Recycling Plant Six, Prime Dome
Planet Irkalla, Survivor’s Refuge
4452.2.11 Interstellar
Barry was surprised to see him. Once he’d reassured the plant manager he hadn’t been mistreated and that his uncle was also well, aside from being in jail, Janus went down to the plant’s second sublevel and joined the other manual sorters.
“You know how to do the job?” one of them asked.
“Yeah.”
“Get going, then.”
Those were some of the last words he shared with his new colleagues, aside from the occasional grunts of acknowledgment or calls for help with a heavier piece. Most of them were stuck in manual sorting because they didn’t have a specialization or they’d had disciplinary problems. All of them were outsiders, like him. Of the ones who came from failed settlements, Janus was surprised to find he automatically ascribed a sort of sloppy carelessness to them, even though he’d never met them before, and in light of what Nikandros had told him, that bothered him.
As for the sorting, it wasn’t difficult. Most of the waste that came to the plant was automatically split by weight, color, and even shape. Whatever the machines couldn’t handle trickled down to the bowels of the factory to be classified by human eyes. Some things just needed another pass through the machines, and Janus threw them into a hopper to be conveyed back topside. Others were dirty, or composed of mixed materials, and he either put them through a water-efficient pressure washer or separated the pieces with tools that ranged from manual shears to power cutters. The work was mindless, the team as efficient as it needed to be. There wasn’t much to keep his brain occupied, but that gave him space to think about other things, like the interviews he’d been through.
Was dome admin’s policy of degrading outsiders the reason Lira hated him, or was that personal? He’d been around her for years, although he couldn’t have said he knew her, and he couldn’t remember a time when she hadn’t looked at him with anything short of disgust.
End-of-shift took him by surprise. He checked the newsfeeds. There didn’t seem to have been any follow-on violence after dome-sec’s intervention and last night’s curfew. He had a message from Callie that she’d gone home on her own, so that’s where he headed, too.
The apartment was unnaturally quiet when he got there. “Bug?” he called but received no answer. “Callie?” he tried again.
Callie wasn't in her usual place on the couch. He went to her door and gingerly pushed it open. At first, he didn't think she was in there, but when he walked into their room, he found her huddled sideways on the bottom bunk, facing the wall with her whole body under the sheets.
“You okay, Bug?” Janus asked.
Callie pulled the sheets down. “Does it look like it?”
Janus sat down on the bed, but Callie scooted away.
“Do you want to talk about it?” Janus asked.
“Everything sucks,” Callie said, pulling the sheets back over herself.
Janus nodded. “I agree.” He sat there quietly, giving her space to talk if she wanted to, ignore him if she wanted to. After a minute, when he was about to get up and go to the living room, she popped her head out of the sheets.
“Everyone at school knows. There was this group of girls I thought were my friends, but they pretended I wasn’t even there, and the teachers were nice about it but I could tell they pity me. It’s not even worth it for them to keep teaching me if I’m not going to be able to finish the program.”
“Did you get bullied?” Janus asked.
“No one laid a hand on me, if that’s what you mean. Bullying would have been easier. I could have fought back.”
She was a lot more like Uncle Ivan than Janus would have liked, although the way her brain worked reminded him of his parents. He wasn’t sure what he could do to help.
Callie let out a sigh. “Aren't you supposed to say something about how everything is going to be okay?”
“Everything is going to be okay,” Janus deadpanned.
“Like you mean it, Janus.”
“Everything is going to be okay like I mean it, Janus,” he said, and she rolled her eyes..
“You’re a real comfort, you know that? Like a cold drink when the cooling system is broken, or like one of those old, beat-up massage chairs in the transit stations.”
“I do make everything better, that’s for sure.”
“You know I was being sarcastic, right?”
“I couldn’t tell,” Janus said, and Callie grinned. “I went to see Uncle Ivan.”
“How is he?”
