The Steampowered Globe

by Неизвестный

  Iron Inch wondered for a moment if she should tell Woon what had happened. Then again, he would find out for himself the next time he visited the privy.

  Leaving the vine to its own devices, she vaulted the fence around the station with a running jump and headed off to the High Heels Bar, where the mecha officers congregated when off duty.

  The next morning a tremendous commotion from across the road woke all the day-shift officers in the barracks. Still half asleep, Iron Inch rolled out of her bed and pulled the curtain away from the small wooden-grilled window.

  The sight that met her eyes woke her up at once. The entire police station was covered from corner to corner in an enormous mass of purple-dotted green – huge, flourishing morning glory vines run rampant. Leafy stems criss-crossed the roof, poked into windows and extended to the top of the surrounding fence in a bright green spider web. The night shift officers were standing in the road among a litter of torn greenery, staring helplessly at the overrun building.

  Forgetting that she was wearing only a sleeping robe, Iron Inch made her way down to the street and joined the crowd of officers gathering in the road. Residents from the adjacent buildings were also coming out to stare at the plant-engulfed station.

  “Is it a hacker attack?” some of them were whispering.

  “Why morning glory flowers?”

  “We didn’t have anything to do with it,” one of the day-shift sergeants was telling everyone loudly. “It didn’t happen on our watch.”

  “Is anyone left inside?” Inspector Chung of the night shift was shouting. “Fall in for head count! Is everyone here? Where’s the superintendent?”

  Gibson, in fact, had emerged from the barracks and was staring up at his vine-covered station with a look of such horror that Iron Inch, watching him, burst out laughing despite herself. Over the rising babble of voices no one heard her, though, and Gibson himself was visibly too shocked to notice anything besides the monstrously grown hacked plant.

  “Well,” Shu said, joining her in the road, “now the hairy old man has a real incident to deal with. He should be happy, now he can order every single mecha in the station out to handle this.”

  Out of the corner of her eye, Iron Inch could see Inspector Woon sneaking guiltily away behind the barracks. “That’s if we can even get into the garage,” she said out loud. “Can you see the doors? Because I can’t.”

  Eventually the night shift mechas, who were still in exoskeleton, organized themselves enough to clear the station doors. This took some time because the morning glory grew back nearly as fast as it was torn away. Then, when everyone got into the garage, none of the other exoskeletons were charged and the engineers couldn’t be found to start up the steam generator – they had apparently absconded with Woon, afraid that they would get a share of whatever blame came his way. So the rest of the mecha officers had to borrow weapons from the station armoury and join the regular constables in manually chopping up morning glory vines.

  “I never knew this could be such hard work,” Shu groaned, jamming the tip of her machete into the ground and leaning on it. They had been hacking away for nearly four hours, and most of the officers, mecha and regular, had developed a nice collection of blisters.

  “When I get my hands on Inspector Woon,” Iron Inch said and stopped, overwhelmed by a flood of vindictive fantasies. From around the corner she could hear the clang of shovels and male voices cursing as a group of regular officers struggled to extract the vine’s roots from under the outhouse. The smell was carrying, too – they were having to dig the privies up lock, stock and barrel.

  “There’s going to be a nice big hole left back there when the men are done,” Shu said, looking sadly at the raw skin of her hands. “Maybe they’ll let us bury the inspector in it.”

  Gibson called a halt at noon and the exhausted constables sat around in the station’s courtyard, looking resentfully at the enormous piles of leaves and stems they had pulled off the building. The three squads who had been digging up the men’s privies sat downwind of everyone else.

  “I’m starting to hate plants,” Iron Inch said.

  “Look on the bright side,” Shu said, picking up one of the fallen purple flowers. Inside its large trumpet, the tiny eyeball jiggled slowly back and forth. “The district commissioner will probably post the hairy old man to the outer islands when he hears about this.”

  “Yes and then he’ll post all of us there as well!”

  There was a small stir going on at the courtyard gates and the officer who had been on guard duty came across to where Gibson was sitting gloomily on an upturned bucket. The superintendent, to his credit, had joined in the effort to clear the station and was now nursing his own blisters.

  “Sir,” the constable said, looking quite discomfited, “we have a report from Maan Seui Bridge. There’s been a hacker incident, a minor one. Something involving fish. They sent us a specimen ...”

  His voice trailed off. Every head in the courtyard – and a number of morning glory eyeballs – turned to stare at Gibson.

  “If the hairy old man says we have to go and investigate it, I’m going to brain him with this shovel,” a voice muttered to one side.

  Gibson, however, was staring at the constable as if the young man had spoken in Mongolian. “Tell the residents,” he said, “that they’ll have to handle the fish themselves. I can’t spare anyone for a minor incident right now.”

  “Yes, sir,” the constable said, the corner of his mouth twitching with the start of a grin.

  “And get rid of that specimen,” Gibson added, raising his voice to carry to the whole courtyard. “From today onward no one is to bring any more hacker specimens back to this station. Not plants, not fish, not birds, not animals. No more specimens. Ever again! Am I making myself clear?”

