LJ Idol Season 9 Week 37: "Rapture of the Deep"
Mags scratched uselessly at the outside of her pressure suit. It was hard to stifle that reflex, especially when she was nervous. Unwelcome moisture traced fingers down her torso and armpits.
Deep in this chunk of rock called UML16, her mining rover scuttled a bit faster than the safety regulations would have advised. She was making her way to the Secondary Employee Shuttleport at the south pole of this planetoid that had been work and home, a trip that required a long spiraling loop down through a honeycomb of mineshafts shooting off into the planetary center. She was leaning into that single, long turn, driven by an artificially dulled ache in her shoulder.
She had liked being able to brag that she worked at United MacroLabs on her visits home, but the truth is that she wasn't part of whatever assuredly world-changing experiments were going on upstairs. The internship had turned into donkey work: she was being used as a highly educated miner in the bowels of this rock that Lab 16 was planted on. She didn't even know what the glossy black lumps she was charged with recovering were. There was an intimation about needing them for some alluringly murky genius-work they were supposedly conducting, work she'd dearly hoped to be part of, some kind of progressive spacetime exploration. Her actual stuffy directives merely commanded that she extract these shards of alien obsidian, WITH the surrounding rock if possible, and to never cut them under any circumstances. Nothing more. She'd expected to have to start at the bottom, so this didn't really bother her, until the weeks dragged on with no sign of graduating upstairs.
She drove past another miner, their visor tinted as their plasma cutter burned through rock. She knew there were other interns, but she'd never formally met any of them, so hectic was their gathering schedule. Her dorm was at the top of the mine, the lowest point in the pressurized labs; she had no idea where the other dorms were.
Jeez, speaking of interns, her open car suddenly jostled against another white pressurized suit. The idiot had stepped into the driving aisle without looking, emerging suddenly from the Materials Dropoff Bay, yelping as the rover's rear fender buzzed their side. Mags glanced back and saw the idiot juggling with one of the black rocks. They needed to pay attention - a little closer and that could have been a serious accident. But she didn't have the bandwidth to dwell on it, or to stop and yell at them - her focus was on reaching the south-pole port. They were clearly uninjured, so hell with 'em. She put it behind her and looped down and down again.
She was distracted by an itch that joined the ache in her left shoulder. It never failed: you try not to think about itching before you suit up, but you inevitably do at some point.
She scratched at her suit again, and peered at the spot just as uselessly, as if she could see the offending pinprick through a visor, patched pressure-suit and wet undershirt. It was then that oncoming movement snapped her attention forward again, and her mind pulsed suddenly in a blank, failed understanding.
In the middle of the carefully carved driving aisle stood ...her mother. Her mother? But there, plain as day.
She was wearing a standard sample-collection pressurized suit, and though Mags could only see her face framed in the suit's viewport, she looked exactly as Mags remembered her as a child - and not as she would be today. The figure was walking calmly, almost detachedly forwards, dead in the center of the aisle, eyes boring through the hurtling vehicle and its occupant. When Mags' brain finally checked back in a second later, the impossible figure was already far too close for brakes -- the vehicle's top speed was admittedly modest, but she'd been gunning it flat out. All she could think to do was to jam the controls hard to the left, squealing the car almost up onto two wheels.
She had a second to realize that she was slaloming into a half-finished excavation site - she recognized it, she'd worked this floor ages ago, it's funny how you have time in that one loaded second to process this stuff - when her vehicle careened into a jumble of half-exposed black rocks.
***
Mags was already walking when she returned to herself, pacing down the main driving aisle of this floor. She didn't feel well. She had no idea what had happened to her rover, but she couldn't shake the feeling she'd just narrowly avoided a close miss. She stopped and leaned heavily against the shaven wall, shaking her drooping head from inside her pressure suit. Suddenly, she decided she couldn't do this anymore. It wasn't that she didn't feel safe, exactly, but she did feel decidedly uncomfortable here. Her mind was a rocketing mess, as it tried to process her own input. Had she hallucinated? How did she end up here, walking a half a klick from where she'd seen ...what HAD she seen, exactly?
She continued her current path, looping up, out of sheer inertia.
