The heat had grown in intensity during the course of the shift.
Not gradually, not in a way you could see coming and prepare for, but in slow increments that built until even simple respiration was an effort and the moisture dripped through every layer of clothing despite the design of the thick cloaks to wick the water away. The face wrap of Alucent's mask was wet against his skin, and every breath took on the flavors of salt and machine oil as well as the hint of re-used air that had passed through too many lungs.
The machinery was louder now too. Or perhaps his ears simply quit screening it out, quit incorporating it into the background noise of the forge floor. Every strike of the hammers, every pressure release, every engagement of gears was now a separate note in the cacophony.
The workers moved with a learned economy of motion through the space. Not rushed, but budgeting energy in a way that implied a deep familiarity with the management of fatigue. No unnecessary motion, no unnecessary words, each step a deliberate end towards a functional means because what else would drain what they would need later.
No one spoke except when procedure called for it. Communication was a matter of gesture and position, of physically choreographed bodies that knew what they were doing and did it without needing to verbalize it. When they did verbalize it, they used short and technical talk that eliminated any extraneous message.
Every surface bore signs of functionality rather than age. What passed below their feet was a metal grating smoothed in high-traffic areas, edges rounded from countless boots walking across them. Valve handles Alucent had adjusted bore the signs of thousands of preceding adjustments, brass darkened from hand oils and chemicals. This was not old infrastructure; it was heavily used infrastructure, strained to its utmost limit day and night with little in the way of maintenance until an absolute necessity was reached in order to prevent catastrophic failure.
Alucent was still in the control alcove.
Nobody had relieved him yet, which meant either the duty cycle was longer than he expected or perhaps he was doing well enough to not be removed because it would be inefficient.
In Iron Vale, the best kind of approval one could expect would be to be allowed to continue as is without interference or adjustment.
He had fallen into a rhythm without thinking about it consciously. Watch the meters, pick out the ones that were approaching critical levels, turn the appropriate valves before the warning systems went into alarm mode. Straightforward recognition and response, basic cause and effect, the sort of activity that kept his hands busy enough to let his brain deal with other issues.
He wondered where Gryan and Raya were. Whether they were successfully handling their roles. Whether the split was only going to be temporary, or whether the labor allocation networks of their facility would continue to keep them separated indefinitely. Whether they would have a chance to coordinate before whatever was to come next forced them to respond.
In the pressure chamber below, men worked as if by clockwork. Making adjustments to the positioning of components, inspecting readings, carrying out a sequence of tasks which likely made sense within a broader production line, although they were arbitrary and pointless from his perspective. The clouds of steam and heat distorted what could be clearly seen, reducing the men to silhouettes and blurry motion.
There was another worker who had replaced the one who had died. Alucent could not tell who was who in the face masks and in the similar cloaks; he could only recognize the individuals according to the role they played in the production process. The new worker simply followed the procedure that the previous one had been carrying out, possibly having learned it from observation or a brief tutorial.
Talented employees are assigned in locations where failure costs less than replacement, Alucent hypothesized, his hand moving to turn another valve without his conscious direction. Training takes time, whereas time reduces efficiency; therefore, training requirements must be kept to a minimum in systems that can tolerate acceptable levels of loss rather than eliminating loss altogether.
It was horrifyingly logical. Brutally efficient. Exactly what you'd expect for a culture that had optimized the elimination of compassion in favor of maximum output.
---
Gryan was pulled out of his general labor work midway through the rotation.
Was not promoted, nor reassigned for better conditions and less strenuous work. Simply moved to a different part of the complex where his particular talents could be put to better use. A supervisor has taken notice of his mechanical arm and realized that his particular skills were wasted where he was when he could be doing far more complex work.
He was led to a secondary forge line; it was smaller than the assembly pits but seemed to have a more intense atmosphere. The area was narrower; the ceiling was lower, and the heat was more intense because the cooling systems were not capable of handling the output of the processes being performed in this area. All this felt like it was being squeezed: the equipment as well as the entire environment.
The task was pressure oversight calibration. The monitoring systems that controlled catastrophically dangerous equipment and made adjustments to prevent a catastrophe that would kill everyone in the vicinity and halt production for several hours while a cleanup crew removed debris and parts of bodies. It was a dangerous job that demanded technical know-how and rapid decision-making where an errant choice was lethal.
This was not progress. This was risk concentration.