“Alive. A little bruised up. He says it was one of the other prisoners, not the guards.”
“Did the guards do anything about it?”
“They put him in solitary,” Janus said. “Uncle Ivan acted like they were doing him a favor. I just… I don’t understand how he can be so calm about any of this. It’s like he doesn’t get how much trouble we’re in.”
Callie looked at him for a moment, then said, “When I was a kid, I used to think Uncle Ivan was a crime boss, or a secret millionaire.”
“You’re still a kid, Bug.”
“I’m serious!” Callie said. “Every time we ran into money trouble—real money trouble, not just having to skip a meal or something—Uncle Ivan would come up with the credits. It was like a magic trick, or maybe like he was pretending we were poor so we’d toughen up.”
“You make him sound like a wayfinder. You know, I spoke to one today.”
“A wayfinder?”
“Kind of? He called himself an architect and said a bunch of stuff.”
“Did you tell Uncle Ivan?”
“I did not,” Janus said. “Uncle Ivan and I didn’t have a polite conversation. But you’re right. I think the world might be full of things we don’t know, and maybe things will work out. If they don’t, you and me are going to make them work out.”
“Because we’re Prometheans?”
“Because we have to. Being Promethean just means we’re going to win,” he said, giving her a wink. “Hey, Bug?”
“Yeah?”
“You studied dome policy and stuff, right?”
“Not all of it,” Callie said. “Just the charter and some of the maintenance policies. That’s actually what my big project is about.”
“Really?” Janus said, surprised. “I thought they were teaching you how to participate in board meetings, not grease monkey work.”
“What do you think they talk about in the board meetings? Poetry? Trilith husbandry?”
Janus shrugged. “I guess I didn’t think about it. But say there was a policy about poetry or trilith husbandry, and I wanted to get that changed. What would I do?” He was trying to be casual about it, but this was one area in which Callie’s knowledge was so much greater than his—he was the kid and she was the adult.
“There’s not much you can do, honestly,” she said. “You’d have to gather a lot of people or a lot of data to get dome admin to listen. You don’t have access to data, and you aren’t great with people.”
“Now, come on…”
“I’m not trying to be mean,” Callie said. “You work hard. You see things in black and white. You basically have one friend, and Ryler’s way out of your league.”
Janus whistled. Callie was really unloading on him. She wasn’t wrong, but it was still rough to hear it laid out that way.
“What you could do is take the first step,” Callie said, her face pensive. She looked a lot like their dad in that moment. “You could show dome admin the better way you’re talking about, create new data, and then take it to someone like me, or Ryler, and then they could push for a change.”
Janus nodded. It wasn’t as glamorous as marching on the Hub with thousands of citizens at his back, but it appealed to him—the idea of just fixing the problem in front of him and having smart, well-connected friends who could do the schmoozing and politicking.
“So, what is this big change you want to push for?” Callie asked.
“It’s confidential,” Janus told her with a wink. “C'mon. Let's eat. I'll make your favorite, leftover slop.”
“You’re gross,” Callie responded, but she crawled out of bed. “And you suck at cheering people up.”
“I’ll admit it’s my weakness,” Janus answered. “Only my little sister is great at everything.”
***
Early shift the next morning was uneventful. He went to the locker room and got changed. Like he had the day before during sorting, he noticed the divisions between the different outsiders and the few Primers on the crew. In a way, he’d always known it, that kind stuck to kind, but he hadn’t thought of it as a system like the organic recyclers or the heat exchangers. He made a point of introducing himself to the new Beta Station workers, although they were wary of him.
Stolen novel; please report.
“No offense, but it seems like you’re the only one with fewer friends than we have.”
Janus shrugged. “It’s nothing but standard hard suits outside. Help is help, no matter where it comes from.”
The Beta Stationer nodded thoughtfully, then shook his hand.
