The alarm bleating, Dosnak realised he hadn’t slept all night. He rolled over in his hab-unit and let his fingers dance across the heads-up display of his Neuralink augmented virtual screen. The screen illuminated his hab-unit and his face, pulsing gently in time with his alarm.
Another day in paradise awaits.
The alarm faded quickly as he set the toggle to the off position and he slid toward the entry of his hab-unit pod. It was still early morning, so he was careful, as he always was, not to awaken his neighbours. Hab-block 57 had been Dosnak’s home, as close as you could consider it, for the past 4 years. This floor had three high by two hundred rows, giving a generous six hundred units in total for this side of the hall. Dosnak’s unit, 3-092, was situated on the top row, so at the very least he was thankful that he couldn’t hear the tossing and turning of those below him while he rested.
Sleep would rarely come to him, and he was unable to entirely recall the last time he slept. He would constantly swim in a state bordering conscious hallucinations and blatant blackouts with little regard for either one. The moments he was aware however, seemed to always be that which he spent in hab-unit 3-092.
One of the few luxuries Dosnak had access to as a result of having an early morning schedule was an almost guaranteed shower stall for his floor. After slipping gingerly from his pod, he gently lifted himself down toward the floor with bare feet. He peered up and down the hallway and saw Brahd to his left from 2-084, and Richel from 3-095 emerge to his right. They all silently nodded to each other as they did every morning, never saying a word. Only glances and nods were exchanged. Although a trivial and largely sparse interaction, he cherished seeing them both in the morning.
I’ve never actually spoken to either of them in the 4 years I’ve lived here.
The Hive system was optimised in such a way that his daily schedule would never intersect with any of the occupants on his hab-unit floor. Although Brahd and Richel awoke at similar times, they all headed to separate exits as well as being assigned to different work details throughout the industrial sectors of Typhon.
Dosnak reached up toward the entry of 3-092 and jammed his hand in the railing leading to the locking mechanism. This allowed him to control how quickly the hatch would close and thus lead to very little noise. He had copied this technique from Brahd within his first week of living in Hab-block 57.
Dosnak gently pulled open the single draw that came with his hab-unit that contained his clothes. His fashion mostly consisted of basic and functional clothing; three crew cut tee shirts and just as many pants. He could only just barely fit his khaki coat inside amongst the other few things he owned. He efficiently patted down his coat pockets as he did every morning - Working Ident-Cypher, Transit-Auth and augmentation sickness medication.
2 years since they put in the Neuralink - still doesn’t stop the headaches.
He double checked his breast pocket for his most prized possession. A photograph. Crumpled lines ran across its face from being stored in his pocket for so long. Rolling green fields and a gentle blue sky, cirrus clouds gently swirling on the horizon. Dosnak gazed for a moment to centre himself before starting his daily routine.
With one final nod to both Brahd and Richel, he headed for the shower stall.
“Attention all citizens, please refrain from deviating from your designated routes. Citizen Protection patrols are here to help. Have a lovely day.”
The ever watching eye of Citizen Protection was akin to an omnipresent force that could swiftly deploy and quell any potential dissidents throughout the hive of Typhon. Having a population in the 100s of millions, a sizable force of CP officers were always patrolling.
Dosnak had considered joining the Citizen Protection on several occasions, particularly on days when he had so little credits he couldn’t afford any protein-bricks; not even the bottom shelf ones.
“ID: H57-3-092, one unit of rice and one unit of protein, please.” he spoke into the faceless intercom of a sustenance distro unit - a half-glass dome with a red neon symbol in its centre pulsating in time with its artificial vocal cords.
“Acknowledged, please standby.” it replied in calm and monotonous tones.
“Cost: 15 standard credits. Deducting…”
“Thanks.”
CP officers walked by in droves, their faces completely shrouded in white ceramic masks. Data fibers and ethernet cables ran from their helmets into their black flak armour.
A slot opened in the distro unit which presented Dosnak with a single small bowl of steaming hot short-grain rice alongside a compressed cube of soy-bean and nutrient composite. Enough carbohydrate and protein to stay full until the next meal and just barely enough nutrients to keep his body’s immune system working. Dosnak grabbed his tray and walked over to the mess hall.
“Mind if I sit here?” he asked the nearest patron who had a spare seat next to them.
“Do I look like I give a shit?” the man huffed without looking up, mouth half full of protein paste and half-paying attention to the vid playing on his Ident-Cypher.
