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It’s my last day on the job, so why oh why do I have to get into a space suit, which is a twenty-minute ordeal, so that I can get into the maintenance tunnels to deal with what is most likely a literal piece of shit and, even worse, go to my retirement party right after? I don’t even understand why you would want to have a party to celebrate the fact that I’m going to be unemployed tomorrow. But then again, maybe we should have one last hurrah. This is the last time we will get to splurge. Still, it should have been a small affair, dinner with just the two of us, but you had to go invite everyone who ever gave a damn about me.
I’m glad that there was this last-minute mess for me to clean up. If it’s complicated enough, I might even have to miss my party. No, wait, I can’t do that, not when you took so much time and effort to set the whole thing up. I’m sorry for my momentary betrayal. Is having to suit up punishment enough for me?
[I’m going to be an hour late], I shoot you a message.
I’m probably not going to be that late though, if nothing goes wrong, but it’s better for everyone to be pleasantly surprised rather than hangrily waiting for me.
[No problem, we’ll wait], you reply.
[Please feel free to start without me]. Frankly, I would be happier if the party ended without me and it was just us. There’s something I want to tell you and only you.
[Don’t be silly], you reply.
Maybe it was silly, but I had to try.
Dook dook dook dook. I’m coming up on Roger’s house. I still don’t know how he manages to live with the stench all the way out here, right beside the farm. If it weren’t for the constant reek of shit wafting in from the farms, you would have met him already. He’s cool. He likes bass as much as I do. And because he’s the farm supervisor, he has enough payload to bring in a subwoofer that is beefy enough to blast his beats all the way out here to the edge of the residential zone.
The last time I tried to bring you out here, to listen to one of my songs on proper equipment, you couldn’t even make it out of the residential zones because of the persistent acrid odour. I understand. I had the same reaction the first time I had to go into the maintenance tunnels, the entrance of which is just past his house. I have been here plenty of times since then and I still can’t get used to the stench. I don’t think I can ever learn to tolerate it. It’s something I survive through sheer willpower.
I almost jump out of my skin when I hear a loud groan. Is Roger okay? I run up the short flight of stairs to see Roger staring at the tree in his front yard. He doesn’t look hurt, so what was that groan about? Maybe he groaned because something is wrong with his maple tree. I can’t say for sure though. Calling it a tree feels like a misnomer to me. Every branch and every leaf is straining towards the farm because that’s where all the light is coming from. It looks more like an abused giant red brush with bristles frozen at a sunward angle.
Roger turns around and signs, “Hello!” while still bobbing his head to the beat. But he seems frustrated by something.
“Hello,” I sign, “Need any help?”
“No,” Roger signs.
He picks up a pair of shears from the ground and snips off a tiny piece of his tree. What the fuck difference did that make?
“Okay, see you,” I sign, but he is too engrossed in esoteric maple tree minutiae to notice.
I leave Roger behind and head towards the farms. It’s different looking at it from here, where it fills up your whole field of view, instead of back at the residential zone. It’s one of the most beautiful places in the station if you can handle the aromatic challenge. For reasons that probably have to do with profit maximisation, the farm side of the station isn’t spinning, so everything is floating, weightless over there. And because there’s no gravity, the entire volume is filled with all kinds of crops, all kinds of colours; mostly green but with snatches of orange, yellow, red, and even indigo.
If you listen closely you can hear the pssh pssh pssh of air thrusters firing, the sound of the thousands of bots working the farm. It sounds like white noise most of the time. But right now, the timing between the thrusters is just right for me to imagine laying a beat over them; dook pssh dook pssh.
The bots are there to maintain the moisture level, which gives the whole area a blurry, dreamlike quality, magnified by the way the light from all the LED strips refracts into a multitude of rainbows that continually blink in and out of existence due to the spin on our side of the station. Alas, the bots are also there to manage the fertilizer level, which is the reason why everyone who values their olfaction avoids the farm.
It’s a pretty sight, but I must retreat posthaste from this invasion of my nasal passages. I reach the airlock but it doesn’t agree with me. CLOK CLOK CLOK, it goes, materialising the beat that was only in my head. My sense of smell is being annihilated while it dillydallies with its open cycle.