Meg gave them all the nod to move out, including Janus, so he followed the others and got to work. He made quick fixes on non-critical systems, although he still made more thorough repairs on three machines that had clearly been hotfixed too many times. He flagged two more as “down” for more in-depth maintenance, but he didn’t do the work himself. After four hours, he was seventeen percent ahead of quota, and Meg sent him a private transmission.
“If you keep this up, they’ll make me work for you. You trying to make me look bad, Janus?”
Janus could tell she was joking, and that she was pleased with his performance, but the truth was it grated on him. He’d done the work he was told to, but it wasn’t good work. The only thing that had kept him going were Nikandros’s words, that what had been the right answer in the past wasn’t the right answer now, but it could be again. He just needed to keep his head down and work through the distractions.
The airlock jammed again, and Janus cleared it again. There were some lines he wasn’t willing to cross. He made sure to add a comment to the ticket he’d already filed and was surprised when sector maintenance dispatch pinged his comm.
“Invarian?”
“Yes?”
“Do us a favor. Next time you want to comment on what we do, fix it yourself.”
“I’m sorry, but have we met?” Janus asked, not recognizing the name displayed by his retinal implant.
“We’ve all heard about your little chat with the chief over at dome-sec. Guess what? Your complaining didn’t create more qualified maintainers or make dome admin’s requests for more living space disappear. Use the override like everyone else, outsider.”
The caller hung up on him.
You did the right thing, Janus told himself, even if it meant that strangers in sector maintenance were learning his name for the wrong reasons.
He got home and found Callie with her goggles on in the living room. She must have heard him, because as he walked in, she said, “So help me, Janus, if you tickle me—”
“You’ll kick me in the nuts?”
“Hard,” his sister confirmed. She took the goggles off and put them away. “I already ate. Let’s head to the sector gate so you’re not late for work.”
“You sure? I could tell your teachers you’re skipping school until you start the new classes.”
Callie shook her head. “You didn’t skip work, and I’m not skipping school. I’m going to finish my project before I go, no matter what the other kids say.”
Janus looked at his little sister. She looked solid, determined, like she’d aged several years while he slept. “I’m proud of you, Bug.”
“Yeah yeah,” she said, although he could tell she was pleased. “That’s what Prometheans do, right?”
“You’re a light in the dark for sure, Callie.”
He dropped her off and made it to the recycling plant a few minutes early.
The head manual sorter pulled him aside. “Listen, Invarian. We all know you think you’re too good for this work; plant manager came down personally to say you’re off limits, and that’s no business of mine, but we don’t need any bright ideas down here. My people work. We get paid by weight, you understand me? Buckets filled pay the bills, so fill the buckets until your friend Barry pulls you back topside.”
“I’m not asking for special treatment,” Janus said, stuck between grateful and annoyed that Barry had stepped in for him.
The head sorter scoffed. “Whatever. Me and the boys got work to do.”
Janus went to it with a will. In a way, the head sorter was right. This wasn’t a skilled job. The skilled job was done by machines. A few days ago, Janus had been the one making those machines send less scrap down to be re-sorted, but those days were gone and right now there were only the piles of unsorted materials and the buckets that hauled them back topside. Whenever he saw another sorter struggling with a heavier piece, Janus immediately went to help. The head sorter smirked at him the first time, but as the shift wore on, a grudging kind of acceptance settled in between Janus and the rest of the crew. Keeping that pace up was physically demanding, but no more so than fixing pumps in a hard suit.
“You hear what happened to Beta Station?” one of the workers asked.
“They wrecked their dome. What more do we need to know about the bastards?” the head sorter said.
“I heard it was nanotech,” another said. “Full-on gray goo incident. Can’t even go in and salvage the place.”
“Hey, Invarian! Isn’t Beta Station the reason you’re down here? Heard you got bumped.”
Janus shook his head. “Dome admin made the assignment. It’s not my replacement’s fault they’re more qualified than I am.”
“You really believe that?” the head sorter asked.
