Chapter 5 #4
Iris could do that. Holding the orb above Yan’s shoulder, he watched the engineer concoct an improvised escape plan.
“I’m trying to manually override the door from here,” Yan explained.
“Usually, any signal to the door gets sent from one of the ship’s ‘brains,’ and the door reacts, but if I can nudge it just right, it’ll pop open like it’s supposed to. ”
“Brains? As in, more than one?”
“Yeah,” Yan replied like Iris had asked the dumbest question in existence. “A ship this size can’t operate from a single terminal. Plus, if one goes down, the ship still has to keep the rest of itself running. Don’t they teach you anything in monk school?”
Of course, they had taught Iris plenty in monk school, but none of it had much use when it came to entrapment on generation ships.
Whatever he knew about ships came from books and media Iris managed to request from the library and the brief loans from kind passengers he met during his travels.
Unfortunately, he had yet to come across any engineering textbooks in his years as a Vessel, or any engineers.
Although the latter might have been a blessing.
Yet even his limited knowledge was enough for Iris to have an unpleasant thought. “Then, hypothetically speaking, if the ship didn’t want you to open this door, it could just order it shut, even if the terminal that short-circuited in the first place is inactive?”
Yan muttered an aggravated no. He looked over his shoulder to where Iris was and glared unapologetically.
“This is more like—like when a doctor hits your knee with a mallet. Reactionary. The ship can’t help it.
” He went back to pulling apart the wires.
“And anyway, why would the ship not want to open the door?”
I can think of a few reasons, Iris and VIFAI said at once.
As the minutes dragged on, and Yan worked away at the wires, the air around them grew thick with carbon dioxide.
The cracks in the vent scales were doing a poor job of sustaining air circulation.
Only an hour into their ordeal, and Iris was already sweating, partially from the static exertion of holding up the orb over Yan’s shoulder.
Partially from the exertion of keeping himself in the present instead of slipping away into kind oblivion.
The conversation had long died out as Yan preferred to work in silence and had only given Iris affirmative grunts for responses.
“Stay awake.”
Iris jolted himself into awareness. His arm, the one holding the orb, was trailing downwards and taking the light with it. “My apologies.” He quickly brought his arm to eye level again.
“What the hell is happening to you, Vessel?” Yan was beginning to strip the insulation on the wires. “Are you claustrophobic or something?”
Iris didn’t say. He didn’t like the edge in Yan’s voice and didn’t feel compelled to explain himself to the engineer while he held the pulsar blade. “I’m fine. I’m perfectly all right,” Iris said instead, doing his best to exude calm.
“No, you’re not,” Yan retorted, face buried in the fuse box, his own sweat a dark stain between his shoulder blades.
“You’re panicking because you’ve never been stressed for a single moment in your life, and you have absolutely zero coping skills.
They don’t teach you to perform under pressure at monk school. ”
Iris wanted to say that no, he was, in fact, stressed every waking minute of his life, except for about thirty seconds when, during sunrise prayer, he could shut out everything that was excruciatingly wrong with him and be blissfully numb.
But Yan’s tone remained confrontational, and Iris held no desire to have a confrontation.
What Iris wanted, more than anything, was to be alone.
Alone with the bones of the Nicaea’s passengers, alone in their silent company and their stories.
Mercifully alone, with only VIFAI’s soothing voice and the occasional song chirping away in a distant corner of his mind.
He could sit then and meditate. He could breathe, really breathe, without worrying that he was wasting precious oxygen that would be better spared for the person who was actually working towards freeing them.
“Vessel!” Now, Yan was properly angry, but instead of hurling an insult, he changed his expression to one of worrisome calm.
“Your turn,” he said, handing Iris the blade.
“Start stripping the wires that still have insulation. Get on with it.” He held out his hand expectantly for the glowing orb.
“Come on. Hopefully, your Vessel-ness isn’t too holy to do some actual labour. ”
No, he wasn’t. Iris got to it. Having worked the pulsar blade before, his movements were much more precise than Yan’s, and his fingers glided effortlessly along the convoluted wires.
The engineer peered over his shoulder as he worked, holding the orb just above Iris’s head and teeming with impatience.
“How does the blade work?” Yan asked, his voice so close that Iris had to consciously restrain himself from jumping headfirst into the fuse box.
He was effectively trapped between the engineer’s towering frame and the box, forced to answer pestering questions.
Stuck in this tiny maintenance room, quickly running out of air, Iris became painfully aware of the positions of their bodies in relation to one another, to the sound of their breaths, and how each one drove the temperature of the room higher. He could think of nothing else.
At least you’re not drifting anymore, VIFAI said, and Iris nearly jumped at its voice. He had been ignoring it again, lost in the delicate work of stripping wires. He had never been able to ignore VIFAI before, but then again, he had never been this engrossed in anything he was doing.
It was impossible to dissociate from the moment when, in one hand, Iris held the sharpest blade ever made in all of humanity’s history and the other was bent at the elbow, carving out a shred of personal space for himself.
Somehow, in this newfound discomfort, Iris had regained a fragile balance, a deep and painful awareness of the present moment.
“It’s biometrics,” he told Yan after a long pause.
