---I'm still trying to figure out Anika's reaction to that.
I tried to make a scene together with Jet, Kohran and Eddie - but it's bloody hard. Anyway, something a little bit different.
-------
Five waited in the corridor, each wearing the same anonymous disposable white overalls.
The door opened. Beyond it, the bright lights, timber wall panelling and floral patterned linoleum of the de-aerator corridor gave way to gloom and concrete, flaking Soviet-era paint transforming the corridor into something ominous and entirely unnatural.
The scent of damp concrete, mould and metal drifted on a cold breath from within.
A handheld meter alarm, followed by a second, then a third within a heartbeat
“What does the dosimeter say?” asked the tallest of the three.
“3.6 Roentgen,” said the second, a goofy grin plastered across their face. Her blond hair spilled from under the square white cap.
“3.6, Not Great, Not Terrible,” the third answered, before taking a photograph of his gamma-scout with his phone. All three giggled like schoolchildren, as if nobody’d ever shared an instagram post of a panicking gamma-scout at Chernobyl before.
‘Oh for fuck’s sake, thought Serhiy Kobrin. If the meters read anything, it was in microsieverts. Harmless for a short while. They wouldn’t allow tourists anywhere dangerous.
“Tourists,” he huffed in his own language
“They bring good money,” said Khem Starodumov - official plant tour-guide.”Especially with the anniversary.”
Serhiy raised his head in grudging agreement.
“Walk straight. Walk quickly. Do not touch the walls. We are approaching the control room of reactor four. Do not touch consoles or equipment. Photographs only. Everything is contaminated. If you are contaminated you will not be permitted to leave.”
Without being decontaminated, he didn’t say.. .
“I was on a Discovery Channel film crew twenty years ago. I touched a switch. Now I am a tour guide,” added Khem with a smile.
One wall of the original corridor had been damaged by the blast. A new one had been built along with the shelter object, guiding the small group through a turnstile, a radiation checkpoint, another doorway, and then into the new corridor, built alongside the run of the collapsed de-aerator corridor.
Even after ten years, the layout felt new to Serhiy - just that little bit wrong and unfamiliar compared to how he’d learned it..White LED light’s from the tourist’s phones lit the corridor ahead, throwing hard black shadows onto the walls. Steel pipes and cableways plunged into the darkness, inert and empty for four decades.
A new steel door stood where the Shift Supervisor’s desk had once been. The wall had been added to support the demolition of the shelter object.
Prior to that, the room had lay in state for twenty years - untouched like the city beyond the station.
Serhiy almost found himself wishing it’d remain that way. A monument to the moment a routine Saturday morning test became a life-long nightmare.
He watched the visitors move through the room from the doorway, making sure they disturbed nothing. Footsteps took a space beside him.
“A little bird told me you’re retiring,” said Khem, with a faint smirk on his lips.
“From Chernobyl,” Serhiy confirmed with a single nod. “Someone sent me a job specification.”
“Hmmm…” The silence begged for more information.
“A station blew a reactor last year. They’re replacing it with a fission reactor - an RBMK derivative. Which means someone experienced has to train them how to operate it.”
“Why would they build an RBMK?” Khem asked. He might’ve asked why they bothered sacrificing a living child on an altar for the look for shock on his face.
“God only knows. But it’ll pay better than this…”
Raised voices interrupted their quiet conversation, as the tourists played their roles.
“You’re delusional. RBMK reactors don’t explode.”
“Take him to the infirmary.”
Serhiy drew down a deep breath, watching them re-enact a re-enactment. “...I’ve no reason to stay here. And I’ll take any chance to run a reactor once more, rather than another tour group.”
“Ah…” said Khem, understanding everything.
And of course, they touched things. They snooped around the room, gamma-scouting for the hottest of hotspots - perhaps the tiniest mote of reactor fuel or graphite that’d settled in a crack to decay peacefully for four decades.
They seemed to revel in a danger long since passed.
Their flight to Ukraine would’ve registered a higher rating on their chirping counters, if they’d bothered to look.
His eyes closed for a moment. Somehow, he could still taste metal.
“Excuse me, Can I ask a question.”
She stood taller than him, and far thinner. A dustmask hid her face, but her brown eyes stared down at him in a way that made his skin crawl - as if maybe she thought he was nothing more than a tour guide - something beneath the contempt of one able to afford the tour. It rose up his back, crawling with a thousand legs, mingling with the taste of bile on his lips.
He didn’t feel like holding back.
“I was a trainee operator in reactor room three. Yes, I was on duty. And I knew everyone in this room. Proskuryarkov and Kudryatsev were my friends, and I spent four months in Hospital Number Six because the ventilators were not switched off and I finished my shift in three. A year later they restarted the reactor, and here I am still. Is there anything else you would like to know?”
She blinked. For a moment he thought, maybe she got the point. Even behind the mask, he could see her scowl.
“We paid to be here you should treat your customers better - we have ‘gram accounts you know…I’ve over a thousand followers”
And then he understood. To her, the entire was a TV show - a documentary - a farway thing. Chernobyl was a word from a foreign country that’d become the latest Dark Tourist hit - another place where you could purchase your own personal fragment of a tragedy.
“I can’t do this any more,” he said, in his own language.