Janus shrugged. “I believe it’s not their fault at least.” Some people laughed at that, and others seemed to quietly resent him. He couldn’t win everybody over. The two Beta Stationers on the crew, at least, looked grateful.
One of them even spoke. “We were attacked by triliths on the way here. They were as big as buggies.”
Janus frowned. “I didn’t think they got that big.”
The Beta Stationer winced as the crew turned a skeptical eye on him, but the head sorter shook his head. “Beta here’s got the right of it. They’re small around Prime Dome because the Hunters clear them out. I heard there was a dome that decided not to pay the tithe, and the Hunters let the triliths around there do whatever they wanted, and they got as big as a sorting machine before the settlers finally gave in.”
That matched what Callie had told him. Maybe Janus had been wrong to tease her about it.
“Anyway, back to work, you lot,” the head sorter said. He slapped the Beta Stationer on the shoulder in passing, and there was a subtle change in how the group operated. Janus couldn’t have quantified it, but it felt better, like doing a full fix on a machine so you didn’t have to fix it again.
The crew got back to work. The second half of the shift was harder on Janus physically, having been up and working for close to nine hours. He kept up, though, willing himself to stay moving, to “fill buckets,” as the head sorter had said. He didn’t even notice Ryler watching him from the upper gantry until his friend called out. “You should save those circuit boards!”
Janus and the other sorters looked up. “What?”
“The circuit boards!” Ryler said, pointing at the armful of computer parts one of the sorters was hauling. “There’s about ten to twenty-five credits worth of gold in each of those if you know how to process them.”
Ryler flicked Janus a file on how to do it, and both he and the head sorter looked it over. It involved soaking the silicon boards in a mixture of hydrogen peroxide and hydrochloric acid, then melting the gold flakes down.
“I can handle melting things down, and I’ve got a friend at Recycling Plant Three who could help us with the chemicals. You think your friend Barry would give us space?” he asked Janus.
Ten to twenty-five credits per chip, especially if they were pooling two plants’ worth of them, was a non-trivial amount of money, especially to manual sorters.
“I don’t see why not,” Janus said. “It’s not like you can’t still recover the fiberglass, and it was all just getting crushed, anyway. I’ll talk to him after shift. We all split the take?”
“Yeah,” the head sorter said. “All the same down here anyway, right? Everyone who works gets their share.”
Janus shook his hand on it. It wasn’t going to be a lot. It wouldn’t be nearly enough to keep Callie in the advanced program, but it was progress.
***
Barry agreed to let the sorters use a storage cabinet for scrapping circuit boards, although the team would have to procure their own solvents. That part was in the head sorter’s hands; he said he would meet with his friend from Recycling Plant Three after work and explain the scheme. Janus looked for Ryler after he was done, but his friend didn’t stick around after sending him the file. He’d said he was busy the night of the bar fight. Janus wondered if he should have asked Ryler if he needed help. Janus wasn’t sure what he could offer, but he definitely felt like Ryler had been there for him more than the reverse for the past few days.
He walked home dead on his feet. The temperature was up to 33°C, half a degree hotter than the day before. Half a degree didn’t seem like much, but it would have a knock-on effect on a lot of things, from processing speed to birth rates. It also meant that dome and sector maintenance didn’t have things under control, and that things like pressure on quotas and using bypasses instead of fixing things would only increase. In a more cynical thought, he realized that as his sweat evaporated and got reclaimed in the condensers, it would be sold to him when he tried to rehydrate himself at home, which was just another way that dome admin made sure outsiders stayed where they were—where they belonged.
I’ve only been at it for a day, Janus reminded himself. A whole new him, hitting his quotas while subverting the system from the inside. Hah! He still felt frustrated. Callie’s comment the night before had indicated there was information stored somewhere about why all this was happening, like the recycling plant stats that Barry had shown him, and while Janus didn’t see himself writing up reports and proposals like Callie or the plant manager, he thought maybe, if he could have access to that, he could figure out how he could help.
