Cost of Power
An imaginative composed by Kristian (Year 10, Mackillop Catholic College)
I am expendable.
It's true. Today marks the 100th anniversary of the United World's Space Fleet since the day of its creation on a far-away terrestrial rock in space so long ago. I am just one of the many descendants of the crew members who travelled on this very fleet all that time ago, Crew Member 676F6E6572, and the job bestowed upon me on the day of my assignment was that of 'Main Utility Personnel', a role that so many disparage and abhor, as do I. My job is to maintain all assets under the UWSF's possession, which is technically everyone's job, just in different forms. You have your brainy types, engineers and scientists working on newer and better ways to harvest energy. Then you have more brutish positions, guards in armoured Cosmo-Suits and sector managers, whose job mostly consists of expending every living moment bludgeoning your ears with the most scolding words you'll ever hear; breaking down into tears is just a part of the job description around here. No matter what you do, we all reside on this ship we call home, made in the shape of a pseudosphere; basically just a spinning top that floats in space, tethered between the surfaces of two dwarf planets without an orbit. The ship is designed to spin at speeds so fast that from the outside, all the surfaces blend. It's so we can have artificial gravity of course, made to mimic that of the planet whose species we derive from, although I've never really seen an image of what the people of that planet look like, I can only assume they looked like us at the point in which we left them a hundred years ago. The goal of this fleet was to provide that planet energy from a renewable source after it ran dry there, something about fossils- I didn't really pay attention to that part during Terrestrial History, the past just serves as a real downer for me. Why stay in the past when you can look forward to the predictable future, of working...
every day,
all the time,
Forever.
But work isn't all bad! We barely get called out to do any real work, most of it's just monitoring equipment and cataloguing wires. On the times we do get called out, it's usually not in our job description and we just refer them to another department. It's been like this so long that I feel like if any real work were to pop up that needed us, all of us, simultaneously, would fail. But that hasn't happened yet and may never happen, so no need to worry. We're here all day on standby. It's all worth it though, as through all this inaction comes my true reward. It's not the money, but the gentle hands I get to hold when I return to my living quarter; Scarlet's hands: my daughter. With needle-like threads riveting towards your eyes from her head, a scarlet-tangerine hue like that of oxidated steel. She gets it all from her mother of course, although recently the flame I married has been beginning to smoulder, and now I'm afraid that the pyre of a dying candle may fall onto the eyes of my Scarlet - My angel, my everything. I can still vividly recall the day I first felt her touch, an outstretched appendage with five fleshy extensions sprouting from it; barely resembling its reference but would soon meet it. She's the reason I still work on this lacklustre assignment, letting my brain decay of all its knowledge through the inactivity I participate in each and every day.
It's all for her.
So back to the present, and it’s the same routine again. Lazing around and browsing the Space Wide Web as my colleagues grift for gain on a poker table, one leg being noticeably shorter than the others, but remedied with the addition of our employee manual, only barely supporting the burden of a generation's carelessness. A position whose purpose is non-existent, a nothing, a waste, a- Oh. That’s not good. Alarms mounting the wall are screaming crimson light onto the floors and walls, wailing like a child without attention. For the first time in all my years of employment, our services are required.
My hands and arms fumble as I force them into the sockets of our cosmo-suit, the others aren’t doing much better either: one’s got his leg and arm sockets reversed. Our crew leader is reading the manuscript that’s just been spooled from the emergency console. His pupils scatter as he raises the now-earthy textured paper, with each paragraph causing his eyelids to drift further apart, until... he’s frozen now. Orders are suddenly strewn through the air, reverberating off every surface, bringing all the men to attention. The sound of lowly static replaces the sound of struggling rubber and flesh in the air for a few seconds, our crew leader levers his jaw open from its recluse state, ‘The coolant system in the Dyson Sphere has gone bust. It’s a matter of uttermost importance that we restore it, lest it implode and end us all.’ His irises shoot at mine, then at the tacked floor. Why?
We’re rushed into our repair ship, and I catch a quick glance at the crew leader, our eyes meet even as the translucent polygonal ship door closes. A countdown whines from the ship’s speaker, dropping from 5... 4... 3... He’s mouthing something to me now, "I’m sorry" can be read from his deafened words. "Sorry for what?" The thought only lingers for a moment before the ship is slung from the dock, luminous kaleidoscopes beaming from our front windows and... we’re already here. The view from the front panels is immense, the Dyson Sphere, man’s greatest accomplishment is in full view. I’ve only ever seen it once, during the tour, but I am in much more awe now given it was only just a skeleton of itself back then. The whole structure is designed to harvest energy from the sun, using reflective mirrors to beam sunlight into photovoltaic collector panels that convert it into electricity. The electricity is then beamed all over the solar system, to our colonies on Mars, and the very space station we reside. Its beauty can only be compared to a glass chandelier orbited by silver tinsels that glimmer as the light refracts from its surface. The ship is docking, another countdown runs its course and the splintering click of the doors ushers us inside. The control centre is located on a dwarf planet which orbits the sun we’re harvesting, the planet itself being responsible for the production and launching of the mirrors into the sun’s orbit. As we step out onto the planet’s dust-sprinkled surface, we see the scientists in charge herded together in their company-branded space suits, one sheepishly speaks out to us,
“Are you guys evac?”
