RE: [Story]The difference is, a Lightbulb stops working...
06-10-2024, 06:16 PM (This post was last modified: 06-10-2024, 06:17 PM by Dartz.)
06-10-2024, 06:16 PM (This post was last modified: 06-10-2024, 06:17 PM by Dartz.)
----8----
After six months, Lee had gotten used to the sensation of ‘snapping’ awake - going from dead asleep, to perfectly alert the moment the cybernetic alarm clock in the back of her mind decided to ring.
She took a few moments to curl up into her silken bedsheets, letting them rub against the haptic feedback panels between her thighs. She thought, if she tried she might’ve been able count the individual fibres beneath her fingers and toes.
She lingered for as long as she could, crunching her toes against the sheets, savouring the sensation.
Half her body existed in a sort of hyper-reality - an absolute awareness of every nerve ending. The other half, existed as a numb shell, covering a slow, beating heart and a building pressure inside that warned she needed to use the bathroom.
She took a breath, and forced herself to sit up. Her bedsheets slid off her body, pooling at her waist. Fabric would glide across metal and carbotanium in a way it wouldn’t against skin. Her gaze fell to her forearms - formed from lacquered metal and carbon-covered myomer in an imitation of bone, sinew and muscle
Of course, she would’ve been one of the ones that modern biotech wouldn’t work on. Either a full cyber, or living the rest of her life as a one-armed half-body in a bucket - no regrets ever entered her mind. Those things she missed, were already gone anyway.
She stepped off her bed, stretching on reflex, straining myomer actuators against themselves. It felt almost natural, artificial signals mimicking the human body’s natural force-feedback that kept a person’s muscles from tearing their body apart.
It limited her strength to human norms, without the discomfort of hard restrictors.
Lee bounced on her feet once, then twice, still marvelling at how easy it all felt, even after half a year .She imagined it would be close to what the really fit people felt - free and fluid - almost weightless, rather than stiff, aching and heavy.
Her apartment had been made by partitioning one of the older family-size apartments into a cluster of studio apartments - each one consisting of a sectioned-off double-bed, a central living area with a large seating area cut down into the rock floor, a small kitchenette with breakfast bar and a japanese-style wet-floor bathroom pod on the other side of the smallest-possible porch.
The buckling of the bathroom floor reminded her of the true weight of her body - a full hundred and thirty kilograms, not including what she’d eaten. Ares didn’t believe in light construction - even for the ‘civilian’ body types.
A ‘civilian’ body lacked things like independent life-support and vacuum hardening, or direct comms interfaces, network uplinks and radio-telepathy. It included the ability to use a bathroom like a normal human being and to have a mind filled with nothing but her own thoughts and no intruding datastreams.
She showered under a water-saving high-pressure jet, activated by a foot-plate on the shower tray. The real sensation of artificial fingertips kneading cherry shampoo through artificial hair soothed. A quick rinse washed the suds from her body.
It took longer to dry. The grykes between metal panels held water in a way skin didn’t. Blasting her body with a hairdryer helped keep her clothes from being stained. A chamois leather took care of the streaks on her thigh.
She took a few minutes to brush her teeth and straighten the curls in her oil-black hair. The face watching through the mirror belonged to her, but still, lacked the texture of who she’d been been - the subtle imperfections in the skin
It was a biomimetic image of who she’d been, draped over a ceramic substrate. A quick touch-up with a little makeup added a dose of healthy reality to her visage.
Six months after first waking up in a cybernetics lab on Noctis, giving herself one last quick check in the mirror before getting dressed, Lee felt perfectly fine.
—-
“It’s different with the limiters off, isn’t it?”
Jet popped her helmet visor Of course, she hadn’t even broken a sweat. It’d all been so effortless for the Panzer Kunst Meister.
Lee took a breath, half astonished that still that she didn’t feel any more sense of fatigue than a soft headache at the back of her mind from concentrating for the last thirty minutes.
“....harder.” she said after a moment’s thought. “Hard to keep up.”
Everything was always a heartbeat beyond where she expected it to be. Her body finished a form and started the next before her mind had gotten halfway through the first. She’d felt compelled to look down at her hands, astonished.
