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The severance procedure does not erase everything from the human mind. Innies know instinctively how to walk, how to speak, how to read. They retain a general knowledge of the world around them.
That 'general knowledge' is not precisely the same for everyone. It can sometimes prove revealing.
Petey
“Bum bum bum ba, bum bum ba da, bum bum ba, dum dum.”
The notes were stuck in Petey’s head. He breathed them under his breath, over and over and over.
“Can you stop doing that?” Dylan groused. “It’s irritating as fuck.”
Petey shifted in his seat. “Sorry.”
Two minutes later he was doing it again.
“Bum bum bum ba, bum bum ba da, bum bum ba, dum dum.”
“Dude,” Dylan said.
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m not doing it on purpose. It’s just stuck in my head.”
“Well let it go be stuck in your head somewhere else. I’m almost done processing this file, and I’m not letting anyone get in the way of my green fingertrap. Not even you, bossman.”
Petey rolled his eyes. “Oh come on, it can’t be that annoying. Mark?”
Mark popped his head around the cubicle. “I mean, it’s not great.”
“I’m barely making any noise!”
“You’ve been barely making any noise for the past hour. Why do you think goody-two-shoes Irv is stretching his coffee break time to the absolute limit?”
“What is that song anyway?” Mark asks. “I don’t think I know it.”
“None of us know any songs, dude,” Dylan offers.
“I mean, there’s the Kier pledge-”
“Oh please, that doesn’t count.”
“It’s Deep Purple,” Petey cuts in.
“What the fuck does that mean?” Dylan asks.
Petey has no idea, but he’s sure of it. “It’s just Deep Purple.”
“Whatever man. If you want to keep it to yourself, that’s your business.”
Irving walks back in finally. They all stop talking, hoping to avoid a lecture. For all that Petey’s technically Irving’s boss, half the time it sure doesn’t feel that way.
Five minutes later, Petey finds himself tapping the same tune on the desk.
Bum bum bum ba, bum bum ba da, bum bum ba, dum dum.
Irving snaps.
“Yes, Petey, we know! Smoke on the water, fire in the sky, all of that nonsense! Will you please stop that infernal tapping and let us get back to our business?”
Dylan and Mark look at Irving like he has three heads, like he's suddenly speaking gibberish. Petey just blushes and turns back to his workstation.
Peter remembers teaching his daughter her first chords. Those first few notes of one of his favorite songs. He remembers how quickly she got it, how he taught her to turn those chords into a hundred other songs. Even now, years later, occasionally they’ll play that first song together. It always makes him smile.
Dylan
Dylan is looking at Mark. He can tell right away something’s wrong.
“You okay?”
Mark grunts at him.
“Come on man, you gotta do better than that.”
Mark doesn’t.
“Use your words dude, what’s up?”
“I just,” Mark mumbles. “I feel kind of shitty.”
A little alarm starts to ring in Dylan’s head. “Like how shitty? Scale of 1 to 10.”
“Uh…6? I don’t know.”
“That seems not ideal.”
“I mean the other me comes in feeling like crap all the time, it’s whatever.”
No, this isn’t like normal. Mark looks flushed. He’s sweating.
An absolutely disgusting impulse comes over Dylan. He has no idea why he wants to do it, if Mark’s sick the last thing Dylan wants is to get his nasty germs all over his hands.
He does it anyway.
Dylan sticks a hand on Mark’s forehead.
“Uh, excuse me-”
“Shut up and let me feel this out.”
Mark is warm. Too warm.
Dylan draws his hand back instantly. He backs up a couple feet. “Hey Mr. Milchick!” he calls loudly. “Mr. Milchick! You need to get in here!”
“Dylan, what the fuck-”
Mr. Milchick comes running in. “Yes?”
Dylan points at Mark, almost accusatorily. “Mark’s got a fever.”
“What? I do not, it’s just a headache.”
“No way, you are way too warm. I can tell.”
“How the fuck can you tell?”
“Maybe other me is psychic, I don’t know. I just know you definitely have a fever, and I’m not sticking around in this room to be breathed on by you.”