“It’s more than that. You did something else with it when you were turned around.”
Iris closed his eyes and counted to ten. It didn’t help. “Why is it that you want to know so badly, engineer Yan?”
“It’s a thing.” Yan shrugged. “I want to know how it works.”
Of course he did. Yan sounded like the sort of person who, as a jubilant child, cut frogs open to see what made them hop.
Iris finished stripping the last wire. It was then, with no lack of humour, Iris was reminded that in his experience, the Light truly did not love or care about anyone in particular because otherwise his penance and work with the Starlit would have spared him from this entrapment.
Neither salvation nor reward was coming to him.
He was well finished with the wires, but Yan hadn’t moved and instead, casually and methodically, began explaining the next steps.
“Now you’re going to systematically engage each of these circuits.
See the silvery part where you stripped the wire? Take that—No.”
Iris’s hand froze in midair, his index finger poised a millimetre from the copper wire.
“Only touch the insulation, Vessel, otherwise you will quickly go and meet your maker.”
Iris heeded the warning.
“Now, make sure you’re only crossing two wires at a time. We’re going to go through all of them one by one—No.”
Something wrong again. Iris set his jaw and waited for Yan to take over and do the job himself, correctly, but the engineer muttered a curse and started over.
“It’s important that we do these in a systematic way, so, before you touch anything, listen, Vessel.
All the wires are colour coded. We will start with the green and match it to another green, then we will match the green to the yellow, then to the red.
When we’re done with the green, we will move on to the yellow, and so forth. Is that clear?”
Iris gave Yan a curt nod. “Why would jamming a circuit make the door open?”
“We’re not jamming anything. The door, as is, is dead.
‘No signal’ is closed by default,” Yan explained.
“Always is on ships. Something about it being important to keep air inside when things go poorly. But you can always manually override the door if you try hard enough. We’re just going to give it a little jolt to get it going. The right circuit will do just that.”
That sounded reasonable enough. Circuit by circuit, Iris pressed the wires together, hoping the right combination would trigger the door to open.
Sweat ran freely down his bare head and under the collar of his robes.
If for a moment he became mindful of his breathing, he would find it laborious and a mostly useless endeavour.
Air was running out. Behind him, Yan continued to provide his instructions in the same slightly irritated yet reassuring voice.
Every couple of minutes, the engineer would run his free hand through his hair, slicking it back with the sweat beading along his hairline.
“How long have we been in here?” Iris asked. That single question took most of the air from his lungs.
There was a delay to Yan’s answer, and Iris knew he was looking down at his wristwatch for far too long for it to be just about reading time.
“Don’t bother with time,” Yan said at last. “Just keep doing what you’re doing.
Don’t get distracted. Don’t they teach you to focus on things in monk school?
” There was a twinge of desperation to his voice that Iris did his best to immediately forget.
Their time was running out after all. They would fall unconscious first, before the breathing got too difficult and too painful, before they turned blue and everything came to its natural end.
It wouldn’t be the worst way to depart, nothing like drowning, nothing like being burned alive.
No violence, no resistance. Iris’s biggest regret was that he hadn’t done enough in his life, done enough of anything he deemed valuable.
But the wires needed crossing, and he had no time to dwell on his inevitable demise.
He touched a red wire to a green. The door twitched, so slightly that Iris convinced himself it was a hallucination, but Yan wasn’t as easily convinced.
“There she goes,” he hissed victoriously. “Do it again.”
Iris touched the wires together, and the door twitched once more, this time a few centimetres before slamming back down against the floor and sending a short wave of cool air into the room.
“OK, move.” Yan tossed the orb to Iris and shimmied past him.
“Now, I just have to get this thing to output an uninterrupted current, and it should free us right out of here. Vessel, pocketknife, give it.” Yan held out his hand, and Iris begrudgingly dropped the pulsar blade in it.
After a few seconds of rummaging inside the fuse box, he called for Iris to come back over.
“Just do the exact same thing you did before.”
Iris touched the wires together, and the door slowly slid open, this time all the way, and stayed open—for good.
A fresh wave of ship-circulated air flooded the small space.
For the first time in two and a half hours, Iris allowed himself a full breath.
Behind him, Yan took an equally liberating breath.
To their mutual surprise, there was no one on the other side waiting for them.
Tev, Jesi, and station security were gone.
“Well, this bodes well,” Yan said. “OK, stay there and keep those wires crossed while I go and figure out what’s going on.”
“I’m coming with you,” Iris said firmly.
Yan stepped in the threshold between the maintenance room and the corridor. “You can’t. If you let go of the wires, the door will shut. Sorry.”
“I beg your pardon?”
But Yan was gone, already hurrying down the corridor.
With growing panic, Iris watched the engineer round the corner, his muffled steps on the mossy floor quickly fading from earshot.
Iris was about to call out after him when Yan’s head popped around the curve of the wall.
“I’m just fucking with you. Why on earth would it do that? ” His head disappeared again.
Breath hitched, Iris slowly let go of the wires holding him hostage and took a single step back. The door remained open, and with quick prayer and a stiff curse, he scurried across the threshold and chased after the engineer.