I squeeze past when the opening is big enough and jump into the suit. The suitbot helps to seal me in, but the faint aroma of putrefaction lingers still. I hope it’s just my imagination… no wait, I hope the shit particles are real. If they’re real then they’ll be gone soon, but if it’s in my head then this whiff of shit might stay with me all day!
Thank fuck the smell dissipates halfway through my two klick treadmill walk.
I remember your reaction when I complained the first time. “It’s only two klicks,” was what you said.
“It’s two klicks while wearing a ten-kilo suit!”
“That doesn’t seem like much.”
To be fair, it isn’t, now that I’ve gotten used to it. But back then when the heaviest thing I’ve ever carried was my one-kilo suitcase?
“Why don’t you just wait, or get off the treadmill?” You changed tacks after seeing my entirely justified indignation.
“Wait an hour? I’d rather walk twenty minutes. And the suitbot won’t let me get off.” It was then that my tablet rang and the janitor app notified me of some shit I had to deal with in the maintenance tunnels. I threw my hands up in despair and showed you the notification.
“Oh, poor thing,” you said while patting my head, which made me think you were being sincere, until I saw your cheeky grin.
I stalked off. I was so angry at the time, but looking back now it seems so silly.
I somehow manage to clock a record fifteen-minute two-klick walk. Who knew remembered rage could be such a performance enhancer? But the stupid suitbot won’t let me off! [5m 02s], so says the LED display on the treadmill. I might not be able to escape from the bot’s clutches but that doesn’t mean I have to expend any more effort than necessary. I’m going to relax for the next five minutes.
What? The timer won’t count down unless I walk?
Fuck this fucking bullshit.
Finally I’m done.
Before I start climbing down the ladder, I turn and give the bot a one-finger salute. But it has already tucked away its six manipulators and the red LED above its cyclopic eye has dimmed, so my protest falls on dead sensors.
I almost slip halfway down, because I can’t feel a damn thing through these gloves and boots, and because I’m still angry at the stupid fucking suitbot.
Breathe in.
Breathe out.
In.
Out.
Okay, I’m calm enough to continue. No point ruining your party because I fell and broke something because I was pissed at a bunch of circuits.
I make it down the ladder in one piece. But now I have to walk downspin in this stupid suit.
“Downspin syndrome is not a real thing.” That’s what you said the first time we met. “It’s all in your head. You are just out of shape.”
Walking in a ten-kilogram suit, which is probably more like twelve kilograms down here in the tunnels, is daunting for someone who is ‘out of shape’, which I admittedly was. After two years, I’ve gotten used to the weight, but not to walking downspin with the extra bulk. There is just something about the minute changes in perceived gravity, increasing on toe-off and decreasing on heel strike, that makes me want to puke.
There’s going to be a new janitor in a few hours though and I reserve my moral right to remark on the outness of your shape if it just so happens to be you.
I hope you’re not claustrophobic. You’re about a head shorter than me so you will have more headroom, but the tunnel is so narrow that you could brush both walls with your elbows. To make things worse, the walls and the grated floor are made of some sort of light-absorbing plastic that swallows most of the light from the LED strip overhead. But the tunnel has a constant upward curve, so you will only be able to see the lights for a couple of dozen metres before the ceiling rises out of view. Your only consolation will be the occasional cross junction, where you can finally stretch out.
Wait a minute, the section that I need to get to is sealed. There’s an airlock in the way. I’ve been down here so many times and I’ve never seen any of the airlocks in the tunnels closed. There are some muffled cloks as it starts to rise. I wonder what happened?
The airlock finally cycles open. I step inside. It’s really just two bulkheads dividing a stretch of tunnel. The bulkhead behind me seals shut. Now I just need to wait for the one in front to open.
Why are these airlocks so slow? At this rate, you might start my party without me.
I wait and wait, and nothing happens. I don’t hear any cloks anymore. Did something go wrong? Am I stuck here?
