by Ben Wolf
As they did, Justin looked at the Sector 6 science office door. The screen on the terminal mounted next to the door lacked the electric blue glow of the other terminals, as if it was off or malfunctioning. He shuddered as he tried to push away the memory of what had happened to him in there.
Carly brought him to the small metal door for Sector 13, swiped her card, and punched in her code. The door beeped at her in the negative, and she sighed. Three attempts later, the door finally opened.
“Damned, glitchy network,” she muttered and entered the science office.
Justin followed.
Inside, multiple colors of rock samples, not just the blue stuff that seemed to be everywhere on this planet, covered tall Plastrex tables. The tables also held smaller screens, and colorful digital images and charts flowed across the office’s glass walls as well.
The seven scientists inside ranged in age from early twenties to fifties, and Carly was the only female. Rather than the ruckus of heavy machinery and talkative miners, Justin heard the faint tapping of fingers on screens and an occasional yawn. The scientists sat at their stations, working on a variety of sciencey-looking stuff.
“You’ll be working throughout the office today. Essentially, you’ll be our gopher. Go for this, go for that.” Carly sat down in a chair at one of the stations. She explained that he’d mostly hand-deliver testing materials, tools, equipment, soil and rock samples, and other lab resources to anyone who asked for it, and, of course, he’d make sure the coffee flowed freely.
Carly stifled a yawn of her own and pointed to a coffee machine in the corner. “Speaking of which, I could use a cup.”
Justin didn’t like being reduced to a peon, but he didn’t have a choice, either. He gave her a hard stare and a fake smile and then headed over to the machine. As he grabbed a disposable cup, he wondered why they didn’t have an android doing this kind of work instead.
He brought it back to Carly, and she asked, “Cream and two sugars, right?”
Justin stared at her. “You didn’t ask for that.”
“So that’s a no?” Carly shooed him away like she had half an hour earlier.
Justin bit back a growl and displayed another forced smile. Within moments he returned with Carly’s enhanced coffee.
“Thank you.” The way she said it, with her dumb accent, it sounded more like “theeeank yeeeou.”
He hated it.
“Justin?” someone called from across the science office.
He turned.
A guy wearing a red sweater and black slacks under his lab coat waved. “I’d like a coffee, too. And then I need you to get me some supplies from the inventory room.”
Justin forced another smile and wondered how long it would take for his jaw to start hurting from the effort.
Within an hour, Justin was more than ready to return to his actual job on the mine floor. So far, he’d bungled requests for specific scientific equipment three times, and one of those times he had to go back twice to check for the right tool. He’d never enjoyed science class in school, and he didn’t really care what all of these white-collars were doing.
He’d glanced through the office’s windows down at everyone working at least a dozen times, but he’d only caught sight of Shannon once. No sign of Dirk from what he could see. Then again, from that high up, everyone but Shannon and Harry looked the same, differentiated only by their sizes and job functions.
Carly called him over again. “You’re doing a pretty good job. Sounds like you had a few mishaps, though. You know everything in inventory’s labeled, right?”
Justin’s jaw tightened. “Yes.”
“Okay.” She beamed at him. “Just making sure. What are you doing now?”
He shrugged. “What do you want me to do now?”
“If you’re not busy, pull up a chair. I can show you how to handle some data-entry tasks.”
Kill me now. Justin would’ve rather taken another pair of punches from Dirk than do data entry, but he grabbed a chair and sat down next to her.
She rambled on about how the spreadsheet program worked for five minutes. “Do you understand? You really need to get this right. Dr. Steelheart is super picky about it.”
Justin didn’t understand, but he squinted at her. “Dr. who?”
Carly chuckled and glanced around. She lowered her voice. “Dr. Stielbard. You know, the cyborg? Get it?”
So the cyborg worked in the science office? That explained the lab coat he’d seen her wearing in the cafeteria before his incident in Sector 6.
Carly nudged him. “Stiel-bard… steel-heart… and she’s a cyborg…?”
“Yes, I get it.”
“We call her that because she’s cold and calloused, too, not just because she’s a cyborg and probably literally has a heart made out of metal. We’re not that terrible.” Carly smiled again. “And anyway, her robot parts are some sort of alloy. Not pure steel.”
“I get it.” Justin glanced around the office, hoping Carly would shut up for his sake.
He hadn’t seen Dr. Stielbard since she’d been sitting alone in the cafeteria the other day, and his curiosity about her hadn’t dwindled since. From what little Justin had seen of Dr. Stielbard, Carly’s assessment made sense: Dr. Stielbard didn’t like people.
“Where is she now?”
“Beats me,” Carly replied. “She comes in when she wants to. Not much of a morning person. But she runs the department, so the company doesn’t care.”
“I see.”
Carly leaned close to him and whispered, “You know how she got like that?”
“Like what?” Justin leaned closer as well, more out of habit than because he actually wanted to. Carly smelled of cheap soap and even cheaper perfume. “A cyborg?”
“Yeah.”
He shook his head.
“Apparently, she was involved in the accident.”
Justin eyed her. “What accident?”
