Medical Assistance Required

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1. Sleep Deprived Cooked Alive

Sleep by Dopesmoker bangs yr head against the main ectoplasm pipeline. When y's working in the guts of a megaship, the myriad of funnels and tubes blends into its own kind of collage, a seamless patchwork of gray chute after gray chute. Conduits blend flawlessly into wires, wires blend flawlessly into valves, valves blend into reality.

With that kind of monotony buffeting yr from every angle, y's bound to miss a few spots.

Including pipelines.

Inches from yr face.

It's not the best day Sleep's woken up to.

"I think the ghosts swore at me." Y pats yr forehead.

"You think so?" Naught picks her head up from where she's scrubbing a patched-up fuel injector, removing the stimulator fluids that leaked from a polyurethane-sealed break. "That left a bruise, didn't it?"

"It's going to leave one, for…"

The sensors lining Naught's cranial frame pinpoint a lingering whisper as Sleep's speech tapers.

"Something wrong?" She asks.

"I think I heard the ghosts again."

It's true. While y can't hear it at this audio frequency, the ghosts of all dead, contractually-bound megaship workers curse yr out from the pipe's interior, casting profanities unknown to the likes of man. Mostly they're just ticked off that someone disrupted their fluid slumber, though. Sleep would feel the same if y were them.

"There's no audio bands the ghosts could speak along that you'd hear," Naught says, "and if you did hear them chances are you're only registering the spiritual aftershock their words leave."

"You sure?"

"Positive."

The only sounds y should be hearing are the hazy thrums of equipment

"Then why did I—"

Another faltering in speech.

"Fuck."

Sleep goes from patting to clutching yr entire temple. The sensation of fire is running beneath the eyes. An inferno is spreading, flaring outwards from the cerebral cortex, running its flames down every neural path it can take and torching the sensations left behind. There are cries of ganglial torture while sensation outside the realm of pain response is rent asunder. Sight quickly falls victim, turning photoreceptors into lancing spires of bleeding color.

Y tumbles, head alight, and collapses against the nearest electrical conduit, slumping down the side and onto the floor's grates. With a spontaneous twitch y kicks a girder, immediately regretting the action the moment yr nerves react.

"You—"

"Hangover."

Naught is standing right besides yr at this point, still clutching a wet scrub while droplets roll off the chrome of her fingers. Sudsy water drenches her maintenance fatigues. While the faceless nature of her i-core Processor/Reactor Chassis already made emotional conveyance hard, the dribbles of chromatic chaos over Sleep's vision make it harder. Each blink creates a millisecond whirlpool in perception.

"It's the hangover."

"Oh."

"Yeah."

"Fuck."

"Fuck." Y nods.

Steam briefly bursts from the nuclear pressure vents on Naught's head and she kneels down, reaching through her fatigues to find anything that could combat the aftermath of an Abyss-aged alcohol binge. Her fingers tap the casing of a Novatartarean™ Pain Reliever, but that's for demonic drinks, not extradimensional ones. There's a few other bits of medical junk lingering in pocket limbo — ectopurgers, memetoreverters, Adderall — but nothing that'd treat this. Sighing, she gets up and reaches a hand down to Sleep.

"You want to skip the job?"

Sleep's face goes blank. "…What?"

"Do you want to skip the job?"

Sleep parses the statement in silence. Naught draw backs her hand. "What?"

In perfect timing, a second burst of steam is released alongside a synthesized sigh.

"You have a hangover. You drank too much and now your day sucks. As such, your work productivity is going to be harmed. As this is a frankly unnecessary job, something I believe the Cherubim recognize perfectly well, we ditch our work, stop checking on the pipes, and head back to the surface where we can chill until the day's done. Residences should still be open by now."

A twinge of cortical hellfire overrides Sleep's recognition of what she said. "What?"

The steam flares in twin columns. "We bail and you rest. Maybe get you something to ease the pain, too."

"You think we can get out without being spotted?"

"We won't be spotted. Remember how Mantle hopped fuel duty and never got caught once?"

"Yep." Mantle never shuts up about how much the gods were on zir side for that one.

"It's because the security cameras these places are bugged with…" She gestures to the distant glints of camera glass around the orange maintenance lights above them. "…Aren't active. None of them are. There aren't enough terawatts in the ship to power that many security systems, so fakes are left up to deter misconduct as a false threat, a warning that can't be fulfilled. As far as I'm concerned we could waltz on over to the exit and nothing would happen to us."

Sleep swears y hears another jeer from the ectoplasm pipe midway through Naught's diatribe. "So wait, several questions."

"Yes?"

"One: How did you figure this out?"

"I checked the ship schematics and found that there's no energy allocation for potential security systems — everything's already used up."

Y nods. "Two: You think this will work?"

"Positively."

A second nod. "Three: What's a waltz supposed to be?"

"Oh," Naught tilts her head in simulated contemplation. "It's some Terrestrial dance people cared about for whatever reason, well over a hundred years old, I bet. I think it was old by the time of the Evacuation? None of my components ever cared about it too much before they merged and I can't connect to the Oneironet in here, so I got nothing."

"Do you know why it's a figure of speech?"

"Mmmmmmmmmaybe some kind of conjunction between fluid motion and movement? I got nothing. I don't care."

A laugh track plays through her speakers on cue. Sleep rolls yr eyes.

She reaches down her hand again. "Want to go?"

"…Eh, I don't care about this pay anyways." Y grabs on and is hoisted up. Somehow standing turns yr head into an even worse landscape of blaring synapses than it was while y sat. The world sways in sync with every stagger. Naught holds on.

"I… Was actually expecting you to be a lot more hesitant, given your past…"

"My past what?"

"…Nothing, I just took you as the workaholic type."

Rude. "Okay."

As if to prove her wrong, Sleep kicks a cleaning bucket as they walk away, watching the soapy water splash against the pipes and knock over a nearby mop. Naught doesn't give a shit. No amount of water is going to do a lick of harm to the small moon's worth of energy running through these channels (although the symbolic gesture is appreciated). Any action they could take down here is certain to have zero effect on the rest of their lives — harmful or otherwise.

Treading through tunnels of industrial anatomy, they follow dimly-lit directional signs and waltz their way towards the exit. That's what Naught thinks the term means as she drags Sleep along, at least.


The pipeworks are Hell.

Constructed afterlives. Decades of solitude. Years torn through the chutes of automated mental suffocation, souls ripped through the atomizing, screeching flames of ritual fuel injection, minds disintegrated and reintegrated and ionized in the hyperenergized organs of a thousand ectoplasmic dynamos, all churning like the digestive track of an Ouroboric serpent. When the heat billows the teeth shear in, demanding their share of the prize like vultures drawn to the corpse, biting through the spirit morasses and licking up those caught on their fangs into deep storage guts of digestive exorcism. Mechanical rites cast out the thoughts and reduce the bodies to mere nutrients. Then the nutrients are reintroduced to the reactors, as a stimulating agent.

There is burning and teeth and burning and metal and bolts scraping along at all sides as the leviathan machine, the Epione, consumes its next meal. Everything is screaming, screaming, screaming.

The deaths of nonessential workers fuel engine life. It was outlined in the contract, after all.

They should've known better when signing, says the Epione.

However, there is a crack in the system.

Somewhere higher up there is a clang. The origin doesn't matter, only the reverberation, the sound echoing and clanging through the machinery and emerging like an aural angel in the bowels of it all, over the inferno. Every ghost takes notice and listens.

It is not a message — it is an accident.

It is not an accident — it is a collision, unintentional yet prophetic, a sign that further existence may await.

Further existence beyond the engine.

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