I guess I can try to message someone on my tablet. No, there’s no connection! Shit, this has never happened before. I don’t want to be stuck here! I told you I was going to be an hour late. I’m going to be here for at least an hour! Will anyone even know where I am? I might even be here for days! Wait, the janitor orientation video had a section on the suit that said that I won’t have to worry about oxygen and water as long as there is power. And the power for my suit can last for days. I can’t remember how many days, but I recall at least two digits. Fuck no! I’d rather die than be stuck in here for weeks!
What am I going to do?
I beat on the door with my fist. It doesn’t sound like I would expect it to. In fact, I don’t hear much of anything at all, only the low hum of my backpack.
I place my hand on the door. Yup, it’s still working. I can feel it vibrating. The airlock is still cycling.
Fuck me and my stupid brain. I’m in an airlock, and the only reason why this airlock is sealed is because the pressure on the other side is different from this side. It must mean that there is only vacuum on the other side. I can even feel it, the way my suit doesn’t press in on me anymore. I move my arms around. Wow, I no longer have to fight against my suit to move. This was the environment the suit was designed for.
I really should have known better than to panic. I think I understand now why a space suit is required in these tunnels. It’s actually needed on rare occasions like today.
The door opens with a whoosh that I can only imagine. I step out. All I hear is my own breathing and my blood pounding in my ears. It’s like there’s nothing else in the universe except for these four walls and me. Even though I know for a fact that there are about a thousand people above me, all my senses are telling me that, no, I’m all alone.
“Hello? Anyone there?” Maybe there’s someone else in another suit, maybe there’s someone, anyone, on the other end of the suit’s comms.
But there’s no one, nothing, not even radio static to tell me if the comms are working or not.
At least my tablet is working. The connection icon is showing five bars, telling me that I am indeed connected to civilisation, but knowing this fact does nothing to soothe my feeling of utter isolation.
I head further down the tunnel. My icon on the map shows me moving towards where I’m supposed to be.
An area bathed in flashing red lights comes into view past the curved ceiling, starkly contrasting with the bluish white LEDs illuminating the rest of the tunnel. The red flashes come from two bots, the knee-high boxy types that usually clean up our residential area. The one closer to me seems to be working on a patch of floor that is shinier than usual. No wait, the flashing red isn’t suffusing the floor with crimson, because there’s no floor there, and the shiny points of light are actually stars. Something punched through the hull, though I’m not sure what could produce such a perfectly circular hole like this.
The other bot is near a weird spiky brown crystalline substance that is protruding out of a pipe that has been sheared clean where it meets the hole in the floor. That weird stuff is probably why I’m here. It is probably a literal piece of shit, frozen in vacuum. But maybe it is a fatberg. I need to take a closer look.
Lucky for me the hole isn’t in the centre of the passageway but slightly off to the side. There is just enough space for me to squeeze through if I press myself against the wall. But I can probably just jump it. Wait, can I? Will I fall into the hole when I’m over it? How does this centrifugal force thing work? The hole doesn’t seem big enough for me to fall straight through though. Most likely, my backpack would catch on the edge. But I can also imagine the impact of my backpack tearing the hole wider, just enough for me to slip through. Then I’d drift away from everyone, from you, and starve to death because it’s not like I can pop my helmet for a quick exit in these idiotproof suits. And no one, not even you, would know what had happened, would know why I didn’t show up to the party you had so painstakingly planned.
Yeah. I think I’ll just sidle along the side.
The stars are slowly spinning outside the breach. Or rather, we are spinning. Oh wow! Our sister station is coming into view. This is the first time I’ve seen it, but it’s nothing special, just a dull hunk of grey CarboWeave™, spinning lazily against the backdrop of an apathetic cosmos, just like our station.
I’m now close enough to make out the sewage label on the pipe, which means that the brown blob is human excrement flash-frozen via sudden decompression.
I’m on the other side of the hole now and the bot there notices me, changing its LED light to a warm, steady yellow. Oh no, what I thought was a frozen turd is actually a frozen fatberg, a piece of wet wipe that got stuck in one of the filters and has been collecting fat, shit, grease, oil and human hair ever since.