“The one that got the whole mine shut down the first time, before it opened back up. In Sector 6.”
“They said it was a cave-in, but—”
“But you already know that isn’t the case.” Carly eyed him. “Everyone’s been talking about it. You somehow ended up in there, didn’t you? The company tried to keep it quiet, but we all know it was you.”
Justin bit his tongue and muttered, “I’m not supposed to discuss it.”
Carly rolled her eyes and scoffed. “Typical.”
“What did you mean about Dr. Steelheart being involved with the first accident?”
Carly shrugged. “You don’t want to talk to me, so I won’t talk to you about this.”
Seriously? Justin frowned at her, but she’d already redirected her attention back to the spreadsheets. She was behaving like a child.
But if she knew something about the last accident, or if she knew about Dr. Steelheart’s involvement or presence when it happened, it might be worth revealing a bit more to her.
He leaned in close again and whispered, “Look, all I can say is that it wasn’t a cave-in, alright? I’ve been working in mines my entire adult life, and nothing in there indicated that.”
She turned her head slightly toward him, but she didn’t take her eyes off of the screen. “Like what?”
He shook his head. “Your turn. Tell me something.”
She laughed. “That’s not how this works.”
“Then I’m not telling you anything else.”
“Alright. Back to spreadsheets again.”
The thought sickened him, and he grunted. “Fine. It looked like a cover-up. There were huge fissures in the floor, and someone had filled them in. When I was in there, they broke open, and phichaloride gas came shooting out. It almost killed me. My muscles are weakened from it, so that’s why I’m on light duty. Your turn.”
Carly grinned at him. “All I heard about Dr. Steelheart was that she was in some sort of explosion that took out half of her body. I have no idea if that’s true or not, though. You can’t
believe everything you hear.”
Justin recalled seeing the charred ceiling in the Sector 6 science office. Perhaps Carly’s rumors about Dr. Steelheart were true. And if she’d somehow been involved, then perhaps she could explain some things to him about what had happened to him just days earlier. “What else?”
“Whatever happened in there supposedly left over a hundred workers dead.”
“From the explosion?”
“No. From the gas and radiation.”
“Radiation?”
“From the copalion. It is a radioactive element, after all,” interrupted a heavily accented female voice from behind them. The words lilted with a slight hint of electronic modulation.
Justin slowly turned back.
Dr. Steelheart stared down at him with dull blue light in her cyborg eye and quiet anger in her blue human eye.
15
Justin stammered, “I, uh… I didn’t—”
“Why are you here?” Dr. Steelheart—Stielbard asked.
Justin could only stare at her.
The line separating her skin from the alloy started on the left side of her forehead, ran through the center of her left nostril, and angled over to the middle of her lips. The left side of her face amounted to little more than a chrome-like skull, and steel teeth punctuated the left side of her mouth.
The metal continued down her chin, onto her neck, and disappeared under her violet-colored shirt, but it reappeared in the form of four articulated fingers and a thumb that protruded from the end of her left lab coat sleeve. The metal fingers tightened into a fist. Only then did Justin hear the rhythmic, mechanized pull of air pumping into her lungs.
The blue light within her robotic eye constricted. “Do you intend to stare, or will you answer my question?”
Justin cleared his throat. “I’m—I’m on light duty. They sent me up here to help with errands, coffee, basic tasks.”
“We received a message about it last night. We’ve put him to good use so far,” Carly said. “I was just teaching him how to—”
“I was not speaking to you.” Dr. Stielbard snapped at Carly, and her voice modulated slightly, but she hadn’t even looked at Carly.
Carly’s mouth hung open for a moment, then it clamped shut.
“Ms. Wilson, when will your report on the scorallite samples from the sector’s north quadrant be ready?” Now Dr. Stielbard looked down at her.
Carly glanced up at her, and then at Justin.
He just stared back at her. Don’t look at me. I’m not the scientist.
“Within an hour.” Now Carly forced a smile.
“Make it sooner. We cannot delay the entire operation because you work at a slug’s pace.”
Carly nodded, her jaw tight with strain and her lips curled into that artificial smile. Justin didn’t care for Carly, but Dr. Stielbard was really living up to her “Steelheart” nickname.
“Will do, Dr. Stielbard.” The way Carly said it, Justin knew she’d wanted to use the nickname instead but restrained herself.
“And you.” Dr. Stielbard pointed at Justin with her prosthetic index finger, and her dead, robotic eye reminded him of how Groucho the kitchen android had been staring at him. “You will gather information regarding the intersection points of active and inactive sectors in this mine.”
Justin blinked. What did that even mean? “How do I do that?”
“You will go to the administrative offices and pull the files locally, put them on a handscreen, and then return them to me. I will authorize your access to the proper range of files. Right now, the transfer of such information over the mine’s network is inconsistent, and I need it promptly. So rather than finding it myself, I am sending you.”
Great. At least I don’t have to do spreadsheets. “So I just go up to Admin and…?”
“Someone will meet you and direct you from there.” Dr. Stielbard pointed at the door. “Go. Now.”
