by Mark Stawecki
Boom Hiss Jane is ready for another dull, monotonous day and doesn’t mind at all.
Machine 45 is there as always, a complex, monstrous companion. Jane takes her place beside it, overalls stained from the chemicals, grease, and lubricants that are the factory’s blood. She takes plugs, converters, and bolts from various bins and puts them together, making a larger piece that she places on a conveyor belt to be taken to Machine 52. She does it again and again and again. Fits them together, places them on the belt which moves into a small furnace which goes Boom! as the doors close, and hiss as it heats the pieces and fuses them and spits them out into a new piece for the next worker.
What do the pieces become? That’s not her concern. Only the functioning of Machine 45. It has been like this as far as she knows.
Supplements drop out of the feeding tube on the wall behind her. She swallows them when the display prompts her to then continues working. Jane simply knows when it is time to exercise and moves into Room 102 where she stands on her disc before the instructional monitor. It lights up and shows an image of her, Jane, going through today’s exercises and stretches. She squats and jumps, flexing her arms, pulling back her fingers in sync with her computer twin.
At the end of the day she goes to Chamber 74 and walks through the shower tunnel where she’s steamed, soaped and rinsed. After that she lies down on Bed 32, closes her eyes and promptly sleeps. Wakes up, puts on another pair of overalls. Goes to Machine 45.
Jane is ready for another dull, monotonous day and doesn’t mind at all.
Boom! Hiss. The machine compresses and steams, making the rhythmic sounds. She fits the pieces together and places them on the belt.
On her way to the exercise room she passes Switcher Liz looking at something in a drip pan. Jane stops and looks at it too.
“Is it a loose part?” she asks, peering over Liz’s shoulder.
“I don’t think so,” Liz replies. “Should I make a fix call?”
Jane picks it up. It’s very tiny. Even with her grime coated fingers she can tell how soft it is. Delicate.
“It’s a bug,” she says.
Liz frowns. “Where does it go?”
“I don’t know.”
“How do you know what it is, if you don’t know where it goes?”
Jane doesn’t answer because she can’t. “The cleaners will get it,” she says instead.
The two of them go into the exercise room, already forgetting the matter. Jane swallows her supplements. Through the shower room. Spray, soap, rinse then to Bed 32.
While sleeping, she sees the bug. It flies in the air, whirring like a motor, moving sporadically with no pattern.
Jane wakes. There were pictures when she was sleeping. That hasn’t happened before. She had a…dream. Strange. How does she know that word? Or even what a bug does? The incident would scare her except that the dream fades even as she thinks about it.
Pieces. Belt. Boom! Hiss.
Days later, her hands are fitting two converters together when something jumps in the air and swirls like dust caught in a current.
Another bug. Jane watches it move randomly in the air, without pattern or purpose. Seeing the bug does something to her mind. It ignites her memory, hits her senses, brings forth something other than grease and sweat. An image of a ground with many, small green blades that are feathery, not sharp like the ones that Slicer Mary works with. Bugs fly above the green blades.
The converter she’s holding slips in her grasp, cutting the edge of her hand. Red liquid oozes out.
Blood. She’s only seen it on the monitors during her regular examinations, circulating like oil through her body.
A bit shaken, she hurries into the nearest healing chamber. It’s no bigger than the room where she relieves herself, yet it has shelves, tubes and basins, one of which is filled with a green liquid. Green like the blades. Like grass.
Grass.
The sudden word makes her queasy and a little frightened.
A lone monitor reads STEP ONTO THE DISC. She spots the disc on the floor then does so. A ray covers her in blue light. The monitor shows layers of her body–bones, muscles, fluids. It beeps then reads PLACE YOUR LEFT HAND INTO BASIN 2. She steps off the disc to the sink filled with the green liquid and plunges her hand into the solution. The cut tingles as it’s repaired. She withdraws it when the monitor prompts her to. From a tube by the door a brown pill falls out. TAKE BEFORE SLEEPING. She pockets the pill then goes back to work.
Pieces, soap, rinse. Boom! Hiss.
She takes the brown pill, lies down. Sleep comes much faster then usual. The next morning she can’t remember what had bothered her.
