I felt...warm. Blissfully warm.

That's what made me stop.

My worklight 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 light headed and dizzy now. The combination reminding me of what happened after trying his concotion for the first time.

The drink had smelled horrible and tasted worse; Pure alcohol and jet-fuel mixed with rotten-fruit and vitrol. 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 which didn't match the situation; Issues concentrating; 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 returning before I'd realized I'd lost it.

I was laying 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 gasses. 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.

Did you know this story is from Royal Road? Read the official version for free and support the author.

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 tempurature 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, 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. Orignally, 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 air tight. 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? Lets 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 managable, 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 tocold 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: Gasses 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 gristly 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 airtrap 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 waiving 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 worklight 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 worklight, sat the sole of a boot.

A boot, which seemed to be connected to someone, stretched out and lying face down on the floor.