They drop you off at the front gates.
You are alone. You are tired, and the desert behind you spreads out for miles.
You’d heard about this place in school a couple of years ago. It was designed as an initiative to crack down on juvenile homelessness and tie up all the issues with the foster system or something.Prima Viata was a luxury resort city that catered mostly to upper class families. Children who found themselves without guardians were removed from their home environments and made to work there until their 19th birthdays, Upon which they would be allowed to enjoy living in the resort for free with the rest of the wealthy tourists for another 15 years as payment for your service. Or to leave and begin their adult life with viable work skills and a tidy sum of back pay.
When your teacher was going over the concept, it really didn’t seem like that big of a deal. You remember kind of shrugging and tuning out your teacher’s explanations and concerns so that you could read a book under your desk and pass notes.
Besides. They’d made this place like 30 years ago and you were a 7th grader with no real power over anything. Even if you did object to the government creating a giant foster home-vacation resort out in the middle of the desert, there was pretty much nothing constructive you could do about it.
But, a lot has changed in four years. And that lecture that you didn’t listen to back then has become uncomfortably relevant...
Now it mattered. Now you were standing in front of 30 foot high gates in the middle of nowhere, with a sad piece of paper detailing your parent’s death clutched in your sweaty hand. The bus was long gone and the armed guard on it had made sure you got off and wouldn't be getting back on.
After gathering your resolve, you push open the door. The hot desert wind blows in dirt and grit along with you and slams loudly, sealing you inside. There is no welcoming lobby, or anything else like you saw in the brochure. Just a huge empty space, like a factory stock backroom. The lobby is painted a sickly grey and there are a few plastic chairs lined up against the wall. Opposite from the chairs is a small window, and from that small window comes a loud and impatient voice.
"New hires must be seated in the waiting area to await processing."
You walk to the chairs and sit down. Several other people are in the waiting room with you, and nobody looks particularly happy about it. There are two twin girls, a woman holding a baby and a boy who was about 6 or 7 years old. From your seat, you can see into the little window, where an old man with a froggy looking face and large stack of papers seems to be processing new entries.
“Next.” The man calls. The twins both stand and make their way to the window.
“One at a time!” he barks angrily and they flinch.
The girls part from each other, lightly touching hands, before one of them sits back down.
“Age.”
“14.” She murmurs.
The man scrutinizes her as she keeps her eyes on the floor.
“Too skinny to start any really strenuous work… hmm… your options are Domestic Servant or Dress maker’s Assistant.”
She looks up at him hopefully. “Dress maker’s…Assistant?”
He didn’t respond, but presses a couple of buttons. You hear some loud whirring noises and clunking sounds. Then, he shoves his flabby arm through a hole at the bottom of the window and slaps a small metal badge into her hand.
“Pin this to your uniform and go through the door on my right. Next!”
The other twin stood and made her way to the window.
“You will be a house worker.” He said, without waiting for her to speak “Say goodbye to your sister in the lobby. Your chances of seeing her again are slim.” The whirring and clunking begins again and he hands her a badge.
“Next!”
She bursts into tears and runs through the door.
The woman sitting next to the twins stands up and approaches the window. Without saying a word, she thrusts the baby into the man’s arms and leaves the building covering her face as if she were ashamed for anyone to see her.
The man calls into the back and a young girl comes to remove the child from his office.
“Next!”
The smaller boy siting next to you goes to the window and is assigned “Landscaper." He solemnly takes his badge and leaves the room.
“Next!”
You stand up and walk to the window. The man peers over his glasses and looks you up and down, paying special attention to your arms and face.
“Age?” he grunts.
You tell him how old you are and slip the paper into the hole. He snatches it impatiently.
“Hmm…. I see….” The man says, running a finger over his stubbly, grey chin. “I don’t say this very often, but you’re rather lucky. You're old and strong enough to have a few options and several positions have recently been vacated. You can either be a steamworks operator, a laundry worker, a generator manager or a trolomite miner.”
*PICK AN OCCUPATION*
He types the name and occupation into the machine, then hands you your new badge.
“Pin this to your uniform and go through the door on my left.”
The room on the other side was just as empty as the waiting room. There were several chairs against the wall and a matronly looking woman guarding a second door. She was nearly six feet tall, with hands like huge hams and a heavy jaw. She wore a long gray dress, with a crisp white apron draped across her thick midsection. Her hair was cropped short to her head and her face was etched with a permanent scowl.
The other children are waiting patiently for her to begin speaking. You've barely managed to touch your chair when she shouts.
“Sit!”
And you do.
“We have ten rules.” She paces the room, looking down at you all with her hands perched high on her hips.
“One: No speaking. You are not here to talk, you are here to work. Two: You rise at 5 and go to bed at 10. There are separate sleeping quarters for boys and girls. You must begin your return home in time to wash up and be in bed by 10pm exactly. No earlier and no later. Three: Girls must keep their heads shaved and Boys must wear their hair long. This makes it easy to differentiate between residents and employees. Four: No employee may walk unaccompanied through the city. Five: You must honor and respect our mayor. Six: The word of your overseer is law. If they tell you to stay up all night, you’d best not blink. If they tell you to jump, you should be in the air before they finish their sentence. There are times where an overseer’s command may overrule other laws, but you must follow it regardless.”
She stopped in front of the ten year old boy who was beginning to look petulant.
“That means you, Thomas. I’ll not like seeing you in lock-up again. You’re lucky you had someone to vouch for your actions. Next time the punishment will be more severe.” She looked hard at everyone in warning.
“Seven, “ She continued “ You must keep your uniform clean and tidy, and your name tag visible. Eight: Mail privileges are for residents and visitors only. There was an …incident a while back. You may thank your fellow employees for the removal of that privilege. Nine…-”
One of the twins began sobbing loudly. The woman continued speaking as if she didn't hear her. When she had finished her lecture, she gestured for everyone to stand.
You all follow her into a freezing cold room with nothing else in it besides several barber’s chairs. She points at you and Thomas
“you two, you will shower in the next room. When you are finished, you will be handed your uniforms and escorted to your posts.”
Zebadiah looked at Thomas who rolled his eyes and gestured for him to follow.
The showers were a large square room with nozzles sticking out of the wall. It was tiled in a sickly hospital green with icy concrete floors and the water was already running
You take off your clothes sheepishly and place them neatly in the corner of the room away from the jets of lukewarm water.
“Don’t bother. They burn them, anyway.” Thomas said happily.
The younger boy had discarded his clothes in a heap all over the shower area; his gray shirt and pants darkening as they soaked.
“Any cheap shots at the overseers that you’d like to take.. take them now. Once you go through that door, all the rules apply. “ Thomas tosses you a bar of soap.
You thank him and try to wash up without letting him see you, but he doesn't seem to care.
“This is my second time through. Pardon the awkward conversation, but I’ve been in lock up for three days and you’re the first person I’ve had a chance to speak to in a while.”
Well, that sounded alarming.
“What job did you get?” Thomas asked
You tell him the job you picked.
“Oi! You got a good one! I worked there before I got punished.” Thomas said excitedly “They demoted me to-”
The door to the showers slammed open and the twins were shoved in. They screamed in surprise and slid across the tile. Their heads had been shaved completely bald. They clung to each other, shivering with cold and fear.
Thomas, on the other hand, is completely unfazed.
“You shower on the other side.” he says to the girls, without turning around.
He glances over at you. “Turn around. It’s polite.”
You snatch your eyes away from the twins who have scuttled into the corner of the showers. They look like baby birds. Thin and naked and helpless.
It makes you feel sick.
After you finish your shower, the matron hands you your uniforms. Thomas looks on in contentment as the overseer picks his sodden clothing up off the floor.
The matron rushes you all out the door and closes it firmly behind you, leaving the group standing awkwardly on a street corner.
"We've gotta get to our posts as quickly as possible before anyone notices we're unaccompanied." Thomas says, tying his wet hair up with a string "They usually give us about ten minutes--twenty if you're heading to the other side of the city." "I'm going to walk the girls over, but you should be fine. Here, take this." He gives you a small scrap of worn cloth with an illustration stitched onto it.
"One of my older friends made this map for me when I first got here," he says shyly "But you can have it because you need it more than I do now, I think... Good luck!"
Thomas takes the twins away with him down the street. You look down at the map
Did you choose to be a
[[steamworks operator]], turn to page
[[laundry worker]], turn to page
[[generator manager]], turn to page
or a [[trolomite miner]], turn to pageYou glance down at the map. The steamworks is all the way on the other side of the resort. Ugh. You rub at your new hair self consciously and begin walking.
It really wasn’t a bad looking place now that you were actually inside. The buildings were all tall, new-looking and well maintained. There were many trees and bright green grass. The streets were immaculately clean. As you walked through, you also saw lots of restaurants and some sports centers, beautiful individual houses along side of the large apartment-like hotel buildings. The map Thomas had given you even featured a beach and some movie theaters, though they weren’t near the same path you were taking to work.
It was almost like a very small, very clean city.
There were quite a few families and couples walking down the streets, laughing and talking to each other. It would have been freakishly picturesque if it hadn’t been for the quickly moving, sullen children dashing back and forth, sweeping up the streets, pruning the flowers, washing the windows up high on scaffoldings. Some of the vacationers even had children next to them carrying their bags—very young children, no older than five or six. You took some of your walking time to stop and peek inside a nearby bank just to check, and were a bit surprised to see it was staffed entirely by children and teenagers as well.
Everyone was wearing different colored, neatly pressed uniforms based on their occupation. You were wearing red, the restaurant workers were in blue, the landscaping kids were in brown—like Thomas, the kids in the bank were in a light gray and everyone’s uniform was altered slightly to suit whatever they were meant to be doing. It was a little unsettling. Doubly so because none of the workers were talking to each other at all or making that much eye contact unless it was necessary and absolutely none of them were smiling. The vacationers, by contrast looked like they were having the time of their lives and regarded the workers as if they were extremely polite objects and ignored them completely.
"HEY."
You turn around, startled. An older man in black—the color the overseers wear—has stuck his head out of the door of a restaurant and is shouting at you from across the street.
"Where is your escort? Get back to the steamworks!"
You walk quickly away from him and keep your head down until you finally reach the large building at the edge of the resort. Its a massive square block of concrete with no windows and only one small door with the word “steamworks” embossed helpfully into the glass.
As soon as you get inside, you’re glad you picked this job. The steamworks is filled with mostly teenagers and everyone looks much more relaxed than all the other people outside being scrutinized by the overseers. Its incredibly loud with a deafening clanging, a mechanical hum and the churning of rushing water. The workers are all talking and joking around.
"Oi! Newby!" An overseer jogs over to you, and sticks out his hand for you to shake. He’s young, the youngest overseer you’ve seen so far. Probably only 20 or 25. When you take his hand, he smiles.
"You look right nervous. It ‘ent so bad ‘ere," He says "I’m Rudy, I’m your mum until you get switched, die or graduate— and I mean that."
"He means it!" one of the steamworkers shouted gleefully from halfway across the room.
Rudy grins at the worker fondly. “Back to work, ya’baggit!” he shouts back, “Pay no mind to ‘im, right. We came in same time. Well disrespectful, that one. Anyhow, lemmie give ya some info and get ya started. Steamworks— we do waterin’ tasks. This ‘ere spot’s out in the middle of the desert, yeah? Well, water’s scarce and we mean to keep every drop we get.”
Rudy picked up a helmet and gloves.
"We do cleanin’ and filtration- bad water in, good water out. We got boiler positions if you like bein’ hot. We got tinkers who fix pipes and slop workers in the sewers. We got wotchers who wotch to make sure no one’s fit to get hurt doin their job. And we got me, youngest overseer in the garrison. I make sure the wotchers are wotchin’, the boilers are boilin’ the tinkerers are tinkrin’ and the slop workers get good scrubbin off at the end of the day."
"Now we all wear the same colors and you can move around from job to job in here for the first year, but unless you get transferred out to the mines, after that point, you’re stuck bein’ wet like the rest of us. We got two positions open right now: boiler or tinker. Now which is it?"
Are you a [[Boiler]]
Or a [[Tinker]]You glance down at the map. There are L’s,presumably for laundry, embroidered all over it, stitched in various sizes and colors. Ugh. You rub at your new hair self consciously and begin walking towards one of them.
It really isn’t a bad looking place now that you are actually inside. The buildings are all tall, new-looking and well maintained. There are many trees and bright green grass. The streets are immaculately clean. As you walk through, you notice there are lots of restaurants and some sports centers, beautiful individual houses along side of the large apartment-like hotel buildings. The map Thomas had given you even featured a beach and some movie theaters, though they weren’t near the same path you were taking to work.
It was almost like a very small, very clean city.
There were quite a few families and couples walking down the streets, laughing and talking to each other. It would have been freakishly picturesque if it hadn’t been for the quickly moving, sullen children dashing back and forth, sweeping up the streets, pruning the flowers, washing the windows up high on scaffoldings. Some of the vacationers even had children next to them carrying their bags—very young children, no older than five or six. You took some of your walking time to stop and peek inside a nearby bank just to check, and were a bit surprised to see it was staffed entirely by children and teenagers as well.
Everyone was wearing different colored, neatly pressed uniforms based on their occupation. You were wearing white, the restaurant workers were in blue, the landscaping kids were in brown—like Thomas, the kids in the bank were in a light gray and everyone’s uniform was altered slightly to suit whatever they were meant to be doing. It was a little unsettling. Doubly so because none of the workers were talking to each other at all or making that much eye contact unless it was necessary, and absolutely none of them were smiling. The vacationers, by contrast looked like they were having the time of their lives and regarded the workers as if they were extremely polite objects and ignored them completely.
"HEY."
You turn around, startled. An older man in black—the color the overseers wear—has stuck his head out of the door of a restaurant and is shouting at you from across the street.
"Where is your escort? Get back in the alleys with the rest of the laundry workers!"
The alleys?
You jog a little further down the road to a set of buildings tall and close enough to make an alley between them and skid to a stop, mouth agape.
Between the buildings, many children and teenagers, dressed in white, rushed swiftly and silently around a system of pulleys, ladders and wooden racks. The sheets, pillowcases and curtains clipped to the racks billow in the air sending fragrant puffs of scent out of the alleyway and into the streets. At the back of the alley, large stacks of steaming hot linens sit on platforms, snatched and passed upwards by the younger children to the older children that hang precariously high pinning the cloth to the racks.
Other laundry workers dashed back and forth along the edges of the buildings—where very little water dripped—carrying huge wicker baskets loaded with freshly dried clothes. The alley was so dense with activity that only small, golden glimpses of sunlight managed to filter through to the streets.
They worked moved like a well choreographed dance. In spite of all the activity, they were so very quiet that, beyond the flapping of the drying clothes, you couldn’t hear them. Every laundry worker was barefoot.
Before you can open your mouth to ask for help, a large muscular overseer dressed in black ducks out from beneath a rack. He presses his finger to his mouth and motions for you to follow him a ways away from the alley.
"Welcome to Laundry." His voice is a hoarse whisper and is very gentle."Do you know which faction you are meant to be working for?" he asks.
You do not and you tell him so. He looks contemplative for a moment.
"You can be with us then. No sense sending you halfway across the city when you’re already here. Sorry to pull you so far from the work, its just… we have to be quiet. Laundry workers are meant to be quiet." The overseer looks sad when he says this. As if something terrible had happened to him.
"I should start with the rules. We cannot wear shoes because shoes make noise and make it harder to grip the wood of the ladders and racks. You must learn your part in the shifting. If someone messes up, it throws the entire thing out of order. And you must not ever let anything clean touch the ground. The laundry is cleaned and boiled at the steamworks. Each morning we send two laundry workers to retrieve a cart with the laundry stacks. They will drop the laundry off here and the laundryworkers will drive the carts back. At the end of the day, everyone is so tired that the steamworks sends carts out to pick us up and take us to the sleep rooms so we don’t have to walk." The thought of that seemed to make him happy.
"May I see your hands?" he asks, pulling them up to see before you can even offer them to him. "You’re from the city then? No rough work there, I suppose…. Well, you get used to it. You hands will never be this smooth again. You should make peace with it. You have to make peace with everything here…"
Well that wasn’t a very comforting statement. The overseer didn’t seem like he noticed.
"This first year is freedom." He continued "You can move wherever you like. If laundry doesn’t suit you, you can always go back to processing and see what other positions have opened up. After the year is over, you’re trapped where you are. And nothing except the grace of god can pull you lose from your position. Do you understand?" The look he gives you is so deep and fraught with pain that it chills you, in spite of the desert heat.
"Good. Now, where would you like to start. Up high on the racks, or passing sheets with the little ones?
[[on the racks]]
[[passing sheets]]
You glance down at the map. The generator is all the way in the middle of the city. Ugh. You rub at your new hair self consciously and begin walking.
It really wasn’t a bad looking place now that you were actually inside. The buildings were all tall, new-looking and well maintained. There were many trees and bright green grass. The streets were immaculately clean. As you walked through, you also saw lots of restaurants and some sports centers, beautiful individual houses along side of the large apartment-like hotel buildings. The map Thomas had given you even featured a beach and some movie theaters, though they weren’t near the same path you were taking to work.
It was almost like a very small, very clean city.
There were quite a few families and couples walking down the streets, laughing and talking to each other. It would have been freakishly picturesque if it hadn’t been for the quickly moving, sullen children dashing back and forth, sweeping up the streets, pruning the flowers, washing the windows up high on scaffoldings. Some of the vacationers even had children next to them carrying their bags—very young children, no older than five or six. You took some of your walking time to stop and peek inside a nearby bank just to check, and were a bit surprised to see it was staffed entirely by children and teenagers as well.