She decided that she would make her daily quota for today, get paid, and get out. She couldn't deal with whatever this was. Her weekly paycheck would cover a ferry to Caldwell's Reach Station, then a wire home, and a few days' stay until her parents could come get her. That ...sounded good. Something was messed up here. It was time to find a different job, opportunity be damned.
She took a lift up a few floors to her current worksite, found her plasma cutter from where she'd left it, dimmed her visor, and got to it.
It was quiet today, and the isolation started to echo in her head, playing that incident from earlier off of her imagination, until she began creeping herself out with wandering thoughts. Hours passed without another soul in sight, until finally a transport rover hummed past her, as if to pull her out of her own head, to remind her that she was part of a team on a station. She continued sending pulses through the rock, probing for paydirt, and cutting out what she found. Two, three, four sizeable chunks; great. A good haul in a relatively short time. Planning her next steps, distracted within her own thoughts, she nicked one of the black rocks with the cutter - damn.
***
She was at the Weigh Station holding three rocks. This startled her, until she spied a plasma-scored fourth rock discarded on a bench behind her.
Oh, that's right. The lab folks only want pristine samples, so she had only brought the three complete pieces up to the Materials Dropoff port.
She must be operating on autopilot, she decided, and she reminded herself how dangerous it was, getting spacey around all this heavy equipment. This delivery put her just a bit above the minimum sample size needed this week. That would trigger her paycheck, meaning it was quite good enough for her. She placed the heavy lumps into a chunkily padded delivery cartridge, and fired it up the chute. Through the access bay window she watched the red lights turn green, one after another, as the payload rattled up the proboscis and into a gilded delivery shuttle.
She squinted at that shuttle with mild interest, in fact, because now that she looked at it, wasn't something wrong, there?
The departing wedge was a whole lot fancier than she remembered it. The lab could only afford the standard equipment a government stipend allowed. But this thing was bigger, twin engines glowing at the stern instead of a single directional impulse drive, the interior lit up like christmas. It was definitely theirs, though, it was emblazoned with the L16 logo. When had they bought THAT thing?
She had almost turned away when something else caught her eye. The departing shuttle didn't tilt up towards the labs, but instead jetted away with a silent boost and banked off to the subjective "planetary east", like a fish circling a tank. She followed it around the bay, and peered as far as she could lean until her visor tapped the port window. There she spied a massive deep-space shipping frigate that she didn't recognize, parked just outside the planetoid's gravitic well. The delivery shuttle was pulling in to dock at a belly port meant for that purpose. The monolithic gray frigate out there was itself emblazoned LAB16, and that took her spark of unease and fired it into a thrill.
If she wasn't able to wrap her head around a fancy shuttle, she sure as hell couldn't rectify a heavy beast like that. Ships that could shuttle cargo through deep space cost a fortune. What was going on with THAT?
She grabbed the damaged hunk of rock and bolted out the door, almost immediately getting sideswiped by some maniac taking the turn too quickly in a transport.
She yelped and stumbled, more from losing her footing than by impact with the speeding rover, and over she went as the vehicle disappeared around the turn. She felt a pain in her shoulder as the lump in her arms splintered on the hard ground beneath her, driving a thin shard through her suit, shirt, and into the skin beneath her collarbone. Oh crap.
***
She regained her footing - thank God, the shard was still in, partially sealing the hole. She glanced around, she was in the motor pool on the planetary west side of the mine. Her oxygen was already down to 14% - it fell so quickly! - but there were supplies on hand. She took three quick breaths, winced, and withdrew the shard. It seemed to have pierced the skin but it didn't get too deep into muscle. She grabbed a thermal patch and tube of adhesive from a nearby rover's emergency kit, and sealed the hissing hole shut. As she stood by the compressor re-pressurizing her suit, she racked her brain. How had she been so reckless as to puncture her suit? Christ, she was going to need some medical attention.
There were a few meddroid compartments in the station; getting her bearings, she realized she was closest to the one at the employee departure port at the south pole of the planetoid. Her shoulder didn't hurt so badly as the suit applied a temporary antibiotic foam, but damn did it itch. She clambered into a rover.
***
Mags scratched uselessly at the outside of her pressure suit. It was hard to stifle that reflex, especially when she was nervous. Unwelcome moisture traced fingers down her torso and armpits. Deep in this chunk of rock called UML16, her mining rover scuttled a bit faster than the safety regulations would have advised.
