-42. Chill. Forced surface-air cooling loop subsystems: Heat-rejection; Condensers.
-43. Sparks. MVA Power Transformers; Insulating Oil Chillers; Coolant Pumps
-44 & -45. Geothermal. Geothermal steam powered generators. Double height vaults.
~~~~~ Panic now! You are entering Hell ~~~~
* Danger! It's lethally hot! Duration Limit: 20 minutes. *
* Thermally protective gear & cool suits are mandatory. *
* Warning! Stick to marked safe areas -- robot hazards. *
-49. Swap. Steam loop heat exchangers. Limited Access. Here be Robots!
-50. Steam. Steam generation boilers. No Human Access. Here be Dragons! And more Robots.
-53ish. Volcano. We do not recommend alighting here as this is a volcanic magma chamber full of lava at 1500 degrees Kelvin. Yes, we built the whole facility above a volcano, but trust us: it is dormant.
~ © United Planetary 2024 ~
Chapter 1
Tobias was still a teenager when everything went kaboom; then everything went away.
He was a puzzling mix of athlete and nerd, being much like his parents. Genetics, or something. He had hobbies on the base, but being brought up by scientists and engineers had warped his view of 'normal'. He played basketball and soccer with the young trainees, and baseball when they were allowed out of the dome before the summer recess. In the dark evenings of winter, he practiced his electronics and fabrication skills when confined to quarters. Three-dimensional printing had fascinated him, so he spent hours designing random useful items and begging for time on the machines to fabricate them. He spent a lot of time on 'Hammer' and 'Chips'. He wanted to be like his father; an athletic engineer, rather than a space adventurer.
Station Zero, a research and training facility on Earth, had been set up by his family, pretty much. They had all been high-achieving astronauts, engineers, scientists, and 'athletic nerds', just like Tobias. Genetics: again. He didn't live in their shadow, not really. Without other teenage boys around he was happy, if somewhat lonely. His family had argued about that, of course, but in the summer the number of trainees reduced and only the core team was left behind to keep the base running; and to prepare it for the next season's graduate trainees. Tobias loved the rest of the year when hundreds of twenty-somethings would be available to play with and against in energetic team sports. Like all of them, he was a competitive and enthusiastic consumer of sports, tech, and science. The high-tech base attracted the brightest and the best to train for off-world exploration and adventure. The next generation of astronauts and colonists, who would live on distant moons and planets, were shaped using this perfected template for all other off-world colonies. It was, by definition, the perfect training environment.
The base itself was astonishingly remote from the rest of civilization, and only partly by design. The tectonic location was important, and New Zealand had plenty of what they needed: geothermal heat. Simulating an off-world colony, it had perfected the skills and technology needed to survive without a direct lifeline to civilization, or a friendly environment. They weren't survivalists, or anything; survival was just a necessary factor to living in worlds without a human-friendly atmosphere. There were no cans of spam or stashes of guns and ammo. Instead, the founders had stashed information and technologies that could build and sustain a civilization on another planet; a planetary settler's tool kit. Some governments thought that this sort of emergency world reboot capability was also worth having for humanity on Earth, but most weren't that foresighted. Mostly, the base's core residents were occupied with training ambitious young adventurers for space agencies. The base station itself was located partly on a volcano ('hot but dormant: we promise you it's not active!'), partly inside it, partly in a surface dome, but mostly underground where it was fifty shades of cold/cool/warm/hot/scorching.
All of the bright young people came, trained, and then left. Just the kids of the core families remained behind during the summer. Tobias was the only teenage boy on the base, with something like twenty-six female teenagers ranging from fourteen to eighteen. It sounds mathematically improbable, a ratio like that. Being a nerd--and bored-out-of-his-skull one soccer free afternoon--Tobias had even worked out the odds of it happening by chance. It was one of those one in sixty-seven million chance occurrences that seemed to happen all of the time. Perhaps that sounds like some sort of teenage-boy wet dream until you realize quite how isolating being a teenage boy can ultimately be. And Tobias knew all about isolation; he was intimate with the concept. The only girl he got on with was called Tess; and she only liked playing soccer with him because she was better at it than him. Still, they were friends; sort of. Everyone else thought that they were best friends; just because they hung out together all of the time.
With just over fifty people on site over the summer, the people left were mostly the families of those countless teenage girls and one teenage boy. Apart from the parents, the remaining adults consisted of a few singles in their late thirties and forties who were too busy to book summer holidays that year.
So, yeah, boy-to-dateable-girl ratio was at a respectable twenty-six to one? Well, after redacting the too-related-to-date cousins that number plummeted to the far more manageable twenty-two to one. Still, not a bad ratio. Fantasy land, huh? Bear with us, because this fantasy just got real.
