RE: The Melancholy of Mackie-Chan
10-27-2019, 08:27 PM (This post was last modified: 10-27-2019, 08:36 PM by Dartz.)
10-27-2019, 08:27 PM (This post was last modified: 10-27-2019, 08:36 PM by Dartz.)
A short piece. About three months work.
------
“Thirty-six microsieverts,” said Shinji. The Patrol watch on Shinji’s wrist chimed a warning, screen flickering a cautious yellow
“What’s going on here?”
They both stood on the ramp of their Bolitho, watching life on Frigga carry on with its usual rhythms. A kilometre away, a diesel locomotive idled, being attended to by its crew. Behind it waited a train of empty ore wagons, low-loaders loaded with machinery and a single passenger coach
An oversized fighter aircraft sat halfway between them and the locomotive, surrounded by tools and equipment. Somebody’d been working on it. A dozen or more assorted shuttlecraft sat parked haphazardly, ignoring the painted markings on the steel deck.
“Nothing, apparently,” said Shinji. He looked around, checking “But there’s always something going on.”
“You’re not chief of security out here, Shinji.”
“But there’s danger,” said Shinji. His eyes narrowed, focusing on a scaffold at the far end of the landing bay. A section of concrete wall had been shored up with foot-thick steel beams capable of supporting a skyscraper.
For a moment Miyuri found herself if maybe he’d been getting too far into the role of security chief. She pondered a moment, before adjusting her glasses. A change in polarisation shone up the cracks in the wall, iridescent ribbons of stress flowing across the concrete
“I’m worried too.” She felt a shiver roll through her body. “I’ve sent a message to Koran about it.”
Shinji looked at her for a moment, then back at the wall. “I wonder if someone’s driving the bus today.”
Miyuri raised an eyebrow “Today?”
Shinji offered her a wan smile. “It stops at the railway tracks.” He took a breath. “Maybe we should’ve landed closer.”
The landing bay stretched for nearly a kilometre in front of them. There was nothing for it but to walk, watching the life of the station churn on. The oily scent of diesel exhaust clung slick-like to the air they breathed, mixed with a parch of dry concrete dust.
Her patrol watch alarmed once more - in a more insistent tone. It begged her to exacuate.
One hundred and five microsieverts per hour.
Higher than.interplanetary background. Around her, people went about their ordinary days. She watched a man work under a disassembled landmate, lying on thick mat laid out on the steel deck. Miyuri watched people walk, work and talk in a radiation field high enough to burn a Stellviacorp employee out for life inside a month.
For a moment, Miyuri felt like she was watching someone lie in nettles. The sensation crawled across her skin, mingling with the unsettling idea that someone had allowed them to work there.
There wasn’t much either of them could do about it.
For a few minutes, she wondered if nobody’d told them - if they’d kept the consequences as big a secret as the cause. When she saw that everyone had some sort of dosimeter with them, she realised they knew.
Miyuri didn’t know if that made it worse or not.
It took her far longer than she expected to reach the end of the landing bay. Shinji beside her quietly logged the radiation readings. She found herself wondering on Anika - whether she knew, or whether it’d affected her in some way.
Even androids could be harmed by enough of a dose of radiation. Sensitive electronics could be damaged as surely sensitive biology.
At the end of the bay waited what amounted to the ceremonial entrance to the settlement proper. A large gateway, wide enough to drive a Space Shuttle through led to a darkened tunnel. A pair of rail-tracks struck two shining white lines ahead into the darkness, curving upwards in the distance.
Beside the gate stood A single blue comet-star, four-pointed with one of the beams trailing, holding the settlement’s name in white capitalised letters.
ELEANOR CITY
At the centre of the starbust, the settlement’s founding year: 2024
Leaning on the sign was a dark-skinned woman in orange overalls, tied half-around her waist. Sweat on her skin shone in the overhead lights. A cool-blue glow from the tablet illuminated the sharp features of her face.
“Excuse me, miss?” Miyuri started. For a moment, the woman seemed to ignore her, before slowly raising her face. Wide brown eyes seemed
“Ah..” Miyuri’s voice caught form “Do you know if the bus is running?”