They responded the same as they always did. It felt the same. Only this time, the force between her finger and palm could crush stone into sand.
She’d twisted steel beams into bow-ties as easy as someone might twist a straw.
“You did well for your first time,” said Jet. “Most people trip.”
“I…..” Lee thought for a moment. “It’s hard to fall over.” A cold veil of discomfort settled across her shoulders. In a moment, she felt her self pull back away from the shell of her body into the hollow space deep inside. “I have autostabilise,” she said, her voice shrinking away.
Talking about herself in such a way alienated her soul. She could take a breath, find her centre, concentrate on the sensations of her toes against the leather liner of her boots, and the weight of her feet on the ground.
She curled her toes inside her boots, grounding herself in the reality of the sensation.
Jet waited a moment, seemingly distracted, her mind momentarily outside the room.
“I never got on with stabilisers,” Jet said. “Always end up fighting against them”
Lee couldn’t even tell hers worked - except for the microadjustments her body made to its posture when she decided to push it by doing something silly - like balancing herself upside down on one finger-tip.
Moments like that thrilled, where the exceptional had become the effortless. Lee clenched her right hand into a fist, tighter than she’d ever done before to the point where her fingers felt like they could punch right through her palm and crush solid steel.
From alienation to exhilaration, in the space of a few seconds.
“We’ll just do a few easy counter-strike exercises, and then end it for today.” Jet’s voice brought her back to the real world.
Lee thought it strange for a moment that they’d be doing it at full speed, especially since it was her first time without any running restrictors. She thought about saying something, but figured Jet knew what she was doing.
Jet Jaguar had been training cybers for well over ten years.
Jet Jaguar had settled herself into an easy, ready stance, waiting for Lee to match.
The object of the exercise was simple. Jet would give her an easy attack, she would block, storing up some of some of the energy from the attack to kick it back around. Jet would block, come back around and she’d block again, building energy and momentum the entire time.
Lee caught a strike from Jet on her arm, letting the energy flow through myomer actuators into the core of her body, amplifying it with a push from her feet. Kinetic energy snapped through her leg, accelerating far faster than her mind could keep up.
It felt like the difference between a mousetrap, and a rat-trap. Both were the same basic mechanism, operating in the same basic manner. One cracked your knuckles. One cut your fingers off.
She felt her leg catch something hard on the side of her thigh, scraping off it - and knew something had gone wrong. Her whole body continued to accelerate, even as she tried to get her mind ahead of herself, trying to bring her arm into the right place to catch Jet’s return strike.
Her shin cracked through something hard, ringing her entire body like a bell. She dropped into a ready stance, ground the momentum out by planting both her feet, bringing her guard back up still expecting a second hit.
Nothing.
Something hit the wall to her left. She glanced at it.
For one brief instant, came the dread idea that she’d taken Jet’s head clean off, the other cyber’s white helmet skittering back along the floor from where it’d ricocheted off the wall.
Jet herself lay on her back with her hair splashed across the stone
“Holy shit,” Lee breathed. Her whole body went cold in a way she didn’t think was possible anymore. Goosepimples crawled across skin she didn’t have anymore, a sensation like being covered in thousands of crawling spiders at once.
“You okay?”
Her voice quivered.
“Jet?”
A low groan rolled from Jet’s throat, her arms hinging slowly up into some form of broken fighting stance. She wheezed, trying to sit, reaching for a handhold that didn’t exist, but only her glazed eyes could see.
Lee reached down and grabbed her hand, dragging to the other cyber to her feet. She staggered, threatening to fail again before Lee took hold of her by the shoulder.
“You okay?”
Jets head turned towards the sound of Lee’s voice, her glazed eyes still staring at a point lightyears outside the rooms walls.
“Jet?”
Jet blinked, her eyes clearing slowly as her mind rebooted. She took a step, steadying herself on her feet. Her metal fingers probed at the left side of her head, where dark, thick blood had already begun to matte her hair together.
“... was a good kick.” she said. Her eyes scanned the room, her mind still finding its place. Jet helmet sat on the floor, the side of it caved in hard enough to pop the visor open. It’d obviously taken the worst of it. “I forgot to put your limiters back on,” said Jet, wearing an almost embarrassed smile.