Everyone was wearing different colored, neatly pressed uniforms based on their occupation. You were wearing dark grey, the restaurant workers were in blue, the landscaping kids were in brown—like Thomas, the kids in the bank were in a light gray and everyone’s uniform was altered slightly to suit whatever they were meant to be doing. It was a little unsettling. Doubly so because none of the workers were talking to each other at all or making that much eye contact unless it was necessary, and absolutely none of them were smiling. The vacationers, by contrast looked like they were having the time of their lives and regarded the workers as if they were extremely polite objects and ignored them completely.
"HEY."
You turn around, startled. An older man in black—the color the overseers wear—has stuck his head out of the door of a restaurant and is shouting at you from across the street.
"Where is your escort? Get back to generator! You lot always walk around like you own the place. If I catch you unaccompanied again, it’s 3 days in solitary!"
You walk quickly away from him and keep your head down until you finally reach the center of the city. As soon as you get near it, you don’t even need to use your map anymore. You couldn’t have missed this place if you’d tried.
It was a tall gold building covered inch to inch in brass and white marble, with an architecture style you’d never seen before in your entire life. You spend a couple seconds just staring at it because, you just can’t look away from all the pointed arches and the creative geometric supports on the stairs.
The door opens and a stern female overseer looks down at you.
"You must be our addition for today. Come in."
You follow the overseer into a sleek black lobby and down a matching black hallway. It is incredibly quiet and she makes no effort to speak to you. She opens a door and motions for you to go inside.
Instead of having many floors, the generator building just has one enormous room and in the center stands a tall vertical generator behind several protective panes of glass. Around the edges of the room, spiraling up towards the ceiling, there are ten balconies with one or two grey clad generator workers on each attending individual computer screens.
"This," The Overseer says "Is a dual purpose steam, electrochemical generator. Trolomite, our chief input, has both electrochemical and severe heat making properties. We stimulate its electrochemical proprieties through agitation and the introduction of water as a primary catalyst and thusly, we create energy as if from a standard electrochemical generator. The heat from such a reaction is used to fuel the steam generator. Ideally they would exist on a perfect balance, however, because of Trolomites rather violent proprieties, including but not limited to mild radiation and caustic build up, every aspect of the generator must be monitored closely, 24 hours a day every day for the foreseeable future."
The overseer gestures to the balconies.
"Unlike some of the other departments, all of our task-people are specialists and for that reason, there are only a few of us. There are two workers for each task and they sleep on a rotating schedule. You are to be the new generator manager. Your responsibilities include the dispersal of daily monitor reports on the generator’s activities to our mayor’s office every morning, checking the generator’s protective barriers for leaks, and responding to any and all human resource requests from generator task-people.
"As generator manager, it is your job to stay as close to the generator as possible, therefore you are unable to leave this building outside of your trips to the mayor’s office. As you see, a mat has been provided near the generator. This is where you will sleep. Do I make myself clear?
[[Yes]]
[[No]]Trolomite Miner
You glance down at the map. There is a large TM in bright red at the very edge of town near the steam works. That’s probably it… Ugh. You rub at your new hair self consciously and begin walking towards one of them.
It really isn’t a bad looking place now that you are actually inside. The buildings are all tall, new-looking and well maintained. There are many trees and bright green grass. The streets are immaculately clean. As you walk through, you notice there are lots of restaurants and some sports centers, beautiful individual houses along side of the large apartment-like hotel buildings. The map Thomas had given you even featured a beach and some movie theaters, though they weren’t near the same path you were taking to work.
It was almost like a very small, very clean city.
There were quite a few families and couples walking down the streets, laughing and talking to each other. It would have been freakishly picturesque if it hadn’t been for the quickly moving, sullen children dashing back and forth, sweeping up the streets, pruning the flowers, washing the windows up high on scaffoldings. Some of the vacationers even had children next to them carrying their bags—very young children, no older than five or six. You took some of your walking time to stop and peek inside a nearby bank just to check, and were a bit surprised to see it was staffed entirely by children and teenagers as well.
Everyone was wearing different colored, neatly pressed uniforms based on their occupation. You were wearing yellow, the restaurant workers were in blue, the landscaping kids were in brown—like Thomas, the kids in the bank were in a light gray and everyone’s uniform was altered slightly to suit whatever they were meant to be doing. It was a little unsettling. Doubly so because none of the workers were talking to each other at all or making that much eye contact unless it was necessary, and absolutely none of them were smiling. The vacationers, by contrast looked like they were having the time of their lives and regarded the workers as if they were extremely polite objects and ignored them completely.
"HEY."
You turn around, startled. An older man in black—the color the overseers wear—has stuck his head out of the door of a restaurant and is shouting at you from across the street.
"Where is your escort? And why are you still in the city? Get over to the miner’s station before they leave or you’re getting a week in solitary!" He shouts.
Leave? You pick up your pace to a brisk jog making it to the edge of the city just in time to see a couple of tired looking kids wearing the same color as you getting on to a shuttle bus. You sprint over and skid to a stop right before the driver closes the door in your face. Curiously, you note as you step onto the bus, the driver isn’t an overseer. In fact, as you make your way to your seat, you realize that you don’t see an overseer at all.
But, what is most pressingly noticeable is the other workers. They look awful. Every single one of them has what looks like rough red patches somewhere on their skin—mostly on their hands, arms, or faces. The kid sitting next to you is missing a finger. More than one is wearing an eye patch, and there is one kid in the back whose breathing sounds like he’s garbling marbles in the back of his throat. All of their skin is ashen with a slight yellowish tinge, and they all have very muscular arms. Most of them are boys, but there are some girls, and all of them look excessively tired.
And suddenly, with a welling horror more potent than the kind that you felt at the city gates, you realize that you may have picked the wrong job.
The shuttle takes you out of the city to a site in the desert less than a mile away. When you arrive, the workers file silently out of the bus and into the small square building. The driver, a kid who looks like he’s getting old enough to age out of the system, parks and follows.
The building consists of one large room with concrete walls and floors. It smells strongly of vinegar and steel. The walls are lined with lockers and there is a large metal door at the end of the room. The workers all go to their lockers and start putting on equipment- thick overalls with boots attached to the bottoms of the legs, plastic lined jackets that zipped up to the neck, large thick gloves, tightly woven head socks, hard hats and elaborate face masks.
Another worker who had finished dressing early taps you on the shoulder and pulls you to a locker. He or she jabs you in the chest with a gloved finger then taps at the locker, clearly indicating that this locker is now yours. They point to their hat, gloves jacket and pants, then gesture behind them at a big trunk of pants of various sizes—options in case the pants in your locker don’t fit you. Then, they turn around and point to a line that is rapidly forming in front of the door. You scramble into your gear. The head sock is incredibly scratchy and smells awful, as though it has never been washed. The boots are a bit tight, but you’re too nervous to go rummaging for new overalls. The mask makes it incredibly hard to see, but you’d rather not become one of those kids with eye patches so you put it on anyway.
Lost in a rictus of ill fitting uncomfortable clothes and awkward protective supplies, you shuffle into line with the rest of the workers.
After about two minutes, the door swings open and out comes a stream of other workers and a stench so abrasive that you can almost taste it, even beneath your mask. It’s sour and salty and metallic and so terrible it makes you want to rear back in disgust, but the line is moving and you’re forced to follow.
Behind the door is a huge elevator that could probably fit up to 50 people. The workers cram inside, packed tightly together, unheeding of personal space. The worker who showed you where your locker was — or at least you think it might be them— is standing next to you. He or she pats you on the shoulder, then presses your masks together briefly in an attempt to make you feel less alone or something, but it doesn’t work. It really doesn’t work.
The door slams shut, plunging the room into darkness and you begin your decent.
The ride seems to take ages, though it couldn’t have been more than a couple of minutes.The elevator clinks down jerkily like its being fed into the ground from a large chain link lead that someone is pulling manually, and the shuddering motions are terrifying. When it finally lands, it slams roughly into uneven ground and the door slides open to reveal something like you saw ages ago in Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, but about ten thousand times worse.
The mine is cavernous and smells so intense that your eyes immediately begin to water. There is very little light, and what there is comes from a bunch of lanterns on the ground that glow a dim green. Strewn all over the floor are shovels, hammers, picks and shovels. The workers all around you are picking them up randomly and testing their weight, or swinging them a bit before following the lantern trail into the dark. The kid who stood next to you in the elevator picks up a small pick and hands it to you. They grab a heavy looking hammer for themselves, then gesture for you to follow them.
As you get close to the lanterns, you realize that they’re not actually electric or candle-lit. They’re filled to the brim with some kind of lightning bug. It’s… really gross, kind of creepy, and not at all as good as electric light, but no one else seems to care.
The tunnel itself feels like it goes on forever. You’re walking for at least several city blocks. There are pathways branching off on the sides that some of the other workers file into, but your guide just takes you straight down the middle.
The main pathway opens up to a gargantuan mine that is swarming with workers. Studded in the wall are clumps of yellow green rock that the workers are prying out with picks or smashing out with hammers. Workers with shovels are tossing piles of the yellow rocks into carts, and emptying said carts into a giant drum. Yellow dust is settling all over everything and mixing with the dirt on the floor.
Your guide pulls you to an area where no one else is working. They motion for you to watch, then they hit the wall hard with their hammer. The dirt falls down pretty easily, and a small bit of yellow rock (trolomite?) peeks out from behind it. They use their gloves to pry the dirt from around the trolomite and toss it into a nearby pile. Then they grab your pick, and move to another part of the wall and dig the pic into the wall until they find another bit of trolomite, then they push away the dirt around it and toss it into the pile. The miner weighs both tools in their hands and shrugs. Apparently, it doesn’t matter what tool you use, as long as you get the mineral out. Huh. That little bit of freedom is kind of nice.
The miner gives you a thumbs up and pats you hard on your shoulder, then wanders off, leaving you alone in the dark corner.
You look around curiously, but you still don’t see an overseer. Everyone seems to be working away unsupervised. Also, now that you’ve had some time to adjust to the circumstances—you notice that there are a couple of workers without face masks or wearing just one glove. In fact, the person nearest to you doesn’t have a face mask on. She’s a girl about your age. Every so often she coughs hard and spits on the ground. To your extreme and mounting horror, you realize that she’s spitting out blood. She notices you watching her and smiles. Her teeth are stained red and the lower part of her face is marred with an angry looking rash.
Do you:
[[Nod hello]]
[[Look away quickly and begin your work]]You nod hello, and shrug.
The miner nods back. “Newbie, huh. Well, it doesn’t get better down here, but it does get easier.”
Her voice sounds awful—rough and wet like she’d been smoking for ten thousand years and then gargled some maple syrup after. You frown deeply, glad she can’t see your face behind your mask.
"Making friends is tough cause its so loud and no one talks" she continues "But we get breaks and there are no overseers so we can pretty much do whatever we like."
She Smiles again and goes back to her work. You follow suit, pick up your tools and begin.
After a while, you realize that it isn’t actually that hard.
The wall is solid, but any of the rock around the trolomite is dry and crumbly. If you find a lot of it in one spot, or a vein of the mineral, you can pretty much just scoop it out with your hands. Your pile is getting really big— not much smaller than the other miners—and you’re kind of proud of it.
Other than the awkward gear, terrible smell, itchy clothes, hostile coworkers, insufficient light and sub-par work conditions, this isn’t really so bad. There isn’t any homework down here. And there won’t be any midterms. There is no such thing as “gym”. And no one tells you what to do down here. As long as you get breaks and the food is good and where you get to sleep at night is comfortable, you might be able to live like this. Besides, since there are no overseers here, if you get bored of one thing, you can always just switch to another. Maybe try the shovel a bit, or go exploring down one of the other tunnels. This thought sustains you for a bit longer
Eventually your hands and back start to hurt. You stretch as much as you can in your stiff jacket and look around. Everyone else is still working steadily. Suddenly, it occurs to you: There is no way to track the progress of time down here. You comb the walls for a clock, but there isn’t one. They took your watch and cellphone with the rest of your things when you came in, so you can’t even rely on those anymore.
How could you tell how long you’ve been here? It felt like you’d been working for hours, but what if you’d only been here for a couple of minutes? How would you be able to figure out when your shift ended? Or when to go to lunch? Or when to leave?!
And there was no one to ask either. The girl nearest to you was nice, but you couldn’t really speak clearly with this stupid mask on your face. And the prospect of taking it off was unthinkable.
And what about the worker who helped you? How on earth would you be able to find them again?! Everyone looked the same in this stupid gear, you’d never be able to pick them out from the rest of the workers. And even if they weren’t wearing their gear, you’d never seen them without it, so you couldn’t figure out who they were that way either.
What if you never knew when your shift was over?
What if you accidentally stayed past the time the elevator went up and had to stay in the mines over night?
The prospect was overwhelming and standing there in the dark, surrounded by hundreds of strangers, you found that you couldn’t handle it. Your breathing was loud in your own ears. Your heart beat wildly. You couldn’t get it to stop. Your mask was fogging up. You were so hot. You couldn’t get enough air. There wasn’t enough air! The darkness was rushing at you faster than you could blink it away…
[[Do you yell for help?]]
[[Do you suffer silently?]]You look away quickly and begin jabbing your pick into the wall.
"Don’t look so smug." She spits "You’re not better than me. Don’t think this can’t happen to you, newbie."
Her voice sounds awful—rough and wet like she’d been smoking for ten thousand years and then gargled some maple syrup after. You shudder at the sound, and continue working.
After a while, you realize that this isn’t actually that hard.
The wall is solid, but any of the rock around the trolomite is dry and crumbly. If you find a lot of it in one spot, or a vein of the mineral, you can pretty much just scoop it out with your hands. Your pile is getting really big, not much smaller than the other miners, and you’re kind of proud of it.
Other than the awkward gear, terrible smell, itchy clothes, hostile coworkers, insufficient light and sub-par work conditions, this isn’t really so bad. There isn’t any homework down here. And there won’t be any midterms. There is no such thing as “gym”. And no one tells you what to do down here. As long as you get breaks and the food is good and where you get to sleep at night is comfortable, you might be able to live like this. Besides, since there are no overseers here, if you get bored of one thing, you can always just switch to another. Maybe try the shovel a bit, or go exploring down one of the other tunnels. This thought sustains you for a bit longer
Eventually your hands and back start to hurt. You stretch as much as you can in your stiff jacket and look around. Everyone else is still working steadily. Suddenly, it occurs to you: There is no way to track the progress of time down here. You comb the walls for a clock, but there isn’t one. They took your watch and cellphone with the rest of your things when you came in, so you can’t even rely on those anymore.
How could you tell how long you’ve been here? It felt like you’d been working for hours, but what if you’d only been here for a couple of minutes? How would you be able to figure out when your shift ended? Or when to go to lunch? Or when to leave?!
And there was no one to ask either. The girl nearest to you was pissed at you, and even if she wasn’t, you couldn’t really speak clearly with this stupid mask on your face. And what about the worker who helped you? How on earth would you be able to find them again?! Everyone looked the same in this stupid gear, you’d never be able to pick them out from the rest of the workers. And even if they weren’t wearing their gear, you’d never seen them without it, so you couldn’t figure out who they were that way either.
What if you never knew when your shift was over?
What if you accidentally stayed past the time the elevator went up and had to stay in the mines over night?
The prospect was overwhelming and standing there in the dark, surrounded by hundreds of strangers, you found that you couldn’t handle it. Your breathing was loud in your own ears. Your heart beat wildly. You couldn’t get it to stop. Your mask was fogging up. You were so hot. You couldn’t get enough air. There wasn’t enough air! The darkness was rushing at you faster than you could blink it away…
[[Do you cry out?]]
[[Do you suffer silently?]]Yes
You ask if there is any way you can be allowed to sleep with the rest of the group for the first night while you get used to things.
The Overseer goes ashen white and her lips tighten with anger. She marches over to where the cot is set up and whips the blanket off the neatly folded pile, tucking it under her arm. Now, all that’s left is the lumpy thin cot and an equally lumpy grey pillow. You can feel the other generator workers watching the scene play out, curiously.
"Do you have any other questions or requests?" She snaps.
Even though the situation is highly unfair and that was not even an unreasonable request, the pressure of the other workers’ gazes chastens you. You shake your head.
"Good!" she says, her eyes lighting up in cruel triumph. "The manual for the generator is next to your cot. The code to temporarily shut down the generator is 44335275. Without the code it must be shut down manually, so remembering the code is very important.The generator can be placed offline for a maximum of 3 hours before emergency supply kicks in, automatically. It needs an additional 30 minutes to begin producing energy at regulated levels, so time your response accordingly. I primarily function as security. I monitor who enters and who leaves and besides today’s interruption, and any following additions of staff, I will not be to this area of the building again. If you have any questions, you may refer to your fellow employees."
And with that, she turns on her heel and marches right out of the room.
As soon as the door closes behind her, a generator worker at the very top of the room rushes over to the edge of her platform and screeches “Oh my God. Oh my god, we haven’t had a new hire in agesss. I am so freakin’ excited. And you’re cute too! Jackpot.”
"Hey, do you know what happened at the end of "The Lawless Ranger"? They don’t let us watch TV in here and I haven’t seen anyone from the outside in a year." Someone else calls from over the edge of their platform.
The room immediately fills with workers yelling out requests and questions and agreeing (or disagreeing) with the first worker about your attractiveness.
"HEY! CAMERAS. GET BACK IN YOUR CHAIRS." A tall blonde girl shouts pointing at a big black circle on the ceiling. She hops over the edge of her platform and strides towards you confidently.
"Brittany Jones." She shakes your hand firmly like a CEO. "I’ve been here the longest, so technically, /I/ should be manager. But I’m the only right now one who can read the realtime spec graph Jenny puts out, so I’m stuck on platform one until I get the fuck out of here. How the hell are you?"
You mumble something about being okay, but you’re still a bit overwhelmed. Brittany just grins winningly. She reminds you of Regina George from Mean Girls.