After the kabooms, not much changed at the base for about ten minutes. That was because everyone was asleep in the above ground housing on the station campus. After inspecting the warning alarms, there was a lot of tired scratching of heads. For reasons unknown, all of the communications with the rest of the world disappeared. The blinded and deafened satellites were still there, of course, but nothing at the other end of the links. The other excitement came from the science specialists who were always collecting data on everything. Seriously: they were data junkies. The seismometers and neutron counters only made sense if global thermonuclear war was occurring everywhere else that was not there. Being so far away from any city had made the facility safe from pretty much any disaster, barring direct meteor strike; or volcanic eruption. The data was still puzzling given the lack of any warning. Perhaps someone 'important' had pressed the red button thinking it was the borscht and jail-bate demand button, or the hamburger and golden shower order button, or the YÃn call-girl with extra noodles polite request button, or something. Those who survived on the planet would, ultimately, never know the reason of course. There was no one left to explain what had happened. Science could describe only the result, not the chain of causal events that led up to it.
The first that Tobias knew about it was when, much to his shock, he was woken up in the middle of the night and yanked from his comfortable bed in the above ground house by his focused mother. He was wrapped in a hazmat suit and then pushed from home to dome, which was situated next door. After being bundled into an elevator, he was then taken eleven levels down to the 'Chips' floor. He was then forcibly inserted into the pressure sealed semiconductor processing plant, buried deep underground, and introduced to the clean-room changing areas that, fortunately, had a bunk and a bathroom. It also had a rack of bunny-suits that the technicians needed during the rare occasions when people needed to enter the human-accessible clean room part of the facility. After the hazmat suit was removed, he was just abandoned in his underwear, and then firmly locked inside. Fortunately, being so far underground, nearer the hot core of a dormant volcano, it was nice and warm. He stood, semi-naked and debated if this sort of parental 'care' could be classified as reasonable.
Drowsy, but unable to sleep due to residual stress hormones, he logged into the base network to try to make sense of what was going on. The computers on the base were the very definition of basic and slow technology, as they were all made on site. That was the point: Station Zero was a microcosm of civilization. It had been designed to make, repair, and sustain itself by itself. As it turned out, the sluggish technology was perfectly suited to this situation: being hardened to resist the radiation expected from interstellar missions. By coincidence it was also hardened against the radiation and electromagnetic pulses of nuclear war. So, that was a bonus. Unable to do anything but look at weird data that made no sense without a PhD in "global hostile exchange dynamics (thermonuclear)"--and unable to get any sort of external internet connection--Tobias mused his options. He attempted to contact his friend, Tess, but she wasn't available. No one would answer him. He wasn't inclined to panic, or cry, but it was a worry. His father did leave him a terse note about an hour later; asking him to stop texting him for an update every two minutes. Tobias gave up and just lay on the bunk next to the big rack of bunny-suits and breathed in the fresh, ultra-clean, dust-free air; and eventually fell asleep.
"Tobs?" His father shook his shoulder to wake him up. Without any natural daylight it was impossible to tell if it was day, night, an hour, or a year later.
"Dad?" Tobias yawned. "What's happened?"
"Here's a snack and a uniform. You need to stay here, but stay online. We're calling a town meeting on 'Garden', so join remotely." His father replied. He sighed. "Try not to panic. I need to be there and chair the meeting. Be strong."
"Where is everyone?" Tobias asked, sitting up and rubbing his eyes.
"Checking systems all over Zero. Except for you, all of the other kids and families are gathered on 'Garden' for safety until we can figure out what to do next." His father replied. He looked stressed.
"What? Why am I here? What is happening?" Tobias demanded.
"Stay calm, Tobs. You're not in trouble but, as the only boy, protocol states that you must be isolated from infection and radiation hazards. That's why you are in here on your own; and why we can't come in here again unless you are in critical need of emergency care. I also need you here to command and report on the status of 'Chips' for me. Hence the uniform: you just got promoted to 'Chip Manager'." His father just replied with calm deliberation. He was obviously deeply worried and was doing his best to keep it together. Tobias rolled his eyes. The entire 'Chips' level was highly automated. By definition it didn't need any human to manage it, or report on its status! This was a non-job to pacify him.
"If you can't tell me what has happened, can't you at least let Tess stay with me? I don't want to be on my own." Tobias requested. His father huffed and shook his head.
"Sorry, we need to ration the clean air in here to only you. I can't allocate resources to boost filtration to support both of you in here. We also need every division to have someone in charge of it. You are now in charge of this level. Tess is required elsewhere and will have her own responsibilities in charge of sealed labs on 'Hydroponics'. Just be patient; and be brave. Answers are coming." He replied, obviously flustered. He closed and pressure-sealed the door after him. Tobias wasn't surprised that his own access code didn't let him out of the facility, or into it. And yes: he checked. This was a highly restricted area. He sat in the clean-room office in his new station uniform, just off the changing room, and logged into the local network. Again.
