I
felt...warm. Blissfully warm.
That's
what made me stop.
My
work light found nothing as I swiveled around. Dust motes were the
only thing immediately visible, stirred by my intrusion within the
dark tunnel. Something was off, but there wasn't anything I could
see.
Warm?
Warm was new. Warm was dangerous.
My
fingers were now tingling.
I
licked my cracked lips, taking a deep breath. The skin was dry. Torn.
The sensation should have been somewhat painful. I could feel the
roughness and wetness of my tongue. I could even identify where my
lips had been hurting, but now? The pain was gone.
Physiologically?
I felt the best I'd felt in a long time.
That
seemed wrong somehow, but I couldn't seem to line up enough mental
dots to decipher the strange feeling.
Overall I felt...good.
Breathing felt glorious, like the first gasp after breaking the
surface of a pool following a deep dive. I exhaled and inhaled deeply
again, the rush of warmth and comfort increasing.
I
took another breath. It came easily; no unease or feeling of panic,
no constriction or pain, which might indicate organ issues. My
logical thought centers kept telling me something wasn't right as the
warmth and comfort shifted to a floating sensation...like I'd taken a
long pull from a jar of Wren's
Best.
Wren's
Best was
moonshine, and the name was a joke. Wren was one of the guys from
Third Shift who made some of the worst moonshine you could ever
taste, or at least it seemed to taste like the worst I could've ever
tasted. Rob had threatened Wren pretty badly after one of the Second
Shift guys went bli—wait.
Why
was I thinking about this?
I
felt lightheaded and dizzy now. The combination reminds me of what
happened after trying his concoction for the first time.
The
drink had smelled horrible and tasted worse: pure alcohol and jet
fuel mixed with rotten fruit and vitriol. Enough to make my eyes
water just looking at it. Despite the harshness, I'd felt a
euphorically floating bliss right before...I blacked out. It had been
warm then too.
I
felt a mental tickle. The familiar trail of sensations allowed me to
tug the string of an old memory, yanking it straight from cold
storage into active view like a fish on a line. A safety briefing.
The signs were all there: Disorientation, floating sensations,
moments of euphoria that didn't match the situation, issues
concentrating, and dry mouth.
The
logical parts of my brain spun, and I turned quickly.
Oxygen
deprivation. The lack of the urge to gasp and choke meant another
inert gas was present, enough to keep my organs from functioning if I
stayed...Oh no.
How
long had I been down here breathing it in?! I might be in some
serious trouble...
I
intended to make for the doorway but stumbled and tripped onto the
ground instead. A soft, keening alert notice came from my suit's
sensors as I tried to make sense of my new position while the tunnel
lifted and spun against the laws of physics. My temples were pressed
within the jaws of a vice. My skull, reverberating with painful
sensation, felt as if my brain were swelling to become too large for
it to contain with every pulse of my heart.
A
new alert, delivered by the suit's feminine voice, buzzed in my sound
conduction implants as I tried to clear the near-blinding notice from
my view.
[AIR
QUALITY ALERT: WARNING! NITROGEN-RICH ATMOSPHERE DETECTED. SEEK LIFE
SUPPORT MIXTURE IMMEDIATELY! WARNING!]
The
next few seconds went by as I clumsily managed to prop myself up. The
rest came to me in disjointed flashes, like old-time celluloid film
in slow motion.
One
flash and I was drunkenly bouncing off the feedline-covered walls, my
head turning awkwardly as gravity led me to the floor in a tripping
stumble.
Another,
and I could see my booted feet, one foot flying above the other as
they clomped with each heavy, stumbling step in a pounding staccato.
Dust flew to either side of my passage as I slid and fell time and
time again.
Now,
a door. My finger aching as I jabbed it on the contact port a little
too harshly.
I
heard my words slurring as my tongue sluggishly formed the sounds
necessary for the opening code. It took three tries before it was
finally accepted.
I
saw flashes of white, bordered by black, as the world began to dim
and eventually go out.
I
came to. My consciousness rapidly returned before I'd realized I'd
lost it.
I was lying on my side. On the ground.
I'd
collapsed before the doorway, which was open. Just in time.