"So," she says, steering you by your shoulders "I’ll show you around. This is the main room. There’s the hallway outside, and the bathrooms are to your left. We have the nicest bathrooms out of any of the Facility Departments— I mean, you should see the one in the Steamworks— disgusting. I had to work there for a month before they figured out I was brilliant and sent me over here. Between you and me, the minerals in the water were hell on my hair shafts. I was a fucking mess."
She herds you out of the room and down the left hallway into the bathroom. There is only one; and though there are multiple stalls, there is no differentiating at all for gender, which is kind of interesting and progressive for a dystopic hellspace like this terrible government run “easy fix-it” initiative city.
The door closes behind you and Brittany whirls around, suddenly dead serious.
"If you can get transferred. Do it." She says. "Sorry I had to drag you, but this is the only place there are no cameras or microphones. It’s easy to get away with things if they think the only thing you care about is bullshit, so get good at it. Now, I’m going to give it to you straight as quickly as I can before they realize we’ve been in here too long. There are cameras everywhere. They’re small, but once you figure out what they look like and where they like to hide them, you start seeing them all over the place. There are less microphones than cameras, but they really don’t need them. I’ve been in this department for 7 years, and in that time we’ve had 45 generator managers. The position has high turnover because the generator system is shit and dangerous and they keep dying of radiation poisoning. The manager before you? Dead. The one before him? Dead. The one before that was my sister. We came here together, and now I’m an only child. They transfer you if you suck at your job, but you can’t afford to suck here, so you have to figure out another way. Piss someone off, get sent to solitary, just get out of here as quickly as you can. Its too late for the rest of us, we’re indispensable. Without us watching and understanding the feeds, terrible things will happen. Now, the city is sectioned off into 4 different levels of security: lax, moderate, high and government. The generator hall and the mayor’s building are government level, so shit in here is serious as fuck. If you mess up in here and they think you did it on purpose, its considered unlawful endangerment of mass population—which is a fancy phrase for terrorism; and our city is almost like its own country according to US law—kind of like monsanto— and we do practice the death penalty. So keep on your f—"
Brittany stops talking and tilts her head, listening intently. Then she darts into one of the bathrooms and flushes the toilet and then turns on the sink.
"So keep on your feet because you never know who’s watching." she continues quietly "I have a friend in security who went to solitary for three weeks to learn and pass on to us all that they have over 200 overseers monitoring a fleet of security feeds 24 hours a day, seven days a week, indefinitely." Brittany glances at the door. "There’s no time, but we’ll talk more later. And for the love of /god/ don’t forget the generator password. 44335275. Say it with me: four four Three Three Five Two Seven Five. And no matter what happens, no matter what anyone says to you in the main room: Its all bullshit. We’re all in this together. Outside these doors, our world is an endless play that lasts for years. Where you can never take off your stage paint and you can never take off your costume." She flicks the bottom of your uniform.
"Get it? Perfect." she says grinning brightly, as gratingly perky as she’d been earlier. With the added perspective, the effect is absolutely terrifying. As Brittany turns and walks out, you look at the broadness of her shoulders and her athleticism begins to make sense. This is a person who is planning for something. Training for something big that she would have to endure. Who knew that she’d need every ounce of strength to fight it. You’re looking at a soldier.
"I mean seriously," she continues, walking out into the hallway, as if you’d been having a much different conversation in the bathroom "You wouldn’t even like the barracks. They call them sleeping quarters, but whatever. Its just like, not even easy to sleep there. And it smells like sweaty ballsack. Totally not up to my standards."
She flips her hair over her shoulder and steps back over into her platform.
"So, yeah, if you need anything else feel free to let me know. Otherwise, You can just read the manual or whatever. Our other generator managers would like, sleep and work out, but you can’t really leave so—get used to it. Okay? okay." Brittany says obnoxiously and turns around in her chair, opening up a graph on her screen.
You need a moment to process all of this. You stumble to sit on your mat. Is it really worth it to stay here and see if you can cut it in this room with such a high mortality rate and ten bazillion cameras? or should you walk out and do anything you can to get transferred?
Brittany seemed to know a lot of important information about living here and she’d said she’d tell you more later. But would such information be worth it when 40 people before him had literally died of radiation poisoning in this same job?
You stare at the manual resentfully as it lies innocently on your mat. All 600 pages of it, it looks like.
Do you
[[try to get transferred]]
[[read the manual]]You ask if there is any way you can be allowed to sleep with the rest of the group for the first night while you get used to things.
The Overseer goes ashen white and her lips tighten with anger. She marches over to where the cot is set up and whips the blanket off the neatly folded pile, tucking it under her arm. Now, all that’s left is the lumpy thin cot and an equally lumpy grey pillow. You can feel the other generator workers watching the scene play out, curiously.
"Do you have any other questions or requests?" She snaps.
Even though the situation is highly unfair and that was not even an unreasonable request, the pressure of the other workers’ gazes chastens you. You shake your head.
"Good!" she says, her eyes lighting up in cruel triumph. "The manual for the generator is next to your cot. The code to temporarily shut down the generator is 44335275. Without the code it must be shut down manually, so remembering the code is very important.The generator can be placed offline for a maximum of 3 hours before emergency supply kicks in, automatically. It needs an additional 30 minutes to begin producing energy at regulated levels, so time your response accordingly. I primarily function as security. I monitor who enters and who leaves and besides today’s interruption, and any following additions of staff, I will not be to this area of the building again. If you have any questions, you may refer to your fellow employees."
And with that, she turns on her heel and marches right out of the room.
As soon as the door closes behind her, a generator worker at the very top of the room rushes over to the edge of her platform and screeches “Oh my God. Oh my god, we haven’t had a new hire in agesss. I am so freakin’ excited. And you’re cute too! Jackpot.”
"Hey, do you know what happened at the end of "The Lawless Ranger"? They don’t let us watch TV in here and I haven’t seen anyone from the outside in a year." Someone else calls from over the edge of their platform.
The room immediately fills with workers yelling out requests and questions and agreeing (or disagreeing) with the first worker about your attractiveness.
"HEY! CAMERAS. GET BACK IN YOUR CHAIRS." A tall blonde girl shouts pointing at a big black circle on the ceiling. She hops over the edge of her platform and strides towards you confidently.
"Brittany Jones." She shakes your hand firmly like a CEO. "I’ve been here the longest, so technically, /I/ should be manager. But I’m the only right now one who can read the realtime spec graph Jenny puts out, so I’m stuck on platform one until I get the fuck out of here. How the hell are you?"
You mumble something about being okay, but you’re still a bit overwhelmed. Brittany just grins winningly. She reminds you of Regina George from Mean Girls.
"So," she says, steering you by your shoulders "I’ll show you around. This is the main room. There’s the hallway outside, and the bathrooms are to your left. We have the nicest bathrooms out of any of the Facility Departments— I mean, you should see the one in the Steamworks— disgusting. I had to work there for a month before they figured out I was brilliant and sent me over here. Between you and me, the minerals in the water were hell on my hair shafts. I was a fucking mess."
She herds you out of the room and down the left hallway into the bathroom. There is only one; and though there are multiple stalls, there is no differentiating at all for gender, which is kind of interesting and progressive for a dystopic hellspace like this terrible government run “easy fix-it” initiative city.
The door closes behind you and Brittany whirls around, suddenly dead serious.
"If you can get transferred. Do it." She says. "Sorry I had to drag you, but this is the only place there are no cameras or microphones. It’s easy to get away with things if they think the only thing you care about is bullshit, so get good at it. Now, I’m going to give it to you straight as quickly as I can before they realize we’ve been in here too long. There are cameras everywhere. They’re small, but once you figure out what they look like and where they like to hide them, you start seeing them all over the place. There are less microphones than cameras, but they really don’t need them. I’ve been in this department for 7 years, and in that time we’ve had 45 generator managers. The position has high turnover because the generator system is shit and dangerous and they keep dying of radiation poisoning. The manager before you? Dead. The one before him? Dead. The one before that was my sister. We came here together, and now I’m an only child. They transfer you if you suck at your job, but you can’t afford to suck here, so you have to figure out another way. Piss someone off, get sent to solitary, just get out of here as quickly as you can. Its too late for the rest of us, we’re indispensable. Without us watching and understanding the feeds, terrible things will happen. Now, the city is sectioned off into 4 different levels of security: lax, moderate, high and government. The generator hall and the mayor’s building are government level, so shit in here is serious as fuck. If you mess up in here and they think you did it on purpose, its considered unlawful endangerment of mass population—which is a fancy phrase for terrorism; and our city is almost like its own country according to US law—kind of like monsanto— and we do practice the death penalty. So keep on your f—"
Brittany stops talking and tilts her head, listening intently. Then she darts into one of the bathrooms and flushes the toilet and then turns on the sink.
"So keep on your feet because you never know who’s watching." she continues quietly "I have a friend in security who went to solitary for three weeks to learn and pass on to us all that they have over 200 overseers monitoring a fleet of security feeds 24 hours a day, seven days a week, indefinitely." Brittany glances at the door. "There’s no time, but we’ll talk more later. And for the love of /god/ don’t forget the generator password. 44335275. Say it with me: four four Three Three Five Two Seven Five. And no matter what happens, no matter what anyone says to you in the main room: Its all bullshit. We’re all in this together. Outside these doors, our world is an endless play that lasts for years. Where you can never take off your stage paint and you can never take off your costume." She flicks the bottom of your uniform.
"Get it? Perfect." she says grinning brightly, as gratingly perky as she’d been earlier. With the added perspective, the effect is absolutely terrifying. As Brittany turns and walks out, you look at the broadness of her shoulders and her athleticism begins to make sense. This is a person who is planning for something. Training for something big that she would have to endure. Who knew that she’d need every ounce of strength to fight it. You’re looking at a soldier.
"I mean seriously," she continues, walking out into the hallway, as if you’d been having a much different conversation in the bathroom "You wouldn’t even like the barracks. They call them sleeping quarters, but whatever. Its just like, not even easy to sleep there. And it smells like sweaty ballsack. Totally not up to my standards."
She flips her hair over her shoulder and steps back over into her platform.
"So, yeah, if you need anything else feel free to let me know. Otherwise, You can just read the manual or whatever. Our other generator managers would like, sleep and work out, but you can’t really leave so—get used to it. Okay? okay." Brittany says obnoxiously and turns around in her chair, opening up a graph on her screen.
You need a moment to process all of this. You stumble to sit on your mat. Is it really worth it to stay here and see if you can cut it in this room with such a high mortality rate and ten bazillion cameras? or should you walk out and do anything you can to get transferred?
Brittany seemed to know a lot of important information about living here and she’d said she’d tell you more later. But would such information be worth it when 40 people before him had literally died of radiation poisoning in this same job?
You stare at the manual resentfully as it lies innocently on your mat. All 600 pages of it, it looks like.
Do you
[[try to get transferred]]
[[read the manual]]Double-click this passage to edit it.Double-click this passage to edit it."Boiler? Right. Backbreakin’ work in the blazin’ ‘eat. Not what I’d’ve picked, but to each his own, I guess." Rudy scratched at his chin and scrunched his eyebrows together "Same thing as shovlin’ in the mines but ‘otter, basically. At least you’ll get to sit down though. Right, come with me."
With a wave of his hand, Rudy tromps deeper into the steamworks. You follow close behind.
The front room is bright and cheery with red painted walls and gleaming wooden floors. The air is heavy with steam and smells thickly of laundry detergent. Six gigantic washing machine towers, each the size of a three car garage, take up the entirety of the space. Five steamworkers hover around each washing machine; either waiting for it to complete a load, or shoveling in massive piles of sheets.
As Rudy passes through the center of the room, some of the kids wave or let out a lazy “Hi, mom.” as they work. Rudy waves back. A girl around 7 or 8 years old who had been pushing sheets up to the older kids, stops and runs across the room, throwing her arms in the air. Rudy picks the girl up and hoists her high on his hip.
“‘Ya comin’, Adeola?”
She nods and buries her little brown face in his shoulder.
“We‘re going to the boilers, ’ya still want to come? It’s ‘ot down there.”
She nods again. Rudy glances back at you and then shrugs. He pulls his hard hat off his head and plops it on hers.
“Now, you‘ll get some gear when ya start,” he says “But, today’s just orientation. So you’ll have to do with-oot fer now.”
He leads you down some dark stairs at the end of the room, the smell of laundry detergent is rapidly replaced by a smokey metallic scent and the clanging noises get louder.
“Boilers, work in the ‘ottest room I’ve ever been in. Management understands, so you can modify your uniform however ya like to deal with it. They just want ‘ye to keep movin, they only care if ya stop. Then they start pokin around and makin’ inquiries—ya don’t want that. Ya really don’t. See, ‘Ya get the job done, they don’t bother us none‘.” Rudy turns around and pins you with a sharp gaze. “Remember that phrase—very important…Now ’ya can get to anywhere from this stairwell. This is the main stairs. Tinkers and Slopworkers go to the sewers which is this floor right ‘ere. We’re goin a little lower where the boiler room and filtration system is. And even further below that, is the river. This whole city is sitting on top of a massive river, if ’ya can believe it. 50 meters below.”
He turns back again and presses Adeola’s head to his chest and covering her other ear with his free hand.
“Ya doon‘t. Go down there. Unless. Ya /have to/.” He says quietly, sounding more threatening and serious than you’ve ever heard him. “Doon‘t go near it. We’ve lost a hundred people to that river since I come to this place, and I don‘t mean to see any drown in the dairk while I’m overseer. Doon‘t even try. Ya get curious, ya come to me. Ya’ hear?”
You nod.
“Good.” He takes you down a couple more flights of stairs then veers sharply left.
"Ya go right, is filtration. Not much going on over there. Left, is boilers. Now, the city is self reliant, bein’ in the desert and all. And they doon’t like to spend money on us, because technically we’re an annex of the country.." Rudy stopped and adjusted Adeola on his hip "—a lot of people don’t know that, actually. That’s how they get away with all this. It’s proper strange. The mayor is basically our president… or king, I guess? And your ID doubles as a passport. They never tell you that in processing…. Anyway. The city is self reliant, no imports no exports. There’s no crude out here, obviously, and the energy from the generator all goes to powering the city,cause we can’t spare the trolomite on heatin’ water…"
As you walk down the hallway, the temperature increases a bit with every step. You can also hear muffled rhythmic shouting every so often. It’s… well, it’s confusing.
"—so then someone had the bright idea of just using people for it, since energy is energy. It’s not all bad down ‘ere though. Boilers are friendly-like, if you can get a moment to talk." Rudy pushes the door open and suddenly everything he’d said in the past ten minutes instantly makes sense.
The boiler room is a massive rowing fields. About 500 hundred kids sit, elbow to elbow moving in unison at individual rowing machines. Every time they pull back, the entire room gives a collective shout of effort. Its like something out of history, but weird and modern. It looks incredibly difficult and tiring, and the room is dangerously hot. Some of the kids have torn the sleeves off their uniforms. Others have taken their shirts off completely—including the girls, though no one is sparing them a second glance. Most of the boys have their hair up in tight buns, or braid crowns like Jagger, to keep it up off their neck. The girls have their shorn so close to the root their scalps are gleaming.
At the front of the room there is a large empty area where about a hundred kids are sitting or laying, catching their breath. There are faucets in every corner of the room and steel cups in a stack.
Rudy takes you over to the empty area and puts Adeola down on the floor. A couple of the resting rowers scoot over to intercept her, cooing and fussing over her kindly. Rudy uses the time to stretch his back and roll his shoulders.
“‘Ya work in shifts, 3 hours and then yer shift gets moved to the plains, which is this spot right ‘ere. 3 hours of work, 2 hours of rest and then 3 hours of work and so on until its time to go. Second shift period is lunch, whenever ya begin work. Unlike the rest of us, boiler workers get a super intense protein based shake, and water comes straight filtered here from next door. No deaths in this section since I come, but I wouldn’t know from before. It’s back breakin’ work, yeah— but healthy clean labor. Not like in the mines. Some of the boilers leave and become really successful athletes. We’ve even had a couple in the Olympics. I usuallycome down three times a week and put in a couple shifts beside ‘em to keep fit. They ‘ent doin’ it now, but sometimes they do chants or tell stories. More solidarity here than anywhere else, I think.”
Rudy clicks his tongue loudly and Adeola springs up and dashes back into his arms. He hoists her onto his back and she wraps her little arms around his neck.
"There are some seats open in the back if ya want to start now, but I’d wait with this group for a bit so ya can start new. If ya can’t keep up in a week, let me know and we’ll get you started with the tinkers. Good luck."
With a quick wave, Rudy and Adeola leave you standing awkwardly in the middle of the plains. Some of the workers look up at you, but no one says anything.
Do you
[[Try to get started rowing]]
or
[[sit down with the rest of the group]]"Tinker… tinker tinker tinker…" Rudy muses, rubbing his chin. "Ya know yer way around a wrench? agh, nevermind. You’ll learn. Follow me."
With a wave of his hand, Rudy tromps deeper into the steamworks. You follow close behind.
The front room is bright and cheery with red painted walls and gleaming wooden floors. The air is heavy with steam and smells thickly of laundry detergent. Six gigantic washing machine towers, each the size of a three car garage, take up the entirety of the space. Steamworkers of all ages hover around each washing machine; either waiting for it to complete a load, or shoveling in massive piles of sheets.
As Rudy passes through the center of the room, some of the kids wave or let out a quiet “Hi, mom.” as they work. Rudy waves back. A girl around 7 or 8 years old who had been pushing sheets up to the older kids, stops and runs across the room, throwing her arms in the air. Rudy picks the girl up and hoists her high on his hip.
"Are ‘ya coming Adeola?"
She nods and buries her little brown face in his shoulder.
"We’re going to the sewers, ‘ya still want to come?"
She nods again. Rudy glances back at you and then shrugs. He pulls his hard hat off his head and plops it on hers.