Gryan grasped the math in an instant, his engineering brain racing with consequences before he could feel a strong emotional reaction. Experts were not deployed in a stable area, in a place with a system working well, if a little rough around the edges but basically under control. Experts were deployed in areas where a problem was anticipated and a malfunction about to happen, and only a knowledgeable expert could stop it from going belly up.
He was the safety valve. The flesh-and-blood factor in a system that knew it was pushing past the point of safety but couldn't afford to hold back, since productivity targets were more important than equipment integrity or employee survival.
The forge line was manufacturing something he could not immediately put a name to. Large metallic parts that were red-hot when they came out of pressure chambers, quickly cooled and then put through stress tests that would surely destroy them but sometimes did not. The ones that passed were labeled and moved on to the next stage. The ones that failed were processed into new material and the cycle repeated.
A transport corridor with sealed sections ran side by side with the forge line, divided by thick walls but joined by means of access ports that facilitated movement of materials between compartments. Gryan could catch glimpses of activity behind the access ports cycling open, noticed workers with containers that somehow resembled others he recognized.
These are the same crates found at Hollow's Heart.
Wooden boxes with the spiral symbol etched into them.
Being transported deeper into the facility under escort now, with rune locks to seal out unauthorized entry, and destination markers removed to intentionally disguise their destination.
There was the faint humming of one of the boxes as it moved through his visual range. It was not the humming of the steam engines or the electricity of the runes. It was a living energy that was somehow repressed behind the runes.
The parasites. To be transported off to wherever Iron Vale planned to use them, for whatever reason necessitated the rearing of memory-devouring organisms and thence dispersing them throughout the Vales.
Gryan committed to memory the path the boxes were taking, the direction they were headed, the security measures he could see from his angle. He knew he couldn't draw a second glance, that any indication of interest in the closed shipments would classify him as non-cooperative and subject to corrective action. But he took what information he could from his observation before his focus was forced back to the pressure systems he was supposedly checking.
They had to be here. In this facility, navigating through these corridors designed for deployment or research or whatever horrible usage the Iron Vale envisioned. And locating them, making sense of what was being done with them, was why they'd embarked upon this utter madness in the first place.
---
Raya was tasked with perimeter loading, easy-sounding work that was actually a test of endurance masquerading as simple labor.
The work itself was not complicated. Transport boxes from storage points to workstations, observe movement of materials to pinpoint bottlenecks, and verify that supply deliveries occurred before shortcomings impacted productivity.Nothing difficult, nothing requiring particular skills.
However, the volume just kept on coming. It was heavy enough. There was never a reprieve from the pace that never varied and never allowed them more than the minimum breaks dictated by efficiency experts studying work-rest ratios for optimal production levels.
She'd lifted maybe two hundred boxes since her assignment, her muscles aching with cumulative fatigue, her back grumbling from the repetitive motion of lifting and carrying and stacking. This was mirrored by the other workers around her, their movements growing increasingly sluggish as the hours passed and their stores of energy were depleted to their physical thresholds.
A worker stumbled alongside her. Not falling, exactly, but a lack of coordination for an instant before regaining himself against a support column and resuming his path. Exhaustion, not injury. The kind of lapse that would occur when human bodies are pushed to their limit for prolonged periods of time without adequate rests.
Two supervisors did notice. Raya watched while they pointed to it, while they turned their gaze to the stumbling worker, while they. wait.
Non-intervention. Failure to determine if he required help or provide relief or change his workload. Simply observing and analyzing and allowing things to take their own course one way or the other.
The policy was never verbalized but easily understood once one recognized the trend. If a worker was able to heal on his own and continue with his duties, then he was still a viable member of a team and could still contribute towards a production team's goals and was still a good return on the investment that was made in order to retain and care for him. If not, then obviously he was already a liability and thus so would the system treat him.
Raya knew the calculus with a terrible clarity. This is triage in the management of labor, where the value of the worker is constantly assessed in terms of future use rather than past performance or mere humanity.
The worker recovered. Pushed himself up, shook off the momentary weakness, went back to work with somewhat inefficient but adequate continuation of function. The supervisors noted their observations on their slates and moved on, content that no intervention had become necessary, that the system had self-corrected itself due to the desperation of the worker to continue to be of use.
And Raya had done nothing. Had observed this happen, understood what was being assessed, and deliberately chosen not to act or provide help or do anything that would indicate she was non-compliant with approved procedures.
It had cost her far more than anything she'd ever fought for. More than wounds, losses, strategic mistakes. Because those were merely outcomes, reactions to things outside of her total control. This? It was a matter of choice, of weighing survival against honor, of being party to the very machine she'd vowed to dismantle.
