Compartment - Part 5

“Pythagoras!” she hissed. The only curse word that Mother let her use.

Start from the beginning: Enter the Compartment

Missed the last part: Dance with the trochanter activator

In some ways, wriggling through the outvent duct was more dangerous than her dance with the crushing trochanter actuator. The air manifold immediately behind the now-removed vent cover was cramped, but Arin could still awkwardly turn around in it. Beyond the manifold, the duct narrowed into rectangular passage that was about three centimeters narrower that her shoulders.

She adjusted her headlamp to point directly forwards, collected her tools in front of her, and angled her body, taking advantage of what Father called the “blessing of Pythagoras.” The hypotenuse of the vent’s profile was longer than its base, and that extra length was what allowed her to fit her rotated shoulders through. (Conversely, when an object couldn’t rotate or fit through a rectangular space due to the length of the hypotenuse, Father would complain about the “curse of Pythagoras.” When she was younger, Arin thought the Pythagoras Father referred to was a sixth person. Someone who lived in the compartment that she had yet to meet. Now that she was older, she knew better. Pythagoras was just one of Father’s many curse words.)

As she pushed her body into the narrow passage, air that had been sucked into the vent – the same air she was now following – built up behind her. With her body nearly plugging the space the air wanted to travel through, the pressure in the duct changed and the air that managed to squeeze between her body and the vent wall made a strange whistling sound as it passed by her ears. At first, she thought the whistling sound was an alarm, or the sound of some piece of the outvent system beginning to fail. Eventually, by experimenting with the angle she held her head, she discovered that the sound was caused by the moving air resonating in her ear. She had never experienced an airstream that moved this quickly, and wondered what other strange phenomena she might find in the bizarre pressure conditions she was now creating.

Six meters into her crawl, she came to her first obstacle. A metal panel partially blocked the vent. It was a like a small door that was stuck halfway open. The door was attached to the top of the vent with a motorized hinge. The motor could close the panel or open it fully. Despite having performed maintenance on the outvent system in the past, she was completely unaware of a motorized door within the duct.

The motorized hinge and its mounting bracket was attached to the vent with a pair of double-S roto-clips. She didn’t bring the press-grab, but she thought she could probably manage to use the twist driver to remove the clips (she heard Father’s voice in her mind – “the right job with the wrong tool is a wrong job”). No, she decided, there might be an interruption relay or some other sensor in the circuit that would trigger the unack light if it was disconnected.

She gently pushed on the door. The motor gave a small whine and offered some resistance to the force of her hand, but the door opened. The mechanism that connected the door to the interior of the duct took up nearly two precious centimeters of duct height. She painfully wriggled through the even-narrower gap, scraping her shoulder on the hardware as she went by.

Now eight meters into the duct, with the door behind her feet, she had a terrifying thought. What if the door closes? If the motor activates, and the door swings shut, will I be able to get it open again? Then she had an even more terrible thought. If there is no place for me to turn around up ahead, I will have to exit the duct backwards. Could I open that door with my feet?

She thought about wriggling backwards and wiring the door open with the bit of the medvolt wire she brought. Would a motor overage cause a fault that would illuminate the unack light on the Maintable? Her lack of familiarity with the outvent system was starting to be a problem. “Making a plan with incomplete information is like eating a meal without food,” Father always said. Arin had to acknowledge the fact that she had incomplete information. Woefully incomplete information. Truthfully, she admitted to herself, she was operating in a state of near perfect ignorance.

She stopped her squirmy forward motion into the dark duct. She could head back now, and maybe, maybe fool Father with her lies about her injury. But most likely, she had to admit, he would suspect her of wrongdoing and be furious. If she was going to endure Father’s rage, she might as well endure it with the knowledge of where the air goes. She started wriggling forward again.

The duct took a sharp turn, and she had to puzzle through the way to contort her body to manage the turn. Five meters. Another door like the first one. She pushed it open and kept crawling. Eight meters. Another turn.

Wriggling exercised a completely different group of muscles than the usual walking, climbing, scampering, reaching, and hanging that she was used to during her work shifts. She paused for a rest and reviewed her journey so far. The first run of duct, before the first turn, was about eight meters. That would have put her about halfway past the expansion tank manifold when she made her first turn. The second door would have been just above the electrical feeds. Then the last run, the long one of about eight meters, would have placed her …

She thought through the geometry of her journey through the duct again. Eight meters, turn. Five meters, turn. Eight more meters. She had traveled farther sternward than there was to travel in the Compartment. Somewhere – about a meter behind where her feet currently were – was the point where the duct passed through the compartment bulkhead. She was outside the Pose Control Compartment.

“Pythagoras!” she hissed. The only curse word that Mother let her use.

She wriggled forward, pushing her body farther sternward than it had ever been. The duct made another turn. As she squirmed into the next segment of duct, she found that there was no need to shine her light down the dark passage to see what was ahead. The airway ended in a bright light.

She wriggled through the final eight meters of duct. It ended in a small space – an air manifold like the one she had entered near the trochanter actuator. But this manifold did not have an ordinary vent cover. Unlike the vent cover she had easily removed to enter the outvent system, this cover was made from thick steel, like the material used in the Pose Control Compartment’s major moving components. It was welded in place through some process that left a thick bead of slag where the vent was mated with the duct. None of the welds in the Compartment looked like this one.

An impossibly bright light burned through the slats. She pushed her face onto the vent and craned her neck to get a view through the angled slats. She saw nothing other than a blinding blur. A minute passed. Then another. Her eyes adjusted and she was able to make out what was beyond the vent.

The space beyond the vent cover was enormous. She had never contemplated such a volume of space, and couldn’t begin to estimate its size. The deck, far far below, was a brown colored, irregular surface. It looked a bit like a bonding table that had never been cleaned. There was no bulkhead wall to be seen beyond the vent cover. It was a space that went on forever.

Arin twisted her neck the other way, and managed to obtain a sliver of a view upwards through the slats. The ceiling, if you could call it that, was bright blue. Not just colored blue, like the Compartment’s sensor wire harnesses or her underpants. The entire ceiling seemed to be made out of blue light.

She stuck her arm through the slats in the massive vent and was able to reach out far enough to put her hand directly into the light that shown from above. Although the ceiling above glowed blue, the light was white. And warm, like curing lamp.

Something moved on the opposite side of the vent, casting a brief, flickering shadow into the manifold. Arin screamed and yanked her arm back inside and pushed herself to the back of the cramped space.  She held the twist driver in front of her, in case whatever was moving outside the vent decided to come inside. Nothing did. Whatever moved on the other side of the vent was gone. Or at least had become completely still.

What did she think she would find here? Some piece of critical machinery? Another Compartment like her own? Something dangerous? From what she could see through the vent, the enormous, forever-sized compartment with the brown deck and blue ceiling didn’t hold anything dangerous. Yet, she sensed danger. Her deadly dance with the trochanter actuator felt like a game compared to the undefinable risks lurking in this air manifold at the far end of the outvent duct.

Through her unauthorized, secret journey, she had gained knowledge. And it was the knowledge itself that was dangerous. In some way she sensed, but didn’t understand, just knowing about the brown and the blue could shatter the little life she lived in the Compartment. For the first time in her life, she was afraid of the future.

Part 6 coming soon...