"Now, you’ll get some gear when you start," he says "But today’s just orientation. So you’ll have to do with-oot fer now."
He leads you down some dark stairs at the end of the room, the smell of laundry detergent is rapidly replaced by a smokey metallic scent and the clanging noises get louder.
"Tinkers; ‘ya get tools, gloves and boots. Yer gonna get wet and your tools’ll get lost, but the water breaks everythin’ down so fast here tha’ no one in management complains if we ask fer more. ‘As long as ya get the job done, they don’t bother us none’." Rudy turns around and pins you with a sharp gaze. "Remember that phrase—very important…Now ‘ya can get to anywhere from this stairwell. This is the main stairs. Tinkers and Slopworkers go to the sewers which is where we’re headed. A little lower is the boilers and filtration system. And even further below that, is the river. This whole city is sitting on top of a massive river, if ‘ya can believe it. 50 meters below."
He turns back again and presses Adeola’s head to his chest and covering her other ear with his free hand.
"Ya doon’t. Go down there. Unless. Ya /have to/." He says quietly, sounding more threatening and serious than you’ve ever heard him. "Doon’t go near it. We’ve lost a hundred people to that river since I come to this place, and I don’t mean to see any drown in the dairk while I’m overseer. Doon’t even try. Ya get curious, ya come to me. Ya’ hear?"
You nod.
"Good." He takes you down a couple more stairs then veers sharply right. You follow him down a hallway with a bunch of abandoned office rooms.
"Before Arthur designed the new mayor’s building, this used to be it. So there’s a bunch of corporate hallways left over. We’ve sealed most of them off, or gutted and re-purposed them—but this one we made into a shortcut to the sewers."
At the end of the hall is a heavy looking metal door. The floor slopes dramatically towards the door and foul smelling grey-ish water fills up the valley.
Rudy adjusts Adeola’s weight on his hip and digs around in his pocket in his pocket for a key. Adeola raised her pudgy little hand to her nose and pinches it. She stares at you curiously with her big black eyes. You smile back. She hides her face in Rudy’s neck.
Rudy kicks the door open and hops through the gap. He holds it open for you with his back. When you slip through, the door slams hard behind you.
"Now, this door is usually locked because tinkers and slopworkers stay down here all day. I doon’t open it til’ mornin’ to let them back in again. I know it sounds harsh, but since you can get anywhere in the city from down ‘ere and just pop up through a man hole, most steamworkers in the sewer just get out that way and head towards quarters at 10. Just a bit of freedom. S’nice."
The sewers are exactly as you’d imagine them to be, but cleaner (it doesn’t make them smell much better, though.) They are constructed entirely of concrete. Small white lights line the ceiling in a line that snakes off in many different directions and pathways.
"Now, what you’ll be doing is fixing pipes and problems. Sometimes they’re above ground, sometimes they’re underground. The wallshave maps that let you know where you are. When there’s a problem and a resident needs something fixed, the wotcher down here will pull a tinker or a slopworker from the roster and send them up or down or wherever they need to go to fix it."
You turn the corner and come upon a large, slightly elevated platform smack dab in the middle of a central diversion in the sewer streams. Sitting, or laying lazily next to a giant switchboard, are a couple of workers dressed in thick overalls with bulging aprons.
One of the girl workers kicks at the worker next to her and they jolt awake looking very dazed.
"Rudy?" they say, rubbing at their face."Haven’t been down this way in a while…"
Rudy hurrumps, in warning, side eyeing the worker ferociously.
"I was ‘opin to provide a good example for a shadow, but it looks like you lot’ll have to do." he said darkly.
He turns back to you. “This is Dallas and their sister Jane. They’ll both be takin’ you ‘round and givin’ advice and all that. Good kids, they are. When Dallas ‘ent sleepin’ and Jane ‘ent explorin’. To be honest though, I’ll take lazy over mischievous any day.”
"Don’t you know it." Jane says, grinning. She’s has a wide gap in her teeth.
"Yeah yeah. Grab some extra overalls and get to it. Say goodbye Adeola."
Adeola lifts her head and waves sleepilly.
Before you can dodge him, Rudy pats your head soundly, and strolls off into the dark… Leaving you alone in the sewers with the rest of the tinkers.
Dallas immediately gets up and sticks out a hand for you to shake. Even though they have short hair, you honestly can’t tell whether they are a boy or a girl. And now that you think about it, Rudy didn’t make any indication either. But, it seems rude to ask, so you just shake their hand.
"Mum isn’t so bad. Much nicer than our real parents, at any rate. He doesn’t come this way often because he’s got friends in the boilers. And the smell… really isn’t that great. So, we all understand. You get used to it though." Dallas shrugs their shoulders and twists their mouth into a grimace.
"It’s not nice to stare." Jane says threateningly, sticking her tongue between the gap in her teeth. "Just ask if you’re so curious."
"Shove off, Jane." Dallas shoots back. "Its hard to be new. You weren’t half as brave on your first day… But yeah. I guess it is a bit…" Dallas rubbed their head self consciously.
"Whatever, I’ll explain. When we first came in, the only jobs they had for boys was Miner, and I wasn’t frickin’ doing that. Like I really REALLY wasn’t interested. Plus, I was a tad younger… 13 I think, so I was pretty andro-looking. And my name "Dallas" is gender neutral—thank fucking Christ— so when I went up to the window, they actually had to ask. So, I just lied."
"Not many siblings get to work together," Jane continues, picking up where Dallas left off. "But they were hurting for miners after the huge collapse and for steamworks operators after the flood, so they were just funneling people every which way based on gender for at least a year, I think." Jane continues, picking up where Dallas left off.
"Yeah," Dallas agrees, "It was so stupid. Anyway, after 4 years of undercover-girl-duty, I just stopped caring … But you can call me she or he or whatever. I prefer she, just cause it keeps the overseers off my back, but I really don’t care. Rudy uses "they", as I’m sure you noticed. But really, 2 kids drowned yesterday, no one gives a fuck what’s in your pants around here. Especially because if you knock anyone up, they literally try to whip you to death."
"No, they changed it. You get made to be an overseer for ten years, now." Jane said contemplatively, picking at her teeth with some metal she found on the floor.
Dallas, swirled around to gape at her.”What? Really? Oh, I’d take that over a lashing any day. Aaannnny fricken’ day.”
Some of the other workers snickered and one covered his eyes.
"So! Who wants to get porked?" Dallas shouted into the depths of the sewer, unbucking her overalls theatrically. "Ten years in the chokehold for a chance at the no pants dan— whoa" Dallas cut herself off in surprise "The gay kids are /so/ lucky. Why did it take me so long to realize they get a free pass on that?"
"I don’t know." Jane snorted "We should be helping the new kid get ready to tinker before one of us gets—crap crap crap whyyyyyy."
"Really?!" Dallas groaned in exasperation.
Both Dallas and Jane’s pockets had begun blaring loudly. They each took out some weird key that was attached to the type of buzzer you usually get while you wait at the olive garden, and shoved their keys into the switch board. The switchboard responded by making ominous chunking sounds and spit out a small token.
"Town" Dallas said immediately, tossing the token up in the air and catching it between her teeth.
"Sewers. Ffff." Jane huffed in agitation. "They keep splitting us up. Every fricken’ ugh—Okay." She whirled around to face you and put a hand on her hip. "Basically, even though you were assigned to shadow both of us, they just sent us to completely different areas to work. So now you have to pick where to go. With me, deeper into this rot, or with Dallas up into the town?"
[[ Go with Jane]]
[[ Go with Dallas]]You wake up on your back in the trolomite mine lobby with the girl who you inadvertently insulted peering down at you, in disgust. Your mask is on the ground next to your head and the air feels cool on your sweaty face.
It’s still embarrassing.
She looks up at another miner who nearby who still has his mask on.
"What the fuck, Jagger," She rasps "You’re supposed to be taking care of the new hires. I had to drag this one all the way down the hall and up the elevator. Where were you? You’re supposed to handle this!"
She scowls at you for a second, then turns back to the miner.
"This kid can’t cut it in the mines. They’re weak. Luckily, they don’t have an orange mark on their ID, they’re not punishment class. And their ID is brand new so they must have just got here. The stupid SOB must have picked this job right off the bat. Take them to the steam works. Maybe they have some extra room over there…."
She narrowed her eyes at Jagger. ”And give me your mask while you’re at it.”
Jagger lowered his shoulders as if he had sighed deeply, then pried off his mask and helmet, handing them over with a resigned frown.
You stare at him.
You couldn’t look away if you wanted to. Jagger was quite possibly the most beautiful person you’d ever seen.
He looked like a model. Or like an elf from Lord of the Rings. Or like, a male version of a Disney princess, or something. Whatever it was, the intensity was a bit unsettling. His face was perfectly symmetrical, with wide bright eyes and dark eyelashes. He had the sort of chin and cheekbones you only see on heroes in paintings. His long black hair was braided into a sloppy crown around his head; tendrils whisping around his face like a lady from a goddamn Jane Austen novel. The effect was stunning— if not a bit ridiculous. But, in spite of it all, he was just as sallow and yellow as everyone else in the mines, and looked exhausted.
The girl notices you staring at him and rolls her eyes. “Every single time.” She mutters, snatching the mask out of Jagger’s hands and shoving it over her head, pausing to spit a wad of blood and saliva on the ground before she snaps it under her chin.
"He can’t talk." She tosses over her shoulder to you as she hops back into the elevator. "Good luck, kid."
Jagger picks up your mask and opens your locker, tossing it inside. He knew what locker was yours, so he was probably the person who helped you earlier. You scramble after him, pulling off your uniform and shoving it into the locker, trying not to watch as he steps out of his own gear.
The drive back is quiet. But it isn’t uncomfortable. It’s a lot easier to sit in silence with someone when you know that it’s not that they aren’t talking, but that they couldn’t talk even if they wanted to. Every so often Jagger looks over at you and smiles, or nods out at the desert with a twist of his mouth. Like he also couldn’t believe that he was trapped out here in this roasting wasteland either. You look at him and wonder what he’s doing here. Is he an orphan or is he a runaway? Back home, you’d heard that some kids were even born here. The miner seemed pretty nice, so if you asked him, chances were he’d probably have told you. But, you doubt he could manage to explain it in any amount of detail, what with the super basic sign language thing he had going on.
Jagger parks the shuttle back where you got on this morning, and leads you across the street to the steamworks. Its a massive square block of concrete with no windows and only one small door with the word “steamworks” embossed helpfully into the glass. He pushes the door open and ushers you inside.
The steamworks is incredibly loud with a deafening clanging, a mechanical hum and the churning of rushing water. Like the mines, most of the workers are teenagers and everyone looks pretty relaxed. Unlike in the mines, where everybody trudges around silently, the workers here are all talking and joking around.
Jagger puts two of his fingers in his mouth and whistles loudly over the din. Several steamworkers look up in curiosity.
"Oi! Is that you, mate?"
An overseer jogs over and whips off his helmet. He‘s young, the youngest overseer you’ve seen so far. Probably only 20 or 25. His hair sticks out crazily in all directions, like he’s been shocked, or has rolled himself wildly down a hill.
"Jagger!" He shouts happily, slamming the miner into a full body bear hug. “‘Ent been out of the dark in a while, love. ‘Ya need some sun. ‘Ya look a right mess." He tousles the miner’s hair playfully. Jagger shrinks away from him in mortification, and bats the overseer’s hands away, but still seems pleased.
"Who’s this, then?" The overseer says glancing over at you.
Jagger puts a hand on your shoulder and guides you forward. He points to himself and to the overseer and then crosses his fingers together and smiles. Oh. They’re friends.
Jagger tugs at the ID pinned to your uniform and the overseer takes a close look at it. The miner does an entertaining variety of arm motions and then points back at where he came from and crosses his hands in an “X”, shaking his head.
The overseer looks at you and raises an eyebrow.
"Wow. Kicked out of the mines… Well, we’ve always room down ‘ere. Second most dangerous job, ay. You workin’ yourself up the ranks? Getting all the hard options out of the way so ya can settle in a nice job like flower arrangin’ or city plannin’ without fear of being knocked down any? Proper, smart. Shoulda done that. Then maybe I wouldn’t be stuck in the pipes, with these wee buggers." He shouts the last part over his shoulder.
"We /love/ you, Mum." A passing steamworker retorts back obnoxiously.
"Yeah, yeah." The overseer grins fondly and lightly pushes the steamworker back in the general direction of the waterworks. Jagger rolls his eyes.
"They call me ‘Mum’; but the name’s Rudy." He explains a bit bashfully, sticking his hand out for you to shake. "Youngest Overseer in the garrison."
Jagger looks between you two as you shake hands, and deciding that his job is done, pats you hard on the back. He reaches for Rudy like he’s about to give him a hug goodbye—but licks him up the side of his face in one long slimy swipe instead. As Rudy screeches and wipes at his face, Jagger dashes out the door. The steamworkers all laugh.
Rudy looks down at his wet hand and grimaces.
"They would call him ‘Da," he says darkly "But that one’s trouble. And sometimes not the fun kind…. Now. Lemmie give you some background so we can get started. Steamworks— we do waterin’ tasks.We do cleanin‘ and filtration- bad water in, good water out. We got boiler positions if you like bein’ hot. We got tinkers who fix pipes and slop workers in the sewers. We got wotchers who wotch to make sure no one‘s fit to get hurt doin their job. And we got me, youngest overseer in the garrison. I make sure the wotchers are wotchin’, the boilers are boilin‘ the tinkerers are tinkrin’ and the slop workers get good scrubbin off at the end of the day.
“Now we all wear the same colors and you can move around from job to job in here for the first year, but after that point,you‘re stuck bein’ wet like the rest of us. We got two positions open right now: boiler or tinker. Now which is it?”
Are you a [[Boiler]]
Or a [[Tinker]]You wake up on your back, in the dark. You sit up quickly and look around. The mine is completely empty and silent. All the lanterns have been taken away. The only reason you can see even a bit is because it turns out that trolomite is slightly bioluminescent.
You’re alone.
And you’re terrified.
But the longer you stand there something begins to occur to you: it is completely silent, which means there aren’t any animals or people moving around down here with you, or anything else that could startle you in the dark. And you didn’t see any bugs when you were working earlier, so it’s not like that could rear its ugly head and make this worse. All you have to do now is get from the cavern to the main hallway and take the main hallway to that area that was sort of like a lobby, then buzz the elevator and get to the surface.
After that, it would just be a matter of finding the sleeping quarters. Honestly, at this point, you’d welcome running into an overseer if they could tell you where to find a real bed. Solitary, be damned.
You pick into the wall, pull out a piece of trolomite and use it to light your way.
It’s not that hard, but as you go you start to get angry. Why didn’t anyone wake you up? Where the heck is the nurse’s station. Did they even have one? What about that girl who was nearby? Why didn’t she run and tell anyone what happened? Why is there no protocol for when people get sick or hurt? Why in seven levels of hell wasn’t there an overseer to manage what was going on down here?!
This system was poorly designed.
You bump into a divider between two hallways. Two hallways.
Two hallways?! You didn’t remember there being two hallways when you came in?!
Maybe the main hallway doorway is larger… You pat around the edge of both halls, but they seem about the same.
Huh.
Trying not to panic, you untuck your head sock a bit to hear a little better and tilt your head towards each opening. The opening on the right is as quiet as the cavern. From the opening on your left there is a very quiet rushing noise, like the wind, or someone dragging a bag from really far away or something.
Which hallway do you go down:
[[Right]]
[[Left]]You let out a yell before falling to the ground.
The girl next to you steps over and smacks at the side of your helmet.
"Stop making loud noise. Its already annoying enough down here. Literally just figure out a thing to do down here and stop making me talk to you so much. Gosh." She looks disgusted.You sit on your cot and stare at the doorway.
You've got to get out of here.
But how?
Certainly someone has managed it, or Brittany wouldn't have suggested it in the first place.
You've only been here for less than an hour. Maybe you can just... ask to leave?
You peel open the manual.
"Generator Maintenance, Parts and Construction"
It appears to be written in incredibly dense technical jargon. You look up to the rest of the generator workers. Now that the excitement of your arrival has died down, everyone is facing their computer screens attentively.
You turn your gaze up towards the ceiling. 'There are cameras everywhere' Brittany had said. Now that she'd pointed it out, they were difficult to ignore. There was the huge one on the ceiling, of course. But there was also a camera at the front entrance by the doorway to the room. A camera in front of every work station and a several in the hallway that you'd remembered seeing from before you knew exactly what they'd looked like.
There was also one right in front of the generator, where you were supposed to sleep.
You look into it suspiciously, then turn back to the manual.
Two items are circled in the table of contents: "Safety" and "Functions."
Which do you read:
[[safety]]
[[functions]]
You make your way through the rowing fields to the back, where there are still a few seats left on an open bench.
You wrap your hands around one of the bars and fit your fingers into one of the groves that has been rubbed to a mirror like shine from use. The bar jerks your arms as the other rowers move it. The girl sitting next to you glances at you in confusion.
"If you're not going to help, go sit back on the mat for goodness sake." She gasps. "If you are going to help, then thank gosh. We need it. The bar is lighter with more people, and two kids on our team graduated last week."
You grab the bar and throw your back into rowing with the rest of them. It's not as hard as it looks, but it's definitely not easy-- especially keeping up with the pace.
After an hour of rowing you're starting to get dizzy. A boy in the row next to you gets up and passes you his cup of water.
"I could see you slipping. It's easy to get dehydrated in here. You need water
Double-click this passage to edit it.You decide to go with Jane.
"What?!" shrieks Dallas."I’m like ten thousand times more fun!"
Jane rolls her eyes. “Tough tomatoes. You’ll just show off the next one. It’s not like there will ever be a shortage of new people coming here.”
She waves for you to follow her down the dark sewers and you jog a bit to catch up.
