Corpse Planet: Chapter 1
Chapter 1 : The C-Class Technician
The Behemoth Class strider, the Hecatoncheir, groaned its way across the Great Pacific Wasteland. Grapho-Adamantilum feet, several kilometers across, crashed into the barren landscape, sending grey-black ash spiraling into the air. Thick poisonous smog shrouded those feet, a blanket of gaseous death that rose a third of the way up its legs. The strider bore on its back about a million souls, ponderously conveying them across the surface of the hellish world in search of elusive pockets of survivability. It superficially resembled an enormous tardigrade, a squat metallic beast resting on six legs, its surface jagged and irregular, a patchwork of centuries’ worth of eclectic repair with scavenged materials. At the center of its back, in the center of the city, rose a command tower, ever so slightly tilted, that served as the brain-center of the Hecatoncheir. There resided the Kee-Ose, clad in blue-black, the council of eight whose decrees directed the behavior of countless tons of metal and flesh. The Hecatoncheir went left if they commanded it to go left, right if they commanded it to go right, and if they so ordered it the colossal beast would throw itself into one of the numerous volcanoes that speckled the surface of the earth like weeping sores.
One Eustace Morris, C-Class technician, was tucked away in a sweltering pocket inside one of the feet of the strider. It took the better part of a day for the strider to take a single step, so while Eustace technically spent most of the day entirely in motion, that motion was slow enough and gentle enough to not cause him too much discomfort.
Course it's not comfy for the sake of my comfort, he mused to himself.
I suppose that’s the way of it: what comfort comes our way is incidental like.
Eustace was wedged in a small void amongst the network of pipes and conduits, a hiding place he had found some months ago that enabled him to evade the eyes of Supervisor Reg. By the light of a miniscule flashlight he had fished out of a pocket a moment ago, Eustace attempted to corral small bits of crumbled leaf onto a tiny piece of discarded paper, a shred of paper from an advertisement for a now defunct DreamScape business. The paper was hardly the right sort to be smoking out of, and the burning ink would cause his eyes to water and his lungs to sting, but Eust hadn’t been able to find any proper rolling papers in months. His kid sister Maurem had begged him to stop smoking entirely, and especially with such suboptimal materials, but Eust knew the truth of the matter: he was gonna be dead from something else long before his smoking habit caught up with him.
The fragments of plant matter were carefully arranged with monk-like patience. The top of the makeshift cigarette was daintily pressed against a nearby exhaust pipe, igniting it as Eustace took a small puff. His lungs tried to reject the poison but, with some effort, he managed to inhale…hold…
A violent coughing fit overtook him at this point, rattling, phlegmy, barking coughs emanating their way from Eustace’s chest. But the drug had found its way home, the soft warm buzz of nicotine settling in behind his temples. His lungs quieted and he risked another puff. This one tickled but didn't trigger the same coughing attack. Now he could watch the smoke from his mouth mingle and merge with the smoke and steam coming from dozens of poorly maintained pieces of machinery.
Can't be any worse than what I was breathing in anyway.
Secure in his hiding place, safe in the knowledge that Reg wouldn't be bellowing “WHERE THE FUCK IS EUSTY?” for at least ten minutes, Eustace committed the sin of uselessness. He smoked, and he stared -mostly thoughtlessly - at the smoke. For ten minutes, he could exist for himself.
Six minutes later the world lurched. Not by much, but Eustace had been down in the leg for long enough to know that the step was a few degrees off from where it should be. A sick thrill of panic shot through him. He stamped out his makeshift cigarette with a whisper of regret and squeezed, weasel like, through a tangle of pipes to get to the access shaft. A sudden drop of many meters loomed beneath him, but the terror kept him brave enough to swing out and down, feet finding the rungs of a ladder. He scrambled down the ladder as quickly as physics would allow.
He’d seen a fall once, or at least the aftermath. He had been eight years old, pressing his eye up against a shoddy telescope. In the distance he saw the wreckage of the fallen strider, the Daidarabotchi. The Hecatoncheir had only been in brief radio contact with them a few days prior, but the connection had been extremely poor. Only a few words had managed to get through, “sinkhole” and “avoid” among them. The Daidarabotchi had been smashed to pieces, and if any had survived the fall, they would have quickly died from the toxic smoke.