Lee should’ve said something. She felt nothing but a hot relief that nothing serious had happened. The helmet gave its life to save its owner.
“Maybe we’ll call it there for the night.”
It was 11 in the morning.
“You sure you’re okay?”
“That was a good kick,” Jet said, again, still a little unstable on her feet. She took a breath. “I’ve had worse. Couple of painkillers and I’ll be fine.”
Lee started to feel a butterfly take flight in where her stomach used to be - maybe she needed to say something. Head injuries could be tricky like that.
“I’ve had worse,” Jet said, again, with a flippant wave of her hand. Don’t worry about it.
Jet seemed fine.
It wasn’t until after they’d finished cleaning up and broken for the day, that Lee realised her limiters had been left off.
–
A mix of Oxycodone and Ibuprofen soothed the ache in the side of her head to a dull throb, pulsing in time with her heartbeat. After about thirty minutes, she figured it would do. A dangerous injury would’ve had her on the way to the morgue by then anyway.
The bleeding had mostly stopped.
The whole side of her head still felt tender under her fingers.
The rule was, that if a person couldn’t complete their normal duties for two days after an injury, it had to be reported. There had to be an investigation. Another investigation just seemed like too much bother over something as simple as a training accident.
The helmet had taken the worst of it - shattering like her skull should have. She probably should’ve congratulated Lee on the kick.
Something felt strange.
She found herself wondering where he train of thought had been going as she found herself back outside the house, not entirely sure why she’d gone up there. The whole side of her head still throbbed.
Even most of the way to Jupiter, the unfiltered sun still had enough power to bleach and peel the paint on the old timber-frame house. Some of the windows had popped from their frames as the timber shrank. A strong kick would knock it over.
Her heartbeat pulsed in her ear.
Keeping it up seemed like it’d take far more time than Jet could ever spare. Eventually it’d collapse.
On some level she sympathised.
She blinked. A woman’s voice broke her train of thought.
“So what do you think?”
A moment's confusion as her world shifted around her. She found herself sitting in the grey room of the station council at her usual chair. Where a collection of weaponry had once been proudly displayed in the glass cabinets on the walls, now a collection of photographs of Earth and the solar system had replaced them.
The photo Noctis Labyrynthus on Mars called to her soul.
“Jet”. Kim Tchombe - reactor shift lead - waited for her answer. “The phase imbalance on TG-Two is affecting the grid. We’re at two percent,” she explained. “Any more and it’ll start to burn out equipment.”
Jet’s mind jammed in spinlock, trying to find its place
“It’ll trip TG-three on negative sequence and blackout the station.” Mellick was the turbine section forman. He still wore his orange jumpsuit overalls, even in the council room.
“What about generator one?” Asked Jet, stalling a little until she caught up. “How long until we get it up to temperature?” It might take a day to get the core running and up to steam temperature.
“We’re rebuilding it after last month.”
Obviously.
“Last month….” Jet felt her mouth goldfish open. What happened last month?
“After the turbine motored,” said Mellick. “We’re rebuilding the hydrogen seals. All the casings are off and the turbine is hanging from a crane thirty feet above it’s bed.”
“What?”
“....we talked about it ten minutes ago.”
“Are you okay?”
She looked at the six faces with their interrogating eyes demanding an answer. The implied threat if she was discovered didn’t need to be stated.
“Maybe I just zoned out for a bit,” Jet said, forcing herself to smile. “I’ve a bit of a headache.”
“Looks like a pretty bad headache to me,” Mellick laughed.
Jet gave him a tired look. “We need to…..” she stopped, wondering where she’d been going with that. “You know the right thing to do. You don’t need me to tell you.”
“Right,” said Kim. “Shut down Two. Spin up the backup generators.”
“And a System Alert?” Mellick suggested?
“Yeah. System alert,” Jet repeated. “And warm up the back ups.”
Everyone agreed with that.
The rest of the meeting seemed to run in circles, to everyone’s frustration. Jet muddled her way through, like getting herself through an exam she hadn’t really studied for, or a job interview she wasn’t really qualified for.