“Oh.” the woman blinked. “ Yeah, I do,”
She walked off, mind clearly on other things, face buried in the tablet, leaving Miyuri standing bewildered.
--
The sound of a twig snapping, followed by a whisp of blue smoke marked the death of a black microcontroller at the centre of a silver-flecked PCB. The scent of burning electricity tinged the air.
The only light in the crawlspace came from a small torch jammed up between a pair of interface cards. Hard white light shone off silver circuit traces. Cables hung from the shadows above her.
Anika lay on her back, hammed in by circuitry on two sides. She kicked herself forward, deeper into the computer system. Cooling fans howled around her, drawing cold air across her body.
Anika took a breath, waiting for the probe in her hand to recharge.
A light on the grip flashed green.
At the other end of the grip was a pair of silver metal probes. Anika offered them up to a pair of solder bumps on another innocent PCB.
Her thumb pressed a button on the grip. More blue smoke liberated itself from its gallium prison.
An alarm sounded from the tangle of cables, warning of data corruption in the system. She dragged herself out with her heels, scrambling feet-first out through an access hatch into the station’s control room.
She lay on the cold floor for a second, looking up the trouser leg of the man working the console above her. Sweat sparked across his face, beads trickling in rivers.
“That get it?”
He looked down at her and smiled with relief.
“Bank 23-50 crashed - it’d dumping corrupt data to the backups at 40-70 and 80-72.”
She sat herself up, exhaling the breath she didn’t know she’d been holding
“Good.” said Anika. She glanced over her shoulder at the monitors high above her. A dozen indicators flashed red amongst a hundred green. “Now it’ll look like the power surge did it.” She took another breath.
“We didn’t notice because we were too busy with the reactor,” Keisuke finished.
The hardest part about nuking the data, was making it look like it hadn’t been nuked on purpose. She pushed herself to her feet, taking a moment to steady herself.
The reactor panel still showed a circular representation of the reactor and its four tangental neutral beam injectors, along with constellation of indicators flashing red, orange and yellow for sensors which no longer existed. A hundred selsyn gauges indicated the final positions of the fuel throttle valves and diverter plates. The unit control panel panels showed one of the surviving seperator assemblies at vacuum pressure, one of the circulating pumps offline and everything else to do with moving water through the core with no signal. Every flowmeter and gauge remained jammed at their final values.
On the Turbine and Generator console, cup of coffee left over from the accident had turned to sludge. The turbine and generator showed as shutdown - as if nothing more dramatic had happened - with no oil or hydrogen pressure and all valves closed. The power systems were still active, tied in to Unit 03’s busbars to activate the reactor control systems one final time.
Radiation warning lamps shone a dangerous orange, monitor gauges throughout the reactor chamber pegged in the overload position.
On the back wall off the control room, two whiteboards still wore a tangle of semi-permanent marker sketches of the reactor, surrounded by fragments of calculations and a scrawled table of radiation readings.
Reactor Chamber. 175KR/hr
A shiver of unease rolled through her body. It had to happen - she assured herself. She watched Keisuke drum his fingers on the keyboard as the corruption moved like a plague through the system, spreading from cluster to cluster.
He’d done that constantly while the reactor burned. He had the same intense stare in his eyes watching each poisoned cluster flash from green to red
She slipped the probe into a pouch on her hip, before adjusting her skirt and jacket.
“Anika!”
She recognised the voice. A guilty thrill ran up her body, like she’d been caught with her hand in the cake tine
“Miyuri?” she said, not really believing for the heartbeat it took her to turn on her heel. Her body went rigid as she recognised the silhouette in the doorway. A nervous trill ran up her throat. “When’d you get here?”
“An hour ago,” she answered with a bright smile. For a moment, Anika thought Miyuri hadn’t noticed. “Shinji used his personal access key.” There was a pause. “Is everything OK?”
“Ah…” Anika struggled to find the words.
Around her, the annunciators on the panels continued to flash their warnings. She heard Keisuke step in behind her, putting himself between Miyuri and the data screen. He couldn’t hide the whiteboards.
For a single pulse of her heart, Anika thought she might get away with it it. Miyuri wouldn’t notice. Everything would be normal.