She picked up another box and continued moving, her face hid behind a mask of indifference, her hands steady despite the burning sensation of shame in her chest. Because stopping now, and refusing to go any further, would only serve one purpose: getting her out of this facility and eliminating any chance they had at succeeding in their mission.
Thus she lifted boxes and witnessed the laborers fall and did nothing about it, with her soul corroded with each passing iteration.
---
The alarm tone in Alucent's alcove intensified from warning to insistent urgency.
Not sudden, not surprising. He'd been observing the build-up of this pressure differential for the last several minutes, watching the needles rise despite his best attempts to compensate for it, realizing with a sick sense of inevitability that this was a situation that he could neither control nor understand.
Two connecting chambers were involved. The pressure development was working both at once, some kind of cascade problem with the pressure distribution system that his knowledge couldn't locate properly. Standard procedure provided a fix for one of the chambers via emergency pressure release, but carrying out the procedure would simply dump the entire pressure overload into the other chamber, ensuring a breach.
The system didn't provide a third option. No means of retaining both, no ingenious technological solution that could spare all lives. Just a choice between two passable outcomes, and he got to decide which one he wanted and which function he wanted to retain.
System feedback messages were presented on a secondary screen adjacent to the meters. Both chambers were full of workers, the interface reminded him. Numbers flashed on a screen displaying the current levels. Chamber Seven contained three workers. Chamber Nine held five workers. There were no names, only facts—not enough to individualize the figures and cloud the decisionwith the complexities of emotions.
Just numbers - resource allocation data, production capacity that would be lost depending on which decision he had made.
Alucent hesitated. His hand was already on the emergency release valve, his fingers wrapped tightly around the handle, but his brain wouldn't finish the motion. It wasn't a matter of flow control or system adjustments at this point. It had stopped being about system adjustments long before this. It was a matter of life and death decisions, decisions made through calculations that equated lives with output.
The system did not hesitate. The warning alert tone escalated once again, close to reaching the point at which automated reactions would take precedence over direct control and activate default priorities Alucent did not comprehend or possibly did not want to comprehend.
Chamber nine was stabilized. Five people instead of three, greater occupancy, and likely greater output value based on the algorithms in place regarding priority calculation. His hand moved purposefully as it threw the release valve that released the extra pressure to chamber seven in an attempt to stabilize chamber nine.
The pressure gauge in chamber seven shot up instantly. Red lights flashed as the pressure rating was overstressed by design specifications as the metal was further loaded than it could handle.
It was audible even through the walls of the alcove. It was not an explosion so much as the failure of the structure itself; the bursting of the container as the paths of least resistance became the paths of release. And that included the bodies that just so happened to be in the room when the failure took place.
Three lives lost because of the calculation that three lives are less valuable than five, that in the application of utilitarian ethics, three lives are sufficient to sacrifice in lieu of five, when in fact five lives cannot all be saved.
The gauge turned green. Chamber nine's pressure became stable at acceptable levels, having been brought back from the brink of disaster by Alucent's intervention. The system deemed his action successful correction, appropriate reaction to serious situation, evidence of sound decision-making abilities under pressure.
The bell rang once. A different sound, different than the shift markers or break signals, with its own meaning. One that was clear to every soul on the floor. Probably related to casualty reporting. Recording the loss for tracking, for maintaining records, for some kind of administrative reason related to the utilization reporting.
No one ever looked at him. The workers in his line of sight simply continued their work without being distracted by the fact that three of their number had just died fifty meters away because of the bell's message.
Which is exactly what he had decided. He had made a decision that the system would have made, shown he understood the priorities and values that defined how things were allocated in Iron Vale. Of course, if he had made a wrong decision, if he had saved chamber seven instead of chamber nine, someone would have corrected him. Someone would have relieved him of his duties.
But no one came. No one corrected him. The system.just accepted his decision and operated with complete indifference to the expense.
Alucent's hands shook now. He withdrew them from the control panel and pressed them firmly against his thighs. He willed himself to control them. He was breathing quickly and shallowly, his chest constricted with horror that he could not indulge. He could not allow it to show.
It was a cold and harsh reality, to be sure, because three people were dead because of a choice he'd made concerning their deaths, finding them acceptable. The system agreed with him.
He'd become part of the machine. Had implemented the logic, absorbed the values, worked out the calculation that needed doing and produced the result expected.
And a part of him, a calculating part of his mind that operated outside the boundaries of right or wrong, knew that five was greater than three. Knew that keeping the greater number was the right decision when the only alternatives presented were binary. Knew that he had made the only decision a rational mind could or would make.