  “Bet you a silver tael he changes his mind by next week,” Shu murmured.

  “Not taking that bet,” Iron Inch said automatically, but her words were drowned out by the applause from the rest of the officers and, after a moment, both she and Shu joined in.

  Mint Kang: “I spend half my life trying to be interesting and the other half failing.”

  Help! Same Angler Fish’s Been Gawking for Eight Minutes!

  by Ng Kum Hoon

  Jay types fluidly on the keyboard, thanking his lucky stars that the emergency communication console in the Vertical Transport Capsule is configured for inputs in Charilaus rather than the cumbersome Morse Code. Semiotic efficiency can mean so much in the present distressful situation.

  Don’t think VTC is moving.

  He sits and waits. He has sent an almost identical message down to the MACIPS a few minutes earlier. The station’s failure to respond so far is quite disturbing. He can only hope that the surface depot does better.

  Eventually the gilled gargoyle just outside the broad window gets tired of peering into the capsule. As it backs away, the miniature “lantern” on the tip of its cranial filament merges back into the Stygian ambience of sparse, stellar bioluminescences.

  All is as quiet as a cemetery.

  “This is definitely not a good day to be caught in a lift breakdown,” Jay sighs at the ceiling gaslights.

  One would imagine that the Straits Settlements’ most prestigious power station keeps its machines in the best shape at all times. But then again, MACIPS Corporation already overturned his preconceptions yesterday. After putting him and a few other candidates through an intensive round of preliminary interviews, they singled him out and explained that Mr Lek Soo Hock himself – or Towkay Lek, as the magnate would prefer – wished to speak with him in person. Yet by the time Jay found his way and walked into the chairman’s office, there was no one in the lavishly decorated room except for a man in a panda suit who was vacuuming the confetti-littered Samarkand carpet.

  Sure, Jay had heard about some kind of function involving a delegation from Beijing, but the sight still bordered on the ridiculous.

  “Mr Peterson?”

 
And the lack of courtesy! He did not even bother to take off the furry head.

  “Yes.”

  “Towkay Lek regrets to inform you that he has just received word of certain unforeseen and very urgent matters arising at the power station, by reason of which it is no longer possible for him to meet you today. He left for the Malayan Abyss minutes ago. ”

  Jay was speechless. For a moment he had second thoughts about getting himself employed as Lek’s personal secretary. Fortunately the panda added, before returning to its thankless chore, “If you would accept Towkay Lek’s apology, this part of your job interview shall continue tomorrow at the station. Please report at the reception counter downstairs by 9:00 and we will take you to the surface depot, where your undersea descent will be arranged.”

  It is now nearly an hour since he has last seen or heard another human being. Jay reckons that he must be fairly close to the station. And what a descent it has been. The variety of marine life that passed before the young interviewee’s eyes was endlessly intriguing. The trip started to get boring only when the capsule gradually sank beyond sunlit waters into the threshold of the “dead zone”. The phrase “close to the station” offers only deceptive comfort, for Jay shudders to imagine the horrific (albeit speedy) death he would suffer should anything disastrous occur at these depths. He tries to look downwards through the window, but only unfathomable blackness looms where the MACIPS is supposed to be, at the bottom of the capsule shaft. A sense of being incredibly alone threatens to overwhelm him. He feels trapped here, like an astronaut in one of those science fiction novels, spinning halfway between Earth and Jupiter, hemmed in on all sides by treacherous unknowns.

  Why has the capsule stopped for no apparent reason? Jay wonders for the eleventh time. He cannot help but suspect that it has something to do with the “unforeseen and very urgent matters” Lek needed to attend to. He recalls recent reports in the newspapers concerning international eco-activists who vowed to shut down the MACIPS at all cost ...

  Grrrr.

  The communication console’s sudden vibrations jolt Jay out of his musings. Rollers churn out five inches of paper. At last, a reply!

  Mr Peterson?

  The message is signed by an operator in the surface depot. Jay’s fingers go into a frenzy immediately.

  Yes.

  Unclear why VTC has halted. We have lost all contact with station for past thirty minutes. Never happened before. Please standby.

  Jay can feel his entire body turn cold. He slumps in his seat. Without any warning, the overhead gaslights start to flicker. A quirky idea flits through the would-be secretary’s mind – perhaps the deep-sea fauna out there in the distance might interpret this as a sos signal and flock around him. Under alternately strong and weak illumination, the inscription on a large plaque on the opposite wall conjures images of accursed ancient oracles etched in some Atlantean shrine:

  Welcome to the Malayan Abyss Counter-Implosion Power Station (MACIPS), brainchild of the inventor, entrepreneur and philanthropist extraordinaire Mr Lek Soo Hock. Decades ago, Sir Isaac Kelvin thought he could circumscribe the future of steam power with his famous declaration, “Maximum steam pressure equals maximum power, but a viable containment chamber can only be so strong.” It was Towkay Lek who transcended the limitations of materials per se, and broke through the impasse of steam development with a simple concept – counter-implosion. It was he who realized that steam pressure could be doubled, tripled or even quadrupled by using immense water pressures to reinforce steam containment more robustly than ever thought possible. Naturally, the perpetually tremendous forces on or near the ocean floor are most ideal for such purposes. Continuously maintained steam pressure in an encasing counter-implosion layer can help engineers to not only reach the nethermost parts of Neptune’s domain in lightweight submersibles (rather than expensive, clumsy and massively armoured behemoths), but also, in turn, sustain the integrity of a steam-producing plant there. Built over a period of seven years on the basis of this notion, the MACIPS is located more than six miles below sea level, where it enjoys the additional advantage of an inexhaustible water supply for steam conversion. At present, our ultra-pressurized steam output fully satisfies the day-to-day power needs of the Temasek–JB Megalopolis ...

  Grrrr.

  The words “continuously maintained” burn forebodingly into Jay’s retinas. He remembers how the surface depot’s technical personnel proudly inundated him with figures as they led him down the corridors to the Vertical Transport Capsule – figures like 15,000 psi, one thousand times the standard atmospheric pressure at sea level, et cetera. These previously abstract numbers feel so ... so physical, so asphyxiating now as catastrophic failure of the power station seems less and less inconceivable with each passing minute.

  Particularly unforgettable are the analogies those folks came up with to elucidate for him the MACIPS’ all-important mechanism.

  “Why, it’s the ouroboros of the alchemists of old, the self-devouring serpent,” raved a monocled gentleman.

  “The ocean clamps down hard, making ultra-pressurized steam possible. This steam then keeps the ocean at bay. The whole set-up is about constant, delicate balance.”

  “Visualize two elephants, A and B, pushing against each other head-to-head with all their might,” a scrawny lady in a lab coat gesticulated. “Everything’s all right as long as the forces cancel out each other. If, however, a wizard comes along, waves his magic wand, and KAPOOF! causes Elephant A to vanish in the twinkling of an eye, you’d better not be the chap picnicking behind A’s rump.”

  Grrrr.

  Jay lunges at the lengthening paper tongue that hangs out of the communication output slot.

  Pressure readings on steam pipelines here highly anomalous. Seen any large bubbles outside? Heard any boom?

  No. But gaslights flickering.

  Bad news. Means running on inbuilt gas reserve.VTC’s

  “‘Bad news’? Now that’s a sensitive way of putting it.”

  Jay waxes cynical with terror. It has never occurred to him before that the in-capsule lighting was fed with gas pumped from the station below. The dread is further magnified when, at this precise moment, he hears a muffled explosion. Like a ripe durian on a windswept tree, the entire capsule shakes for a while in the midst of surging currents. What appear to be pieces of rising debris and a frenetic flurry of pony-sized bubbles stream across the window.

  Just got bubbles and rumbling.

  There is a pregnant pause before the operator confirms Jay’s fears.

  MACIPS probably sabotaged.

  Jay yells, “What? Sabotaged? To what extent? Do we still have ‘continuously maintained steam pressure’?”

  Survival mode kicks in.

  Please bring me up.

  Impossible. VTC powered entirely by station. Not a single whiff of steam enters from above.

  Second capsule?

  Parked at station.

  External rescue team?

  Gone for other mission. Nearest bathyscaphe hours away.

  Jay has to exercise every ounce of self-restraint within him to refrain from pounding out a scatological outburst. The rational part of his brain knows it is not going to help. The jaw-dropping ill-preparedness of the MACIPS Corporation – the world-famous MACIPS – is too much to bear nevertheless.

  Please be assured that every effort is being made to rescue you. Be strong.

  Bathyscaphes on their way?

  Yes. Please be patient. You should be fine as long as VTC stays put. Gaslights will die out soon though.

  “‘Die out’? Splendid. How reassuring is your choice of words!”

  Jay cannot recognize his own voice anymore. A hundred runaway thoughts crowd his mind, revolving mainly around an illustrious life (or what could have been one) cut short, the lips of the girlfriend he might never see again, his Siamese cat in want of supper tonight, the front page of tomorrow’s Temasek Daily mentioning him briefly in a slightly tragic tone, et cetera. And then t
he unthinkable happens.

  Fish lights outside resuming upward movement. A little faster than before. I think.

  VTC must be slipping downwards.

  Jay finds himself blinking in step with the gaslights above him. His rotten luck defies belief.

  Meaning?

  Safety catch device probably damaged by shock waves.

  Will slam into station?

  What remains of it. Much sooner than we can reach you. Capsule puncture probable.

  The subsequent line could very well have come from a sadist:

  We think another scenario much more likely.

  Tearing at his necktie and gelled hair, Jay mumbles, “But an explosion of this magnitude ... The capsule shaft must have been severed down there. Please, please tell me I’m not going to swerve off eventually like a derailed locomotive ...”

  Will slip off and disintegrate on ocean floor?

  According to our calculations ...