My
limbs ached. My eyeballs, hands, and feet hurt, but I was alive.
Black spots I hadn't realized were obscuring my vision began to clear
as the cold, the wonderful, biting cold, began creeping back into my
body. The icy tendrils headed straight for my soul while I savored
it. Absorbed it. The false warmth was gone, which I took as a great
sign.
I
rolled onto my back and watched as my breath floated up and out the
open doorway. A dull safety briefing, of all the darnest things, had
actually saved me. I'm sure stranger things have happened.
The
atmosphere we breathe is made up of several different gases. Nitrogen
represents about seventy or so percent of it. Combined with oxygen
and a bunch of other stuff, it made up what some would call the
proper mixture for breathing, or so the briefing had said. The same
breathing I'd need to do things like walking, dodging, hiding,
running, or...living.
Support the author by searching for the original publication of this novel.
Oh
man.
Right
now? The tunnels. The tunnels were going to be a problem, at least
regarding my original plan.
They weren't filled with the right
ratio, or at least so my sensory history said as I called it up. The
recorded air mixture tied to the suit alert was showing something
somewhere around ninety-eight point four percent nitrogen. Someone
somewhere had flooded the tunnels with pure nitrogen. While I could
tell you it wasn't this way when I was a kid, it didn't help my new
problem.
My
new problem was needing to somehow go through these tunnels, filled
with an odorless, colorless, and entirely undetectable gas. Several
times.
The
distance I'd traveled, how long I'd had the door open, my height,
general level of respiration, and even relative temperature all made
it difficult to accurately gauge when I'd hit the beginning reaches
of the large pocket of gas. I also had no clue just how long I'd need
to be exposed. Going through once wasn't an issue, but since I still
didn't know if the other doorways functioned with my current code,
the potential existed for multiple trips.
No.
For my original plan to succeed, I'd need to have a way of finding a
working second door. That required a method of not passing out from
the nitrogen and potentially dying while traveling through the
tunnel. My suit sensors had only tripped after I'd fallen the first
time, and that was also a problem. I couldn't trust them to let me
know before I'd already gotten too much of a dosage to be dangerous,
and there were now too many unknowns. The suit was a major part of
it.
Outeralls
were the external-most layer of three, which consisted of Outeralls,
a single-piece outer protective garment, a jacket, pants, boots, and
a base-layered sweat-wicking skinsuit worn underneath everything
else. Together they made up the whole of the official Port employee
uniform. Originally, the Outeralls, at least the external portion of
it, was simply a cut-down hostile environment suit meant for the
outer fringes of abandoned mining colonies. It could do an amazing
job keeping me mostly insulated from the cold environment outside
without a head enclosure, so long as the undersuit did its job of
warding off hypothermia by wicking away the moisture and sweat.
It
wasn't sealed. It wasn't airtight. The supply line feeds for water,
air, waste, and nutrition were still present for convenience and
operation, but the mechanisms had been changed out, just like Pod
Housing; no longer valid for exotic conditions outside Corporate
norms in the Stacks. In the currently retrofitted configuration as a
Port Uniform, where weight mitigation and cost prioritized over
utility and functionality? Let's just say I could've worn a plastic
bag over my head and gotten more headway toward my current problem. A
potential bust unless I could figure something out.
If
I just had a locking collar, helmet, or at least a soft hood, I
could've even used it for a few minutes of extra air. Sadly, the suit
configuration lacked those features. All I really had, besides the
Ident-Chip and Contact Interface, was the wicking system, which put
"captured" liquid into a fluid bag.
Yeah,
it's as gross as it sounds, but so was sitting in a pool of sweat.
Stewing.
Hmm...
I
sat up straight as a thought began to form.
Without
the wind chill, the cold could almost be manageable, and the
undersuit was actually a touch larger than it should've been, so I
might be able to stretch the neck up past my mouth and nose.