Deep in this chunk of rock called UML16, her mining rover scuttled a bit faster than the safety regulations would have advised. She was making her way to the Secondary Employee Shuttleport at the south pole of this planetoid that had been work and home, a trip that required a long spiraling loop down through a honeycomb of mineshafts shooting off into the planetary center. She was leaning into that single, long turn, driven by an artificially dulled ache in her shoulder.
She had liked being able to brag that she worked at United MacroLabs on her visits home, but the truth is that she wasn't part of whatever assuredly world-changing experiments were going on upstairs. The internship had turned into donkey work: she was being used as a highly educated miner in the bowels of this rock that Lab 16 was planted on. She didn't even know what the glossy black lumps she was charged with recovering were. There was an intimation about needing them for some alluringly murky genius-work they were supposedly conducting, work she'd dearly hoped to be part of, some kind of progressive spacetime exploration. Her actual stuffy directives merely commanded that she extract these shards of alien obsidian, WITH the surrounding rock if possible, and to never cut them under any circumstances. Nothing more. She'd expected to have to start at the bottom, so this didn't really bother her, until the weeks dragged on with no sign of graduating upstairs.
She drove past another miner, their visor tinted as their plasma cutter burned through rock. She knew there were other interns, but she'd never formally met any of them, so hectic was their gathering schedule. Her dorm was at the top of the mine, the lowest point in the pressurized labs; she had no idea where the other dorms were.
Jeez, speaking of interns, her open car suddenly jostled against another white pressurized suit. The idiot had stepped into the driving aisle without looking, emerging suddenly from the Materials Dropoff Bay, yelping as the rover's rear fender buzzed their side. Mags glanced back and saw the idiot juggling with one of the black rocks. They needed to pay attention - a little closer and that could have been a serious accident. But she didn't have the bandwidth to dwell on it, or to stop and yell at them - her focus was on reaching the south-pole port. They were clearly uninjured, so hell with 'em. She put it behind her and looped down and down again.
She was distracted by an itch that joined the ache in her left shoulder. It never failed: you try not to think about itching before you suit up, but you inevitably do at some point.
She scratched at her suit again, and peered at the spot just as uselessly, as if she could see the offending pinprick through a visor, patched pressure-suit and wet undershirt. It was then that oncoming movement snapped her attention forward again, and her mind pulsed suddenly in a blank, failed understanding.
In the middle of the carefully carved driving aisle stood ...her mother. Her mother? But there, plain as day.
She was wearing a standard sample-collection pressurized suit, and though Mags could only see her face framed in the suit's viewport, she looked exactly as Mags remembered her as a child - and not as she would be today. The figure was walking calmly, almost detachedly forwards, dead in the center of the aisle, eyes boring through the hurtling vehicle and its occupant. When Mags' brain finally checked back in a second later, the impossible figure was already far too close for brakes -- the vehicle's top speed was admittedly modest, but she'd been gunning it flat out. All she could think to do was to jam the controls hard to the left, squealing the car almost up onto two wheels.
She had a second to realize that she was slaloming into a half-finished excavation site - she recognized it, she'd worked this floor ages ago, it's funny how you have time in that one loaded second to process this stuff - when her vehicle careened into a jumble of half-exposed black rocks.
***
Mags was already walking when she returned to herself, pacing down the main driving aisle of this floor. She didn't feel well. She had no idea what had happened to her rover, but she couldn't shake the feeling she'd just narrowly avoided a close miss. She stopped and leaned heavily against the shaven wall, shaking her drooping head from inside her pressure suit. Suddenly, she decided she couldn't do this anymore. It wasn't that she didn't feel safe, exactly, but she did feel decidedly uncomfortable here. Her mind was a rocketing mess, as it tried to process her own input. Had she hallucinated? How did she end up here, walking a half a klick from where she'd seen ...what HAD she seen, exactly?
She continued her current path, looping up, out of sheer inertia.
She decided that she would make her daily quota for today, get paid, and get out. She couldn't deal with whatever this was. Her weekly paycheck would cover a ferry to Caldwell's Reach Station, then a wire home, and a few days' stay until her parents could come get her. That ...sounded good. Something was messed up here. It was time to find a different job, opportunity be damned.