As he neared the bottom of the ladder Eustace simply let go and let gravity take him the rest of the way, crashing into the steel floor directly in front of Overseer Reg. Glancing at Reg’s face told Eustace everything: Reg wasn’t furious, and that meant everyone stood a good chance of dying.
“EUST! Panel 18-Delta! 4800 psi, twelve degrees outward! Hold for the call, then throw your goddamn life into it!”
With a nod of acknowledgement, wanting to save his breath, Eustace sped past Reg toward the designated panel, weaving his way through a labyrinth of metal and rubber and wire. Halfway there he snatched a crowbar and a wrench from a depot nook. Sammy ran by in the other direction clutching her own tools, but he wasn’t at all sure that she even registered him. Barely a minute later he was slamming the wedge of the crowbar into the crack of the panel, bending and buckling metal that he would have to replace later if he was alive. He spotted the valve control he needed, placed his wrench appropriately, kept an eye on the gauge… and waited.
Shit shit shit shit shit. Come on man make the fucking call…..
Ten seconds crept past.
Maurem is in class now ya? The school is in sector D level 25. So if we fall she…fuck fuck FUCK FUCCCKKK
Abruptly, every speaker in the lower part of the leg gave voice to Reg’s bellow.
“THROW IT YOU FUCKERS!”
Eustace whipped the wrench a precise half turn, his back muscles creaking with the effort. The gauge hit 4800 psi, or as close to it as Eustace could keep it. The wrench fought him, pulling him back, but if he used too much force he’d shoot past his target pressure. He clenched his entire being, and focused on the wrench and the gauge as the only two points of focus in his universe. He had to hold it long enough for the adjustment to be made. The foot was coming down at a bad angle, and it was about to make contact. Somewhere in the bowels of the strider, in a control center near to the joint at the main body, an A-Class technician was making an emergency adjustment. Said adjustment required roughly a hundred other smaller adjustments to the system to ensure things didn’t explode or implode or short circuit or corrode or spew radioactive gas everywhere. Eustace was making one such adjustment, and he would need to hold it until the A-Class was done. Needed to hold the wrench at exactly this position or his kid sister would die.
Seconds moseyed by, then minutes. The temperature in this part of the machine was always sweltering, and sweat poured down every inch of Eustace’s trembling body as he did his best to keep millions of people from dying. The sweat distracted him. He felt the drip from his armpit down his torso, down his back, down his pants, down his leg. The sweat stung his eyes horribly, but he hadn’t a free hand to wipe it away, so he blinked profusely.
The wrench slipped a fraction of an inch and his heart stopped briefly.
Maurem. Maurem. Maurem.
The wrench moved back to its appropriate position. His whole body was numb from the effort. He held. He held. His bowels gave out and he soiled himself, but he was glad that he wasn’t wasting any additional energy holding back his shit.
Another minute.
Maurem. Maurem. Maurem.
The heat started to properly get to him and he felt his thoughts get muggy and slippery. He started to see stars.
Maurem. Maurem. Mau-
“RELEASE RELEASE RELEASE!” screamed Reg over the loudspeakers.
And Eustace collapsed, lying awkwardly on the grate floor. He was distantly aware he had shit himself. Distantly aware that searing hot pipes had stolen a few patches of skin from him as he had brushed past them while rushing here. Even distantly aware of the almighty crash of the foot of the Hecatoncheir making contact. Distantly aware of everything except the fact that his kid sister probably wouldn’t die today.
********************
Eustace luxuriated in the tepid water spraying down his back, even as it stung him terribly when it encountered one of his many recently acquired burns. He was in the unit showers, a little makeshift room with valves crudely attached to part of the water system. It was a tiny room, barely large enough for 4 people to decently shower, but since there were six shower heads it was usually crammed tighter than decency would allow. This was the case at the moment, forcing Eustace to occasionally dodge an elbow as he scrubbed himself clean. No space for dignity when you worked in the legs, and the four men and two women in this shower had gotten plenty used to each other's bodies by this point. When he had first been assigned he would sneak peaks at Samantha when they showered together, but the charm had worn off almost immediately. Hard to be even a little lecherous in a place that smelled as bad as this. The job had a strange ascetic effect: everything that wasn’t work or survival got stripped away.