At least until that afternoon, when she sees yet another bug. She thinks again of grass and again feels sick. The bug swoops and zooms, gliding over the belt and around a corner. How did it get here? There should be nothing in the factory other than the machines and workers.
She follows it.
Around the corner is a narrow corridor formed by the backs of Machines 48 and 57, where Sweeping Beth and Burning Sara work. Jane walks between the machines and comes to an end, blank except for a large ventilation fan. The fans are all over the factory, their humming as regular as the rolling pieces and the boom hiss.
This one has stopped.
She looks at it, unsure of what to make of this irregularity. Surely someone has made a fix call. Nothing stays broken for long once a fix call is made.
Curious, Jane steps forward. The layer of grime coating the vent’s insides is smeared as if someone touched it several times. A closer inspection shows two words scrawled into the dirt.
COME JANE.
What is this? She stares harder, thinking perhaps she’s seeing the marks wrong. The letters are exaggerated, warped. She could be mistaken.
Jane hurries back to the comforting boom hiss of her station.
Someone should make a fix call. Her hand glides over to the red maintenance button. But what if she did see her name and she makes the call? What would happen to her? Better to let someone else do it. She tucks it into the back of her mind, confident the problem will be fixed tomorrow.
It’s time for bed and she still feels jittery. Something is wrong. She goes to the healing chamber once more and stands bathed in the blue light. Another brown pill is assigned to her. She picks it up and goes to Bed 32.
As she is about to place the pill on her tongue she holds it up and inspects it. What are the pills for? Did the one she took last night have something to do with what happened today?
Over and over she wonders until she finally goes to a refuse chute and, without quite knowing why, tosses the pill in.
That night there are more dreams. Of running on grass, of a strange blue ceiling. Someone calling her name. There’s a girl, smiling at her. Smiling?
The dream shifts to the factory. The workers are all skeletons, pulling levers and switches, wiping and sweeping. As her own fingers put together plugs and converters that clink against her finger bones, she becomes aware of why it’s Switcher Liz, why it’s Slicer Mary, and why she’s Boom Hiss Jane.
Then she’s awake and very, very scared. Questions bubble, but she can’t discern them. Jane does her morning routine and once again is at her machine. She picks up the bolts and screws and finds she can’t fit them together.
And suddenly she hates. Hates everything. The factory, with its never-ending motion. The lack of voices and grass and blue ceiling. No blue at all here, no…weather. If there was weather in the factory, it would be rain. Acidic. It would erode the metals and plastics of the giant machines. Jane would dance in the corrosion, laughing as the rain sizzles her flesh, filled with joy that she, something more than a machine, is finally released from this routine world.
The fan.
Quickly yet discretely, she goes back to the blank end between Machines 48 and 57, careful to avoid Sweeping Beth or Burning Sara. The fan remains broken.
Jane sticks her head past where her name is etched. It’s dark and smells like tangy mold growing in a filter pan.
“Is it not working?” Sara’s head shows around the edge of Machine 57.
Jane says the only words she can think of. “Call a fix.” Sara nods then disappears.
It will be a matter of minutes now before the fan is functional. Almost before she’s aware of it, Jane is sitting inside the shaft past the blades. They start spinning, whirring beyond distinction as they gain speed. She shuttles away from them, more scared of what lies down the shaft then being caught in the blades.
But what’s to be done now?
Forward she crawls, hands and knees making tinny echoes. The shaft starts vibrating as she passes an air recycler, its spastic activity rattling her teeth.
A vent lets in slits of pale light. She hurries past, feeling her way around bends. The tapping of her knees and hands becomes a pounding, pounding. Faster and onward. Onward then faster. Darkness. Fear.
Oh, what is she doing? Does she expect to find grass? A blue ceiling? There is none of that. Only the factory.
Ever darkness. Ever machines. Ever routine.
Then a scent. Something not oil or cleaning solution.
The shaft dips then disappears.
Falling–
Jane lands on a mound of wet metal and wood which yields under her weight. It’s dark except for speckles of orange light that glow through gaps as if the mound lies over a thousand bulbs. Heat touches the undersides of her legs and arms.
Slowly, everything sinks.
She’s inside Machine 57. Burning Sara’s station!