Jet thought she felt like being drunk and hungover at the same time. A little dazed, a little confused, along with a thundering headache, only without the fun. It seemed like decades since she’d been truly drunk like that.
–
Jet thought her head was ringing.
It was a Christmas bell playing from the speakers above the New Bermingham Company Store. It was a week until the big day.
She passed the Midoriyah. Kotono was there, with a tea and cake for herself, and a coffee for whomever she was waiting on.
Kotono said nothing to her. She didn’t wave. Just a shared glance to acknowledge each other’s mutual presence.
She guessed, on some level, that relationship was over. They hadn’t become strangers just yet, but it’d been so long since they’d spoken about anything.
The memory escaped Jet.
She went back to her house to find some painkillers to clear her head.
--
Her house was dead, and judging by the smell, it had begun to rot. Or was that the contents of the ruined fridge?
She turned on the lights. The breakers tripped with a snap. The cables must’ve broken. A beam holding the ceiling up had split, causing the upstairs floors to sag under their own weight.
The whole building would give soon. The collapse had already begun. It began weeks ago the moment the fridge went through a load-bearing wall.
Her head thrummed.
It could’ve been saved, if she’d bothered. If she could gather a few people and had the spare time. It’d be like embalming a corpse, and claiming it still lived.
One of the cabinets in the kitchen usually had something.
Mould had started to grow in some of the sauce bottles. The Chilli dated from 2017, when they’d first moved in. Nothing had been touched in nearly a year. A potato plant had begun to grow from a bag.
She found a pack, already opened and empty.
Her head pounded.
She’d have to go upstairs. She hadn’t done that since it became clear her weight on the floor had a chance of bringing it down.
It was worth it, just to clear her head a little and keep going.
The stairs always complained against her weight. This time they seemed to shift in her feet, threatening to pull loose from the wall. She steadied herself. A ring of lasers which replaced her inner ear had been knocked out of alignment. She’d have to rest to let it re-align itself. When she had less to do, maybe she could.
The floorboards had popped where they’d buckled. The panelling on the walls had seperated from the buckled floor. The walls had begun to sag. Cracks spiderwebbed across the plaster of the ceiling.
A quick flash from her jets carried her across.
She landed with an indelicate clunk. The building shuddered.
Ford’s bedroom door had crept open as the doorframe shifted. The bed still hadn’t been made. Mackie’s room had been disturbed – the floor had buckled on that side of the house.
It’d go soon enough. Maybe in a few days.
Jet felt nothing more about it than a vague, ‘So it goes’.
Her muse popped up another message in the back of her mind. The McRopus tribunal continued with yet more revelations – Nehallaneia’s council had been pulling the same funding and coverup tricks Frigga’s had for years – something her barrister wanted an urgent meeting to discuss, and to try interview AzubaJuban’s councillors for the same reason.
The Eucatastrophe that might save everyone’s bacon, if only they acted now. The journalists covering the clusterfuck demanded comment.
Stingray still needed its usual administrative sign-offs, details and discussions with an increasingly concerned board wondering just where Sylia had gotten to and why she wasn’t showing up in person. Elon Musk thought Sylia Stingray wasn’t ‘Hardcore enough’. If only he knew the truth. It took a cyber to work a 30 hour day.
A dozen minor issues on Frigga begged for her attention alongside – the things that could be solved quicker ‘If only Jet knew’.
Ford’s room remained empty.
Jet pushed the door open and stepped inside for the first time in a year. The faintest echo of the scent of Ford’s favourite deodorant remained. Almost everything else had gone back to Chicago. Only the bedsheets and the furniture remained, along with a single print of a photograph of the pair of them together, grinning like cheshire cats the day the Highway Star broke a landspeed record.
One momentary flash at joy.
A long time ago. When Ford had first warned her about burning out.
It struck Jet like a diamond bullet in the brain. So. That’s why she left it behind.
She took a breath. “I really have been a fool, haven’t I?
The photograph didn’t answer.
At least Jet knew. The only person she could blame for it all, was herself.
Jet shut down her interfaces, then sat herself down on the timber floor beside it. Maybe tomorrow, the lesson would finally take and she might do something different.