The close call had come only halfway through his sixteen hour shift. After briefly passing out he wiped himself down in a latrine, thrown on new pants, and shakily worked his way through another eight hours. Six days on, one off. Off at 7AM; he would have to report to Reg at 7AM tomorrow. This shower heralded the start of his day off and Eustace was planning to do as little as possible for the next 24 hours. 7:15 AM slipped past just as he turned the handle and shut the water off. 1425 minutes of freedom left. He squeezed past five of his coworkers, the grate floor hurting his wrinkled feet as it always did.
Minutes later Euastace was on a rickety elevator up the leg. It would take the better part of an hour to get up the leg. You could only take the elevator when your leg wasn’t in motion. Eustace was shoved into a corner of a rusty steel box, buzzing and flickering greenish lights dimly providing light for twenty people crammed into a space meant for fifteen.
Always doing the sardine bit. Whole damn strider is stuffed to the gills.
Not everyone aboard had decided to shower after their shift and it smelled like it. There was a unique, primordial scent created by six days of hard labor in humid conditions. The scent that had been conjured beneath the coveralls of his fellow leg technicians had a penetrative quality, and only long exposure to it had given Eustace any kind of a defense. A newbie a few feet to his left was clearly suffering. Eustace had only a handful of times endured the fascinating combination of vomit and work stench on his ride up the leg, but they had been memorable moments. And there was no stopping once this ride was initiated.
Trapped in a box. Trapped inside Heccy. Trapped on a fucked planet. Trapped in a twice fucked universe.
Eustace laid his head back against the graffitied wall of the elevator. He was lucky enough to get a wall to lean against, although folks sort of all leaned against each other to various degrees during these trips.
Two of the old heads were huddled - even more huddled - a few inches to Eustace’s right. Jed and Krissy were their names as Eustace recalled, two of the longest serving techs in Leg Alpha. Bits and pieces of them had been claimed by the job over the years. Jed was missing two fingers on one hand, most of his right ear, and rumors persisted about his left testicle. Krissy had had an eye taken by a steam burst on her first day on the job, now forty years ago, leaving her with an angry mass of scar tissue on her face.
“Second close call in six months Krissy,” muttered Jed.
“Goddamn KOs got us wandering here like we ain’t been over this area a hundred goddamn times,” Krissy replied.
“What you think we’re looking for anyway?” Jed said, dipping his mouth closer to Krissy’s ear.
“Fuck knows? Not like they know what the fuck they’re doing.”
“SSSHHHH, jeezit Krissy.”
Trying to keep the conversation one shade away from danger. Hope it works.
“Fuck em!”
Krissy turned to the elevator at large and raised her voice an octave.
“Fuck. Them.”
“Krissy, jeezit, settle the fuck down,” Jed begged her, and he tried in vain to move himself between Krissy and the rest of the room.
Krissy disgustedly pushed him back, but she did indeed stop talking, choosing instead to glare at the floor.
Jed continued to chat at the woman, opting for less contentious topics.
The elevator shook ominously, something in the centuries-old machinery slipping by a few fractions of an inch. That shut everyone up, ears straining to catch another indication of impending doom.
The elevator rumbled on. The twenty of them wouldn’t die this minute it seemed.
Lucky us.
********************
It was 7:58 AM when the elevator doors opened, letting in a blessed rush of relatively fresh air. Down a short access tunnel, a right turn, another set of sliding pneumatic doors.
Eustace stepped out and blinked in the sunlight. Stretched out in front of him was the city proper, a mad assemblage of buildings and tunnels and arching highways twisting and crashing into one another. If there had ever been anything approaching city planning in the distant past it had long since ceased to be a factor. For most of the city there was little enforcement of anything like building codes, although as one approached the central spire that rose up from the city they would notice increasingly safer and more sturdy construction.
The sky was shrouded with a nearly ever present layer of dirty orange smog, sunlight filtering down to the planet below as a sickly glow. It never really got bright anymore, but after being in the leg for days even this was enough to force the technicians to frequently turn their eyes to the ground. It would be a stretch to call the air up here clean, but it beat the hell out of the air on the inside of Hecatoncheir.
The replacement crew stalked past, no thoughts behind their eyes. Thinking would crush you on this job.
The trick is to be one with the machine. To give up your will, who the fuck you are, to old Heccy. Merge. Blend. Pipe. Gear. Valve. Femur. Gallbladder. Parts of the whole.