“Oh Anika no,”
It was the could disappointment dripping from her voice that stung the most. Anika felt it bite deep inside her, she felt her chest wrench, guilt sparking in every circuit tracing through her body.
“You have to understand. We’d never hear the end of it.”
“There’s radiation in the landing bays!” Miyuri showed her the max reading on her watch. “And you’re covering it up.”
“Nobody was hurt Miyuri, and, you know what people are like.” It sounded to her own ears like she was pleading
“This is a crime Anika.”
“It’s necessary,” said Anika, finding herself on the back foot.
The sense of betrayal crawled up her spin.
Of course Miyuri wouldn’t understand - nobody from Stellvia would understand, they lived in the perfect world where everything worked and things didn’t break down and spare parts didn’t come late because they were Stellvia
“How’s it necessary?”
Miyuri pleaded. It sounded like a plea - that her friend hadn’t gone off the deep end. Anika felt it deep in her core - she felt all the colour drain from her face, pins and needles prickling through every wire and circuit in her body, for a moment reminding of of the instant she’d seen the reactor itself burn. Her mouth outran her mind
“The control system malfunctioned. But nobody’d care about that. They’d use it to destroy us.They’d do it to gloat over us because everything’s perfect in the Crystal Cities and we’re just some outsiders who shouldn’t have been allowed to join and they hate us.”
Those final two words hung in the air, rattling the walls. She could feel tears trickling down her cheeks
Miyuri blinked, her mouth half opening as if she’d planned to say something before the words died in her mouth. She held her hands up, almost like she’d expected an attack
“But….you know the cost of lies?”
Anika stepped forward, her body shaking. He eyes went to her friend, he stood somewhere be shock and anger, then too the floor.
“I’m afraid of the price of truth Miyuri,” she said. “The Parliament will blame us. The company who built the reactor will blame us. Everyone has an interest in it being us and not the reactor and they’re all more powerful than we are.”
“Anika…” Miyuri began after a moment.
“What’s the point in telling the truth when nobody will listen?”
Miyuri took a breath, letting Anika’s words sit for a second.
“Maybe we should talk in private,” she said, after a moment, taking an obvious effort to sound calm.
-----
------
“Thirty-six microsieverts,” said Shinji. The Patrol watch on Shinji’s wrist chimed a warning, screen flickering a cautious yellow
“What’s going on here?”
They both stood on the ramp of their Bolitho, watching life on Frigga carry on with its usual rhythms. A kilometre away, a diesel locomotive idled, being attended to by its crew. Behind it waited a train of empty ore wagons, low-loaders loaded with machinery and a single passenger coach
An oversized fighter aircraft sat halfway between them and the locomotive, surrounded by tools and equipment. Somebody’d been working on it. A dozen or more assorted shuttlecraft sat parked haphazardly, ignoring the painted markings on the steel deck.
“Nothing, apparently,” said Shinji. He looked around, checking “But there’s always something going on.”
“You’re not chief of security out here, Shinji.”
“But there’s danger,” said Shinji. His eyes narrowed, focusing on a scaffold at the far end of the landing bay. A section of concrete wall had been shored up with foot-thick steel beams capable of supporting a skyscraper.
For a moment Miyuri found herself if maybe he’d been getting too far into the role of security chief. She pondered a moment, before adjusting her glasses. A change in polarisation shone up the cracks in the wall, iridescent ribbons of stress flowing across the concrete
“I’m worried too.” She felt a shiver roll through her body. “I’ve sent a message to Koran about it.”
Shinji looked at her for a moment, then back at the wall. “I wonder if someone’s driving the bus today.”
Miyuri raised an eyebrow “Today?”
Shinji offered her a wan smile. “It stops at the railway tracks.” He took a breath. “Maybe we should’ve landed closer.”
The landing bay stretched for nearly a kilometre in front of them. There was nothing for it but to walk, watching the life of the station churn on. The oily scent of diesel exhaust clung slick-like to the air they breathed, mixed with a parch of dry concrete dust.
Her patrol watch alarmed once more - in a more insistent tone. It begged her to exacuate.
One hundred and five microsieverts per hour.