"So. In the sewers they either send you upstairs or down stairs to get work done. The little chips we get tell us the address of the places we have to go. It doesn’t really matter who gets sent where, regardless of what Rudy tells you. The only thing that matters is that you get there in less than a half hour and that the job is done well when you leave." Jane says. "Its not hard. It could be worse."
She rummages in her apron and takes out a wrench and a roll of duct tape.
"Down here, mostly you just need duct tape to fix everything. We cover up leaks with that stuff you usually use for grout in bathrooms, then tape over it. If the leak is really bad, we might whip out a welding torch. But that’s pretty rare. Usually the problem is blockages. In that case, you either get it out with your hands or you look around for a shovel."
The deeper you go into the sewers, the louder the sound of rushing water gets. It smells metalic, and stale. The sewer pathway gets slimmer and slimmer until you’re walking in single file behind Jane.
"In case you were wondering," She says suddenly, "We’re walking above the river. There’s so much under these tunnels that no one knows about. About a month ago, we found a massive sandy clay deposit up north near the city gates. A year ago, someone stumbled upon a vein of silver. Its pretty cool."
Jane glances over her shoulder at you and grins.
"There are a bunch of us that like to go exploring." She says conspiratorily. "I mean, they left us completly unsupervised down here with a bunch of digging tools. What did they think we were gonna do? Dallas isn’t really into it— he thinks its too dangerous because of the river. But you can literally hear it all time time running in the walls. No one is going to pick axe a river wall. You’d have to be an idiot to drown in the sewers. I think Rudy just warns people aboout it to keep us in line. He’s nice, but he’s not the best authority figure, you know."
She leads you down a long staircase into a large room with a giant knotwork of intertwined pipes. It’s like a huge tree with a massive base pipe, raised out of the ground like a metal trunk, that splits into dozens of pipes that snake over and around each other
"This is one of a the water rooms we have down here. Water comes up through the base into the pipework using the current of the river. It gets filtered and strained, then heads off to the boiler. Each pipe does something different, I think. They never explain these things all the way to us. They just give us enough information to teach each other how to fix things. Its dumb, but what can you do." Jane shrugs. "Now, occasionally, the water pressure gets all weird and the temperature of the pipes needs to be altered to increase or decrease water pressure. Right now, the pressure is a bit too high, so I’m gonna turn down the heat of the pipe tree."
She guides you around to the back of the pipe tree to a pannel with many small and large gears. In the middle is a silver wheel that is almost the size of an entire person. On one side of the wheel, there is a C and on the other side, an H, just like a faucet. Jane wraps her arms around one end of the wheel and uses the strength of her entire body to pull the wheel. It moves over to the C side about an inch.
Jane backs away from the wheel and looks satisfied.
"That aught to be good enough. Any more and the change gets too drastic. All the rich people start whining about their precious showers not spraying water hard enough and then someone has to come down here all over again."
Do you want toYou hadn’t had much time to explore the town, so going with Dallas seemed like the better bet. Plus, she was way more fun, and you weren’t even sure if Jane liked you or not.
Dallas whooped with excitement and punched at the sky. She slung her arm around your back and dragged you off towards the light. Jane gave a rude gesture and disappeared into the dark.
"No worries. She’s only tough on the outside." Dallas said grinning. "Now, lets get you some gear. You get boots and overalls and a toolbelt if you want it. But today you’re not doing much, so just bring a wrench set and put on the clothes."
In the corner of the large platform, there was a bunch of discarded moist supplies. Dallas gathers some tools as you root through the gear looking for your size.
"We’ve been sent somewhere interesting today." She says slinging a heavy looking sash of tools around her chest. "And I’m surprised they sent me of all the workers. Must be a new overseer or something. I’m not the … diplomatic sort, as you’ve probably noticed. Bottoms up!"
She pushes you to the ladder leading up to the manhole and gives you a boost until climbing gets a bit easier.
Its a steep and long fall all the way down and you’re climbing at least 3 stories up to the top. You look over your shoulder and immediately wish that you hadn’t.
"No one falls much anymore" Dallas says, guessing at your thoughts. "When the height is less scary, its easier. You get used to it. And the gloves help….
Oh! We’re almost there. Pull the lever near the ladder down and the manhole will pop up a bit like a jar lid. Then all you have to do is push it out of your way… good. You’re doing good. Sweet. You’re a natural!”
When you finally manage to haul yourself out of the hole, after scrabbling on the sidewalk a bit, Dallas hops right out and gives you a hand up.
"Okay. Now this huge monstrosity right here is the mayor’s building."
You look up at one of the most unusual and startling buildings you’ve ever seen. The outside is bronze and steel that grows into each other, rising from the ground as naturally as a plant does from the soil. The metal oxidizes from green, up into gleaming silver as polished and brilliant as a mirror. The windows are glass that has been blown out between the metal almost as if the building itself was breathing.
"Prettiest shit I’ve seen since I got here." Dallas says firmly. "Did you know that it was actually designed by a kid who used to live here? His name was Arthur The Architect. He also made the generator hall and did a lot of the interior design in some of the nicer homes. Genius kid; kinda handsy, but really nice. It was the craziest shit, man. The whole city and all the overseers loved him, and we were all sure he would be the only one of us to ever get out of here early." Dallas wiped at her sweaty forehead with a grimy hand, then put her hands on her hips. "But then one day, he just disappeared. Ran away, probably. Or he could be dead. No one knows. He was just gone. Not even 17 years old yet…. It was a shame."
She gave a couple minutes for that information to sink in and rise to true horror while you both stood in the middle of the street, staring at the building.
"Well. No time to loose. Come on newby."
She tugs your through the front door and into the lobby. The room was spacious and white. All the workers inside wore trim black uniforms with gold pins on their lapels. Generic classical music played quietly and it smelled bright and fresh entirely unlike the dank moist sewer smell that hung around you and Dallas like a wet ugly blanket.
As you both approached the chrome receptionist desk, the receptionist— a girl with bright red hair who looked about 13— wrinkled her nose in disgust. She looked up and down at Dallas’s filthy wet uniform and mud encrusted boots, and pushed herself a bit further away from them.
"Don’t look at me like that." Dallas scoffed derisively, before the receptionist could even open her mouth too greet them. "You could just have easily wound up in the sewers as you did behind that desk. Now tell me where to go. I don’t have all day."
The receptionist pursed her lips.
"The pipes are leaking in the upstairs executive suite bathroom." She said "4th floor, door 413."
She slid a card key across the desk and snatched her hand away before she made any accidental contact with Dallas’s glove.
Dallas wordlessly snatched the the card and tromped loudly down the hall. You followed him closely. The further you went into the building, the more opulent it got. The elevators were gleaming bronze, inlaid with mirrors and more of that strange blown glass. They opened with a delicate pull handle that Dallas yanked entirely too roughly, and closed behind you both with a soft hush.
"They’re all like that in here." Dallas said, pointedly avoiding your eyes." Thinking they’re better than the rest of us outside, in the sewers and in the mines. They don’t fucking get it."
She reached forward and pressed the fourth floor button.
"For some people, getting to the best position in a corrupted system is the ultimate solution to oppression. For them its about status and gain—pushing others beneath them so they’re on the top of the pile of shit instead of wallowing in it. They’re more preoccupied with being at the front of the economy car in the train than they are about getting off the damn train to begin with. They’re so preoccupied with their status within their matrix of oppression that they make things harder and more terrible to the people they should be compassionate to the most. No matter who has the nicest uniform, or who has to smells like mold and dirt, or whose hands are the rawest or who doesn’t get to see the sun, all of us are orphans and all of us are stuck here. None of us got much choice in our position and none of us are better than anyone else. The best thing we can do is just make the best of it until either time, legislation or violence sets us free."
The bell dinged at the top floor.
Dallas turned to you and grinned. Her teeth looked crooked and sharp in the golden light, and her eyes had never looked so bright. She put her hand on the lever to open the door and stood blocking your exit.
"The thing is though— the thing they never thought about before they put us here and gave us these jobs—is that they’re teaching us skills. They think they’re teaching us potential job trades, but really, they’re teaching us to work together. They’re teaching us to be clever. We could slaughter them all and run the entire city ourselves, if we wanted to. We have everything we need. Bankers, plumbers, electricians, builders…"
Dallas looked wistfully up at the ceiling for a moment as if she was seeing and enjoying the idea, then she continued. ”But. You see, the thing… the thing that pisses me off the most about coming here, is that this place and the workers in it is a constant reminder that the plan would never work. The elitists kids that this system creates would never ever work together with sewer or mine filth like us, even for the betterment of all. I know I’m all sunshine, jokes, and fun times these days, but I was top of my class when—”
The elevator doors slammed open. Dallas jumped back and turned to face the large suited overseer looming in the opening.
"This elevator. Is not a toy. Get to where you need to be. NOW." He growled.
Dallas wasted no time at all and scurried underneath the overseer’s massive arms, dragging you forward by the front pocket of your overalls.
"Sorry sir. Right away sir." she yelled behind you both as you dashed down the hallway.
Dallas skidded to a stop in front of room 413 and knocked hard on the massive white door.
"Come in."
She pushed through the door, clunking loudly into a large room with gleaming wooden floors.
In the center of the room was a massive table. At the table was seated the largest amount of adults you’d seen since you arrived. They were all in black combat gear, densely muscled and looked annoyed. At the front of the table was a very tall very menacing looking woman with long blonde hair that she’s pulled back into a severe looking bun. She stood in front of a massive map of the city, and it appeared that she’d been interrupted from giving some sort of presentation. She was staring dead into your eyes.
"To the left and down the corridor. There’s water on the floor. You have an hour. Shut the door behind you, Dallas. And you there. Welcome to the city, I hope you enjoy your stay."
Dallas saluted the woman and pulled you quickly to the bathroom. She shut the door tight as requested and sighed in relief.
"Jesus. The receptionist could have let me know this was the guard’s room! Almost had a heart attack." Dallas looked over at you just to check if you were as rattled as she was, and seemed pleased with what she found "Yeah, that woman at the front? She’s leader of the guard. Did you see how she didn’t need more than a second to see that you were new? And she knew my name even though we’ve never met in person before! She’s the smartest and scariest person in the city. Besides the mayor himself and some of the kids in the Generator Hall, of course."
Dallas unbuckled her tool sash and tossed it on the sink.
"Now all the stuff in the city is made the same, since it was built in a little less than a year by the same company. Everything is easy to fix, in both the generator building and in here because they were built by Arthur and he actually cares about his fellow workers and designed the water system to be pretty easy. Everything twists into each other like k-nex and leaks are kept back with rubber sealing bands."
Dallas kicked open the cabinet under the sink and shone her flashlight inside.
"Yup. yeah, what I thought. They put so much garbage under the sink that it nicked the band and eventually it snapped. Ugh. Guards and overseers are such brutes."
She threw all the stuff under the sink inside the only area of the bathroom that didn’t have water on the ground.
"Now come here and watch."
She stuck the flashlight between her teeth and dove deeper under the sink, leaving a small sliver of room for you to see. She pulled a lever that had the words “Water Off” on it and removed the flaccid halves of the band from around the pipe. Then, she tightened the pipe section that had gotten loose with her wrench and tied off a new rubber sealing band around the joint of the pipe. Then, Dallas took a lighter out of her pocket and melted the rubber until it was seamlessly gummed around the joint.
"Normally, I’d just leave the band the way it was— tied on— but I think efficiency works better on military people than aesthetics. If they fuck this one up, I’d be very surprised." Dallas said dryly.
You help her pick up all the supplies from under the sink, and the both of you sluice the water up with some small towels Dallas had been keeping in his pack. The clean up took 5 times longer than the actual fix, but you both manage to get the job done in under an hour.
Dallas quietly leads you out of room 413, but you can feel the Captain of the Guard’s eyes on the back of your neck.
"Not a lot of things break in the city in the waterways, The system is top notch. And though I would generally prefer everything be easy to work with like Arthur’s work always is, the general piping is more similar to what’s on the outside—at least in America. So if I ever did want to become a plumber, I could totally get a job with it…." Dallas said, as she pried up the man hole and slipped inside. "Anyway, mostly we just hang out down on the platform. It’s not a bad gigWhat is the Generator's code:
[[44335275]]
[[43435725]]
[[44435257]]
[[44335575]]You quickly punch in the numbers. The generator screeches deafeningly and slows to a stop. The lights in the generator hall flicker and then go off.
The meltdown has been averted!
You sigh in relief and slump down next to the generator, resting your head against the glass.
You've saved the entire town.You quickly punch in the numbers, but the system beeps loudly and rejects the sequence. You punch them in again and again, but you've forgotten the code completely and there's no one around to help.
A small fire breaks out at one of the desks. You punch in the code again, and the generator keypad beeps angrily then shuts off completely. Your skin begins to itch terribly as more radiation escapes the generator's inner chamber and floods the room.
You wipe the moisture from your stinging eyes and peer through the glass. At the very back near the middle of the cycling cylinder is a manual off switch.
You could break the glass and go inside to turn it off. The radiation will definitely kill you. But you'll save the whole town.
do you:
[[go inside and turn it off]]
[[run away]]You quickly punch in the numbers, but the system beeps loudly and rejects the sequence. You punch them in again and again, but you've forgotten the code completely and there's no one around to help.
A small fire breaks out at one of the desks. You punch in the code again, and the generator keypad beeps angrily then shuts off completely. your skin begins to itch terribly as more radiation escapes the generator's inner chamber and floods the room.
You wipe the moisture from your stinging eyes and peer through the glass. At the very back near the middle of the cycling cylinder is a manual off switch.
You could break the glass and go inside to turn it off. The radiation will definitely kill you. But you'll save the whole town.
do you:
[[go inside and turn it off]]
[[run away]]You quickly punch in the numbers, but the system beeps loudly and rejects the sequence. You punch them in again and again, but you've forgotten the code completely and there's no one around to help.
A small fire breaks out at one of the desks. You punch in the code again, and the generator keypad beeps angrily then shuts off completely. your skin begins to itch terribly as more radiation escapes the generator's inner chamber and floods the room.
You wipe the moisture from your stinging eyes and peer through the glass. At the very back near the middle of the cycling cylinder is a manual off switch.
You could break the glass and go inside to turn it off. The radiation will definitely kill you. But you'll save the whole town.
do you:
[[go inside and turn it off]]
[[run away]]Double-click this passage to edit it.You dash out of the building as quickly as you can but before you make it all the way down the stairs, the generator explodes.
Fire rolls out in a massive wave
When you get sent to 300 you get sent to "solitary". or Jail and your adventure ends there.You turn to the chapter titled "Safety"
While the type and language of the book continues to be indecipherable, someone has scratched out most of the text in pen and written new notes:
"Hahahaha. Safety? No one is safe. You're not safe. I'm not safe. Everyone in this room has very mild radiation poisoning. And god help the kids in the mines. There's a reason the overseers never go anywhere near either of these places.
The generator is an electro-nuclear reactor. Powered by a mineral that barely anyone properly understands. The safety protocol suits were abandoned because of some poorly considered bureaucratic decision to make everyone wear "color coordinated uniforms." And anyone who knows most of the important information about this department either dies early or leaves.
Even when you graduate, the physical damage of working in this department is irreversible. And filing a complaint with the mayor and council doesn't do shit. 3 generations of generator workers have already tried that. They don't care.
They just don't care."
Underneath the notes the original text reads:
5.10. The operating organization should ensure that adequate resources are
available to implement the safety policy. This should include the provision of safe operating plant, the necessary tools and equipment, and a sufficient number of competent staff (supplemented as necessary by consultants or contractors,
including plant vendors). In particular, sufficient resources should be ensured to carry out activities in a safe manner, avoiding undue physical or mental stress on individuals.
5.11. The operating organization should demonstrate a commitment to achieving
improvements in safety wherever it is reasonably practicable to do so as part of a continuing commitment to the achievement of excellence. The organization’s
improvement strategy for achieving higher safety performance and for more efficient ways to meet existing standards should be based on a well defined programme with clear objectives and targets against which to monitor progress...(p 17, IAEA SAFETY STANDARDS SERIES The Operating Organization for Nuclear Power Plants INTERNATIONAL ATOMIC ENERGY AGENCY VIENNA, 2001)
Do you:
read [[functions]]
[[try to get transferred]]
[[read until bedtime]] You turn to the chapter titled "Functions"
While the type and language of the book continues to be indecipherable, someone has scratched out most of the text in pen and written new notes:
"This generator has 3 primary functions: Converting Power, Sustaining Power and Exporting Power. While this model was originally designed to be powered on coal, several modifications have been made to allow for this city's increasing demand for energy.
As you may know, the primary fuel is trolomite, a radioactive igneous rock that is mined from the desert patch outside the city. The generator uses the trolomite's electromagnetic and radioactive properties simultaneously by agitating the rocks at high speed to creating a thermal reaction. It then uses thermal energy to power itself so it can continually agitate without need for supplementary power.
Because of this, it has a base storage of power that remains constant and untouched, in the case of a shut down. The result of excess agitation, is a fierce nuclear reaction that supplies the generator with electrical energy, which is then exported in massive quantities outwards from the center towards the rest of the city. The generator powers everything except for the steam works and the boiler.
The water filtered through the generator is processed through a secondary condensation chamber which changes the steam back into water and sends it rushing back towards the steamworks. The heat left over is also generated into energy through the use of thermocouples that convert the heat into electricity.
If you are reading this, I assure you, that there is very little you can do to fix any of these things if they break. This is a job that was designed to be monitored by many people with advanced degrees, not one kid with a switch, some gloves, and no parents. I'm not sure how many people are responsible for this, but when I was here, it was no less than five. The job needs at least two people, but with the way things are...
Anyway.
If the generator ever overheats, you turn the blue knob on the right to supply more cool water. If there seems to be something wrong with it that has nothing to do with it overheating--unless you're a nuclear physicist and can figure out exactly what the problem is--, just shut the system down. If you can't get past the code, there is another switch beyond the safety barrier.