Eust shook his head.
Look at me being a goddamn poet. Maurem’s waiting.
Eust set off at a brisk pace. It would take him exactly 42 minutes to reach the tiny apartment he shared with his ten year old sister. He glanced at the decaying city about him as he walked, clutching a small knife in his pocket. He had been mugged on a number of occasions, the last time by twitchy hollow-eyed fume addicts. It’s not like he had anything on him to steal, besides the knife that is, but the last time they had cracked him over the head with a length of pipe and he didn’t want a repeat of that incident. Everything around him used to be something else. The small grocery store selling assorted flavors of meal bricks used to be a restaurant, from back when there were restaurants. Painted along the side of the building, now nearly gone, the paint peeled almost all away, was a jolly man offering up some kind of circular yellow-white food, laden with smaller red circles.
Wonder if that was tasty?
The owner, Charles, was out front, engaged in the sisyphean task of sweeping dust and debris away from the entrance of the shop. He smiled, mostly toothlessly, at Eust as he approached, and waved him over. Charles was good people, and Eust had bummed many a makeshift cigarette off the man over the years, and in return Eust had put his repair skills to work on Charles’s plumbing and electrical as the situation needed.
“Eustace! Eustace! You’re looking worse for wear my boy!”
Charles was a hunched man, miraculously fat, with a bushy black mustache and receding salt and pepper hair. He unsteadily lurched toward Eust, closing the distance.
“A few days in the leg will do that Chuck. How’s things been topside?”
“Oh it’s all bullshit, but what else is new? Comm network went down for a day or two, had to haul my ass all the way to Heccy’s ass just to check on my order for next month,” Charles coughed out. He laughed shakily after coughing, a defiant laugh.
“Jeezit fuck. Any new flavors?”
Charles nodded sagely, “Yeah yeah, that’s why I’m bothering you actually. Here, one minute.”
Charles waddled back into his shop for a brief moment and emerged with a plastic crate with a cloth wrap inside of it. Charles twitched the cloth aside, revealing shiny red gelatinous cubes, about an inch on a side, much smaller than a standard nutri-block.
“Cherry flavor they say! Whatever the fuck a cherry is. They gave me a buncha these tiny ones. For sampling purposes they said. SAMPLING!” and now Charles was roaring, “WHO THE FUCK WANTS SAMPLES OF THIS SHIT!”
Eustace rocked back a step, Charles sudden rage overstimulating his weary nervous system. He held a hand up weakly, signaling agreement but also a plea for gentleness. Charles settled down.
“Anyway, I got more of this shit then I’m ever gonna sell. You and Maurem want it?”
Eustace nodded. Food was food. In fact, his stomach growled as it was reminded how long it had been since he’d eaten. Eustace’s fingers snaked down and plucked one of the cubes, unwisely placing the whole of it between his teeth.
A distinctly chemical flavor hit his tongue, artificial sweeteners and some kind of vaguely fruity taste. He bit down, teeth slowly, laboriously, sinking into the dense block.
Gonna take me forever to get this down.
Profusely nodding his thanks, making promises to look at a small leak in Charles’s bathroom next week, Eustace resumed his trek to his apartment, now bearing a package, and therefore more of a target. His eyes darted this way and that, awkwardly holding the crate with one hand while holding his knife loosely at his side with the other.
Slowed by his encounter with Charles, Eustace arrived at his apartment building 48 minutes after getting off the elevator.
8:46. 1334 minutes of freedom left.
Eustace had become an expert in calculating the minutes till his life wasn’t his own again.
The three story building was a dismal grey concrete affair. Once upon a time it had been some sort of municipal building, but now the innards of it had been chopped up into dozens of cramped apartments. Eustace took the stairs two at a time: no reason to waste his day. Down hallways with dim, buzzing lights, he finally arrived at a steel door with a few fragments of ancient green paint still lingering. Before he could turn the handle, the door was flung open, and a scrawny girl with frizzy brown hair and enormous eyes stared up at him as if he was King of the World. Eustace’s world softened.
“EUST!” the girl shouted as she flung herself at him, hugging him tighter than her frame would suggest she could.
“Hey Maurem,” he said, as he hugged her back.
Guess I made it another week.