Rob
used to joke the wicking system worked a lot like a protein
vac-sealer, which extracted air and liquids in order to seal the
proteins within a polymer sheathing to be stacked and shuttled off to
cold storage. The inner layer of the skinsuit worked much the same,
keeping the air and liquids inside, close to our bodies, as the
suit's condenser system worked to extract and funnel the captured
medium into a fluid bag. The way it does this? Scientific
Gobblety-Gook. When used In conjunction with terms like
"Unidirectional Permeable Nano-fibers", "Liquid State
Constrictiors", and "Systematic Distilation Processes",
the idea boiled down to: gases and liquids out, but not in.
Specifically
if the outside were wet.
Let
me just say to you now: You don't EVER want to be in a suit with a
malfunctioning fluid condenser system so the outside gets wet. Once
the external part gets wet, it obtains the liquid retention qualities
of a sealed bottle with you trapped inside.
It isn't a pleasant
feeling, but I was going to have to do it on purpose.
Yuck.
I'll
save you most of the grisly details.
Since
I hadn't had time for a changeover after working a double, the bag
was near full. It meant there was just enough for the exterior of the
skinsuit. It only took one test run to confirm my makeshift air trap
would work, but wasn't without flaws.
For
one: It felt atrocious, the sensation made worse by the requirement
of having to pull the neck of the suit over my mouth and nose. Two:
The smell. Silicon All-Father's-Missing Eye, THE SMELL.
The
liquid had been cool when I...deployed it, but once my body heat did
its work of warming it up?
Well...my
ribs were still hurting from the series of dry heaves I'd done before
I could get myself back under control. I'd only made it a few steps
on that first try. However, since the makeshift seal worked, I at
least proved I wouldn't immediately end up passed out and so
continued.
On
the second trip, I progressed beyond the T-intersection but made the
mistake of not controlling my breathing, made worse when I turned the
corner and had to choke down a scream. My gaze had been unexpectedly
met with eight glowing red eyes from directly above me. A crawler
drone.
I
didn't dare move as the drone continued on, metallic legs creaking
slightly as it glided its feet from tip to magnetic tip on its path
toward me. Carbon dioxide levels rose with each short exhale into my
makeshift seal suit. There was no false warmth, sense of comfort, or
euphoria as there had been from the nitrogen exposure. In its place
was a harsh urgency, the chemoreceptors of my brain screaming for me
to find air as I stood stone still. Several smaller utility arms
extruded from the flat, thin body, their tips and edges waving
languidly toward me as it stopped, eyes bouncing around in scrutiny.
I likely would've felt myself sweating if I wasn't already drenched.
Instead?
I stewed.
With
a sudden lurch, the drone caused me to jump as it skittered sideways
into the gaping maw of a rectangular shadow above. I could still hear
it as it worked, the taps of its utility arms almost as fast as my
racing heart as I pressed onward. As I passed, I witnessed the drone,
belly crouched down low in the sub-tunnel and maintaining an eerie
watch as I swept my work light across it. It continued to direct its
attention toward me from the darkness but let me continue on
unmolested.
I
was unnerved. It had been the first drone I'd seen in person in a
long while, and they were just as bad as I remembered.
Wasting
no further time, I headed in the direction of the working doorway, my
skin and scalp crawling as I pulled down the neck of the skinsuit and
breathed heavily. As a kid, I'd avoided any and all drones within the
tunnel. Their spider-like movements, mannerisms, and extruded tools,
which were capable of cutting through reinforced plastcrete like a
hot knife through butter, were far too much for my childish
imagination to be comfortable with.
Now?
As an adult? I was still finding them far too much for my mind to
deal with.
They
were creepy.
Oh.
So. Creepy...
I
let the shivers finish going up and down my spine, wiping my arms
fruitlessly with my gloved palms to shake off the imagined crawling
feeling, before prepping the suit for another try.
On
the third try, I adopted an easy and measured pace, controlling my
breathing as I walked quietly around the working drone with extra
care so as not to disturb it. This time I made it fully to the
terminus point, where I'd stopped originally. Two more drones had
taken station in other sub-tunnels along my path. I was working on
gliding by their positions undetected when I spotted it.
There,
further up the corridor where it stuck out from one of the sub-tunnel
entrances illuminated by my work light, sat the sole of a boot.
A
boot, which seemed to be connected to someone, stretched out and
lying face down on the floor.