Everything has been sabotaged.
The bivalves outside of Rabbah have been destroyed, released to the hungry mouths of the octopuses, which are also beginning to show signs of weakness from the radiation. Our kelp and seaweed were found shredded and spread across the rest of our garden, soaking salt into the soil and weighing down the delicate greenery. Lettuce strewn across the floor, dead fish and the tubes full of eggs scattered everywhere. Water and slime spread sickly reeking across the floor.
Our attempt to recycle filters for printer material was also smashed. The resin and carbon were in a chunky, melted heap on the floor and the printer ripped, as best I can describe it, in three places.
The air is thick with the stench of bodies and the weight of carbon dioxide. I have not crawled back into the vent system yet, but I can only imagine the rancid soup of dying algae rusting through the metal into spaces below – leeching holes to allow Europa’s oceans, slowly, to reclaim Rabbah.
The city of waters it shall be, indeed.
What remains untouched? Only what our demented saboteur assumed we would need – the remaining unused filters, the nutritional loaf stores, and the computer. Perhaps they allowed the octopuses to live because they can use them as a bargaining tool? We still have the ability to mine the water, but we can’t until the company shows a serious investment in our future. Something like that.
Kailash, Rusul, and Fletcher were furious. They locked all of us, even Haven and Budur, in the common room for a full day while they wrote long missives to their military cronies on Earth, trying to figure out what to do. Yuda and Guo eventually showed us how to crawl through the air filtration system to get out of the common room, and we escaped to our respective rooms only choking a little on the salty, rotting fog.
I don’t know if those three men care. It has been several days, and Durada, Ihsan, and I have already spent most of our time in plain sight, cleaning. I haven’t seen many of the rest of the group. I think Yuda and Bulus are focusing on filter changes, although it seems useless now without anything producing oxygen. We’re just recycling the same particles in and out of our lungs. I’ve developed a wheezing cough that rattles right next to my heart, and I imagine a layer of black dust collecting in the bottom of my lungs, soaking up moisture from my body and oozing up the sides, coating each bronchial branch with a little more tar each day.
I can guess who the lead saboteur is, but I don’t know how many of the other unionizers were involved, and why they thought this might work. Vivien and Abbas were for certain not part of it. Chloe had to be the ringleader. Yuda has less interest in the movement lately than Guo, but they are rarely apart so I am not sure. I can’t imagine Samira or Cyril getting their hands dirty – they’ve made pretty speeches about the responsibility of the upper classes to the lower classes and how that’s failed, but it seems to me that Chloe and whoever else helped her are violating that social obligation just as badly as the Hou CEOs of Breathe Easy.
I still have not told anyone about the communication we received from Breathe Easy, and I suppose that Kailash has not either. Why should he, when he can maintain a semblance of control this way, as though everything were going according to his group’s plan?
I sneak in and read the communications back and forth with the military officers. They are getting more violent in each exchange. Some recommend tying us up and blindfolding us. Some think we should be drugged until a solution has been reached with Breathe Easy. Some think we should be beaten, or outright killed, because no solution is forthcoming. Some gently think we should go to trial back on Earth for our continued bad behavior, because Earth would certainly sentence us to death or asteroid mining – as though we were not de facto sentenced outside of a court to a hard life/death far away from civilization anyway.
Being part of civilization has never done anything for me. That’s why I genuinely wanted to leave it.
It seems as though we have, for now, been set free while Kailash, Rusul, and Fletcher decide what sort of punishment we should receive. They seem to lump those of us who are neutral – who just want to work – in with the unionizers. I guess if we aren’t with them, then we must be against them. And now someone has destroyed the only thing keeping us neutral, and that was our chance at survival.
We have a month or two in food stores, but I’m sure we have less than that before our air and water filters completely go. Then we’ll find out if we have a few days of air, or if we’ll die of dehydration first. I read once that you can live for between 2 and 5 days before you die of dehydration, while it takes weeks to die of starvation. I suppose in a strange way I’m glad for the quicker death.
I will have to ask Ihsan if we have any poisonous plants left in the garden. I’m not sure about an overdose of coffee senna.
