Colour designation 114

Start with the plain statement, because it matters and because the title of this game invites the wrong assumption.

In this fiction, adrenochrome is a colour. It is the trade name printed on a square of theatrical lighting gel, catalogue number 114, a deep amber-red. It was chosen by a lighting supplier in 1962 for a range that also included Sundown, Bastard Amber and Surprise Pink. The game makes no claim of any kind about the real compound that shares the name, and it makes no claim about any real person, group or organisation. Nothing in this story is a coded reference to anything outside it. It is a name on a paper sleeve.

Why the programme used it

The Halcyon Protocol needed a light that a sleeping person would tolerate for a full night and that sat at a specific point on the spectrum. The 1979 equipment schedule lists eleven candidate gels by catalogue number, with a column for transmission and a column for the physician's note. Nine of the eleven notes read "subject reports discomfort". One reads "no effect measurable". The eleventh, against 114, reads:

    114     transmission 12%      "subjects sleep. subjects sleep unusually well."

That is the whole reason. It was not chosen for its name, its associations or its symbolism. It was chosen because people slept under it.

The sleeves

Gel was held in the cold sample vault on sub-level one, in stiff card sleeves stamped with the catalogue number, twelve squares to a sleeve. The vault movement log records every sleeve taken out and put back, with the date, the number of squares, and the initials of whoever signed. Nine years of that log survive and it is, without exception, boring.

The sleeve stamped 114 is in the vault. It is empty, and there is a clean unfaded rectangle on the card where the last square sat for years. The movement log's final entry against it has been written over: another set of initials has been inked directly on top of the original, hard enough to emboss the page underneath.

Why the number matters twice

Subjects were numbered on admission in a single sequence from 001, and by September 1986 the sequence had reached the low hundreds. The subject admitted on 18 September 1986 was numbered 114.

The programme's own filing convention says that is a coincidence, and the filing convention is probably right. Subject numbers and gel catalogue numbers came from different systems maintained by different people in different rooms. Nothing about the way either sequence was kept could have produced the collision deliberately.

It is still the first thing a person notices when they open the file, and it is the reason a records auditor with a decommission inventory to complete stops completing it.

Every character, organisation, document and event described here is invented for this game. The word "adrenochrome" is used strictly as an in-world colour designation.