---
I tried to make a scene together with Jet, Kohran and Eddie - but it's bloody hard. Anyway, something a little bit different.
-------
Five waited in the corridor, each wearing the same anonymous disposable white overalls.
The door opened. Beyond it, the bright lights, timber wall panelling and floral patterned linoleum of the de-aerator corridor gave way to gloom and concrete, flaking Soviet-era paint transforming the corridor into something ominous and entirely unnatural.
The scent of damp concrete, mould and metal drifted on a cold breath from within.
A handheld meter alarm, followed by a second, then a third within a heartbeat
“What does the dosimeter say?” asked the tallest of the three.
“3.6 Roentgen,” said the second, a goofy grin plastered across their face. Her blond hair spilled from under the square white cap.
“3.6, Not Great, Not Terrible,” the third answered, before taking a photograph of his gamma-scout with his phone. All three giggled like schoolchildren, as if nobody’d ever shared an instagram post of a panicking gamma-scout at Chernobyl before.
‘Oh for fuck’s sake, thought Serhiy Kobrin. If the meters read anything, it was in microsieverts. Harmless for a short while. They wouldn’t allow tourists anywhere dangerous.
“Tourists,” he huffed in his own language
“They bring good money,” said Khem Starodumov - official plant tour-guide.”Especially with the anniversary.”
Serhiy raised his head in grudging agreement.
“Walk straight. Walk quickly. Do not touch the walls. We are approaching the control room of reactor four. Do not touch consoles or equipment. Photographs only. Everything is contaminated. If you are contaminated you will not be permitted to leave.”
Without being decontaminated, he didn’t say.. .
“I was on a Discovery Channel film crew twenty years ago. I touched a switch. Now I am a tour guide,” added Khem with a smile.
One wall of the original corridor had been damaged by the blast. A new one had been built along with the shelter object, guiding the small group through a turnstile, a radiation checkpoint, another doorway, and then into the new corridor, built alongside the run of the collapsed de-aerator corridor.
Even after ten years, the layout felt new to Serhiy - just that little bit wrong and unfamiliar compared to how he’d learned it..White LED light’s from the tourist’s phones lit the corridor ahead, throwing hard black shadows onto the walls. Steel pipes and cableways plunged into the darkness, inert and empty for four decades.
A new steel door stood where the Shift Supervisor’s desk had once been. The wall had been added to support the demolition of the shelter object.
Prior to that, the room had lay in state for twenty years - untouched like the city beyond the station.
Serhiy almost found himself wishing it’d remain that way. A monument to the moment a routine Saturday morning test became a life-long nightmare.
He watched the visitors move through the room from the doorway, making sure they disturbed nothing. Footsteps took a space beside him.
“A little bird told me you’re retiring,” said Khem, with a faint smirk on his lips.
“From Chernobyl,” Serhiy confirmed with a single nod. “Someone sent me a job specification.”
“Hmmm…” The silence begged for more information.
“A station blew a reactor last year. They’re replacing it with a fission reactor - an RBMK derivative. Which means someone experienced has to train them how to operate it.”
“Why would they build an RBMK?” Khem asked. He might’ve asked why they bothered sacrificing a living child on an altar for the look for shock on his face.
“God only knows. But it’ll pay better than this…”
Raised voices interrupted their quiet conversation, as the tourists played their roles.
“You’re delusional. RBMK reactors don’t explode.”
“Take him to the infirmary.”
Serhiy drew down a deep breath, watching them re-enact a re-enactment. “...I’ve no reason to stay here. And I’ll take any chance to run a reactor once more, rather than another tour group.”
“Ah…” said Khem, understanding everything.
And of course, they touched things. They snooped around the room, gamma-scouting for the hottest of hotspots - perhaps the tiniest mote of reactor fuel or graphite that’d settled in a crack to decay peacefully for four decades.
They seemed to revel in a danger long since passed.
Their flight to Ukraine would’ve registered a higher rating on their chirping counters, if they’d bothered to look.
His eyes closed for a moment. Somehow, he could still taste metal.
“Excuse me, Can I ask a question.”
She stood taller than him, and far thinner. A dustmask hid her face, but her brown eyes stared down at him in a way that made his skin crawl - as if maybe she thought he was nothing more than a tour guide - something beneath the contempt of one able to afford the tour. It rose up his back, crawling with a thousand legs, mingling with the taste of bile on his lips.
He didn’t feel like holding back.
“I was a trainee operator in reactor room three. Yes, I was on duty. And I knew everyone in this room. Proskuryarkov and Kudryatsev were my friends, and I spent four months in Hospital Number Six because the ventilators were not switched off and I finished my shift in three. A year later they restarted the reactor, and here I am still. Is there anything else you would like to know?”
She blinked. For a moment he thought, maybe she got the point. Even behind the mask, he could see her scowl.
“We paid to be here you should treat your customers better - we have ‘gram accounts you know…I’ve over a thousand followers”
And then he understood. To her, the entire was a TV show - a documentary - a farway thing. Chernobyl was a word from a foreign country that’d become the latest Dark Tourist hit - another place where you could purchase your own personal fragment of a tragedy.
“I can’t do this any more,” he said, in his own language.
---
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.