“Guess not.” Dosnak swung his leg over the steel bench and nestled into as comfy a position he could before starting his meal. He ate his meal using the same method he always used, a three-quarter spoonful of rice to one-quarter of soy-bean ratio. In no more than ten minutes, Dosnak had finished his meal and returned his mess tray to the distro unit.
“No, you idiot! Not like that!” the Foreman Phin yelled from across the synth field. “Production nutrients go via the staging area first, not immediately into Primary-1 - what is this? Amateur hour?”.
“Sorry, boss - I get mixed up with these procedures, sometimes.” replied the floor worker. Dosnak wasn’t quite sure what his name was, but they had been tending to the same synth field for about 6 months now. This particular fellow seemed to make more mistakes than other workers in this synth field; the foreman had no shortage of scathing insults, primed and ready to hurtle at anyone who made mistakes of a similar ilk.
Dosnak had a fairly good idea for the logistical conveyance of nutrients in Synthetic-Field 434f4d50-4c49-4341-5445-44. It had taken him sometime to fully understand the complexity involved in growing nutrients at scale for the 100s of millions of residents in Typhon; it had taken him about the same amount of time to memorise the alphanumeric designation for his field as well for what was inherently a complicated process to begin with. Dosnak also wondered how long these fields had been running for in addition to the 100s of other fields that were currently in operation throughout the hive-city.
The entire process was based on a mysterious document named On the Principles of Hive Nutrients: High-Volume Production Strategies. Stranger yet, this text had no attributed author and also an undisclosed publication date. It provided an end-to-end guide on how to produce nutrient-dense materials that could be later processed into consumable food for the residents of the Hive.
Many workers speculated who or what the mysterious author could be, some said a genius from a previous age predating the construction of Typon - others said it was written by an agricultural god-like AI that was destroyed in a past Hive-war. From Dosnak’s understanding the guidelines described in this text was how Typhon had been successfully making enough nutrients for the past 800 years, potentially even longer.
“Ayah, Dosnak! The things I have to put up with to keep this place running smoothly… I tell ya.” Foreman Phin complained while climbing the staircase to Donsak's main control terminal.
“Yep.” Dosnak replied, unenthused by the topic of conversation and knowing exactly where it was going. “It happens.”
“Say, how did your worklog go over the last synth cycle? I saw that you picked up some PIDs that haven’t been shifted in a long time.”
“Just clearing out the skeletons…” he said.
“Hah! Skeletons… Wait, you didn’t actually find any skeletons, did you?” Phin’s eyes were as wide as Dosnak's CRT screen at the prospect of another synth-field death which could potentially involve Citizen Protection conducting an audit. Dosnak was sure that Phin had more to hide than just skeletons throughout the enormous syth-fields.
“No, nothing of the sort.” Dosnak assured her, “just some old work that needed to get off the log for Primary-1 and Staging.”
“Hah! Excellent… Yes, that’s great. Keep up the excellent work as always, Dosnak!” Phin slapped him heartily on the shoulder and continued back down to the synth-fields to harass the next worker she came across.
The PIDs that Dosnak was actually referring to had been sitting in the worklog for the last 57 years with seemingly no end date tied to the original purpose of work. Additionally, Dosnak questioned the validity of why these PIDs were raised in the first place.
Why would anyone want to redesign the fluid distribution sensor system from scratch? And why was this written as a single PID? Wouldn’t this constitute atleast 10 years of engineering development time to achieve the stated goal? Plus, the fluid distribution sensor system hasn’t malfunctioned in over 100 years.
Dosnak’s main purpose in Synthetic-Field 434f4d50-4c49-4341-5445-44 was to oversee the control systems via his workstation terminal. Control systems could include anything from the aforementioned fluid distributors to conveyor belt systems for moving material from field to field or other processing plants.
The standards outlined in The Principles of Hive Nutrients were, much to Dosnak’s enjoyment, easy to follow and didn’t require too much manual intervention once the control systems automation was deployed. With the gentle orange, phosphorous glow of his terminal, Dosnak could easily oversee how much resources specific parts of the synth-field were being used during its various working cycles.