Justin rode the small grav lift up to the admin offices thanks to Dr. Stielbard somehow ordering it to do so via her cyborg parts. It was kind of cool, but without question, Justin would’ve chosen to keep his body intact over gaining the ability to mentally command technology.
The lift opened into the third floor of the mine’s administration offices. White Plastrex cubicles enclosed sleek, black Plastrex desks and the workers seated at them. Screens glowed all around him, and fingers tapped furiously at them.
The lights in Admin emanated familiar blue light, but they gave off more white tones than those in the cafeteria, dorms, and passageways. Some sort of brushed metal, perhaps steel or nickel, accented the admin light fixtures and gave them a more professional, less industrial feel.
As Justin stepped off the lift and deeper into the office, a middle-aged woman with graying brown hair and wearing professional attire met him in the lobby.
“I’m Delores.” Her voice sounded almost as raspy as Connie’s. “You’re here to dig into the files, right? A request from the Sector 13 science office?”
“That’s what they told me.” Justin nodded, and Delores waved for him to follow her.
Delores opened the door to a room labeled, “C21 – File Storage.” Inside sat a single screen atop a desk with a chair in front of it.
Delores urged him inside. “I’ll be back in fifteen minutes or so to check on you. If you get stumped, just request assistance in the program itself. It’s got some AI, so it’ll either help you or page me or someone else to help.”
“How do I do that?” Justin asked.
“Oh.” She looked him up and down. “Well, just come and get me, and I’ll help you out. I’m the desk nearest to the grav lift.”
Justin nodded. “Thanks.”
He sat in the chair, pulled up the request on the handscreen Dr. Stielbard had sent with him, and tapped the screen atop the desk. It winked to life with light, then its brightness level autocorrected to complement the lighting of the room.
Justin entered the commands slowly, and the program responded quickly with a massive number of results.
Fifteen minutes later, he still hadn’t found what Dr. Stielbard was looking for—at least as far as he could tell.
He’d been the wrong person to delegate this task to. All he knew was how to break rocks, find copalion, and get it out of the ground. Screens and file searches and spreadsheets might as well have been French to him.
He eventually came up with a pair of files that might’ve been what Dr. Stielbard wanted, but they could’ve been utter garbage, for all he knew. He uploaded them to the handscreen and tapped the search field again.
Justin glanced over his shoulder at the door and checked the ceiling, walls, and screen for cameras. Then he typed in the words, “Sector 6 Accident” into the search field.
To his surprise, only three files matched his search parameters. He tapped through to the first one, but it yielded only a batch of messages between the Site Executive and the HR department regarding the reopening of mining operations at ACM-1134. The second and third options didn’t give him anything better.
Who was he kidding? ACM wouldn’t just let sensitive information like that float around for anyone to access.
Then he got another thought, and he typed “Stielbard” into the search field. Maybe her name would bring up some answers.
Hundreds of responses popped up, and Justin cursed. He narrowed the search to “Stielbard injury” first, then “Stielbard cyborg,” then “Stielbard accident.”
Finally, he entered “Stielbard prosthesis” and activated the search. A handful of results came up, but one entitled Etya Stielbard - Case 00014 Prosthesis caught his attention.
He opened it.
The report began with a detailed diagram of a female body with intricate machine parts grafted to the left side of her body.
The prosthesis started with the side of her bald head and working down her neck, over the left half of her chest and the entirety of her left shoulder and arm. The cyborg parts narrowed when they reached her
hips, but they continued down nonetheless and ended with her entire left leg and foot.
Labels denoted each cyborg part with their anatomical equivalents, but Justin glossed over them. He tapped through to the next page of the report and started reading. Amid a slew of technical and medical jargon, he found references to severe burns and limbs and body parts that were entirely missing.
An explosion could’ve caused that. Justin tapped for the next page.
A new diagram showed the internal organs and other systems that the doctors had replaced in Dr. Stielbard’s body—her left lung, her spleen, one kidney, her pancreas, her stomach, and most of her intestines. How she wasn’t dead, Justin had no idea.
Ironically, despite her “Steelheart” moniker, her heart was original to her body.
Descriptions abounded, and Justin went to the next page. More medical and technical notes described the various surgeries doctors had performed on her.
Justin shuddered. That poor woman had endured a lot.
The heading on the next page read, “Advanced Functions of the Subject’s Prosthesis” and displayed a close-up of the cyborg half of Dr. Stielbard’s face. Justin glanced at the other pages in the queue and saw comparable diagrams of her other cyborg parts. It all looked very interesting, but it wasn’t what he was looking for, so he cycled through them quickly.
On the final page of the report, in the conclusion section, Justin found a reference to another report labeled, “Sector 6 Incident Report.” He tapped the link, the screen processed the command, and it came back with an “Access Denied” notification.
He cursed and exited out of both reports. He was no computer whiz, and he had no desire to try to find a way around the company’s system. Even if he did want to know more about what had really happened in Sector 6, he wouldn’t figure anything out this way.
Back to searching for intersection points between the mine’s sectors, or whatever. He started to enter comparable search terms into the program, and the door whooshed open behind him. He turned back.