The bivalves outside of Rabbah have been destroyed, released to the hungry mouths of the octopuses, which are also beginning to show signs of weakness from the radiation. Our kelp and seaweed were found shredded and spread across the rest of our garden, soaking salt into the soil and weighing down the delicate greenery. Lettuce strewn across the floor, dead fish and the tubes full of eggs scattered everywhere. Water and slime spread sickly reeking across the floor.
Our attempt to recycle filters for printer material was also smashed. The resin and carbon were in a chunky, melted heap on the floor and the printer ripped, as best I can describe it, in three places.
The air is thick with the stench of bodies and the weight of carbon dioxide. I have not crawled back into the vent system yet, but I can only imagine the rancid soup of dying algae rusting through the metal into spaces below – leeching holes to allow Europa’s oceans, slowly, to reclaim Rabbah.
The city of waters it shall be, indeed.
What remains untouched? Only what our demented saboteur assumed we would need – the remaining unused filters, the nutritional loaf stores, and the computer. Perhaps they allowed the octopuses to live because they can use them as a bargaining tool? We still have the ability to mine the water, but we can’t until the company shows a serious investment in our future. Something like that.
Kailash, Rusul, and Fletcher were furious. They locked all of us, even Haven and Budur, in the common room for a full day while they wrote long missives to their military cronies on Earth, trying to figure out what to do. Yuda and Guo eventually showed us how to crawl through the air filtration system to get out of the common room, and we escaped to our respective rooms only choking a little on the salty, rotting fog.
I don’t know if those three men care. It has been several days, and Durada, Ihsan, and I have already spent most of our time in plain sight, cleaning. I haven’t seen many of the rest of the group. I think Yuda and Bulus are focusing on filter changes, although it seems useless now without anything producing oxygen. We’re just recycling the same particles in and out of our lungs. I’ve developed a wheezing cough that rattles right next to my heart, and I imagine a layer of black dust collecting in the bottom of my lungs, soaking up moisture from my body and oozing up the sides, coating each bronchial branch with a little more tar each day.
I can guess who the lead saboteur is, but I don’t know how many of the other unionizers were involved, and why they thought this might work. Vivien and Abbas were for certain not part of it. Chloe had to be the ringleader. Yuda has less interest in the movement lately than Guo, but they are rarely apart so I am not sure. I can’t imagine Samira or Cyril getting their hands dirty – they’ve made pretty speeches about the responsibility of the upper classes to the lower classes and how that’s failed, but it seems to me that Chloe and whoever else helped her are violating that social obligation just as badly as the Hou CEOs of Breathe Easy.
I still have not told anyone about the communication we received from Breathe Easy, and I suppose that Kailash has not either. Why should he, when he can maintain a semblance of control this way, as though everything were going according to his group’s plan?
I sneak in and read the communications back and forth with the military officers. They are getting more violent in each exchange. Some recommend tying us up and blindfolding us. Some think we should be drugged until a solution has been reached with Breathe Easy. Some think we should be beaten, or outright killed, because no solution is forthcoming. Some gently think we should go to trial back on Earth for our continued bad behavior, because Earth would certainly sentence us to death or asteroid mining – as though we were not de facto sentenced outside of a court to a hard life/death far away from civilization anyway.
Being part of civilization has never done anything for me. That’s why I genuinely wanted to leave it.
It seems as though we have, for now, been set free while Kailash, Rusul, and Fletcher decide what sort of punishment we should receive. They seem to lump those of us who are neutral – who just want to work – in with the unionizers. I guess if we aren’t with them, then we must be against them. And now someone has destroyed the only thing keeping us neutral, and that was our chance at survival.
We have a month or two in food stores, but I’m sure we have less than that before our air and water filters completely go. Then we’ll find out if we have a few days of air, or if we’ll die of dehydration first. I read once that you can live for between 2 and 5 days before you die of dehydration, while it takes weeks to die of starvation. I suppose in a strange way I’m glad for the quicker death.
I will have to ask Ihsan if we have any poisonous plants left in the garden. I’m not sure about an overdose of coffee senna.
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