If the synthetic soil was drying out, he could adjust the parameters on the fluid distribution system in a few keystrokes. If there were signs of mechanical wear on ultra-high volume processing mills just outside of Staging, he could query the state of the gamma-prime superalloy turbine blades to check if they were remaining within nominal temperatures while cycling. If the outfeed conveyor system from Primary-1 was misbehaving, Dosnak could detect that too. Much of these tasks were made easier with the introduction of his Neuralink augmentation that allowed him to query the control systems more efficiently. This irked Dosnak, as the convenience for querying more efficiently was traded for the pain of constant headaches to maintain his Neuralink alongside whatever side effects that the medication had.
Despite the augmentation and the guidelines provided in the Principles of Hive Nutrients it still wasn’t enough to convince the entire workforce to read the damned document to begin with.
Dosnak would often work shifts up to 14 hours long which gave him ample time to assess the entirety of the field and its various intricacies. The process of creating food in Typhon was quite involved, with multiple convoluted steps from start to finish.
Flowing first from the testing fields, these would contain more experimental proteins or macronutrient materials to help keep the synthetic soil from stagnating. Stagnation happened when subsequent generations of material growth slowly diminished the outputs over time, then reducing the usable material in downstream processes.
In other words, testing was rather important.
After testing was conducted, workers could utilise a decided upon optimal growth mixture strategy to the raw production environment. Here, the mixture and parameters of the synthetic soil discovered from the generational data gained from the testing area could be initially deployed in order to receive optimal raw material yield. Generally, the Typhon Consumable Affairs Commission would get very upset if the raw material yields were lower than expected. This, of course, would naturally affect the final yield of consumable nutrients.
So, in other words, the raw production of material was rather important.
Next, the growth cycles for the synth-fields were delivered via ultra high volume conveyor systems that could process tonnes of raw material with extreme speed in addition to processing and separating the most nutritiously dense materials into categories. Depending on how the raw production environment was configured, which also depended on the initial loading conditions discovered during testing would of course affect how much of each category of nutrients you could yield on each generation.
So, in other words, the staging area was rather important.
Finally, the separated and processed nutrients were delivered through enormous cycling cylinder systems in total vacuum in an area named Primary-1, which was the penultimate destination of the main processing lifecycle of nutrients in Typhon before being delivered to Sustenance Distribution Centers for the residence to consume in all 64,000 residential districts of the Hive.
Considering the number of synthetic fields in Typhon there was a natural redundancy system in place simply because there were so many fields to grow nutrients in. Even so, Dosnak remembered the meal he had earlier that morning and wondered if all of the fields were running at maximum output at all times. If a synth-field did not receive optimal yield, then it was likely that millions of people would consume their entire reserve in as little as 24 hours for their residential district. He didn’t particularly enjoy eating compressed soy-bean cubes, but it was the most widely available consumable nutrients in any of the Sustenance Distribution units he frequented.
Dosnak’s terminal suddenly pinged warnings across his screen indicating a critical systems failure was imminent.
WARNING - TURBINE IV HAS EXCEEDED SAFE OPERATING TEMPERATURES.
Dosnak knew that Turbine IV was located in the staging area and was used for processing nutrient materials. It generally operated in temperature ranges in excess of 1,000° C safely and he knew it was extremely dangerous if the turbine worked at anything exceeding 1,500° C.
“Foreman Phin! There’s a problem I can see -”
Suddenly, Dosnak heard an incredibly loud whirring noise that was getting louder every second. More warning messages appeared on his terminal.
WARNING - TYPE I HEAT CORROSION DETECTED.
WARNING - SUPER ALLOY BLADE CREEP DETECTED.
Turbine IV had been operating for at least 500,000 hours at this stage and was largely ignored by the maintenance crews as it was so reliable which ironically led to it becoming neglected. Some of the footnotes available in Principles of Hive Nutrients had comprehensive descriptions for standard maintenance schedules for safely cycling down the machines.
Dosnak knew that at such high rotational speeds alongside the extreme temperatures that the turbines produced it was likely that some chemical reactions had taken place against the superalloy materials of the turbine blades. Many of the elements added into the synthetic soil included Sodium and Potassium in order to promote growth for nutrients and it was entirely possible that some of the residual elements had somehow made their way into the intake manifold of the turbine.
Generally, this wasn’t a problem. But, over long periods of time the reactions could lead to heat corrosion affecting the base of the superalloy blades with porous scaling forming in the crystal structure. On top of this, the centrifugal force generated by the blades was so high that the excessive temperatures could even stretch the crystalline structure of individual blades leading to them becoming longer than they were at time of installation.
