The Lab makes its own film. At the back of the Supply Room stands a tall cabinet of brushed alien metal that hums to itself, and every morning its drawer slides open on a fresh row of film canisters, still warm. Nobody loads it and nobody orders it. Nurse Marguerite has been looking for the delivery door for sixty-eight years.
The lightning that reset the clock scrambled the film cabinet too. Every canister now comes out stamped with a single question mark, and the film inside doesn't decide what it is until it reaches the darkroom. Same roll, same camera, same afternoon: one frame comes up as glowing Kodachrome, the next as gritty black and white, the next hand-tinted like an old postcard. Some frames look as if they came from a box camera, some from a press camera the size of a toaster, and one memorable roll came out entirely as Polaroids, which is not how Polaroids work. Nurse Bettie has tested it every way she knows: same light, same lens, same model, same pose. The film simply does what it likes, and it doesn't even stay the same for a whole roll: the stock can change from one frame to the next, so a single strip of negatives runs color, black and white, sepia and color again, like a deck of cards shuffled in the dark. (Hold any expedition's Film Strips up to the light and you can see it for yourself.) The crew call it the Mystery Stock.
So they stopped fighting it and started betting on it. Every roll that goes into the tank gets a slip in Nurse Trixie's Darkroom Sweepstakes: a nickel says Tri-X, a dime says Ektachrome, a quarter says sepia. Nurse Dolores swears the film reads the model's mood. Marguerite keeps a ledger of every result, hunting for a pattern; it is four hundred pages long, and the only pattern is that there isn't one. Dr. von Bustier calls it "the Lab's little joke." Asked about it directly, the Lab printed a single line on the darkroom teletype: THE LAB LIKES SURPRISES.
The film has one more habit. Whenever the Lab photographs anything with writing on it (a shop sign, a menu board, a banner over a dance floor), its translator is meant to set the lettering down in good plain English. The lightning got into that too. Most frames come out fine, but every so often a sign comes out of the tank in a script nobody aboard can read: confident loops, letters that almost look familiar, and once, on a diner menu, a word that made Nurse Bettie blush without anyone knowing why. Marguerite stamps those frames LETTERING GARBLED · SHIP'S TRANSLATOR FAULT in blue ink and files them on their own wall, Lost in Translation.
That is why the camera log on every slide lists its film stock as top secret: nobody knows what a roll is until it's developed, and by then it's far too late to ask. Orderly Gus has never entered the Sweepstakes. Before every shoot he writes a word in pencil on each canister, and he wipes it off before anyone can read it. His rolls, the nurses have noticed, never seem to surprise him.