The crew shuffles in place, eyes darting to the man next to them, seeing whether they would respond. I speak up,
“No, but evac should be coming here soon.”
An audible murmuring washes over from the crowd,
“Can any of you direct us to the coolant station, maybe some instructions or a map?”One stumbles over to us, shakily clenched in his hand is a map with the company logo clamped into its surface, I snatch it. I begin to lead the crew using the map, but as we walk past the gossiping scientists, one thing catches my attention.
“I can’t believe they’d send a whole crew to die like this, do they even know?”
I try to block the thought out of my mind, that the company would... are we really that expendable? Even after all our years, they would just...? Ah damn it, it doesn’t matter right now, we’re at the entrance to the coolant station now, a jagged rectangular shape serving as a door. It’s jammed, continuing to pull itself up, slam into the motor, and drop again. We’ve fixed these a million times, but this isn’t the reason we’re here. We install a jack to hold up the door, and we slide on through underneath. The building is painted wall-to-wall in darkness, only lowly red lights seep through from the emergency power underneath. The map given to us serves as a cheat sheet to the labyrinth we stand in, as we jog towards the location of the coolant controls. We slide underneath another stunted door, and finally we stand at our objective, the coolant. Through a control window, the core of the facility can be seen: the single compressed culmination of all the excess heat created by the energy-making process of the Dyson Sphere, the only way to access it being through two consecutive reinforced blast doors openable by a control panel. A workplace poster is affixed to the door,‘One person per entry to prevent organism amalgamation’The crew begin to talk amongst themselves.
“What do we do now? Should we all go in or-“
“What? Are you nuts? You saw the sign, one entry per person, I don’t want to become a fleshy goo pile.”
“Nobody said *you* had to go in, Daryl.”
I have to intervene quickly, ”We need to get the coolant online before this station drops dead. I’ll go in, alone, the rest of you can initialise the technical reboot while I manage the physical reboot.” The crew falls silent.
And then...
“Well, you heard him, fellas, let’s get the doors open and get home in one piece.”
Two men hurriedly walk to the console, scan their company ID’s and the door whooshes open. I step inside and it clobbers the floor behind me, leaving me stuck between two doors. Sterilisation gas begins to fill the room from the vents lining the walls, and a timer counting down from 30 begins on a monitor above the second door ahead. My visors are clouded from the gas, leaving me without sight until I hear a reassuring ding echo through the room. The room in front of me is open now, stepping in I instantly feel the heat resonate through my limbs from the core's tantrum. A muffled voice rains from the speakers above.
"We're going to open the panel containing the coolant antimatter, all you have to do is place it into the core, carefully." A compartment opens from the wall beside me, and two frosted rods shoot out, joined together at their ends to form a loop. I hear the sound of something rolling seeping through from deep within the compartment, and then I begin to see it too. A sphere, akin to that of a glass eye frozen, rolls down, utterly smooth in curvature, slowing down as it travels further towards me aboard the rods. My enclosed hands cradle it as it nears the end of the track, my enclosed hands filling with ice. I hurry to the core, but my hands are numb, my body begins to slink as I lurch closer. I place another step, but my balance unsteadies, and my legs unravel, collapsing upon the floor. The orb, our only hope of fulfilling our objective, is now catapulting from my numbed grip, soaring through the air aimed directly at the core. There's no hope in stopping it, and I can only bear witness to my failure. It strikes the core, causing it to splash some of its contents outwards onto the floor beside me, melting through and leaving a mucus-like crevice behind. The core's luminous white starts to morph into a fierce azure blue as the coolant is slowly integrated into it.
"It's alright, you falling didn't change much - other than giving Daryl A heart attack that is. Get back out through you came and... Uh... That's not good." The voice cuts off.
I turn away from the control panel's window and see the core behind me, now pulsing like a heart. With each beat, it grows in size, enveloping each obstruction in its path. I fumble to the door and begin to sledge my desensitised hands upon the unrelenting steel. Pleas for help spewing from my voice and onto the deaf earth. My arms cave in, and my body shivers from the growing chill, then my legs follow. I'm hunched beside the door, spasms corrupting each of my limbs as I see the core grow closer. I close my eyes. I don't want to see it coming. All my work, all my effort, amounting to this. Did the company know this would happen? Did they know that we would die? Our crew leader, did he know from the start? This was what he was sorry for? The chill grows stronger, my teeth now chatter. All these lies, to get us to die for this colony, the future of our people teetering upon the lives of those deemed expendable beneath them. Me. Did they ever think about us? The people we also held dear to us? The children who would grow up without their father? Scarlet... A tear tries to fall, but crystallises to my skin, I don't try and brush it away.
My last thoughts are of Scarlet, recalling the days I would push her pram in the simulated parks aboard the ship, she'd cry and, I'd grab her hands and she'd smile; passing the warmth from me to her. The chill has progressed to its peak, my limbs are frozen in place, my eyelids now melded to my eyes from the cold. I sit there, looking into the darkness of my eyes, until I'm finally met with one final feeling of warmth, like those I'd feel from my angel, Scarlet.