Higher than.interplanetary background. Around her, people went about their ordinary days. She watched a man work under a disassembled landmate, lying on thick mat laid out on the steel deck. Miyuri watched people walk, work and talk in a radiation field high enough to burn a Stellviacorp employee out for life inside a month.
For a moment, Miyuri felt like she was watching someone lie in nettles. The sensation crawled across her skin, mingling with the unsettling idea that someone had allowed them to work there.
There wasn’t much either of them could do about it.
For a few minutes, she wondered if nobody’d told them - if they’d kept the consequences as big a secret as the cause. When she saw that everyone had some sort of dosimeter with them, she realised they knew.
Miyuri didn’t know if that made it worse or not.
It took her far longer than she expected to reach the end of the landing bay. Shinji beside her quietly logged the radiation readings. She found herself wondering on Anika - whether she knew, or whether it’d affected her in some way.
Even androids could be harmed by enough of a dose of radiation. Sensitive electronics could be damaged as surely sensitive biology.
At the end of the bay waited what amounted to the ceremonial entrance to the settlement proper. A large gateway, wide enough to drive a Space Shuttle through led to a darkened tunnel. A pair of rail-tracks struck two shining white lines ahead into the darkness, curving upwards in the distance.
Beside the gate stood A single blue comet-star, four-pointed with one of the beams trailing, holding the settlement’s name in white capitalised letters.
ELEANOR CITY
At the centre of the starbust, the settlement’s founding year: 2024
Leaning on the sign was a dark-skinned woman in orange overalls, tied half-around her waist. Sweat on her skin shone in the overhead lights. A cool-blue glow from the tablet illuminated the sharp features of her face.
“Excuse me, miss?” Miyuri started. For a moment, the woman seemed to ignore her, before slowly raising her face. Wide brown eyes seemed
“Ah..” Miyuri’s voice caught form “Do you know if the bus is running?”
“Oh.” the woman blinked. “ Yeah, I do,”
She walked off, mind clearly on other things, face buried in the tablet, leaving Miyuri standing bewildered.
--
The sound of a twig snapping, followed by a whisp of blue smoke marked the death of a black microcontroller at the centre of a silver-flecked PCB. The scent of burning electricity tinged the air.
The only light in the crawlspace came from a small torch jammed up between a pair of interface cards. Hard white light shone off silver circuit traces. Cables hung from the shadows above her.
Anika lay on her back, hammed in by circuitry on two sides. She kicked herself forward, deeper into the computer system. Cooling fans howled around her, drawing cold air across her body.
Anika took a breath, waiting for the probe in her hand to recharge.
A light on the grip flashed green.
At the other end of the grip was a pair of silver metal probes. Anika offered them up to a pair of solder bumps on another innocent PCB.
Her thumb pressed a button on the grip. More blue smoke liberated itself from its gallium prison.
An alarm sounded from the tangle of cables, warning of data corruption in the system. She dragged herself out with her heels, scrambling feet-first out through an access hatch into the station’s control room.
She lay on the cold floor for a second, looking up the trouser leg of the man working the console above her. Sweat sparked across his face, beads trickling in rivers.
“That get it?”
He looked down at her and smiled with relief.
“Bank 23-50 crashed - it’d dumping corrupt data to the backups at 40-70 and 80-72.”
She sat herself up, exhaling the breath she didn’t know she’d been holding
“Good.” said Anika. She glanced over her shoulder at the monitors high above her. A dozen indicators flashed red amongst a hundred green. “Now it’ll look like the power surge did it.” She took another breath.
“We didn’t notice because we were too busy with the reactor,” Keisuke finished.
The hardest part about nuking the data, was making it look like it hadn’t been nuked on purpose. She pushed herself to her feet, taking a moment to steady herself.
The reactor panel still showed a circular representation of the reactor and its four tangental neutral beam injectors, along with constellation of indicators flashing red, orange and yellow for sensors which no longer existed. A hundred selsyn gauges indicated the final positions of the fuel throttle valves and diverter plates. The unit control panel panels showed one of the surviving seperator assemblies at vacuum pressure, one of the circulating pumps offline and everything else to do with moving water through the core with no signal. Every flowmeter and gauge remained jammed at their final values.