He sprints to the bathroom to wash his hands.
It turns out Mark does have a fever. A small one, 99.7°. After Mark is sent home, Milchick slaps Dylan on the back, grinning ear to ear.
“Well done, Dylan, keeping a keen eye on the health of the office. Let me see if I can get you something special for this. Personal hand-sanitizer, maybe, for next time.”
Dylan is always able to tell when the kids are sick and when they’re faking. He’s learned to tell when they’re about to throw up, when they have an ear-ache, when they have a fever. After three kids, these things just become second nature.
Irving
“Render not my creation in miniature,” is an unbreakable rule. One of the rules taken most seriously here at Lumon, a rule spoken into the world by Kier himself. This is why Irving is so staunchly opposed to mapping, why he disapproves so heartily of Mark and Helly’s actions.
But, he wonders. After all, not everything in the office is strictly Lumon’s creation. The chairs and the desks and the computers are, yes. The layout of the corridors, most certain. But the employees…well they are perhaps Lumon’s subjects, but not truly Lumon’s creation.
Irving goes back and forth a while on this, wondering that since the building of their minds was undertaken as Lumon, they might indeed count as Lumon creations. But then he decides that since their bodies are not made at Lumon, were made instead in the mysterious beyond…well it might be alright to render them. To devise some sort of small portrait.
So he gets a small pencil and Mark’s departmental memo from yesterday. And he begins to sketch out the lines of Burt’s face. His unique jawline, his strong nose. The slight stoop in his back, the sweep of his hairline.
Irving only means to do this for a moment, so he startles when Dylan comes in, hunting for him.
“Where the fuck have you been, Irv? Cobel’s gonna freak out on us again if you don’t get your ass back in there.”
He shuffles the papers in his hands, flustered. Dylan notices.
“Did you draw that?”
“I was just-”
Dylan snatches it out of his hands before he can say another word.
“Give that back. Give it back right now.”
Dylan stares at the paper. “This is that old fuck Burt, right?”
“It’s not any concern of yours. Give it back.”
Dylan looks at Irving sharply. “You’re not planning to switch departments on us, are you Irv?”
“What? No, whatever would give you that idea.”
“I mean, this is good. O&D good. And if you’re trying to practice your skills so you can go join that group of baby eaters-”
“They do not eat babies, thank you VERY much. And I have no intention of switching departments. I just thought Burt might enjoy having a likeness of himself to look at from time to time.”
Dylan’s mouth turns into an unhappy pout. “I mean if you want to give him this, it’s your funeral. He’ll probably sell you out to Cobel for ‘rendering creation in miniature.’”
“He wouldn’t do that. And besides, portraits don’t count.”
"Sure they don't, Irv. Sure they don't."
Irving misses being able to paint abstracts. Even when he tries to paint something beyond the recurring door in his nightmares, he ends up with giant black patches that take over the canvas, assert themselves into every piece he does. So sometimes, he’ll just sit in the park and people watch, drawing portraits. Doing something so simple, so representational, is a welcome break.
Helly
“Remember, the key to success at Lumon, and in life, is the 9 core principles. These are vision, verve, wit-”
“Cheer, humility, benevolence, nimbleness, probity and wiles,” Helena finishes, bored. “Can we talk about anything else?”
Irving looks torn between thrilled that Helly’s managed to memorize the Nine so quickly and irritated that she doesn’t seem to take them seriously. “Can you just recite them for me once more?”
Helly rolls her eyes. “Vision, verve, wit, cheer, humility, benevolence, nimbleness, probity and wiles,” she rattles off dully. “See? I got it. I’m all good. We can move on.”
“Well, the 9 core virtues aren’t all you need to know. You must also fully internalize the greatest quotes from Kier himself.”
Helly lolls back in her chair, staring up at the ceiling. “Mark, you’re the boss right? Can you make us do something else?”
“Well you do have to know this stuff, might as well get it down now.”
Helly groans. “Dylan? Back me up.”
“If you learn them all quick, they give you a special fingertrap. It’s gold.”