If you shut down the generator, they call someone from outside the city to inspect it. So don't shut it down for a stupid reason or they'll send you to solitary"
Do you:
try to [[read until bedtime]] so you can learn all you can to survive.
read [[safety]]
You spend hours picking through the generator manual. Its tedious and exhausting, but you're determined to learn as much as you can. Sometimes, making the best of a bad situation rewards you in the end. And there is literally nothing else to do but read the manual, write in the manual, sleep or work out.
Eventually, the clock strikes nine pm and a loud beeping alarm goes off.
"Finally!" one of the workers on the top level groans.
With very little warning, she hops over the railing and lands 6 feet down on the platform below her with a loud bang. She fearlessly leaps from that platform and flips in the air on her way down, falling 12 feet in less than a second. She uses the railing of the third platform as a swing bar off her flip, then launches herself at the second platform near the ground.
All the other generator workers watch with mild interest, but otherwise don't seem surprised. No one seems at all concerned about her doing gymnastics 50 feet from the ground without a mat in sight. You watch in impressed, silent horror.
The generator worker somersaults in mid air, outstretching her hands just enough to grasp wrists with another male worker on the second platform. He swings her around a couple of times, using her own momentum to slow her speed down a bit, then lets her go. She rolls to a crouch on the floor, completely unharmed and slams her hand down on the red button on the ground right below the clock.
The beeping stops.
Everyone claps politely, and starts gathering up their things and climbing down the stairs.
"Great work, Maria." Brittany barks. "Nice use of teamwork. Good catch, Tao-liang. I'm going to need a bit more dexterity from the both of you next time. Really go all out."
Maria and Tao-liang hug and clap each other on the back, while everyone else files out of the room.
Brittany is last to leave. She tucks her side bag under her arm and makes her way back over to the generator.
"I know you're new," she says in that same voice she's using as a cover. "But we do routines in here. Its like cheerleading--but without anyone to see us. It gets boring and we get breaks sometimes, you know? And no one's complained or told us to stop yet so... Well, anyway. Have a good night!" She shakes your hand firmly, cramming a small bit of paper into your palm, then leaves.
You crumple the scrap in your hand and look up at the camera.
Do you:
[[go to the bathroom and open the note]]
or
[[continue reading, just in case anyone saw]] you don't want to get in trouble this early in the game.
As soon as the generator hall goes quiet and you're sure everyone's out of the building, you rush to the bathroom and open the note.
Typed on a small bit of receipt paper, under a few calculations says:
-They bring your dinner at 9:10pm, we go to bed in the dormitories at 10pm, the city shuts down at 11pm and reactivates at 6am. The hours between 11 and 6, the streets are crawling with Minute Men--the city's security. Don't try to run. See you tomorrow. 1121-
1121?
You flush the paper down the toilet, then pretend to wash your hands for a couple minutes. By the time you make it out of the bathroom, your dinner is already sitting on your bed in a plastic container.
Its a surprisingly good looking vegetarian stew with a slice of freshly baked, crusty bread. After a couple of bites, you decide that its definitely restaurant quality and begin to wonder whether you get fancy food because you're living in a solitary radiation trap and they feel sorry for you, or if everyone else gets to eat the same thing.
After dinner do you:
[[Go to sleep]]
[[Decide to take a look around]]You tuck the piece of paper into the pocket of your uniform and pick up your copy of the manual again.
The door to the Generator hall opens and closes loudly. You gaze at the doorway in confusion. You hadn't been told that anyone else would be coming back to the facility. Maybe it was Brittany and that's what her note had been about.
You dig the paper out of your pocket, and start to open it, but before you can read anything a small Indian girl in a blue and white striped uniform with little blue hat walks into the room.
She's carrying a plastic container with some plastic silverware balanced on the top.
She smiles politely, places the container down on the mat next to you and opens the top. Inside is a bowl of steaming vegetable soup and a crust of what smells like freshly baked bread. Its much better than what you thought you'd get. You hadn't noticed before but you're absolutely starving. You haven't had anything to eat since that sandwich you ate on the bus over. You thank her.
The girl extends her hand towards you and you reach forwards to shake her hand politely. At the last second girl tugs her hand back an inch and quickly writes something on your palm with her finger tip.
You look back at her in confusion, so she does it again.
"NEW?"
You nod back.
She points to herself and then writes on your hand again.
"NO TALK."
They don't allow her to talk. Or both of you to talk to each other. Okay.
"U B OK" She writes. Then she puts her first two fingers together and taps on your palm.
Tap
Tap
Tap-Tap
Tap
Then she smiles, squeezes your hand warmly and then leaves.
You look down at your hand and then back at the empty doorway.
Do you:
[[Eat your soup and go to bed]]
or
[[Decide to take a look around]]
Morning comes quicker than you thought it would. The rest of the generator workers file in around 6:30 in the morning. They put their stuff down at their desks, then make their way back down the stairs.
Brittany walks over and pats you on the back.
"Morning! Technically, we're not set to begin work until 8. Overseers get up around 7, so we have some free time before we have to actually get started on checking specs. The cameras and mics are still on and recording, but there isn't anyone actively watching them so we use this time to train. We do some sprints and then work on individual exercises."
Now that you're not so nervous anymore, you can get a good look at the rest of the workers. Everyone in the entire facility is really fit. Or at least more fit than someone who sits in front of a screen for hours at a time should be. All the workers are stretching or jogging in place.
Maria from yesterday is bandaging up her hands. She catches your gaze and grins.
"Hey! New manager! You ready for some sprints?" She asks, with a friendly smile.
You most certainly are not, but you let her tug you into line up with the rest of the workers.
Brittany strides to the front of the line and turns to address her staff.
"Alright everybody, we'll be going through some jumps today We've got to work on dexterity. Soft parts, hard hearts, and all that. We'll be doing a chant jog today, instead of sprints. Bolster up that enthusiasm!" She turns and starts to lead the room around in a circle. " One One two one, one one two one, one one two one...." The rest of the workers take up the chant as they jog.
Maria swerves over by you and begins talking quietly.
"We're doing a chant jog today so that the mics can't hear me over everyone else, so listen closely. We're glad you're here, manager, but you caught us at a bit of a weird time. We're setting up to do a protest later this week. Brittany will update you more later. Anyway The minutemen--security, are armed and dangerous, but they're slow. If we're stronger than them and quicker than them, we might have a chance at fighting and dispersing them. There are only 200 or so and less than 50 within city limits at any given time."
As you jog past a mic, Maria falls silent, and pointedly looks away from it and the camera near it. When you pass the area, she begins again
"So, we have a chance. We're trying to see if we can bolster some of the other groups to fight with us. And then we're going to escape into the desert. We need to be fit to survive, if we manage to escape" She nods up towards the front of the group.
"The first couple of kids, until that red head-Andrew, they're all fighters. From Andrew back to the row behind us, are all runners, and from the row behind us all the way back are weight lifters-- to carry people if they faint. We..."
You jog past the mic again and Maria looks away.
"We don't know where you fit into this, but Brittany will look after you. She's got a trust fund waiting for her outside the city if she can make it to 19. So either help, or stay out of our way when things get hairy. And when we're ready to go, we'll grab you on the way out. Got it?"
You nod.
Maria slaps you on the back, then joins in the chant.
"One one two one. one one two one."
You jog with the rest of the group until its time for individual training. The groups break up into the distinctions Maria pointed out earlier.
Weight lifters group up in the corner near the exit, runners begin doing burst sprints in the hallway, and the fighters begin a series of choreographed exercises. Brittany breaks from the group of fighters and bounces over. She grabs your hand and pulls you into the bathroom.
"Oh my god, I completely forgot to show you your shower and stuff!" She says loud enough for the mics to hear, before the door slams behind you.
"No seriously, though. I forgot to show you." She says, her voice dropping at least an octave as she slips off her persona. Brittany takes you to the very back of the bathroom and opens the door of large stall with high walls. Inside the stall is a small black vanity sink with a mirror, a shower-head, and a rack with several more grey uniforms on it.
"Your extra uniforms are here. When you're one uniform from having no clean ones left, let one of us know, and we'll take them to the dorms with us. They'll go into laundry there, and we'll bring back a new set the next morning."
Brittany sighs hard.
"Its nice isn't it. You get your own bathroom, and someone brings you food, and you don't have to live in the crowded dorms. I've heard people use to fight over the position back in the beginning. Now people literally cry when they learn they get stuck with it. Well. If they know what they're getting into, of course.... No offense." She grimaces.
"Anyway, Maria's given you an update on the situation. But, let me fill in some details. All of us in this department have marketable skills. If you'd had enough time to learn the generator, you could probably get hired overseas, no problem. A lot of us in the tech fields are this way. Some of the accountants at the bank could probably get work too. Not that they have the time to organize and do anything about it, though. They don't really get breaks, like we do.
"Basically, what I'm trying to say is that if we get out, we all have a chance at survival. I have a couple of weeks until I turn eighteen and inherit my fortune. Then, anyone who helps will get a cut, and we'll get work overseas-- where we won't have to worry about overseers and won't be freaking dying all the time. We're planning on storming the gates in three days, this Friday after work. We have to get through the desert and the guards first, though." Brittany says determinedly.
"The ride from here to the nearest town takes about an hour at between 40-50 MPH" She continues. "So, walking that should be about 12 hours. Which is why we're leaving at night. If we make good time, we could be there by 9 or 10 in the morning the next day... You were unexpected. We didn't think they'd find a replacement so soon after Adrian's passing, so you kind of caught us all by surprise and we've got to get you updated as quickly as possible--so if every time you talk to anyone here, it feels like a huge info dump it totally is. I don't know if you've ever seen a minuteman, but we really don't have room for mistakes. Speaking of which, we've been in here too long."
Brittany swivels on her heel and steps out of the stall. You follow her back into the generator room, where the rest of the generator workers are finishing up their training.
"Okay. Three days, everybody. I want you to--" She starts
"Overseer." Maria hisses.
Everyone scrambles back to their desks, and turns their computers back on. You look around, quickly, then hurl yourself onto the mat, snatch up the manual, and open it to a random page. Just as the last worker slides into his chair, the front desk overseer steps into the room.
She's just as pinched and mean looking as you remembered from yesterday. She looks around at the generator workers suspiciously for a moment before settling her gaze on you.
"No talking." She hisses."You're not here to socialize, or exercise. You're here to work."
Now, this is ludicrous because not only have you barely said a word since you arrived, but you've done the least amount of exercise of nearly everyone in the room. But, you wisely don't comment on it. You just nod and hope she goes away.
The overseer glances around again for good measure, but eventually she leaves, plunging the room back into silence.
Just like yesterday, no one talks for hours. The only sounds are the clicking of keyboard keys and the quiet printing of receipt tape. The generator itself is very quiet as well. It produces a continuous muffled grinding and a mechanical hum that makes you more sleepy than anything. Its very very boring. Worse than being at school. And the concept that you're being watched at all times doesn't help.
Around noon, an indian girl in a blue and white striped uniform pushes a large cart of plastic meal containers into the room. She hands them off one by one to Brittany who passes them down the row, and up to the higher levels until the cart is nearly empty.
When there is only one tray left on the cart, Brittany and the meal girl hold up their palms. Brittany shifts so that her back is to the largest camera, but you can still see what she's doing. The meal girl reaches out with her pointer finger and swirls something onto Brittany's upraised palm. Brittany swirls something back, and then begin a strange, silent back and forth. After a while, the girl nods, hands the last container over to Brittany and then pushes the cart out of the room.
Brittany brings over your meal container and places it on your mat. Like yesterday, its a very well cooked meal of fresh creamy mashed potatoes with a rich herbal gravy. Tucked under the container is another slip of receipt paper.
-- We want to take you to stay overnight at the dormitories. You'll leave with the group at 9pm: Yes or No --
[[Will you go]]
Or [[Stay ]]You quickly finish off your soup then get to your feet.
There was too much about being in this building that made you really uncomfortable to consider staying. Maybe you could blend in with one of the families that came out here to vacation and escape. Or try to make it to the job selection office place and try to call one of your extended family members to see if anyone could please please take you in.
Or maybe you'd get captured and sent to solitary like Thomas, and get a chance at a different job when you got out. Either way, it's better than dying of radiation poisoning after sleeping in front of the generator for a couple years.
You pack up your dinner supplies, fold up your cot and walk right out the door.
The generator hall is completely dark outside of the main room. Without the overseer or other employees, the silence of the building feels more peaceful than oppressive. The lobby area is still as a tomb. The only remnant of the overseer is her copy of People magazine that she left on the desk.
After only a second of hesitation, you push open the door.
Outside, the air is fresh and crisp. Your heart pounds loudly in your chest, but the only noises around you are from the families playing and enjoying the resort from over on the other side of downtown, where the restaurants are. The rest of the sidewalk is completely abandoned. No overseers, no workers. It's unsettling. Like being at Disney world before anything is open.
You begin walking quickly and quietly. Not too fast, because you don't want to draw attention to yourself, but quick enough to get away from the Generator Hall and a bit closer to the commercial areas.
You catch a glimpse of the clock above the bank. 10:50pm.
You melt even deeper into the shadows, and keep on your way towards the Orientation Building.
It's strange walking past families and couples and having them ignore you completely. And not in the way that people generally ignore each other in the streets back home. More like the way you'd ignore a potted plant on the windowsill of a room you walk into, or a shopping cart sitting in the middle of a parking lot.
You even accidentally make eye contact with a woman. But after a brief assessment of your uniform, she looks right through you.
You thought you would stand out more, seeing as you're the only employee still out, but apparently not. You relax a bit and continue walking.
After a while, things start to look a bit more familiar, and you know you're getting close. You pick up your pace.
"HEY. WHERE IS YOUR ESCORT."
"HEY!"
You turn around. A young man-- too young to be an overseer but way too old to be an employee-- walks out of an alley you just passed. He's dressed in black from head to toe, wearing plastic armor and a kevlar vest. The man begins walking towards you threateningly. Do you:
[[Run]]
[[wait for him to reach you]]
You eat your soup and go to bed.
Morning comes quicker than you thought it would. The rest of the generator workers file in around 6:30 in the morning. They put their stuff down at their desks, then make their way back down the stairs.
Brittany walks over and pats you on the back.
"Morning! Technically, we're not set to begin work until 8. Overseers get up around 7, so we have some free time before we have to actually get started on checking specs. The cameras and mics are still on and recording, but there isn't anyone actively watching them so we use this time to train. We do some sprints and then work on individual exercises."
Now that you're not so nervous anymore, you can get a good look at the rest of the workers. Everyone in the entire facility is really fit. Or at least more fit than someone who sits in front of a screen for hours at a time should be. All the workers are stretching or jogging in place.
Maria from yesterday is bandaging up her hands. She catches your gaze and grins.
"Hey! New manager! You ready for some sprints?" She asks, with a friendly smile.
You most certainly are not, but you let her tug you into line up with the rest of the workers.
Brittany strides to the front of the line and turns to address her staff.
"Alright everybody, we'll be going through some jumps today We've got to work on dexterity. Soft parts, hard hearts, and all that. We'll be doing a chant jog today, instead of sprints. Bolster up that enthusiasm!" She turns and starts to lead the room around in a circle. " One One two one, one one two one, one one two one...." The rest of the workers take up the chant as they jog.
Maria swerves over by you and begins talking quietly.
"We're doing a chant jog today so that the mics can't hear me over everyone else, so listen closely. We're glad you're here, manager, but you caught us at a bit of a weird time. We're setting up to do a protest later this week. Brittany will update you more later. Anyway The minutemen--security, are armed and dangerous, but they're slow. If we're stronger than them and quicker than them, we might have a chance at fighting and dispersing them. There are only 200 or so and less than 50 within city limits at any given time."
As you jog past a mic, Maria falls silent, and pointedly looks away from it and the camera near it. When you pass the area, she begins again
"So, we have a chance. We're trying to see if we can bolster some of the other groups to fight with us. And then we're going to escape into the desert. We need to be fit to survive, if we manage to escape" She nods up towards the front of the group.
"The first couple of kids, until that red head-Andrew, they're all fighters. From Andrew back to the row behind us, are all runners, and from the row behind us all the way back are weight lifters-- to carry people if they faint. We..."
You jog past the mic again and Maria looks away.
"We don't know where you fit into this, but Brittany will look after you. She's got a trust fund waiting for her outside the city if she can make it to 19. So either help, or stay out of our way when things get hairy. And when we're ready to go, we'll grab you on the way out. Got it?"
You nod.
Maria slaps you on the back, then joins in the chant.
"One one two one. one one two one."
You jog with the rest of the group until its time for individual training. The groups break up into the distinctions Maria pointed out earlier.
Weight lifters group up in the corner near the exit, runners begin doing burst sprints in the hallway, and the fighters begin a series of choreographed exercises. Brittany breaks from the group of fighters and bounces over. She grabs your hand and pulls you into the bathroom.
"Oh my god, I completely forgot to show you your shower and stuff!" She says loud enough for the mics to hear, before the door slams behind you.
"No seriously, though. I forgot to show you." She says, her voice dropping at least an octave as she slips off her persona. Brittany takes you to the very back of the bathroom and opens the door of large stall with high walls. Inside the stall is a small black vanity sink with a mirror, a shower-head, and a rack with several more grey uniforms on it.
"Your extra uniforms are here. When you're one uniform from having no clean ones left, let one of us know, and we'll take them to the dorms with us. They'll go into laundry there, and we'll bring back a new set the next morning."
Brittany sighs hard.
"Its nice isn't it. You get your own bathroom, and someone brings you food, and you don't have to live in the crowded dorms. I've heard people use to fight over the position back in the beginning. Now people literally cry when they learn they get stuck with it. Well. If they know what they're getting into, of course.... No offense." She grimaces.