On the Turbine and Generator console, cup of coffee left over from the accident had turned to sludge. The turbine and generator showed as shutdown - as if nothing more dramatic had happened - with no oil or hydrogen pressure and all valves closed. The power systems were still active, tied in to Unit 03’s busbars to activate the reactor control systems one final time.
Radiation warning lamps shone a dangerous orange, monitor gauges throughout the reactor chamber pegged in the overload position.
On the back wall off the control room, two whiteboards still wore a tangle of semi-permanent marker sketches of the reactor, surrounded by fragments of calculations and a scrawled table of radiation readings.
Reactor Chamber. 175KR/hr
A shiver of unease rolled through her body. It had to happen - she assured herself. She watched Keisuke drum his fingers on the keyboard as the corruption moved like a plague through the system, spreading from cluster to cluster.
He’d done that constantly while the reactor burned. He had the same intense stare in his eyes watching each poisoned cluster flash from green to red
She slipped the probe into a pouch on her hip, before adjusting her skirt and jacket.
“Anika!”
She recognised the voice. A guilty thrill ran up her body, like she’d been caught with her hand in the cake tine
“Miyuri?” she said, not really believing for the heartbeat it took her to turn on her heel. Her body went rigid as she recognised the silhouette in the doorway. A nervous trill ran up her throat. “When’d you get here?”
“An hour ago,” she answered with a bright smile. For a moment, Anika thought Miyuri hadn’t noticed. “Shinji used his personal access key.” There was a pause. “Is everything OK?”
“Ah…” Anika struggled to find the words.
Around her, the annunciators on the panels continued to flash their warnings. She heard Keisuke step in behind her, putting himself between Miyuri and the data screen. He couldn’t hide the whiteboards.
For a single pulse of her heart, Anika thought she might get away with it it. Miyuri wouldn’t notice. Everything would be normal.
“Oh Anika no,”
It was the could disappointment dripping from her voice that stung the most. Anika felt it bite deep inside her, she felt her chest wrench, guilt sparking in every circuit tracing through her body.
“You have to understand. We’d never hear the end of it.”
“There’s radiation in the landing bays!” Miyuri showed her the max reading on her watch. “And you’re covering it up.”
“Nobody was hurt Miyuri, and, you know what people are like.” It sounded to her own ears like she was pleading
“This is a crime Anika.”
“It’s necessary,” said Anika, finding herself on the back foot.
The sense of betrayal crawled up her spin.
Of course Miyuri wouldn’t understand - nobody from Stellvia would understand, they lived in the perfect world where everything worked and things didn’t break down and spare parts didn’t come late because they were Stellvia
“How’s it necessary?”
Miyuri pleaded. It sounded like a plea - that her friend hadn’t gone off the deep end. Anika felt it deep in her core - she felt all the colour drain from her face, pins and needles prickling through every wire and circuit in her body, for a moment reminding of of the instant she’d seen the reactor itself burn. Her mouth outran her mind
“The control system malfunctioned. But nobody’d care about that. They’d use it to destroy us.They’d do it to gloat over us because everything’s perfect in the Crystal Cities and we’re just some outsiders who shouldn’t have been allowed to join and they hate us.”
Those final two words hung in the air, rattling the walls. She could feel tears trickling down her cheeks
Miyuri blinked, her mouth half opening as if she’d planned to say something before the words died in her mouth. She held her hands up, almost like she’d expected an attack
“But….you know the cost of lies?”
Anika stepped forward, her body shaking. He eyes went to her friend, he stood somewhere be shock and anger, then too the floor.
“I’m afraid of the price of truth Miyuri,” she said. “The Parliament will blame us. The company who built the reactor will blame us. Everyone has an interest in it being us and not the reactor and they’re all more powerful than we are.”
“Anika…” Miyuri began after a moment.
“What’s the point in telling the truth when nobody will listen?”
Miyuri took a breath, letting Anika’s words sit for a second.
“Maybe we should talk in private,” she said, after a moment, taking an obvious effort to sound calm.
-----
I love the smell of rotaries in the morning. You know one time, I got to work early, before the rush hour. I walked through the empty carpark, I didn't see one bloody Prius or Golf. And that smell, you know that gasoline smell, the whole carpark, smelled like.... ....speed.
One day they're going to ban them.