The Nature of Change

Iron Dirt (Terry 10)

FOUR DAYS LATER

It's been one hell of a busy week since first entering.

Pretty much every day has been jam-packed with lectures, examinations, presentations... It's like I'm twenty-something again, back in university, with the exception of having Bea, Gerry, and Harry there with me. Memories flow every so often, unbidden, back to the days when it was all so clear, back to the days when the future was bright, before my parents died...

That's all in the past. Today, the future isn't bright, but at least I have a clear purpose.

Today is the first day of real work.

I slip hastily into my blue-lined jumpsuit and swipe my standard-issue tablet from the bathroom countertop, once again swinging a pair of left turns. I idly scroll through my orders again as I walk towards the work site, near one of the mining caverns deep on the eighth level down.

My legs carry me briskly through the halls and tunnels, taking lefts and rights as I reprocess the orders. I pass through several intermediary caverns, each rivalling the entry cavern. At first I am awestruck as with the first cavern, but soon the vastness of the spaces I pass through fades from my attention as I focus on the immediate task; getting down to the work site.

I've been tasked with organizing a team to install pipes in one of the mining caverns at the bottom level. As I descend down the elevator, I see sparks flying from other worksites in other caverns doing much the same work as my team is tasked with. The job will be finicky, as some of the pipes are for plumbing while others are containing power busses feeding from the main reactor, and there are pipes running both horizontally and vertically. It'll take a lot of coordination and a lot of time to make sure we install the pipes the right way; I've got nothing else on the schedule for this active watch to accommodate this.

We're standardized to a variant of US Navy submariner schedules, with an eight-hour-long "watch" followed by eight hours of R&R and eight hours of sleep. Everyone's been placed on a watch that's as close as possible to their original sleep schedule, accounting for time zones.

The elevator clunks to a hard halt, and I step out into the minimal, red-hued auxiliary lighting in the cavern. Besides me, one welder, and a few people wheeling crates of piping segments out to the edge of the wall, the cavern proper is completely empty, but I notice an elevator coming down from the other side of the cavern with a few people inside. I squint, and I pick out a welding machine by the side of each one.

Priority one is clearly going to be getting the power buses secured so we can get the main lights working and be able to actually see without needing to rely on our helmet lights or handhelds. Most of those power buses are in the second of four layers, though, so we'll have to lay some lateral piping without any lighting - and were I welding I'd rather work in low lighting than have to worm my hand around behind existing pipes to get into position.

The welder sees me and pushes himself up from his sitting position atop his welder, raising a hand in greeting and giving a small nod.

I close to within earshot, and he straightens up into a snappy salute. "Ahmaud al-Rashid, sir, reporting for duty," he says in a thick East Indian accent.

"Terry Lawrence," I reciprocate. "Here, I'll help you with the harness."

It takes two to don or doff a harness, simply because so many of the fasteners are in weird hard-to-reach places. Ahmaud is very professional about it, taking care to focus his attention solely on the fastening, and before long we're harnessed up. The harness acts as a backup in case we fall from the catwalk, and as a measure of flexibility to allow access to elevations we can't get to from the catwalk.