To say the news was soul-destroying would be an understatement. They would mourn the death of human civilizations in an abstract sort-of way but it would be brief, as survival was the priority. Global nuclear winter would take ten years to dissipate, and the ozone layer a bit longer than that. Only countries thirty degrees south or lower would have any sort of life that survived; plants and sun-burnt penguins mostly. Fortunately, the base was south of there: located in the 'survivable zone' unlike the land occupied by ninety-nine percent of the rest of humanity. People above ground on the rest of the island would be okay for a while longer, but with the ozone layer totally fucked from the nuclear war, they would soon not be. Those in Station Zero therefore faced ten long, dark, years underground on their own. It was exactly like life on Mars was for those lucky enough to have escaped before earth went kaboom. It was a long time to spend underground. If he survived, Tobias would be twenty-six before seeing the sun again. Luckily, the base had long-term stored rations ready for the new trainee intake which, with so few staff on site, could last a year or two. They would urgently need to fabricate and expand their existing hydroponics and vertical farming facilities to support fifty people indefinitely. At that time it only had a thirty-person 'demonstration' capacity. The geothermal energy grid ('thank goodness the volcano is only dormant!') would be more than enough, but they had to keep it maintained to operate indefinitely. Corrosively hot mineralized water had a tendency to dissolve and destroy everything: so keeping it going would be a full-time endeavor. The deep mining and metallurgical operations would, for once, also have to actually extract a useful quantity of minerals, rather than be just a practice environment for trainees. The list of tasks was long and the human resources were few. There were few mouths to feed, but also few hands to make do. There would be enough, but all hands were needed to ensure life would not just survive, but thrive. Humanity depended on them!
There was also that whole 'patriotic duty to reproduce' thing too; rebooting civilization and repopulation of the planet. The twenty-six 'fit' teenage girls to one 'fit' teenage boy concept was going to be important to restore humanity after the nuclear winter ended. In an abstract sort of way, Tobias perked up to that reminder. He liked those odds and the lack of any male competition. Well, twenty-two fit teenage girls and his cousins, to one handsome, rugged, teenage athletic nerd. Make that twenty-one-to-one if he discounted his 'best friend', Tess. Just one minor detail: they had to survive a decade without becoming permanently sterile due to fall-out radiation, or vitamin deficiency. Or starvation. Or geothermal plant failure. Or... or... or.
Tobias looked around his new home: an ultra-clean filtered air environment deep underground away from any harmful radiation. It was either that or lead-plated underwear to protect his bad boys from damage, apparently. His mother, the station doctor, was not going to take any chances with Tobias's thyroid either. She also wasn't going to let anything damage his future potential. The iodine tablets sucked, but if they helped keep him cancer free that was a bonus.
Living underground sucked. Tobias hadn't really understood why anyone had wanted to live on Mars, anyway. No outdoors, no fresh air; no soccer! Living underground sucked and living in a fucking semiconductor fucking changing fucking room sucked too. He didn't complain of course: he lived in a five-star hotel compared to most people. He was alive; unlike most people. He counted his blessings and focused on studying and working hard to make their situation better. Everyone pulled together and gave one hundred percent to keep the base running.
His dad brought him rations once a day, left in an airlock; which for the first three months was too little but just enough to survive. Tobias missed the human contact more than the lack of food. A hug from his dad would have made everything bearable. Ben, an older friend, who was like a big brother, would wave through the window occasionally. He was a muscular mining engineer and twenty-five-years old. Due to his awesome big brother-like attitude, he tried to help his young friend. He even brought Tobias some dumbbells to lift that were small enough to get through the airlock. Tobias was grateful as it genuinely did help to alleviate the daily boredom. A massive muscular hunk of a man, Ben was gay with a partner on site: Matt. They both worked on automated mining robotics. They liked megawatt powered machinery, and they liked getting their hands dirty. They always had time for Tobias, just like caring, older, brothers. Perhaps because of that, to Tobias they were literally the coolest people on site. Tobias had adored and idolized both of them, but his mother had been very strict to limit the interaction. After a month underground, he barely saw them again. Perhaps his mom was worried that they would turn him queer, or something? Tobias would roll his eyes to his mother's concerns. They were just gay, not deviants!
Remote teaching done by some glitchy A.I. 'teacher' running on the base's only decent computer sucked; and it sucked that even after the end of the world he still had to learn, rather than just grab the leathers and build 'apocalypse-town' with some punk-styled mates and custom vehicles. He got to both work and learn, but leisure time at the start and end of the day was restricted to reading, listening to music, or lifting weights in isolation. Streaming video just wasn't available anymore. It was like living in the prehistoric past!
