C James - Dome Six

“You don’t have to get up, Dave,” he said. “I’m not that big a deal.”

“You’re in the FPC today,” he said, stone-faced.

“What?” Dek asked. “Why?”

Cleaning the Stores was a breeze, but the FPC was the shittiest detail you could get. Could it be related to what he’d seen on his father’s old tablet? It was disconnected from the network, but he still felt a jolt of panic.

A smirk crept across Dave’s lips. “Big mess.”

So maybe it wasn’t related, but it still sucked. Hideki about-faced and headed slowly back up the ramp, wondering what he could mean by a big mess. Then he shuffled straight across the Agora to the FPC entrance. Along the way, he noticed the conveyors on the Towers were stopped. Sometimes it was a mechanical issue, sometimes not. In any event, it didn’t happen very often.

A rather unsavory narrative was starting to form, but he pushed it aside. Maybe a day in the FPC was an opportunity to retrace his father’s steps.

He’d taken the train to the FPC that day and came in from the other side during the shutdown. Thousands of people would’ve been milling about the entrance, some eager to return to work and make the time pass more quickly and some content to stand around indefinitely. What had he felt just then? Pressure? Confidence?

“You must be Yamamura,” said the guard at the bottom of the ramp. “Find a mop and report to Bay 5.”

“There must be some mistake. I—”

“No mistake. Scan your CHIT and go.”

Dek brushed past the guard, heard the scanner beep, and went inside. The humid odor of decaying plant matter invaded his nostrils and he thought he might be sick. How anyone got used to the smell, he didn’t know.

It got less oppressive the closer he got to the processing floor. The smell rose up to a river of forced air along the ceiling. It then funneled into ducts that disappeared through the concrete support wall and vented it all out into the Burn.

He followed the catwalk over the processing floor and watched it all for a moment. The harvester buckets from the Towers normally descended through the ceiling and dumped their contents on a conveyor. They were then blasted clean before returning up the other side of the Tower. One set of workers sorted the plants and sent them down smaller conveyors, where other workers removed stems and inedible parts to the adjacent composting center. Pretty much everything else wound up on the conveyor that ran down to the multimeal processor.

It was all shut down. FPC workers were streaming out en masse .

“Wrong way,” said a passing man. He was roughly Dek’s age, his left eye covered by a patch. The FPC had more than its share of horrific accidents. “We just got word it’s gonna be awhile.”

“I’m supposed to report to Bay 5.” Dek said.

The man suddenly understood why he was there. “Oh. Yeah, okay.” He studied his face for a moment and leaned in. “Do I know you? You look familiar.”

“I don’t think so,” Dek said, extending his hand. “Hideki Yamamura.”

“Yamamura. As in, Daisuke Yamamura?” he said.

“Yes…” he said timidly.

“My name’s Mike. I apprenticed with your dad.”

Mike’s thick, cracked hands and missing eye told the tale. He clearly didn’t make it as a technician. He’d been in the FPC a long time.

“Good to meet you, Mike,” Dek managed. He couldn’t believe his luck.

“He was a good man. It’s a shame what happened to him,” Mike said. “One minute I’m talking to him and the next…”

“You saw him?” Dek asked.

“I never could figure why. Everyone else was headed to the Towers for the drill, but your dad was going the other way. He said he was meeting his wife, which sounded weird, but I thought maybe, y’know, he and the missus wanted a little… privacy.”

Dek guffawed. His parents loved each other but using an O 2alarm to shut down production just to hose each other in the smelly FPC? Inside the processor no less?

“Sorry. If you knew my mom, you’d know how funny that was. So what’s going on here?”

Mike’s eyes darkened and he sighed. “There was an accident. Big mess down there.”

“So I hear.”

“There are cleaning closets next to every station in the line. Keep opening doors until you find a mop,” Mike said. “A bunch of you are already down there.”

Dek thanked him and kept moving deeper into the semicircular facility. Each bay under the Towers normally bustled with sweaty, dirty workers focused on feeding the beast. The volume of organic matter carried off to the processor was staggering. The silent conveyors were piled high with it.

After a time, the processor came into view — a floor-to-ceiling behemoth that gulped down piles of fruit and vegetables and spat out multimeal. A team stood at the intersection of the FPC’s two main branches, one from Towers 1–5 and the other from Towers 6–10, plucking the best-looking whole pieces for Ration Rewards. Dek hadn’t earned or used any in years, though the fist-sized strawberries certainly looked appealing.

He descended the stairs and opened the door to the first cleaning closet he saw. No mops. Same with the next two. He had to backtrack all the way to Bay 2 to find one, then took it with him en route to Bay 5. Dek passed a few workers shuffling the other direction, haunted looks on their ashen faces. They drifted by like he wasn’t there.

For as many people as he passed leaving Bay 5, he expected to find a crowd but there was only a handful of FPC supervisors standing in the corridor along the outer wall. They blocked his view of the processor’s intake. He tapped one of them on the shoulder to make way. Upon seeing him and his mop, he stepped aside, though he wore a bemused look that Dek didn’t like.

“Come on in, bud. Join the party,” he said. “We’re trying out a new multimeal formula. See what you think.”

He and the others laughed as they ushered Hideki past. What he saw next was forever branded onto his retinas.

An arm hung grotesquely to the side of the conveyor near the mouth of the machine, suspended from a thread of hemp or sinew. Below and around it was more blood than he’d ever seen. His stomach lurched, but he swallowed it back down. The men behind him sniggered. A handful of fellow sanitation workers sloshed water over the floor and pushed blood into the drains. He reluctantly shuffled over toward one of their buckets to wet his mop and join in, but a voice from behind stopped it.

“Oh shit, ” he said. “You’re Yamamura, right?”

Dek turned and nodded. “Yeah, so what?”

“You won’t need that,” he said, taking the mop. He nodded toward the processor. “Not for the inside.”

He gulped. It seemed this person — a woman, by the looks of it — had probably gotten her clothes wrapped up in the conveyor. He only saw an arm and blood, which meant that the rest of her was inside. Though he had no idea how it all worked, IDA would know he could figure it out. Why send a tech to access the inside of the machine and a janitor to clean it when Dek could do both? And what better way for the Authority to twist the knife than to clean a dead woman out of the same machine that supposedly chewed up his parents?

Now he knew why the supervisors were so amused.

“What happened?” asked Dek.

“She got caught up in the conveyor,” said one of the other men. “Someone hit the kill switch, but it didn’t work. By the time they got to the one in Bay 4, it was too late.”

Though the sides of the processor were smooth, it appeared that access to internal components and gauges was via removable panels — just like the walls in housing units and other Dome buildings. His eyes settled on a large panel near the main intake area. This was the spot.