"Anyway, Maria's given you an update on the situation. But, let me fill in some details. All of us in this department have marketable skills. If you'd had enough time to learn the generator, you could probably get hired overseas, no problem. A lot of us in the tech fields are this way. Some of the accountants at the bank could probably get work too. Not that they have the time to organize and do anything about it, though. They don't really get breaks, like we do.
"Basically, what I'm trying to say is that if we get out, we all have a chance at survival. I have a couple of weeks until I turn eighteen and inherit my fortune. Then, anyone who helps will get a cut, and we'll get work overseas-- where we won't have to worry about overseers and won't be freaking dying all the time. We're planning on storming the gates in three days, this Friday after work. We have to get through the desert and the guards first, though." Brittany says determinedly.
"The ride from here to the nearest town takes about an hour at between 40-50 MPH" She continues. "So, walking that should be about 12 hours. Which is why we're leaving at night. If we make good time, we could be there by 9 or 10 in the morning the next day... You were unexpected. We didn't think they'd find a replacement so soon after Adrian's passing, so you kind of caught us all by surprise and we've got to get you updated as quickly as possible--so if every time you talk to anyone here, it feels like a huge info dump it totally is. I don't know if you've ever seen a minuteman, but we really don't have room for mistakes. Speaking of which, we've been in here too long."
Brittany swivels on her heel and steps out of the stall. You follow her back into the generator room, where the rest of the generator workers are finishing up their training.
"Okay. Three days, everybody. I want you to--" She starts
"Overseer." Maria hisses.
Everyone scrambles back to their desks, and turns their computers back on. You look around, quickly, then hurl yourself onto the mat, snatch up the manual, and open it to a random page. Just as the last worker slides into his chair, the front desk overseer steps into the room.
She's just as pinched and mean looking as you remembered from yesterday. She looks around at the generator workers suspiciously for a moment before settling her gaze on you.
"No talking." She hisses."You're not here to socialize, or exercise. You're here to work."
Now, this is ludicrous because not only have you barely said a word since you arrived, but you've done the least amount of exercise of nearly everyone in the room. But, you wisely don't comment on it. You just nod and hope she goes away.
The overseer glances around again for good measure, but eventually she leaves, plunging the room back into silence.
Just like yesterday, no one talks for hours. The only sounds are the clicking of keyboard keys and the quiet printing of receipt tape. The generator itself is very quiet as well. It produces a continuous muffled grinding and a mechanical hum that makes you more sleepy than anything. Its very very boring. Worse than being at school. And the concept that you're being watched at all times doesn't help.
Around noon, the same girl who delivered your dinner last night pushes a large cart of plastic meal containers into the room. She hands them off one by one to Brittany who passes them down the row, and up to the higher levels until the cart is nearly empty.
When there is only one tray left on the cart, Brittany and the meal girl hold up their palms. Brittany shifts so that her back is to the largest camera. Like yesterday. They quickly run through a fingertip conversation, and then the girl leaves.
Brittany brings over your meal container and places it on your mat. Like yesterday, its a very well cooked meal of fresh creamy mashed potatoes with a rich herbal gravy. Tucked under the container is another slip of receipt paper.
You decide to read this one, this time.
-- We want to take you to stay overnight at the dormitories. You'll leave with the group at 9pm: Yes or No --
[[Will you go]]
Or [[Stay ]]
Yeah. Nope.
You turn back around and begin sprinting.
"Hey? HEY. RUNNER! WE HAVE A RUNNER" He screams into his walkie-talkie as he jogs behind you.
You dash through a group of people, and everyone screams, diving out of your way. You're going as fast as you can, but you can hear him gaining on you. You duck into an alley and make a U turn towards the generator hall.
The alleys are crammed tight with all of these wooden slats and blankets, so you shove yourself out of sight behind some of the bracken. After a couple of terrifying moments of silence, you realize that you've lost him.
You wait a couple seconds more, then you slowly untangle yourself from the clutter. A hand grabs your wrist and wrenches you out from behind the blankets.
Another man you don't recognize, in the same uniform as the one you managed to evade, looks you up and down.
"Generator." He hisses, then punches you in the head.
Everything goes black.
turn to page:[[300]]The best way to get out of situations like this is to play it cool, so you turn around and try to look at normal as possible.
The man catches up to you and wordlessly rips the badge off your uniform so he can hold it close to his face for easy inspection.
"Generator Manager." He says darkly. "Leaving the generator unsupervised is a potential nuclear hazard. I'm going to have to take you in for mass endangerment and attempted terrorism."
Attempted terrorism?! Well, that's serious overkill. You open your mouth to protest, but before you can even draw breath to speak, the man punches you in the head and everything goes black.
[[Jail]]
You wake up in a large room with about 100 other kids. The first thing you notice is the smell.
The air is thick, sour and horrible like a gym lockeroom that hasn't been cleaned in over a decade. When the alarm finally buzzes at 9pm, the nearest worker quickly turns it off without any excess excitement. Brittany signs off of her computer and nods for you to join the group. You look around nervously, but get up from your cot and join the line.
Maria, who is almost as tall as you are stands on your right. Her eyes flicker over you quickly, but aside from that, everyone else acts as though nothing unusual is going on.
You move as a unit through the hallway and past the overseer who is asleep at the front desk. When the door of the generator hall closes behind the group, you audibly gasp in relief.
"shh" Maria hisses curtly. She softens the reprimand by linking her pinky around yours for a brief second. You're surprised at how reassuring the gesture is, even though you're still weirded out by all this casual touching that the generator workers seem to do.
You can't think about that for long, though because you're immediately distracted by the massive migration going on around you.
Workers in white stream out of the alleys in lines of three, groups of workers in green come in a rushing tide from your right and workers in beige come from your left. Workers in lavender hop down the stairs of some of the houses and workers in light pink dart out of the stores and restaurants. Workers in navy file in straight lines from some administrative buildings and workers in hot pink pop up individually in between all the rest of the colors.
Suddenly, a few yards ahead of you, a manhole cover comes flying open and workers in filthy red uniforms climb out from underground. All the groups give the workers in red a wide birth for obvious reasons. They smell so strongly like sewer that you struggle not to cover your nose. After about 20 minutes of walking, workers in yellow join the group and the smell grows infinitely worse.
Everyone wrinkles their nose and a few people cover their mouths or pinch their nostrils. No one in the generator group shields their face or reacts in any way.
You turn to Maria in disgusted confusion.
"Miners." she says, shrugging a muscular shoulder. "That's what raw trolomite smells like. It powers the generator. Those guys are technically our coworkers. they're laying down their lives to power the city, so treat them with respect."
In theory, you get it-- the nose covering is definitely rude. But it's so hard to keep from reacting at all from the spicy metallic stench. Someone near you literally throws up, so you know you're not being overly sensitive.
The entire rainbow of staff flows like a river towards the north east, traveling outside of the limits of the commercial and residential area to a new section of the city you've never seen before. The road narrows to one massive pathway between what appears to be several blocks of greenhouses. The buildings are large plastic and glass frames, clouded over with condensation. They are almost entirely organic structures that seem to be made from actual desert sand that probably blown into the glass framework. You can see the shadows of people moving inside them from the outside. Its miraculous and gorgeous, but no one else seems to be paying attention to it at all. Meanwhile, workers in forest green file out from behind the heavy plastic of the greenhouses to join the rest of the group.
Maria notices you staring and says "Oh yeah, they're kind of cool, right? They were designed by Arthur, the same kid who designed the generator building. He was some genius who made a lot of stuff here. He disappeared a couple years ago, though, so we won't get any more of his work. It was nice when he was around though... I hope he's okay." She looks wistful.
Nice isn't exactly the word you'd use for something that clearly deserves national attention. Or to describe the tragedy that is a kid who should be making millions of dollars working for a successful architecture firm, but is instead "missing" or locked up in a city full of orphans. But, okay.
As you continue towards the dormitories, the road tapers from driving pavement into hard packed gravel.
All of the workers move as a unit towards a large white building at the end of the road. Everyone is so tightly packed together, that you couldn't turn around or change directions even if you wanted to. The doors are pushed open by the sheer force of the crowd. Brittany turns and grabs your hand so you don't get swept away from your group.
The dormitory is painted white and looks almost like a prison. Or at least like the prisons you've seen on TV. The ceilings are very high and the floors are made of polished concrete, but that's all you can really see because it's so crowded.
"Dinner is first, then showers." Brittany shouts over the noise. "We separate by genders after a while, but we'll be back together by morning. Just stick to anyone in gray."
The crowd pushes you into a massive room with a many rows of gleaming wooden tables. The tables are unusually slim--just wide enough to hold a plate on either side-- and attached to a long bench that's rooted to the floor. The crowd splits as the workers divide up by color in their eating sections, red with red, yellow with yellow, gray with gray.
Brittany pushes you onto the nearest bench and you begin the arduous process of scooting down to let more people get on until the bench is completely filled.
The room is barely settled into their seats before the plastic containers begin flying down the tables from an end so far on the other side of the room that you can barely see who's sending them.
The plastic containers shoot down the table. When they slow down the nearest person to them gives them another push until the last person at their row without a container has one in front of them. It's a remarkable act of patience, coordination and cooperation that speeds the process of distributing dozens of thousands of meals to the staff considerably.
Finally, after almost ten minutes of passing, you get your container. Dinner is a fresh salad with bitter exotic lettuce, topped with a light vinaigrette and garlic croutons. You're starting to think that the food in here is better than anything you've ever had back when you were living with your parents. Including the occasional trips to expensive restaurants and the really good meals like Christmas and Thanksgiving. Its good, but really suspicious. You've read books about dystopias and horrifying compounds, and ridiculously awesome food was NEVER a part of the deal.
This must be made by some of the other working staff. At first, you thought meals might just be leftovers from whatever the rich people hadn't eaten. But the food was clearly grown on site. From what you've seen so far, you're starting to think the city is completely self sufficient. If the generator is creating power, and the food is made on site, water must be coming from a nearby source. It was too early to tell, but with these three resources taken care of, there was no real reason to import anything major.
"Hurry up and eat," Brittany scolded. "You only get ten minutes before we have to get in the shower line."
You finish off your salad as quickly as possible, shoving a couple of croutons in your mouth as your end of the table starts standing up. Everyone seems to be leaving their containers on the table so you follow suit. The line of workers funnels out of the eating area and into a large hallway. As you walk, the mass of workers starts separating into boys and girls, girls, with short hair on the left and boys with long hair on the right. Some of the boys have their hair in intricate knots or braids to keep it out of the way. They're all undoing it as they walk and combing through it with their fingers. Some of the older kids have very young children riding their shoulders to protect them from the crowd. Up ahead the hall splits into two.
Do you follow
[[Brittany]]
or
[[Tao-liang]]
When the alarm finally buzzes at 9pm, the nearest worker quickly turns it off without any excess excitement. Brittany signs off of her computer and nods for you to join the group, but you shake your head.
Maintaining the generator is too important for you to leave it alone.
Brittany raises an eyebrow as if to ask if you're sure. You shake your head again and nod back at the generator.
She shrugs and everyone files out of the room.
Exactly at 9:10, the Indian girl comes back to deliver your dinner. She shakes your hand, taps it weirdly on the palm, and then leaves as silently as she appeared.
This time, dinner is a fresh salad with bitter exotic lettuce, topped with a light vinaigrette and garlic croutons.
You're starting to think that the food in here is better than anything you've ever had back when you were living with your parents. Including the occasional trips to expensive restaurants and the really good meals like Christmas and Thanksgiving.
Its good, but really suspicious. You've read books about dystopias and horrifying compounds, and ridiculously awesome food was NEVER a part of the deal.
What if they were just giving workers the excess food the rich vacationers didn't finish eating? Like they scraped it straight off their plate and into these containers. Honestly, it was probably something worse than that, considering that this was the sort of place run by people that didn't balk at subjecting growing children to radiation.
You finish up your food and get ready for a long night of sitting in near silence by yourself. You curl up on the mat and close your eyes.
After maybe an hour or so, you're awoken by a loud whirring noise. The generator's small square maintenance screen is bordered in yellow that's slowly fading to orange. A warning notification flashes: LOW COOLANT, REFRESH COOLANT SOURCE. You snatch up your copy of the manual and look up the section on coolant. Okay. You can do this.
You open the main menu on the maintenance screen.
-- select coolant source. switch from east hydropump to west hydropump, warm/cold? Cold.--
The screen immediately turns green as the generator accepts your command, then fades back to its neutral black.
You stare in horror at the blank screen. Your hands are shaking.
You're very glad you decided to stay here tonight instead of going to visit the dormitories. You have no idea what could have happened if you hadn't been there to regulate the cooling issue.
It shakes you so much, that you don't manage to fall asleep at all that night.
When the other workers file in in the morning, you go straight to Brittany and tell her what happened.
She looks very concerned.
"Its been doing that pretty often lately. I think it might need to be fixed by someone from the outside soon. But, that won't matter. So don't worry about it." She says, pressing her lips together in determination.
Some of the other generator workers are watching and listening curiously, but just like before, they eventually go back to work.
Do you:
[[Tell the overseer about the problem]]
[[trust that Brittany knows what she's doing]]
You follow Brittany down the left hallway. The hall takes a steep dip down the stairs and turns sharply right into a long large concrete room with water raining from the ceiling.
The line slows down as the workers begin stepping out of their clothing as they walk.
"Pass your clothes to the left as you go." Brittany shouts "There are holes in the wall that lead down towards laundry, who sorts and washes them. If you're ever next to the wall, take the clothes you get and toss them down the hole."
Its horrifyingly awkward to remove your uniform in front of thousands of strangers, but no one else seems to be having any issues with it. They just look exhausted and like they're in a hurry.
The line presses relentlessly forward until you're under a shower of soapy astringent water. The entire ordeal is not unlike a massive car wash and you say as much to Brittany. She laughs.
"I've been here so long I've gotten pretty used to it." She grins." Its better than the orientation showers at any rate. At least its just girls in here. I'm pretty sure those are some kind of punishment."
As you press slowly forwards the water changes from a soapy rain to a warm rinse. You brush the soap bubbles off as quickly as you can and steadfastly attempt to avert your gaze from almost everything there is to look at. Brittany's candor helps, but while she is not talking, the seconds drag on like hours and this is still awful.
As you file forwards, the water peters off and hot air blows out from the vents. It is not even slightly enough to get you dry and just reminds you that you're out in the desert.
White outfits are being passed back from the front. Brittany gets hers first and hands you yours. It's a "one size fits all" cotton onsie with long shorts and a zipper that goes all the way up to the neck. Whoever decided on the design for this this couldn't have picked something uglier and more gender neutral if they tried. Once you've gotten your onsie on, you're expected to pass them backwards as you walk. The entire ordeal takes a literal eternity and by the time the crowd pushes you through the doors of the shower area and up some more stairs, your hands are completely dry and a bit rough from touching so much cotton. Brittany, grasps for your hand again as the crowd goes up another flight of stairs. You're so desensitized and overwhelmed from the whole experience that you barely even register it.
The stairway eventually opens up into a massive room about the size of an Olympic gymnasium. Along the floor, inset into a person sized rectangle in the wood floor, are mats identical to the one you slept on back in the generator hall. At the end of each mat is a sheet that is tucked into the ground and spread over the top of the mat.
At the far end of the room about 10 feet off the ground is a small window where an overseer sits. He surveys the sleeping quarters as everyone scrambles to bed.
"ONE PERSON TO EACH COT. ONE PERSON TO EACH COT." He drones over the loudspeaker.
Some of the girls groan and one shouts "Piss off."
Brittany rolls her eyes, but grins. "They can see us, but they can't hear us very well. As long as nothing crazy is happening, they leave us alone" she says. "Come on and lie down in the cot by me. Something cool is gonna happen."
As soon as everyone is settled and horizontal, the lights go down with a loud buzz. The only light left is a dim green glow from the overseers window. It's barely enough to see Brittany's bright blonde buzzcut in the dark.
There is a little bit of talking at first, but eventually it settles into calm and quiet. Brittany reaches across the foot long wood space that separates your cot and fumbles around for your arm. When she finds it, she pulls your hand off the cot and presses it to the floor.
Nothing at first.
Then slowly you can hear it.
Tap... tap.... tap-tap...tap. Tap... tap.... tap-tap...tap. Tap... tap.... tap-tap...tap. Tap... tap.... tap-tap...tap.
"One one two one. One one two one. " Brittany whispers. She lets go of your wrist and taps along with it.
You raise your head off the mat and look around. As the sound travels, all the workers slip an arm or hand off their mat and join in on the tapping until the noise crescendos into a rousing march of sound. The wood and mats vibrate under the onslaught of so many thousands of fingers tapping. The noise echoes and rebounds off the concrete walls. It shivers sensation down to the root of your teeth.
Brittany stops tapping so she can grasp your hand. She tugs you closer until you can hear her talking.
"See how many of us there are? This many people can save themselves if they work together. This many people can change the world." she says fiercely.
"Years and years before we came here," Brittany continues. "They would only do this on days when someone died. My sister told me that someone told her that in every group, if someone died, you would start tapping so that the rest of the workers would know it was time to mourn. They weren't allowed to talk at all back then, so it was really the only way to communicate that between a large group of people at once. But the way things are... After a while, there wasn't a single night without the need to tap out someone's death. Now, its just tradition. The dead are too many to count. We tap to remind ourselves that we are alive. So we can feel and hear how many of us there are. To remind each other that we are many, and that we are all in this together."
One, One, Two, One. One, one, two, one.
"QUIT WITH THE DANG TAPPING. EVERY GOSH-DANG NIGHT. JESUS." the overseer gripes through the loudspeakers.
The tapping dies down almost immediately. The room goes quiet but you can still kind of hear it.
"That's just the boys. They sleep upstairs." Brittany whispers.