This terrified him far more than guilt, horror, or burden of responsibility ever had. Because it meant that the logic of the system was not strange and unknowable. It was simply what happened when efficiency was prioritized above all else, and every decision reduced to a calculable outcome.
---
The water break was five minutes long. Timed to the second and carefully overseen by supervisors to prevent anyone going over their break time.
Alucent headed towards the nearest alcove on autopilot, his body following the patterns it had observed others performing. The small space with a water dispenser - enough room for two people to stand in - supplied the minimum hydration necessary to function without taking precious time to simply relax.
There were two other employees there when he arrived that were conversing in a manner that was quiet and efficient – removing all extraneous communications.
"Chamber breach?" asked the first, his tone level and professional.
"Yes," the second confirmed.
Same tone, same lack of emotion.
Merely stating fact.
"Loss?"
"Acceptable."
That's the word they used. Not "tragic," not "unfortunate," not "regrettable." Acceptable. As if the deaths were a quality issue, not the loss of life, as if noting deaths was the same thing as noting scrap materials or degraded equipment.
The word rang through Alucent's mind with terrible clarity. Acceptable. This was how the Iron Vale assessed loss, how it tracked suffering and death and every human cost that resulted from their efficiency processes. Not reducing the incidence of loss, or even attempting to diminish it, just seeing to it that it was kept within acceptable levels as determined by production needs.
Raya would hear versions of this conversation throughout her remaining shifts at the hotel. Gryan would learn about the word when he noticed that the cleanup teams were carefully processing the remains from chamber seven, treating human flesh like industrial refuse that needed appropriate disposal methods. It would enter their lexicon through repetition and exposure, through the normalization that came with hearing something enough that it became descriptive language instead of something frightening.
barcode
The bell signaling the end of the shift was no less mechanical in tone.
Workers scattered as quickly as possible, following the patterns they knew without needing to be told. Toward the exit corridors, towards whatever was their shelter or sustenance before the shift. And the cycle continued. There was no mourning here either. No recognition of the toll of the day's dead.
Simply transition into the next activity that is scheduled, the next function that is required in the optimization of human resources for production.
Alucent slowly removed his work gloves and monitored his hands as they came out of the thick material.
There was reddening of the skin due to exposure to heat and friction from holding valve controls for such a long time. But they were steady. Steady, without a tremor or a hint of strain.
His body had learned to cope with what had been demanded of it, had accomplished the tasks asked of it with greater and greater competence. That was more frightening than the blood he couldn't see, more than the three dead bodies being handled by the disposal system, more than the cruelty that had been systematically built into every detail of how this place ran. His hands should be shaking.
He should be barely functional from his guilt and horror and the crushing psychological weight of all the things that he'd done. Instead, he was steady. Functional. Already looking ahead to the next day's work with the analytical part of his mind that had begun considering ways in which he could work more efficiently, make better decisions, optimize his participation in the very system that he'd come here to dismantle.
Iron Vale doesn't break you by force, Alucent realized, reaching up to tear away the face wrap and sucking in a breath of air that tasted slightly less metallic. It doesn't torture you or threaten you or use force to make its will known.
It teaches you how to break others without realizing it. How to perform the math, the logic, the conclusions. How to become a part of the machine via the simple function of the desire to live and the realization that it means becoming a part of everything you once claimed to be against. They were still alive.
All three of them, separated but operational, having made it through their first shift unnoticed and unremoved as a threat. The infiltration was going well, their cover holding up strong, positions inside the facility solid enough to continue gathering intel.
And the system had learned something about them, too. Had tested them with assignments and observation and evaluation, noted how they reacted to crisis and impossible decisions.
The system realized they could be trusted with loss. Could do the math without freezing or refusing or falling apart in a way that would affect productivity. Could be part of the machine that processed lives to acceptable numbers without becoming problems themselves.
It would inform what their next assignment would be, how the facility would use their skills in the future. And Alucent was not sure whether this was a good or bad thing, whether it meant that all of these areas would become open to them or whether it meant that they would become assimilated in the same way that all of the other workers were, into nothing more than functioning parts following programmed instructions.
He followed the departing employees towards the exit corridors, his body moving with the practiced thrift that expended the least possible effort. Tomorrow would come another working shift.
Another set of decisions, calculations, and chances of becoming what he was imitating until imitation blended with truth. The difference between infiltration and absorption was becoming increasingly difficult to discern.