I don’t really know why wet wipes haven’t been banned yet, due to all the havoc they wreak on the sewage system. I don’t even know why people waste their payload allowance on them, but to each their own.
At least I’m not the one handling it. All I’ve got to do is tap a button on my janitor app and tell the bot to—what the fuck? The bot knows what it is? The problem is that it can’t dislodge it?
Crap. Crap!
At least it’s frozen. And thank fuck for these sense-dulling gloves. I grab it and it seems solid enough. But the piece of shit crumbles apart in my hands when I pull, greenish-brown flakes falling into the hole and towards our sister station. Whether or not it stains her hull is a question that can only be answered in a few hours.
The bot turns green. I’m done? That was it? Why did it need my help in the first place if that was all it took? The bot behind me turns green as well, starts to spread some type of fast-drying foam around the edges of the hole.
I check my app. Yup, I’m done.
I head back to the airlock. The first cycle is silent this time around. I know it’s only a few minutes to equalise the pressure, but it feels far too long, especially in the silence of a vacuum. They should have added an LED screen with a progress bar, so that people don’t inadvertently panic. Then again, I kinda know how pressurised the airlock is just by feeling how tight my suit is hugging me.
The airlock opens and there is a spring in my step as I go back to the ladder. Why? Because I’m walking upspin!
I’m already there. Upspin is the best!
I stop for a break halfway up the ladder. Even after doing this once a week, sometimes three times a week, for the past two years, I still can’t handle the climb while wearing this suit.
I looked it up the other day and found out that this suit only weighs about two kilos sans backpack. But for some reason, the version on this station comes with the backpack permanently attached. I don’t understand why. It’s not like janitors are going on weeks-long spacewalks.
Maybe it’s because some idiot stepped into a hull breach, or just out the hangar, and ran out of air to breathe before some bots could be reprogrammed to go retrieve the idiot. If you consider payloads, the suit weighs two-kilos, but an idiot in it could weigh anywhere between fifty to a hundred kilos. Adding eight kilos so that the idiot in the suit can be saved before suffocating to death probably makes more business sense.
Either way, you’re going to have to suffer like I did if you win the janitor lottery. I can already picture it; you coming up to me, panting, complaining about the ten-kilo suit, and me, grinning ear to ear. Let me start practising my grin now.
[ERROR], so says the LED display on the suitbot, wiping the grin right off my face. What the hell? It’s my last day and I’ve just dealt with a literal piece of shit and now I’ve got to deal with the figurative version?
Now what? The closest airlock is a klick away by the docks. That will take me about fifteen minutes or so. That’s if the suitbot will actually let me out of here. I’ve got no idea if the door will open when I’m still in the suit.
Phew. It does open.
Hmmm, there’s a cargo bot headed this way from the farm. There’s a zone between here and the farm that’s only plain flooring, and the bot has just entered it. I never paid much attention before, but now that I think about it, something feels off.
Our tangential velocity over here is about three hundred klicks per hour and it’s zero over there. Going instantly from zero to three hundred will be catastrophic, regardless of what the bot is made of.
I try to keep track of the cargo bot, but it soon spins out of view. I can’t look up in this suit, the helmet doesn’t rotate with my head, so I have to wait for it to come around again. When it does, it’s about halfway across the ‘empty’ zone. Hold on, is it just me or is it actually spinning away slower this time?
That’s it! Why didn’t I think of this before? The plain floor isn’t plain at all, but it’s made up of separate sections, each spinning faster than the last, so that the bot goes from zero to three hundred gradually instead of instantly.
Which means that I can get to the airlock on the other side of the station, five klicks distant, in a minute or two instead of an hour. It’s also a lot closer to your apartment.
And now that I’m close enough to make out all the dings and scratches on the transition zone, I can make out each section spinning at a slightly different speed.
I wonder if I can feel the difference.
Nope, apparently not.
I turn around when I’m halfway across and—oh shit, I’m definitely feeling something now; it’s my gorge rising. The residential area is spinning. I know the farm is spinning too. Everything is spinning, especially my brain.
I close my eyes.
Breathe in.
Breathe out.
In.
Out.