Jane scurries over the refuse, scrambling to stay above the furnace. There is no place to go.
Jane.
Who’s that? Sara?
This way.
She claws her way to the voice. There’s a square patch of darkness set in the wall. Her hands grab at scraps and rags…slip—they burn! She lets out a strangled cry. Her eyes become wet and liquid rolls down her cheeks.
Here.
Jane reaches the darkness and crawls onto a conveyor belt.
Stop. Wait.
She does as instructed, lingering in oblivion, all hope on the faint voice. Something falls from above, blocking the way back then pushes her forward. Wherever she’s being goaded to, she resigns to it and shuffles ahead to get there faster.
And then she’s out. The smell, or lack of it, signals the change in her environment. The walls disappear and there’s sudden openness.
“Mother!”
Someone lifts her and pulls her into an embrace. There’s a weird sound…crying. Jane can only stand there as the stranger squeezes her.
“Oh, mother!”
Jane stiffens and pushes the stranger to arms length.
It’s a woman, years younger than she, with similar lines and colors. Jane takes in the thin tapering neck, the slightly large upper lip and the out-turned earlobes. A version of her own reflection.
“Do you remember your name, mother? Arabel. That’s your birth name.” Slender fingers seize Jane’s elbows. “I’m your daughter, Nalani. Can you remember anything? You couldn’t have forgotten me. No one can forget family, even if they want to.”
She seizes Jane’s hand and pulls her past high rise walls. “Hurry. The virus will only keep security down for so long. There’s a dampening field on your tracer.”
They round a corner and Jane suddenly becomes rigid, pulling Nalani to a halt.
Before them the floor drops to an ocean of machines, buildings and metal boxes, all easily twenty times larger than the largest chamber in the factory, expanding on and on beyond sight. Enormous stacks of iron stick out of the industrial landscape. They look like fingers of a mechanical hand, billowing great clouds of gray ash and smoke. Then Jane sees that there is no ceiling, that the rolling smoke and ash climb higher and dissipate into a charcoal slate without edges.
Sky. Not blue, but still a sky.
Her head throbs. She grasps it and squeezes her eyes shut, feeling dizzy.
“Mother! Hold on. I can undo the conditioning. Please don’t–”
The pressure builds in her head. Jane goes limp.
***
Arabel stood on the grass under the crisp autumn sky, smiling. How could she not feel pleased, for she had found a way for her family to survive. Beside her, Nalani played with her new puppy. Arabel had waited until her daughter’s birthday to break the news, wanting Nalani to be able to look back on this day with some pleasant memories and hopefully see it also as a time of maturity.
“I’m doing it, Nalani.”
Her daughter looked to her, eyes blinking.
“Why, mother?”
“So Dad and you can leave. The blight still ravages the countryside. The farm is no more. You have to start elsewhere.”
“But Central Emigration is sending the modified seeds.”
“They won’t get here in time. It took us two weeks to get the new harvesters. They don’t care about us. So we have to care about each other.”
There were other words but they could not crack her resolve. With Nalani in tow, Arabel went to the man in the gossamer suit waiting beside the personal shuttle. Everything about the representative was shiny: his hair, pasted smile, and promises. Yes, we will relocate your family. The farm will go on. Just come work for us.
“Dad will try to stop me if I say goodbye to him. You have to do it for me.” Arabel gave Nalani one last embrace and entered the shuttle, confident of her decision.
***
Jane comes to, cradled in her daughter’s arms.
“We’re past the defenses. The transport is one level down,” Nalani says, her cheeks red and wet.
Jane avoids looking at the gray sky. She focuses on Nalani, tries to guess her age. Maybe ten years since that day.
“Is the farm safe? Is everyone well?” she asks.
“Yes. They’re waiting for you now.”
“Even Scraps?”
Her daughter smiles, almost laughs. “Even scraps. He’s so big now.”
Jane smiles back. Her eyes feel so heavy….
As her eyes close for the last time, Boom Hiss Jane realizes that long before anyone else could do it, she had conditioned herself through love.
About the Author
Mark Stawecki lives in Phoenix, AZ where he is active in the indie film industry and local poker tournaments. He’s enjoying the weather much better than his native home of New Hampshire.
©2009 Mark Stawecki