She took a lift up a few floors to her current worksite, found her plasma cutter from where she'd left it, dimmed her visor, and got to it.
It was quiet today, and the isolation started to echo in her head, playing that incident from earlier off of her imagination, until she began creeping herself out with wandering thoughts. Hours passed without another soul in sight, until finally a transport rover hummed past her, as if to pull her out of her own head, to remind her that she was part of a team on a station. She continued sending pulses through the rock, probing for paydirt, and cutting out what she found. Two, three, four sizeable chunks; great. A good haul in a relatively short time. Planning her next steps, distracted within her own thoughts, she nicked one of the black rocks with the cutter - damn.
***
She was at the Weigh Station holding three rocks. This startled her, until she spied a plasma-scored fourth rock discarded on a bench behind her.
Oh, that's right. The lab folks only want pristine samples, so she had only brought the three complete pieces up to the Materials Dropoff port.
She must be operating on autopilot, she decided, and she reminded herself how dangerous it was, getting spacey around all this heavy equipment. This delivery put her just a bit above the minimum sample size needed this week. That would trigger her paycheck, meaning it was quite good enough for her. She placed the heavy lumps into a chunkily padded delivery cartridge, and fired it up the chute. Through the access bay window she watched the red lights turn green, one after another, as the payload rattled up the proboscis and into a gilded delivery shuttle.
She squinted at that shuttle with mild interest, in fact, because now that she looked at it, wasn't something wrong, there?
The departing wedge was a whole lot fancier than she remembered it. The lab could only afford the standard equipment a government stipend allowed. But this thing was bigger, twin engines glowing at the stern instead of a single directional impulse drive, the interior lit up like christmas. It was definitely theirs, though, it was emblazoned with the L16 logo. When had they bought THAT thing?
She had almost turned away when something else caught her eye. The departing shuttle didn't tilt up towards the labs, but instead jetted away with a silent boost and banked off to the subjective "planetary east", like a fish circling a tank. She followed it around the bay, and peered as far as she could lean until her visor tapped the port window. There she spied a massive deep-space shipping frigate that she didn't recognize, parked just outside the planetoid's gravitic well. The delivery shuttle was pulling in to dock at a belly port meant for that purpose. The monolithic gray frigate out there was itself emblazoned LAB16, and that took her spark of unease and fired it into a thrill.
If she wasn't able to wrap her head around a fancy shuttle, she sure as hell couldn't rectify a heavy beast like that. Ships that could shuttle cargo through deep space cost a fortune. What was going on with THAT?
She grabbed the damaged hunk of rock and bolted out the door, almost immediately getting sideswiped by some maniac taking the turn too quickly in a transport.
She yelped and stumbled, more from losing her footing than by impact with the speeding rover, and over she went as the vehicle disappeared around the turn. She felt a pain in her shoulder as the lump in her arms splintered on the hard ground beneath her, driving a thin shard through her suit, shirt, and into the skin beneath her collarbone. Oh crap.
***
She regained her footing - thank God, the shard was still in, partially sealing the hole. She glanced around, she was in the motor pool on the planetary west side of the mine. Her oxygen was already down to 14% - it fell so quickly! - but there were supplies on hand. She took three quick breaths, winced, and withdrew the shard. It seemed to have pierced the skin but it didn't get too deep into muscle. She grabbed a thermal patch and tube of adhesive from a nearby rover's emergency kit, and sealed the hissing hole shut. As she stood by the compressor re-pressurizing her suit, she racked her brain. How had she been so reckless as to puncture her suit? Christ, she was going to need some medical attention.
There were a few meddroid compartments in the station; getting her bearings, she realized she was closest to the one at the employee departure port at the south pole of the planetoid. Her shoulder didn't hurt so badly as the suit applied a temporary antibiotic foam, but damn did it itch. She clambered into a rover.
***
Mags scratched uselessly at the outside of her pressure suit. It was hard to stifle that reflex, especially when she was nervous. Unwelcome moisture traced fingers down her torso and armpits. Deep in this chunk of rock called UML16, her mining rover scuttled a bit faster than the safety regulations would have advised.