Sector administrator #354-777-EH once again opened his eyes, and only darkness returned. He closed them again and listened to the telltale hissing as the pod doors opened. Sitting up to a stretching darkness, the area close to him only being illuminated by the faint glow of the lights on the pod, his ears accompanied by the humming of the machine.

Sev stepped out of the pod, as dry as when he entered, and made his way back to the room he called home. That was, in essence, the way his life went. He woke up, walked down some hallways, did administrative work for as long as required, then read a good, policy compliant book. It was simple, mundane, boring. It was his life.

The automatic doors whirred to life when he got in front of them, sliding out of the way as he stepped through the door. Everything was so simple and regulatory, it was strange to preside over affairs sent by people you would never meet. But

again, that was his job, and he was simply going through the motions.

Sector administrator #354-777-EH woke up, and opened his eyes and went to work.

Sector administrator #354-777-EH woke up, opened his eyes and began signing papers.

Sector administrator #354-777-EH awoke, opened his eyes, and trotted to his workstation. Sector administrator #354-777-EH was in the midst of puzzling out a very specific issue relating to a sewage leakage, the report wrote that:

‘In sector AED, there are currently complications with multiple sources of water. Through means, we are as of yet unknowing of, it has been found that multiple sources of water designated for consumption, have had the filter-pumps fail, resulting in raw sewage arriving in direct contact with otherwise untouched water. So far, it has been confirmed that 3 different sources have had the filter pumps fail. Wide scale investigations are being considered, and repairs are underway. The damage to individual citizens is still undiscovered. But it is unknown both the

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severity of the outages, and their cause. Optimal considerations would be updating all systems of a certain age damaged or working, however this citizen notes it is unknown the magnitude of such a cost given the multitude of filtration models currently under use.’

This, was troubling. Upper Management had conveyed him to keep the budget this quarter as low as possible. A massive resource intensive project which commissioned not only engineers from the front, but workers, officials, city planners and an ungodly amount of paperwork because it was estimated that some systems *might fail* and kill an unknowable amount of people.

If he signed off on burying the issue, and it emerged again, it would be his head

later. But if he attempted to fix it now, it would severely damage the good graces he had managed to land himself into and may have management necessitate a thorough investigation into his work. Decisions, decisions. He was stuck at a dead end, and stewing in it certainly wouldn’t make it any better, so Sev moved on.

Working through, simpler, lower priority issues, that people had already solved and just needed some higher authority to fix. He went through page after page of

reports and plans until finally, one caught his eye. It was a simple vandalism issue, someone had managed to disfigure a wall where there were no security cameras. What they drew was both crude and unusual, it was a manner of humanoid form colored in presumably whatever the person could find.

Which according to the reports was a mixture of a large amount of things, but the main ones were oil, water, and the nutri-paste they serve to the lower classes. How peculiar, Sev couldn’t even tell what it was trying to tell or show, was it a self-portrait? It was crude and unsightly, parts were falling off, colours had mixed poorly.

The work, if you could call it that, was misaligned however, at the same time, at its core, it was bright and varied. The figure held a sort of depth he hadn’t seen

before in the endless machine generations that played in his mind to help him fall to sleep. It was human. He paused over it, his fingers hesitating, until he eventually gave an order to clean it up.

The vague visage crept in his mind, and lingered, and with a heavy heart, and heavy hands he signed off on the order to commit a mass repair, retrieval, and removal of all purifiers. Out of the corner of his eye, he noticed a small, multicoloured figurine standing tall on his desk.