Okay, my brain is staying still this time.
The other airlock is lining up. I start heading there.
I reach the airlock.
Clok, clok, clok.
I can’t squeeze past when it’s half open because of the suit. I need to wait for it to open all the way.
Clok, clok, clok.
In.
Out.
It’s open. Finally!
[ERROR], so says this suitbot too.
Is every fucking thing not working now?!
I’ll need to go to the airlocks by the docks, but I’ll stop by your apartment on the way to let you know what’s going on.
I get plenty of strange looks on my way to you. One jogger takes a single look at me and suddenly stops. She even takes a step back, wide-eyed. What’s she afraid of?
I turn around, half-expecting to see some crazy psycho on a rampage with a homemade shiv. There was one right after I came here, and he was the reason there are no more straws on the station. If only he had figured out how to murder someone with wet wipes. But that was two years back, so it seems about time for another person to commit suicide by police bot.
But no, there’s no one else around me. That woman thought I was the psycho.
I wave. She sprints back the way she came.
Then I see the shit on my gloves.
Okay, I guess that’s why everyone’s giving me a wide berth.
Why didn’t I notice it before? The shit is palmside and I only saw the back of the gloves when I was climbing the ladder. Usually the suitbot gives the suit a hosedown before getting me out of it too.
Fuck, is there a toilet around?
Nope, nothing but block after block after block of dull grey, each with some five-character alphanumeric code stencilled in black on the side, each with identical rows of windows and balconies, each with the same transparent plastic door, the same lift lobby lit by a single LED strip, a powered down cleaner bot stowed against a wall. The only splashes of colour come from escapist fantasy worlds leaking through television screens, and the red netting above the first floor lining the front and back of each block.
Come to think of it, I’ve never seen a public toilet outside of the communal kitchens.
How am I going to get clean? I can’t show up to your party shitstained.
There’s a young punk pointing his tablet at me. Recording me for his socials, is he? Well, he can have a nice long look at these gloves, smeared with turd. I wave both hands at him. I want to make sure he can capture them in all their crap-splattered glory.
Sure enough, a cleaner bot in a nearby block powers up, zooms up to me, and starts spraying me with heavenly bleach. I offer it my hands, let it scrub away every faecal speck. When it’s done, my gloves are so shiny I can almost hear the shing!
The bot looks me over, lenses whirring, then it scoots off. I’ve never been so happy to see a cleaner bot. Thank you, cleaner bot! I raise two thumbs up to its departing back. It might not care about me but I thank it all the same.
Then I turn and give the young punk the same thumbs up. I’ve become boring in my cleanliness and he wanders off.
Now I can go to your party.
That is easier said than done. The door to your apartment block doesn’t open for me. The infra-red detector probably doesn’t know what to make of a person in a space suit.
[I’m downstairs! Help!] I send you a message.
[ERROR: Unavailable]. So says my tablet.
What? Did you forget to charge your tablet again?
What do I do? I look around but people are still avoiding me. Let me see if anyone is on your balcony. I take a few steps back, but the view is blocked by my helmet. I can’t look up either.
I turn around and walk away some more. I don’t have to walk too much though as you only live on the fifth floor.
The door is open when I turn around, but there’s no one else that could have opened it. I must have done something, but what?
Can I get through before it closes? Nope. It closes when I’m about a metre away, only halfway there.
I turn around and go back to where I was. The door is open. It closes a few seconds later, taunting me.
There’s no one on your balcony. I don’t think I will get much help from the oglers around me. I guess I’ve got to figure this shit out on my own.
What did I do?
I was there, about a metre from the door, and now I’m here, a few more metres out, and somehow the door opened. Logically, I did something between these two points, but what? All I did was walk between them.
Wait, I was walking towards the door, then I was walking away from the door. Is it that simple?
I turn around, face away from the door. Then I turn around again. Nope, the door is still closed.
With my back towards the door, I take a step back. Is that a swoosh I hear? Nope, it was just my imagination.
One more step.
Now it’s open!
I sprint backward, hoping I don’t fall.
Will the door stay open with my back facing it?
It does!
I’m in!