of South Park we were watching, instead of us running for our lives.
We ran and ran, going through hospital-style double doors, sprinting as hard as I've ever sprinted in my life, and those banshee women were never far behind us. We couldn't outrun them, and I somehow knew that they were extremely good at taking down prey together-- but if they were dealt with individually, away from each other, they weren't so dangerous. The two of them working together could certainly kill both Erik and me, but if we separated them, we could probably each handle one of them ourselves. If we split up, and they split up after us, we can take them down and then get the hell out of here before the others show up... and if they both come after one of us, the other might be able to survive long enough to warn Apple and the outside world that the door is open and the inmates are coming.
So as we're running, between gasping breaths, I'm making the plan with Erik-- "At the next four-way intersection, we split up, okay?"-- and he nods. Okay, here comes the next intersection. Three! Two! One! I immediately cut left... and Erik cuts left right behind me. What the fuck?!?!
There's no time to think or argue or be mad. Right after I duck left, I jump through the first door I see, which turns out to be a women's restroom. Erik comes in right after me. Maybe they didn't see us duck in here, oh god, I hope.
I jump into one stall, crouching up on the toilet so my feet won't expose me. Erik does the same in the next stall over. I still don't think he's realized how much trouble we're in. And I realize that I'm having an asthma attack-- my lungs are wheezing, and the noise is going to give away my location. So I try to pace my breathing, take it as slow as possible, minimize the sound-- but it doesn't matter, because in the next stall over, Erik is huffing and puffing from exertion, making a shitload of involuntary noise.
I close my eyes and hope that the noise he's making will mean they find him first-- I will remain quiet, I will remain silent-- and perhaps once they've gotten him they won't be as worried about getting me. One of us has to live to warn the world about the danger, or maybe even close the door. One of us has to survive. I will be silent. I will be silent. I will....
I wake up. And I am, in fact, experiencing light asthmatic wheezing, as if from tremendous physical exertion.