“Fine,” she huffs. “What are these quotes exactly?”
Irving clears his throat. “Well, ideally you should learn the handbook by heart. But to start, there are a few key quotations that can serve as inspiration throughout the day. For example, ‘Let not weakness live in your veins. Cherished workers-”
“-drown it inside you. Rise up from your deathbed and sally forth, more perfect for the struggle,” Helly drones in a bored voice. “Anything else?”
Irving pauses, surprised. “How did you know that?”
“It was on the wall in the perpetuity wing.”
“Well,” Irving continues, trying to move past it. “There is another quotation I find particularly invigorating, when mulling on the importance of our work here. On the lasting impact it will have. ‘And I shall whisper to ye dutiful through the ages. In your noblest thoughts and epiphanies shall be my voice. You are my mouth-’”
“-and through ye, I will whisper on when I am 10 centuries demised, yada yada yada, boring boring boring, can we be finished with this now?”
Irving snaps his mouth shut, looking sour. “Is one of you feeding her answers?”
“Nope,” says Dylan. Mark just shakes his head. Irving looks unconvinced.
“Helly, if you wouldn’t mind, can you roll your chair to that corner over there?”
She looks annoyed, but does it. It takes her several seconds to get situated.
“Thank you. Could you face the wall? And cover your eyes for good measure?”
She does, somehow managing to make every movement of her body look sarcastic.
“Thank you. Now, recite the core principles one more time.”
“Vision, verve, wit, cheer, humility, benevolence, nimbleness, probity and wiles.” She turns around sharply, hands on her knees. “That it? Are we done now?”
Irving seems taken aback. “Well, yes I suppose we can be done. For now.”
“Great,” Helly says, and stalks out of the room.
“Well, perhaps she’ll be something of a prodigy,” Irving offers. “A model employee.”
Helly answering scoff from the kitchen rings around the room.
“Vision, verve, wit, cheer, humility, benevolence, nimbleness, probity, wiles,” she whispers to herself in the mirror every morning, hands gripping the sink so tight they burn. “Vision, verve, wit, cheer, humility, benevolence, nimbleness, probity, wiles. Vision, verve, wit, cheer, humility, benevolence, nimbleness, probity, wiles.”
Mark
“You are so dead if Milchick catches you wandering the halls again,” Dylan tells Helly and Mark as they walk in. “Like he is going to kill you with his bare hands.”
Irving huffs. “Please, Dylan, stop hyperbolizing. Don’t speak of fellow employees in such unkind terms. Mr. Milchick would not be pleased, certainly, but he’s a reasonable man. He’d never resort to murder.”
“You say that now, but wait until an hour from now when he’s spit roasting Mark’s corpse. We’ll never see him again. He’ll just be ashes by quitting time.”
Mark thinks of Petey for a second, and laughs a little to cover it. “Well, it’d take longer than that, but yeah.”
Dylan looks at him oddly. “What would take longer?”
“Well, I mean, it’s about 3:00 now, and it takes way longer than that to burn a human body. At least four, five hours.”
All his colleagues are staring at him. Mark shifts on his feet.
“That’s morbid as fuck dude,” Dylan says, sounding a little shocked.
“Honestly, Mark, this is a place of business. Such statements are wildly unprofessional.”
“Irving, it was just a joke that fell flat, I-”
“New theory,” Helly says with a grin. “Mark’s outie is a serial killer who burns his victims alive.”
“I’m not-”
“I bet he taunts the cops,” Dylan jumped in. “I bet he’s always sending them coded notes and teeth and bits of his own hair.”
“Why would I send bits of my own hair?”
“That’s not a denial,” Helly says. “I say we take it as truth. We should tie him up, leave him in a closet. For our own protection.”
“For fucks sake, I’m not a serial killer.”
Mark stays for every moment. Devon tells him it’s a bad idea, that it won’t help him to watch. But he has to see it. He has to know. He sits by the viewing window in the crematorium, watches the box burn down, heart clenching every second, inner self screaming that it can’t be Gemma in that box, it can’t.
But he knows it is.