01 Provenance
Notes
locker 44
The following notebook was recovered from the locker of a senior field technician during a routine audit. The technician in question is still employed here and would like it back. Facilities has instead elected to publish selected pages as official training material, on the grounds that it is more accurate than the official training material.
Photographs were found taped between the pages. Compliance removed every one of them pending review, and where a page would otherwise be incomplete, substituted an approved artist's impression. The technician has called the substitutions "close enough that it's worse." The tape stays.
Everyone starts on the warehouse floor and everyone thinks the warehouse floor is the job. Move the boxes, run the tickets, keep the racks standing. Then a printer screams at you from two aisles over and you understand that this facility has a second job description nobody reads out loud.
Advice: learn the floor anyway. Learn where the safe zone ends. That line matters more than any line on your paycheck.
The loading dock doors don't lead to a parking lot. There is a jungle out there — a real one, canopy and rivers and things calling to each other at dusk — growing where the rest of the industrial park should be. Nobody at orientation mentions it. You just follow a ticket too far one day, and then you're standing in daylight with the racks behind you, recalibrating your whole employment.
It goes further than the jungle. There's a harbor out there with a working dock and a tide. There's more. I keep this notebook because the map they issue us doesn't have edges — it has redactions.
compliance hold released
The work comes through DISPATCH now. Press T and the UptimeWatcher laptop lists what's broken, sector by sector. Most of it is repair nodes: walk out, stand at the node and hold still until it's reseated. Every fix raises your standing in that sector, and standing is the only reference this place checks.
Do the first Cave relay before anything else. That repair is what earns you a GPS module. You don't need it installed to find your way, though: the world map and the text on your cuff route you fine without it. The breadcrumbs are a courtesy, not a requirement.
Every biome out there builds pressure. Let one run high enough and it breaches the Warehouse itself: somewhere else's weather comes through the racks and brings its residents with it. The incident reports call them cross-biome material events, which is a beautiful way to spell "the magma is here now." You'll hear a big one announced over the PA.
The fix is not a mop. A crew goes into the offending biome's tunnel and destroys its Breach Core. The breach closes after the root cause is destroyed, an approach Management continues to call unnecessarily literal.
You can keep it from getting that far. A repair node vents some of the local pressure, as long as its biome isn't the one already coming through the floor.
compliance hold released
Parts of this facility are underwater. Not flooded — underwater, as a design decision someone signed off on. There are sublevels where you swim between server racks, watching your air, watching the dark past your headlamp, and the dark is watching back with the patience of something that has a name among the dive crews and a redacted incident file among the rest of us.
compliance hold released
North of everything there are mountains — actual snowfield-and-glacier mountains, valleys you walk in your work vest because nobody has invented a company parka budget. It is beautiful in a way that gets techs hurt: the frozen lake looks like the shortest path across, and the lake lies. You'll hear it before you understand it. Walk the shoreline.
compliance hold released
Requisitions maintains that we are issued "standard facility tools." The standard facility tools include a flamethrower, a cryo cannon that freezes water into a bridge you can walk on, an arc welder that has never once been pointed at a weld, a railgun, and a device that generates a small localized gravity anomaly. Twelve tool families are in circulation, from the Spark Pistol entrusted to new hires to plasma, seismic and sonic equipment Procurement has no record of purchasing. You earn your way into them, and every one changes how you work a floor.
Spark Pistol
Cryo Cannon
Arc Welder
Railgun
Gravity WellNone of this is in the handbook. All of it is real. Charge the flamethrower to cost center 7.
A partial census, in the order they surprised me: printers (hostile), printers in groups (organized), things in the jungle that hunt in packs and cut off your exit like they've read your ticket queue, things that wait near paths without moving until you commit, and one thing below the waterline that I am contractually not describing. Every overland sector has a named boss holding its own arena, and the deeper tunnels maintain their own management structure.
They drop what they carry. Some of them carry remarkable things. This is the other economy of the facility and the real reason half the night shift clocks in.
They moved us to a second site and the second site is in orbit. Nobody consulted the locker.
Offsite-1 is one long ring corridor with everything hanging off it. Learn the rooms by what they do to you: the medic lab wakes you up, the implant bay changes what you are good at, the NOC tells you everything that is going wrong, and the Core chamber is where you will be standing when it goes wrong anyway. The Docking Arm has a collar, an airlock and nothing docked. Nothing has ever been docked. The collar is optimistic.
Some sections are still sealed. The cargo hold is one of them. Facilities says each gets restored in turn. Facilities says that about a lot of things.
Every device up there glows when you are close and shows an E. That is the whole interface. Press it and see.
What I have worked out so far: room panels run three channels (Compute, Lighting, Facility) on a battery and keep a log of who did what and when, so the log knows about the thing you did on Tuesday. Rack rows do compute in proportion to the power they get. Door panels hold a handful of unlabelled jumpers: an Engineer sees the labels, everyone else learns by watching the door. The Allocation Terminal orders parts and the Parts Shelf is where they end up, eventually, after a trip through the warehouse and an orbital lift.
If it sparks, it is working. If it sparks and smells, it is also working. If the lights go, see entry 11.
Two kinds of fault up here, and they share a name for no good reason.
Yours. Die anywhere, wake in the medic lab, and it files one fault matching what killed you. Hardware costs max health. Thermal slows stamina. Corruption weakens healing. Signal stretches your gadget cooldowns. Minor lasts two minutes, major four, critical six. Movement is never touched, which I find suspicious. Chemistry's patches and tonics cure them early.
The building's. Sparks, smoke, a dead light bank, a hull breach pulling loose items toward the hole, an electrical fire hopping device to device. If the Core overloads you get a countdown, then battery, then dark, and the cold start is a six-step job for several people. Containment doors seal the quadrant. Extinguishers are not decorative.
Advice: read the panel before you pull the lever. The panel keeps a log.
The Station cannot make anything. Everything it runs on comes up from the warehouse, and the warehouse knows.
The chain, as I understand it: someone files a requisition at the Allocation Terminal; Mr. Patterson approves it, denies it, or explains the ledger; the crew picks the parts from the bins, packs cartons into the freight cage on the Shipping Dock, and the sealed crate rides the orbital lift up. Someone carries it in by hand and scans it. Stock we do not have is back-ordered or special-ordered at a grade the vendor chooses. Worn parts can be tagged at the bench and sent back down for a replacement, a credit, or No Fault Found.
The shredder takes tagged e-waste for a reclaim slip. The break-room lab downstairs turns what the shredder gives back into the cures that fix what the Station does to you.
It is, in other words, a loop. Do not look for the beginning.
02 To the New Hire
The last page of the notebook is addressed to no one, which Facilities has interpreted as being addressed to you:
Whoever finds this: the job is better than the handbook makes it sound. The floor is just the front door. Take the tickets, take the gold, but the first time you see daylight through the dock doors — go. Everything good that ever happened to me here started with going.