That thought carried her to sleep, with her face resting against a soft bedsheet that smelled faintly of happier times.
---
This is not the end..... but it's where I've gotten too.
After six months, Lee had gotten used to the sensation of ‘snapping’ awake - going from dead asleep, to perfectly alert the moment the cybernetic alarm clock in the back of her mind decided to ring.
She took a few moments to curl up into her silken bedsheets, letting them rub against the haptic feedback panels between her thighs. She thought, if she tried she might’ve been able count the individual fibres beneath her fingers and toes.
She lingered for as long as she could, crunching her toes against the sheets, savouring the sensation.
Half her body existed in a sort of hyper-reality - an absolute awareness of every nerve ending. The other half, existed as a numb shell, covering a slow, beating heart and a building pressure inside that warned she needed to use the bathroom.
She took a breath, and forced herself to sit up. Her bedsheets slid off her body, pooling at her waist. Fabric would glide across metal and carbotanium in a way it wouldn’t against skin. Her gaze fell to her forearms - formed from lacquered metal and carbon-covered myomer in an imitation of bone, sinew and muscle
Of course, she would’ve been one of the ones that modern biotech wouldn’t work on. Either a full cyber, or living the rest of her life as a one-armed half-body in a bucket - no regrets ever entered her mind. Those things she missed, were already gone anyway.
She stepped off her bed, stretching on reflex, straining myomer actuators against themselves. It felt almost natural, artificial signals mimicking the human body’s natural force-feedback that kept a person’s muscles from tearing their body apart.
It limited her strength to human norms, without the discomfort of hard restrictors.
Lee bounced on her feet once, then twice, still marvelling at how easy it all felt, even after half a year .She imagined it would be close to what the really fit people felt - free and fluid - almost weightless, rather than stiff, aching and heavy.
Her apartment had been made by partitioning one of the older family-size apartments into a cluster of studio apartments - each one consisting of a sectioned-off double-bed, a central living area with a large seating area cut down into the rock floor, a small kitchenette with breakfast bar and a japanese-style wet-floor bathroom pod on the other side of the smallest-possible porch.
The buckling of the bathroom floor reminded her of the true weight of her body - a full hundred and thirty kilograms, not including what she’d eaten. Ares didn’t believe in light construction - even for the ‘civilian’ body types.
A ‘civilian’ body lacked things like independent life-support and vacuum hardening, or direct comms interfaces, network uplinks and radio-telepathy. It included the ability to use a bathroom like a normal human being and to have a mind filled with nothing but her own thoughts and no intruding datastreams.
She showered under a water-saving high-pressure jet, activated by a foot-plate on the shower tray. The real sensation of artificial fingertips kneading cherry shampoo through artificial hair soothed. A quick rinse washed the suds from her body.
It took longer to dry. The grykes between metal panels held water in a way skin didn’t. Blasting her body with a hairdryer helped keep her clothes from being stained. A chamois leather took care of the streaks on her thigh.
She took a few minutes to brush her teeth and straighten the curls in her oil-black hair. The face watching through the mirror belonged to her, but still, lacked the texture of who she’d been been - the subtle imperfections in the skin
It was a biomimetic image of who she’d been, draped over a ceramic substrate. A quick touch-up with a little makeup added a dose of healthy reality to her visage.
Six months after first waking up in a cybernetics lab on Noctis, giving herself one last quick check in the mirror before getting dressed, Lee felt perfectly fine.
—-
“It’s different with the limiters off, isn’t it?”
Jet popped her helmet visor Of course, she hadn’t even broken a sweat. It’d all been so effortless for the Panzer Kunst Meister.
Lee took a breath, half astonished that still that she didn’t feel any more sense of fatigue than a soft headache at the back of her mind from concentrating for the last thirty minutes.
“....harder.” she said after a moment’s thought. “Hard to keep up.”
Everything was always a heartbeat beyond where she expected it to be. Her body finished a form and started the next before her mind had gotten halfway through the first. She’d felt compelled to look down at her hands, astonished.
They responded the same as they always did. It felt the same. Only this time, the force between her finger and palm could crush stone into sand.
She’d twisted steel beams into bow-ties as easy as someone might twist a straw.