Or, if he couldn’t, he would know to keep his head down and stay out of the way.
He’d never considered he could have an impact on dome policy before. Ryler had been pushing him to apply for sector maintenance, but he’d been stuck in the rut he thought he was supposed to work in. That only led to him being forced into a corner by numbers he didn’t understand and people he’d never met.
He was going to change that. This whole ordeal had started because he fixed an airlock. Imagine how they’ll react when I start bringing outsiders and Sector Sixers together?
Callie was sitting on the couch looking as tired as he felt when he got home. “You okay?”
“Yeah,” she said.
“You get bullied at school again?” Janus asked, concerned.
Callie stared at him blankly for a few seconds, then said, “Just the opposite. I told my teacher, Ms. Wendel, that I was determined to finish my project before I got kicked out, and she decided to help me. She had four other students and a TA working with me all day to get it together, analyze the data, and write up the proposal. I had to redo part of it, but it’s done, I think. I don’t know if anyone will listen, but it’s done.”
“You finally going to tell me what it was about?” Janus asked, getting himself a glass of water.
Callie took a deep breath and closed her eyes. “Adjusting repair metrics to increase preventive maintenance to emergency maintenance ratios, thereby reducing the number of person-hours of maintenance performed.”
Janus had to think it through a couple times, and then he felt his eyes prickle. She’d used fancy words for it, but the big project she’d been working on had been proving a job well done was a job that didn’t have to be done twice.
Whether she knew it or not, she’d been working her butt off day and night to protect her big brother. “You’re an incredible kid, you know that?” Janus said.
“Young adult,” Callie said, looking at him with a small smirk. “Someone’s got to look after you and Uncle Ivan. You’d be helpless without me.”
“That’s a fact,” Janus said, taking a sip from his glass.
Later that night, with Callie asleep and a cold beer in his hand, Janus pulled up the code repository for the airlock override. He couldn’t understand the source code itself, but he read the commentaries other people left, and started to understand what the program could and couldn’t do. It actually allowed sector maintenance to operate or lock down any of the doors remotely, which was a centuries-old holdover from when raiders and thieves would force their way into domes and habitats to steal supplies.
The program his mother had written for him ran in the background while he read. It was comforting to have his mother and father in the room, as if they were still alive, even if he’d already watched most of the holos dozens of times.
“Hello, Janus,” his dad said, dressed in the white lab coat he always wore to work. “How was work? I’m assuming you have a regular occupation like your mother and I, and haven’t become some sort of wandering knight like your uncle. Helping others is commendable, but I’ve always believed that it’s through the long, persistent work of the researcher that true change is accomplished, not the heroics of the man in the field.”
Janus wasn’t sure what the wandering heroics his uncle had been involved in back then, but what Janus had seen in the bar must have been a sad and shortsighted form of what Uncle Ivan had been capable of in those days.
“If you have pursued the path of an aspirant, I hope you’ll use the opportunity to learn about this world and our people, and that you’ll use that knowledge to make things better. I love you, son. Your mother and I always will, no matter what you choose to do.”
Janus sat up. He didn’t remember this recording. Had Uncle Ivan been an aspirant, once? Former aspirants, those who survived, were respected figures in Irkallan societies. Surely even a washed-up Promethean aspirant would be given better quarters and more responsibility than this?
He shook his head. There had been many things lost with Prometheus Base, but the life, the words, and the culture were the most thoroughly eradicated. Janus had only been twelve, and his uncle refused to talk about those days. Maybe his father used “aspirant” to describe a wandering trader and engineer, not a contestant in the Trials. Uncle Ivan certainly had the mechanical skills.
Janus just needed to focus on what he’d started—doing his job, hitting his numbers, and showing people a better way when he could.
He didn’t know that the change he hoped for was only the beginning and that even greater changes were underway.
He didn’t know he was already out of time.