The combination of the two problems meant that something very, very bad was going to happen on Dosnak’s shift.
The whirring sound continued to grow into a terrifying scraping sound as the extended blades began to rub against the internal walling of the turbine. Dosnak immediately synced his Ident-Cypher to his terminal so he could continue to issue commands remotely as he dashed toward the staging area. Foreman Phin fell in step without too much complaint.
Several maintenance engineers were already on the scene attempting to understand what was happening. From a distance of 200 meters, Dosnak could see the outer shell of the massive turbine beginning to glow an amber-red from the heat generation of the extended, scraping blades.
“Phin! You have to shut down Turbine IV now!” Screamed one of the maintenance engineers.
“If we do that, we’ll lose optimal yield and millions will starve! Do not shut down that turbine!” Phin yelled in response over the din of the imminently failing generator.
“If one of those blades comes loose, it’ll strike the coolant seals and it’ll leak hydrogen! Then we won’t have to worry about starving to death at all!” another maintenance engineer who had just arrived at the scene.
Dosnak consulted his Ident-Cypher to check the diagnostics again. He saw that the turbine was slowly increasing in temperature while they were attempting to figure out a solution. The cooling systems were still pumping atmospheric oxygen into the system and pushing them across the blades but the oxygen was not providing enough thermal conductance to cool it quickly enough.
“The fabrication workshop!” Dosnak exclaimed suddenly.
The maintenance engineers and Phin turned “Now’s not the time, Dosnak!” snapped Phin.
“Replace the oxygen in the cooling system with argon to increase the resistance on the blades - it won’t stop the runaway cycling but it might slow them down enough to buy some time.”
One of the engineers jumped into action and obviously agreed “Get to it! On the double! I want all the argon cylinders down here yesterday!”
Several engineers started making calls on their Ident-Cyphers and the fabrication workshop crew appeared thereafter with several thousand litres of argon containers delivered via whatever machinery they had available.
“We’re gonna have to get close enough to divert the coolant systems to inject the argon across the blades - any volunteers?”
At this point, there were at least 50 workers standing amongst the chaos - most of them nervously shuffled their feet and avoided eye contact with the principal engineer.
“We don’t need to get close, we’ll get to the blade coolant system via the centralised fluid distribution system.” Dosnak said matter of factly.
“Heh, should join the engineering team, bud…” the principal engineer beamed.
The fluid distribution system had several access points across the synth-field. It was just a simple matter of joining the argon delivery system that the engineers had cobbled together in the past 5 minutes onto the main injection lines available on the fluid distribution intakes. From here, Dosnak could run one of his diagnostic programs he used to perform maintenance on the systems via his Ident-Cypher and tell the system that the intake was receiving a specific material code of DIAG_FLUID which meant the system would accept it regardless of what it really was, and in this case it being argon. This would then make available a supply of argon and Dosnak could then inject the DIAG_FLUID value directly into the coolant system the turbine was using also via his Ident-Cypher.
“By the way, this might not work.” Dosnak said as he hit the EXECUTE command on his Ident-Cypher.
“Hey, wait a minu-” the principal engineer panicked.
Turbine IV suddenly received a steady supply of argon gas across its super alloy blades. With the increased viscosity of argon compared to atmospheric oxygen it meant that the mechanical system would inherently become less efficient and make the blades turn at a slower rotational speed. This slightly worried Dosnak as he knew this meant the primary engine of Turbine IV was actually running at a higher energy output than before but at the very least this may provide an opportunity for the blades to cool slightly and prevent further deformation.
The workers could hear the argon delivery system working as planned and saw the immense amber-red glow of the outer shell dissipate slowly. This didn’t stop the internal scraping of the already extended blades but it seemed to have slowed down the rotational speed.
WARNING - SUBOPTIMAL CONDITIONS DETECTED.
WARNING - 75% YIELD EXPECTED.
INFO - TURBINE TEMPERATURES NOMINAL.
The crowd of workers cheered in celebration that they had solved the immediate problem but caused several more with their chosen solution. Additionally, the problem of extended superalloy blades and an ultimately broken turbine still had to somehow be decommissioned without being taken offline.
“Hungry’s better than dead, boys!” the principal engineer yelled with a big grin on his face.
Dosnak wasn’t sure he entirely agreed with that sentiment, but his 14 hour shift was approaching its end, so he was very prepared to clock out for the evening.