“You did well for your first time,” said Jet. “Most people trip.”
“I…..” Lee thought for a moment. “It’s hard to fall over.” A cold veil of discomfort settled across her shoulders. In a moment, she felt her self pull back away from the shell of her body into the hollow space deep inside. “I have autostabilise,” she said, her voice shrinking away.
Talking about herself in such a way alienated her soul. She could take a breath, find her centre, concentrate on the sensations of her toes against the leather liner of her boots, and the weight of her feet on the ground.
She curled her toes inside her boots, grounding herself in the reality of the sensation.
Jet waited a moment, seemingly distracted, her mind momentarily outside the room.
“I never got on with stabilisers,” Jet said. “Always end up fighting against them”
Lee couldn’t even tell hers worked - except for the microadjustments her body made to its posture when she decided to push it by doing something silly - like balancing herself upside down on one finger-tip.
Moments like that thrilled, where the exceptional had become the effortless. Lee clenched her right hand into a fist, tighter than she’d ever done before to the point where her fingers felt like they could punch right through her palm and crush solid steel.
From alienation to exhilaration, in the space of a few seconds.
“We’ll just do a few easy counter-strike exercises, and then end it for today.” Jet’s voice brought her back to the real world.
Lee thought it strange for a moment that they’d be doing it at full speed, especially since it was her first time without any running restrictors. She thought about saying something, but figured Jet knew what she was doing.
Jet Jaguar had been training cybers for well over ten years.
Jet Jaguar had settled herself into an easy, ready stance, waiting for Lee to match.
The object of the exercise was simple. Jet would give her an easy attack, she would block, storing up some of some of the energy from the attack to kick it back around. Jet would block, come back around and she’d block again, building energy and momentum the entire time.
Lee caught a strike from Jet on her arm, letting the energy flow through myomer actuators into the core of her body, amplifying it with a push from her feet. Kinetic energy snapped through her leg, accelerating far faster than her mind could keep up.
It felt like the difference between a mousetrap, and a rat-trap. Both were the same basic mechanism, operating in the same basic manner. One cracked your knuckles. One cut your fingers off.
She felt her leg catch something hard on the side of her thigh, scraping off it - and knew something had gone wrong. Her whole body continued to accelerate, even as she tried to get her mind ahead of herself, trying to bring her arm into the right place to catch Jet’s return strike.
Her shin cracked through something hard, ringing her entire body like a bell. She dropped into a ready stance, ground the momentum out by planting both her feet, bringing her guard back up still expecting a second hit.
Nothing.
Something hit the wall to her left. She glanced at it.
For one brief instant, came the dread idea that she’d taken Jet’s head clean off, the other cyber’s white helmet skittering back along the floor from where it’d ricocheted off the wall.
Jet herself lay on her back with her hair splashed across the stone
“Holy shit,” Lee breathed. Her whole body went cold in a way she didn’t think was possible anymore. Goosepimples crawled across skin she didn’t have anymore, a sensation like being covered in thousands of crawling spiders at once.
“You okay?”
Her voice quivered.
“Jet?”
A low groan rolled from Jet’s throat, her arms hinging slowly up into some form of broken fighting stance. She wheezed, trying to sit, reaching for a handhold that didn’t exist, but only her glazed eyes could see.
Lee reached down and grabbed her hand, dragging to the other cyber to her feet. She staggered, threatening to fail again before Lee took hold of her by the shoulder.
“You okay?”
Jets head turned towards the sound of Lee’s voice, her glazed eyes still staring at a point lightyears outside the rooms walls.
“Jet?”
Jet blinked, her eyes clearing slowly as her mind rebooted. She took a step, steadying herself on her feet. Her metal fingers probed at the left side of her head, where dark, thick blood had already begun to matte her hair together.
“... was a good kick.” she said. Her eyes scanned the room, her mind still finding its place. Jet helmet sat on the floor, the side of it caved in hard enough to pop the visor open. It’d obviously taken the worst of it. “I forgot to put your limiters back on,” said Jet, wearing an almost embarrassed smile.
Lee should’ve said something. She felt nothing but a hot relief that nothing serious had happened. The helmet gave its life to save its owner.