They eventually stop too and the room falls to silence. After about an hour, a deafening noise roars through the room. Then, a wave of heat washes over followed instantly by a brief blink of excruciating pain. Before you can even begin to scream, the world goes black.
---------
How did I die?
The Generator exploded because you left it unsupervised.
Well, you can't go with Brittany, so you look around for a guy to follow. You spot Tao-liang, the generator worker who had been doing what looked like parkour with Maria back at work, a couple feet away, mixed up with some of the miners. He has his bushy black hair in a top knot and looks kind of like an Asian Buddy Holly. He catches your eye and waves you over.
"Hey!" He exclaims, pushing his thick glasses up on his face. "New manager! We haven't gotten much time to talk before! I was the guy who asked about The Lawless Ranger when you first got here. Do you watch that show? Before I landed in here there were rumors Fox was going to cancel it and I don't know anyone newer than you so-"
"What, you not going to introduce us? I am hurt. I am completely wounded." Shouts one of the miners in a gravelly hoarse voice.
"I cannot ever even get a word--you know what? Fine." Tao-liang points at the miners one by one. "This is James, Godfrey, Will, Jerome, Pao, Allie, and Jose. All of them are assholes. Now tell me about Lawless Ranger."
"No one cares about Lawless Ranger! You're holding up the shower line!" One of the kids in red who smells heavily of sewer shouts.
You don't know anything about the show Tao-liang is talking about, and you tell him as much.
"Oh my god. Is this real life? Is this really happening to me? You're the first new person in our department since the day I got here and I can't even get a decent update." Tao-Liang groans as the crowd pushes you both forward.
You follow Tao-liang and the crowd down the right hallway. The hall takes a steep dip down the stairs and turns sharply left into a long large concrete room with water raining from the ceiling.
The line slows down as the workers begin stepping out of their clothing as they walk.
"Okay, Listen up before you do anything weird. Don't look at anyone for too long. And also, throw your clothes to the left so someone can shove them in the laundry hole." Tao-liang shouts. Jerome, the only black miner in the group you just met, whips off his shirt, rolls it into a rat tail and hits Tao-liang in the stomach with the end of it. Tao-liang shrieks theatrically and smacks Jerome on the back of the head.
"Behave yourselves, miners. We have company." He says sternly.
Despite the clear atmosphere of camaraderie, its still horrifyingly awkward to remove your uniform in front of thousands of strangers. No one else seems to be having any issues with it. Other than Tao-liang, the miners, and the kids from the sewers, everyone else just looks exhausted.
In spite of all the shouting and playing, the line presses relentlessly forwards, until you're under a shower of soapy astringent water. The entire ordeal is not unlike taking a shower in a massive car wash. When you point this out, Tao-liang laughs loudly.
"Hey guys,' he yells. "Who else feels like you're at the car wash?"
A loud chorus of "ME", follows, and someone all the way at the front screams out "You might not ever get rich. But, let me tell you it's better than digging a ditch!"
"But we do dig ditches." Someone else shouts in response. "That's my whole job. Ditches every day."
"Everyone knows that Barry, shut up, it's a song." Comes from somewhere to your left.
"NO TALKING IN THE SHOWERS." the loudspeaker blares, and everyone covers their ears as the sound bounces off the tile walls.
"How does that guy not know that song?" Jerome mutters. "Not enough black people up in here."
"So, you want /more/ black people in here, Jerome?" Tao-Liang scoffs. "Yeah, I don't think so. How about no people in here. How about that. Lets try that on for size."
As you press slowly forwards the water changes from a soapy rain to a warm rinse. You brush the soap bubbles off as quickly as you can and steadfastly attempt to avert your gaze from almost everything there is to look at. The seconds drag on like hours and this is still awful.
As you file forwards, the water peters off and hot air blows out from the vents. It is not even slightly enough to get you dry and just reminds you that you're out in the desert.
Some of the boys start tossing white outfits back from the front. Tao-Liang gets his first and hands you yours. You shake it out and grimace. It's a dismal "one size fits all" cotton onsie with long shorts and a zipper that goes all the way up to the neck. Whoever decided on the design for this this couldn't have picked something more like a prison uniform if they tried. Once you've gotten your onsie on, it becomes clear that you're expected to pass more of them backwards as you walk. The entire ordeal takes a literal eternity and by the time the crowd pushes you through the doors of the shower area and up some more stairs, your hands are completely dry and a bit rough from touching so much cotton. Somehow in the disorder of the shower, you've gotten in front of Tao-Liang, who pushes you forward as the crowd goes up another flight of stairs.
The stairway eventually opens up into a massive room about the size of an Olympic gymnasium. Along the floor, inset into a person sized rectangle in the wood floor, are mats identical to the one you slept on back in the generator hall. At the end of each mat is a sheet that is tucked into the ground and spread over the top of the mat.
At the far end of the room about 10 feet off the ground is a small window where an overseer sits. He surveys the sleeping quarters as everyone scrambles to bed.
"ONE PERSON TO EACH COT. ONE PERSON TO EACH COT." He drones over the loudspeaker.
"One person to each cot." Someone mimics in a whiny voice and a few people laugh.
Tao-Liang rolls his eyes. "It's like they can't wait to go to solitary." he says. You follow him over to a mat in the corner and settle down in the one across from him.
As soon as everyone is settled and horizontal, the lights go down with a loud buzz. The only light left is a dim green glow from the overseers window. It's barely enough to see Tao-Liang's bulky frame across from you.
There is a little bit of talking at first, but eventually it settles into calm and quiet. Tao-Liang reaches across the foot long wood space that separates your cot and fumbles around for your arm. When he finds it, he pulls your hand off the cot and presses it to the floor.
Nothing at first.
Then slowly you can hear it.
Tap... tap.... tap-tap...tap. Tap... tap.... tap-tap...tap. Tap... tap.... tap-tap...tap. Tap... tap.... tap-tap...tap.
Someone a few rows down has started banging on the ground.
tap... tap... tap-tap... tap. one, one, two, one. /Oh/
You raise your head off the mat and look around. As the sound travels, all the rest of the workers slip an arm or hand off their mat and join in on the tapping until the noise crescendos into a rousing march of sound.
The wood and mats vibrate under the onslaught of so many thousands of fingers tapping. The noise echoes and rebounds off the concrete walls. It shivers sensation down to the root of your teeth.
"Its cool isn't it?" Tao-Liang says. "If we do it, the girls downstairs do it too.
"I know you're new here, but I'm going to let you in on a secret." Tao-Liang continues. "The overseers think they have us trapped here... but they don't. There's a city below this city that the minors built a couple of years after this city was built, back in 2019. No one watches them down there so there was no one to stop them. Apparently, if you can find you way down there, there is a whole community with houses and food and everyone is free. All the workers down there build and work for themselves. They live real lives, free lives, together."
One, One, Two, One. One, one, two, one.
"But the original way in is gone. There was a cave in inside the mines in 2025 that sealed the only path people knew to get to the smaller city. But every so often, people you know find a new way in, and they disappear. The only bad thing about it is that once you're lucky enough to find it, you can't come back and tell everyone because you're already there. The secret to the new path goes down with you.
tap... tap... tap-tap... tap. One, one, two, one.
"And when you get down there, it great, but they don't let you out until you're old enough to leave the whole city and get a real job. You know, when you're an adult. So, you can't even come back and tell anyone either. The only thing that we know is that they can hear us up here sometimes. So we've been hoping that if we keep making this specific recognizable noise every night, they'll remember that we're up here and send someone to come and help some more of us escape.
tap... tap... tap-tap... tap. one, one, two, one.
Tao-Liang turns over and the light from the overseer's window hits the white of his eyes. He grins.
"But, some of the miners are still looking for it. Still trying to dig out a new way. And one day--even if Brittany's plan fails. I'm getting the heck out of here."
"ALL EMPLOYEES MUST REMAIN QUIET IN THE SLEEPING QUARTERS." The loudspeaker screams.
The tapping dies down almost immediately.
The room goes quiet.
"They call it... Prima Viata." Tao-Liang whispers: "The City of Children."
Like thunder after lightening, a deafening noise roars through the room. Then, a wave of heat washes over you, followed instantly by a brief blink of excruciating pain.
Before you can even begin to scream, the world goes black.
---------
How did I die?
The Generator exploded because you left it unsupervised. There was a nuclear explosion and it is 100% your fault.
When you finally wake up, you're lying in a cell.
You sit up and look around. You recognize the dreary gray paint and flooring from when you first arrived, so you're probably in the orientation building somewhere. Or at in least another building exactly like it.
Your head aches terribly and you're pretty sure your ear is a bit cut from the sheer force of getting punched. There was no reason why the guard guy couldn't have used some restraint or dialed down on the force. You weren't even running away. Ugh.
"So. What did you do to get in here?"
You turn to your right and find a boy about your age lying on his back, tossing a small rubber ball up and down. He has very short red hair, which is weird, because you haven't seen a short haired boy in what feels like ages.
The boy snorts and turns his cow eyed gaze over to where you're sitting.
"I didn't think you'd ever get up. The minutemen just threw you into my cell like a sack of potatoes-- didn't ask me if I wanted a roommate or anything. Just, tossed your body on the ground and slammed the door. Not surprised about that at all, though. They're nasty rude fuckers. The lot of them. Anyway. If you're in here, you did something real bad. So. What did you do?"
You tell him.
He scowls. "Well, that's selfish. And also ironic, since now that you're in here, no one is watching the generator. They should have just sent you back or something. So dumb, everyone in here is so dumb. Personally, though, I can't ride you too hard about trying to leave, since that's what I'm here for too."
The prisoner tosses the ball up in the air a couple of times, then continues. "I used to work in the kitchens of one of the restaurants. Got my hands on a real sharp knife and cut my hair down. Switched shirts with a laundry worker so I wasn't in matching uniform, and tried to walk out with a visiting family. Now I'm supposed to sit in this cell until my hair grows back out."
"I begged them not to tell, of course, but they turned me in anyway. Apparently there's... 'incentive coupons' for doing that sort of thing. Deals on time shares, or whatever" He says. "I hope God honors their coupons and they get a timeshare in hell."
"I know that my parents would never have done that. We actually could afford to vacation here, before they died. I mean, we never went because this place is a moral nightmare, and my parent's would rather vacation in France. But, it's so weird, you know?" He laughs mirthlessly.
"I can literally say that, given the opportunity to smuggle out a terrified orphan kid with my family, I'd have done it in an instant. I mean, fuck coupons, you know? And by the way--don't think for a minute that I'm the only trust fund kid in here. You can't buy your way in or out of anything before you're old enough to get your inheritance. It's like getting demoted from CEO to 'guy who fills up the coffee machines''" He wrinkles his nose in distaste. ".... no offense."
"And I'm sure offense was taken anyway, Colton." A minuteman strides up to the cell and bangs his steel truncheon on the bars.
"Unless you have food, please go away." Colton says rudely.
The minuteman rolls his eyes and kneels down to unlock the small trapdoor at the bottom of the gate so he can push meal containers through. But before he can properly get his key in the lock, a deafening noise roars through the room.
"What the hell was--"
A wave of heat washes over the room, followed instantly by a brief blink of excruciating pain. Before anyone can even begin to scream, the world goes black.
---------
How did I die?
The Generator exploded because you left it unsupervised.
Not to be rude, but nuclear disaster was most certainly NOT what you signed up for when picking this position.
The generator didn't need to be fixed later, it needed to be fixed now. Brittany seemed like a very capable determined person, but you're not going to put your life, and the lives of everyone in fallout radius, in the hands of someone you just met.
You tell Brittany that you're going to tell the overseer.
"No you're not." She says confidently.
Yes you most certainly are. You make Double-click this passage to edit it.Double-click this passage to edit it.When the clock strikes , everyone in the generator room stands and quietly files down the stairs. They leave their bags behind and their desks in disarray. Tao-Liang grabs the fire extinguisher off the wall and tucks it underneath his arm.
They all file into the bathroom and take turns drinking from the faucet one last time.
Maria, Brittany and some of the other workers are stretching or jogging in place to warm up. Brittany catches your eye and nods over at the generator room, but you shake your head.
You’ve made your choice. You’re getting out of here tonight.
You follow the line through the hall and to the lobby, where the overseer sits. She looks up, boredly at first, and then again in alarm as Tao-Liang sprints towards the desk. In a single motion, and without a word of warning, he hefts the fire extinguisher upside down and the swings it like a bat--smashing the underseer over the side of her head. She screams but he rears back and hits her again, and again while rest of the generator workers watch in silence.
When Tao-Liang finishes beating her to death, he tosses the bloody extinguisher on the ground and neatly vomits into a nearby potted plant. A couple of the workers laugh nervously, so he flips them the bird, as he heaves.
“Okay guys, listen up.” Brittany says “We’re about 3 miles from the mines. That’s 3 miles in which anything can happen. Partner up and choose your partners wisely. I’ll bite the bullet and take the new kid with Maria. While I’d like to stick together, travelling in numbers doesn’t give us any advantages. I got a message out to Jagger in the miner group and he’s left a bus for us. The keys are in the glove compartment. Whoever gets there first is responsible for starting the bus.”
She gazes over the group in silence, taking in everyone’s faces individually.
“If any of us don’t make it. I just want you all to know that I’ll put a bid out to adopt you once I turn 19. Regardless what happens tonight, we’ll make it out. Because fuck this place! And fuck the overseers! We deserve better than this. We all do.”
She takes a deep breath, then turns and opens the door.
Outside, there is a massive colorful migration happening. Workers in white are streaming out of the alleys in lines of three. Groups of workers in green are coming in a rushing tide from your right while workers in beige come from your left. Workers in lavender hop down the stairs of some of the houses and workers in light pink dart out of the stores and restaurants. Workers in navy file in straight lines from some administrative buildings and workers in hot pink pop up individually in between all the rest of the colors. Everyone is moving at a slow leisurely pace as the streets fill up, heading steadily towards the dormitories.
You’re distracted by the sight for a second because it’s so bright and disarming but then Brittany hops down the stairs and takes off into a sprint.
Almost as if she triggered an alarm, the crowd parts to let her through. The rest of the generator workers follow suit, running at top speed—a bullet of gray, cutting through the other colors. Maria whoops in joy and does a somersault over an open man hole that you have to stumble to avoid plunging into. Brittany runs with the fierce control of a predator. Her eyes on the prize; head straight, even breathing. But, after a couple of exhilarating seconds of freedom, an alarm goes off. It blares loudly through the streets coming out of every hidden microphone site, with horrifying surround sound. Then, with inevitable melancholy, in the distance, come the sound of screams.
You waste a precious second to turn around to see what’s going on, and you wish you hadn’t. Men in full black combat gear pour out from every direction. Pushing kids roughly out of their way, slamming them into walls and into each other with the ruthlessness of their pursuit.
Maria grabs your arm and tugs you forward.
“Are you crazy?! There’s no time! The minutemen will kill you!” She shrieks.
"This way!" Brittany yells. She darts down a nearby alley. You and Maria follow close behind.
Between the buildings, many children and teenagers, dressed in white, are rushing swiftly and silently around a system of pulleys, ladders and wooden racks, where they had been hanging up laundry. They're trying their best to get down from the racks as quickly as possible. Some of the younger children are crying and holding their ears to block out the alarms.
One of the older workers-- a tall muscular kid who had been helping toss people down from the racks---pushes Brittany into a wall.
"Every other goddamn year!" He screams. "Why can't you just wait it out like the rest of us?!"
Brittany doesn't even respond. She just roundhouse kicks him in the chest and jumps over his wheezing body.
You've been running for almost ten minutes now and you're starting to slow down. You can feel your lungs seizing in your chest. Maria sees you faltering and shouts for Brittany to slow down, but she doesn't. Brittany pulls further ahead and the distance between you grows larger.
The alley opens up into a larger more industrial area, further away from the center of town. The groups of other kids thins out significantly until it's quiet enough fr you to hear yourself being chased. A couple of the other pairs slide into view as you make a bid towards the large parking lot. Where the bus sits-- white and beautiful--ready to take you home.
"Tao-Liang!" Maria shouts excitedly, as her friend joins the group. "You made it!"
Tao-Ling limp-dashes closer. He looks terrified and is bleeding from one of his legs.
"They got Ace! They fucking shot Ace!" He yells.
Then, like a slow nightmare, Maria stumbles over one of the half open manholes. She catches herself, somersaults back to her feet and keeps running for a second before a shot rings out from behind her like a crack. She falls like a stone to the pavement.
"Maria!" Tao-Ling shouts, but he keeps moving forwards. He doesn't look back. No one does.
Up ahead, Brittany's made it to the bus. The lights go on as she starts the engine. You skid pass the gate, throw upon the door, stumble up the bus stairs and and barrel roll into a seat.
You can hear Brittany shouting "Lets go! lets go!" as the rest of whoever is left flings themselves inside.
Brittany slams her foot on the gas. The wheels squeal and spin, then the engine revs and the bus lurches backwards out into the desert. The bus bumps crazily on the hard, unpaved desert ground, but at least its going somewhere. The city pulls away from you and for the first time in hours, you feel safe.
You're going to make it. You're going to make it!
"NO!" Brittany screams, suddenly. "NO! NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO-"
Outside the bus, in the parking lot, a woman with blonde hair in a neat bun stands in the arch of the gate.
She looks you directly in the eye from 50 feet away and then calmly shoots out the bus tires. The bus rocks and spins wildly as Brittany loses control of the vehicle. You fly out of your seat and slam your head on the side of the inside of the bus.
Tao-Ling is screaming. Everyone is screaming.
When the bus finally slows to a stop, minutemen descend upon the wreckage. They drag your remaining, crying, coworkers out of the vehicle and shoot them until the crying stops.
The last thing you see before joining them, is the blonde woman putting her boot on the side of Brittany's face.
-----
How did I die?
Failed Insurrection.