Compartment - Part 1

Arin ate her first apple when she turned one million.  The apple was a gift from her father.  She had never seen anything like it before and couldn't imagine where it had come from. 

It never occurred to her to celebrate her birth, or the birth of any of the other four people who dwelled in the compartment.  It had never occurred to her to celebrate anything at all.  Life in the compartment constantly changed in small ways but never changed in any big way that seemed important enough to bother remembering, let alone celebrating. 

The only time in her life something changed in an important and permanent way was when Mr. 5-8 Jenco lost his hand while doing maintenance in the maneuver drive.  But that happened when she was too young to remember. And it didn’t really seem like the kind of thing that anyone would want to celebrate anyway.

Arin had been thinking about celebrations and important things happening and not happening for the last five shifts, since her father told her that her one millionth turn would be happening soon.  

Arin and her father were perched on the catwalk overlooking the initial pose drive gear.  The massive toothed wheel beneath her dangling booted feet rotated just fast enough so that the helical teeth would blur if one was to look at them without a strobe.  The gear was, by far, the largest single part in the compartment. It was the only part that functioned without redundancy.  And was the only part without replacements.  As big as the compartment was, the gear was so large there was no empty space large enough to store another. And even if there was a room for a spare, it would be unthinkable for the five people to manage to swap it out.  The solid metal part was as thick as Arin was tall.  If it stopped spinning, Arin could walk across it in ten giant steps.  Maybe twelve.  But it never stopped.  And it never would.

The initial pose gear acted as both a flywheel and as the main drive for endlessly moving machinery that filled the Pose Control Compartment.  The rotation, translation, gyration, and every other complex movement of the shafts, gears, linkages, and all the other parts that never stopped dancing around them could eventually be traced back, mechanically, to the initial pose drive gear.  If the main gear stopped turning, every other moving part in the compartment would also stop.  The triple and quadruple redundancy that was built into the design of every system, assembly, part, and interface would be helpless against a main gear failure.  

The five lives in the compartment were devoted to ensuring that the main gear and the synchronized madness of moving parts that filled the massive chamber never stopped functioning. Life in the compartment was an endless cycle of work and down shifts that, like the main gear, spun in an uninterrupted sequence into Arin's past, far beyond the edge of her memory.

“Mother always uses the fine gauge wire tool when she cuts my hair.”  Arin stressed the word mother so her statement would register as a complaint.  “She says it’s prettier that way.”

“It takes too long with the fine gauge tool.”  She couldn’t tell if her father didn’t notice her complaint or was just ignoring it.  “And besides, the medium gauge tool is sharper today.  Mr. 5-8 Jenco hasn’t been keeping the electrical tools as sharp as he should.”

She decided her father was only pretending not to notice that she didn’t like the way he was cutting her hair.  “You’re cutting it too short. I want it to be pretty.”

"Long is not the same as pretty, no matter what you or your mother think."  He stopped cutting to emphasize his point. "Long hair is hair that can get caught in machinery and ends up being connected to heads that are decoupled from their bodies."

"Is that how Mr. 5-8 Jenco lost his hand?  was it hairy and got caught in the maneuver mesh?"

"Mr. 5-8 Jenco's accident was a little different from that."  Her father laughed a little as he spoke but offered no explanation as to what was funny.  He returned to the parallel tasks of cutting her bangs and vacuuming the cut hair with the nozzle of the suction hose that he had unrolled down the length of the catwalk.  Arin closed her eyes and blew the falling hair off her face by vectoring her breath with her extended bottom lip. Her father eventually focused his hair-cutting efforts on the back of her head.  "Do you know what the turn is?" he asked.

Of course she knew what the turn was.  The initial gear turn count was simply the count of the gear's rotations.  To Arin it always looked like it was moving at the same speed, but her father assured her that the speed of each turn differed from the last by a few milliradians per second either faster or slower.  These fluctuations in rotation speed were minor, and the turn count therefore was an excellent way to measure time in the Compartment.  All of the maintenance and repair actions were logged according to the turn when the action was completed.  The rhythm of their work and down shifts was driven by the turn: 5,000 turns per shift. One shift on duty, two off, then repeat.  

The five residents of the compartment, in other words, every human in the universe, always knew more or less what the turn was.  When is the end of my shift?  How much longer can I sleep?  I'm starving, when is the next meal?  The answers to all of these questions all depended on the turn.  

But her father's question was silly not just because the turn was how the five people measured time.  Arin's father had chosen to cut her hair at a spot on the catwalk directly in front of the turn count display.  The digits of the turn count were engraved into the edges of metal disks that were linked to the initial gear through a clever series of step downs so that the number displayed represented the total number of turns made by the gear.

Arin turned to her father and pointed to the turning count wheels, not quite believing he was seriously asking her the count.

"What is the turn?" he repeated patiently, as if his question was completely reasonable and that he couldn't just look up from Arin's head for a moment to glance at the count wheels.

"Okay..." Arin began, humoring her father.  "One million, three hundred thousand" the first five wheels all read zero, the sixth wheel - the millionths place - was the first wheel with an actual value.  Arin paused for a moment to make sure her father wouldn't make her read off the insignificant leading zeros.  She was relieved when he didn't make her start at the beginning with "zero trillion..."  (He made all of them write the leading zeros in the maintenance logs.)  "two hundred eighty..." She waited a moment until the last wheel rotated so that its digit was fully in view.  "Four!" She finished triumphantly.

"Good." Said her father, clipping carefully around her ear.  "Do you know what happens in twenty five thousand four hundred fifty turns?"

Arin added the turns in her head.  She couldn't think of anything special about the resulting turn count.   "Uh…," she felt like she had to give some answer since her father was making such a big deal of it.  "Is that when we spray down the bonding table?"  She knew the spray-down wasn't due for many shifts, but it was her favorite maintenance procedure and she hoped if she brought it up, maybe they'd get to do one out of sequence.

"No, it will be even better than the bonding spray down."

"What then?"

"At one million, three hundred twenty five thousand, seven hundred thirty four turns, you will be exactly one million turns old."

"What-" Arin stammered. "when did...but."  She could hardly begin a question when a new and more important question would form, preempting the previous one.  "Was that a work shift?" she finally asked.

Her father laughed for much longer than Arin thought was respectable, given how important she thought the subject matter of her birth was.

"That was more like unscheduled maintenance. But you’re right - I logged it as a work shift for everyone.  It was your first shift.  A work shift."

"It's logged?  In the actual log?" Arin jumped to her feet, unconcerned about her half-cut hair, sprinted the length of the catwalk, flung herself up the ladder to the gauge deck and slid to a stop at the Maintable.  She released the latches to the log book shelf cover and pawed through the steel-bound books.

She found the right book. Its title "Turns 301986 to 478264" was machined in the front and side. She turned to the right page in three flips and ran her finger down the left column to find the log entry.

0,000,000,325734 - New Personnel - Arin Tamarisk