“Maybe we’ll call it there for the night.”
It was 11 in the morning.
“You sure you’re okay?”
“That was a good kick,” Jet said, again, still a little unstable on her feet. She took a breath. “I’ve had worse. Couple of painkillers and I’ll be fine.”
Lee started to feel a butterfly take flight in where her stomach used to be - maybe she needed to say something. Head injuries could be tricky like that.
“I’ve had worse,” Jet said, again, with a flippant wave of her hand. Don’t worry about it.
Jet seemed fine.
It wasn’t until after they’d finished cleaning up and broken for the day, that Lee realised her limiters had been left off.
–
A mix of Oxycodone and Ibuprofen soothed the ache in the side of her head to a dull throb, pulsing in time with her heartbeat. After about thirty minutes, she figured it would do. A dangerous injury would’ve had her on the way to the morgue by then anyway.
The bleeding had mostly stopped.
The whole side of her head still felt tender under her fingers.
The rule was, that if a person couldn’t complete their normal duties for two days after an injury, it had to be reported. There had to be an investigation. Another investigation just seemed like too much bother over something as simple as a training accident.
The helmet had taken the worst of it - shattering like her skull should have. She probably should’ve congratulated Lee on the kick.
Something felt strange.
She found herself wondering where he train of thought had been going as she found herself back outside the house, not entirely sure why she’d gone up there. The whole side of her head still throbbed.
Even most of the way to Jupiter, the unfiltered sun still had enough power to bleach and peel the paint on the old timber-frame house. Some of the windows had popped from their frames as the timber shrank. A strong kick would knock it over.
Her heartbeat pulsed in her ear.
Keeping it up seemed like it’d take far more time than Jet could ever spare. Eventually it’d collapse.
On some level she sympathised.
She blinked. A woman’s voice broke her train of thought.
“So what do you think?”
A moment's confusion as her world shifted around her. She found herself sitting in the grey room of the station council at her usual chair. Where a collection of weaponry had once been proudly displayed in the glass cabinets on the walls, now a collection of photographs of Earth and the solar system had replaced them.
The photo Noctis Labyrynthus on Mars called to her soul.
“Jet”. Kim Tchombe - reactor shift lead - waited for her answer. “The phase imbalance on TG-Two is affecting the grid. We’re at two percent,” she explained. “Any more and it’ll start to burn out equipment.”
Jet’s mind jammed in spinlock, trying to find its place
“It’ll trip TG-three on negative sequence and blackout the station.” Mellick was the turbine section forman. He still wore his orange jumpsuit overalls, even in the council room.
“What about generator one?” Asked Jet, stalling a little until she caught up. “How long until we get it up to temperature?” It might take a day to get the core running and up to steam temperature.
“We’re rebuilding it after last month.”
Obviously.
“Last month….” Jet felt her mouth goldfish open. What happened last month?
“After the turbine motored,” said Mellick. “We’re rebuilding the hydrogen seals. All the casings are off and the turbine is hanging from a crane thirty feet above it’s bed.”
“What?”
“....we talked about it ten minutes ago.”
“Are you okay?”
She looked at the six faces with their interrogating eyes demanding an answer. The implied threat if she was discovered didn’t need to be stated.
“Maybe I just zoned out for a bit,” Jet said, forcing herself to smile. “I’ve a bit of a headache.”
“Looks like a pretty bad headache to me,” Mellick laughed.
Jet gave him a tired look. “We need to…..” she stopped, wondering where she’d been going with that. “You know the right thing to do. You don’t need me to tell you.”
“Right,” said Kim. “Shut down Two. Spin up the backup generators.”
“And a System Alert?” Mellick suggested?
“Yeah. System alert,” Jet repeated. “And warm up the back ups.”
Everyone agreed with that.
The rest of the meeting seemed to run in circles, to everyone’s frustration. Jet muddled her way through, like getting herself through an exam she hadn’t really studied for, or a job interview she wasn’t really qualified for.
Jet thought she felt like being drunk and hungover at the same time. A little dazed, a little confused, along with a thundering headache, only without the fun. It seemed like decades since she’d been truly drunk like that.
–
Jet thought her head was ringing.
It was a Christmas bell playing from the speakers above the New Bermingham Company Store. It was a week until the big day.
She passed the Midoriyah. Kotono was there, with a tea and cake for herself, and a coffee for whomever she was waiting on.
Kotono said nothing to her. She didn’t wave. Just a shared glance to acknowledge each other’s mutual presence.
She guessed, on some level, that relationship was over. They hadn’t become strangers just yet, but it’d been so long since they’d spoken about anything.
The memory escaped Jet.
She went back to her house to find some painkillers to clear her head.
--
Her house was dead, and judging by the smell, it had begun to rot. Or was that the contents of the ruined fridge?
She turned on the lights. The breakers tripped with a snap. The cables must’ve broken. A beam holding the ceiling up had split, causing the upstairs floors to sag under their own weight.
The whole building would give soon. The collapse had already begun. It began weeks ago the moment the fridge went through a load-bearing wall.
Her head thrummed.
It could’ve been saved, if she’d bothered. If she could gather a few people and had the spare time. It’d be like embalming a corpse, and claiming it still lived.
One of the cabinets in the kitchen usually had something.
Mould had started to grow in some of the sauce bottles. The Chilli dated from 2017, when they’d first moved in. Nothing had been touched in nearly a year. A potato plant had begun to grow from a bag.
She found a pack, already opened and empty.
Her head pounded.
She’d have to go upstairs. She hadn’t done that since it became clear her weight on the floor had a chance of bringing it down.
It was worth it, just to clear her head a little and keep going.
The stairs always complained against her weight. This time they seemed to shift in her feet, threatening to pull loose from the wall. She steadied herself. A ring of lasers which replaced her inner ear had been knocked out of alignment. She’d have to rest to let it re-align itself. When she had less to do, maybe she could.
The floorboards had popped where they’d buckled. The panelling on the walls had seperated from the buckled floor. The walls had begun to sag. Cracks spiderwebbed across the plaster of the ceiling.
A quick flash from her jets carried her across.
She landed with an indelicate clunk. The building shuddered.
Ford’s bedroom door had crept open as the doorframe shifted. The bed still hadn’t been made. Mackie’s room had been disturbed – the floor had buckled on that side of the house.
It’d go soon enough. Maybe in a few days.
Jet felt nothing more about it than a vague, ‘So it goes’.
Her muse popped up another message in the back of her mind. The McRopus tribunal continued with yet more revelations – Nehallaneia’s council had been pulling the same funding and coverup tricks Frigga’s had for years – something her barrister wanted an urgent meeting to discuss, and to try interview AzubaJuban’s councillors for the same reason.
The Eucatastrophe that might save everyone’s bacon, if only they acted now. The journalists covering the clusterfuck demanded comment.
Stingray still needed its usual administrative sign-offs, details and discussions with an increasingly concerned board wondering just where Sylia had gotten to and why she wasn’t showing up in person. Elon Musk thought Sylia Stingray wasn’t ‘Hardcore enough’. If only he knew the truth. It took a cyber to work a 30 hour day.
A dozen minor issues on Frigga begged for her attention alongside – the things that could be solved quicker ‘If only Jet knew’.
Ford’s room remained empty.
Jet pushed the door open and stepped inside for the first time in a year. The faintest echo of the scent of Ford’s favourite deodorant remained. Almost everything else had gone back to Chicago. Only the bedsheets and the furniture remained, along with a single print of a photograph of the pair of them together, grinning like cheshire cats the day the Highway Star broke a landspeed record.
One momentary flash at joy.
A long time ago. When Ford had first warned her about burning out.
It struck Jet like a diamond bullet in the brain. So. That’s why she left it behind.
She took a breath. “I really have been a fool, haven’t I?
The photograph didn’t answer.
At least Jet knew. The only person she could blame for it all, was herself.
Jet shut down her interfaces, then sat herself down on the timber floor beside it. Maybe tomorrow, the lesson would finally take and she might do something different.
That thought carried her to sleep, with her face resting against a soft bedsheet that smelled faintly of happier times.
---
This is not the end..... but it's where I've gotten too.
![[+]](/images/collapse_collapsed.png "[+]")
SpoilerI 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.