Europan Slice of Life

[zha everything broken]

Proterna Station (pop 8,781), Europa, Sol

2444-03-07-16:02:43

It's a Monday. Subdued electronic tones signaling the shift-change return muffled echos in stale, oil-thick air. Eliza sits atop a quietly churning circulator rig bolted near the ceiling of the vaulted junction, legs kicking lazily over the thirty-foot drop. It's a fun enough kind of vantage. All the little people in their insulating jackets and overcoats bustling around in every different direction, making graceful arcs as they switch tiers. She's not the only one on overwatch; a handful of other children have perched up in the high nooks and maintenance gaps.

Her primary focus though she glowers at: homework splayed across the book in her lap. Eliza is the best at multiplication tables. Beckett is good too, she guesses, but he doesn't count, for ephemeral reasons that don't bear consideration. SolComm has always been stupid though. Her tongue sticks out unconsciously in focus as she tries and fails to remember tonal distinctions for fully two-thirds the vocab section.

Marin's voice interrupts from below, a sharp-edged hush of urgency. There's a fight! It's Suri again, of course. Crazy ratfucker! It can't be missed. Eliza stuffs her schoolwork into tiny child's backpack and pitches herself from the high ledge. The others jump too.

Europan children in their puffy jackets rain silently from the ceiling in exaggerated slow motion.

They grab onto stanchions and support rods, slinging themselves to the front of the dash to the scene. Eliza lags near the back but the rush is very real because if she'd caught that last handrail she totally would have been in the lead.

Edited February 27 by zha everything broken

[zha everything broken]

Proterna Station (pop 8,781), Europa, Sol

2444-03-19-11:41:10

Eliza and the others eat in one of the maintenance trenches today. They squat in a row, backs against the sweating bulkhead, stubby thermos flasks tucked between their knees. Thin threads of steam, smelling of kelp-broth, gritty milk tea, dilute imitation chocolate, drift over their heads before being sucked sideways into a vent.

They don't speak, just quietly work through fixed portions of algal hardtacks and leathery pressed strips of fruit paste. Their meals are identical to the gram. They eat like the tiniest arctic expedition team from the school-reels. Proctor said they were like the First Wave but they're not because they were Earthers and Earthers have food and air to waste.

They used to get a little square of chocolate too but they don't anymore.

Somewhere deep in the structure, the rumbling pump sound drops out with stutter-crunch, same as earlier. All seven heads tilt at once, listening, counting. It's one of the Old Dukes, they keep the air good, they're the chug-thump sound.

It always kicks right back on but hasn't yet. It suddenly tastes like headache air, all gross coppery from scrubber coughs. They're all remembering escape routes and drill. Eliza trades worried glances with Marin and Venner as they hold, run through what they know to do.

Count seconds, count all the sounds. Just the hull-tick, which is usually okay. The maintenance charms rattle (every panel has them strung, pretty fingerbones and washers). The churning black outside making teeth ache. But still missing the Old Duke chug-thump. It was only down for five seconds earlier.

The same twelve-count then: still down at twelve seconds, you move.

Already at eight seconds.

Nine.

Ten.

Eleven. Marin is hand-on-rung. Eliza coils.

Here comes twelve, they're all ready to fling themselves the Hell out of here (escape gradients, they remember from class, the colors make it easy, green out red in). But then there's a loud mechanical juddering and the pump pitch rises, wavers... and then steadies again. Chug-thump. The steam from their thermos bends the right way again.

Jove alive, that's some shit! Stifled gallows giggles and a few nervous grins are passed down the line. An Old Duke putting a scare into them twice in one day? They have to tell proctor before the next rota comes up; twice ain't nice, tag it. Just don't waste lunch first.

Edited February 28 by zha everything broken
never post your first draft, even if you think it was decent

[zha everything broken]

Proterna Station (pop 8,615), Europa, Sol

2445-01-04-15:22:08

Pods 1,3,8 (every 15m): If cylinder of grey-blue liquid (upper-left) has bubbles, get step stool and tap cylinder lightly until bubbles clear.

INITIALS:___ TIME:______

Eliza was on podwatch which was boring and also gross, but you had to put in station hours after school and this time she had podwatch. Medbay had a bunch of the big pods, spooky ZH coffins (barely-legible stickers peeling off the sides read "2337 CisLunar Cryonics Expo Winner") that they used for cold hold. That was when you were really messed up and the doctors didn't have enough medicine to fix whatever was wrong with you so you had to go to sleep until the next big supply sub docked which would be every few months (currents willing).

The pods were supposed to be able to do a lot of fixing themselves but the station can't pay for the service tier and the fancy chem cartridges so they were just for sleeping. ZH were ghouls and corpse-eaters, everyone knew that, even if the cheery pod voice quietly insisted (in SolComm ugh) that they were eligible for fantastic discounts and coupons. She was pretty sure there were a couple newer fancier pods in the main medbay that were licensed and stocked but those pods didn't need watching and these ones did.

There were a bunch of jobs on podwatch, but Eliza had a big checklist that made it mostly easy, just dull. A nurse occasionally poked their head in to check Eliza's little logbook but otherwise they were always busy in the other compartments. It was the stringy red-haired one today, who'd give you mean knuckle-taps if you missed anything, and she smelled like antiseptic and coffee and pungent medical waste. Her hands were always shaky.

Eliza hated her. Sometimes a pod chimed while you were still ticking off the last one and you had to run over and your grease pencil would smear and then you’d look back at the minutes and they didn’t line up and it wasn’t Eliza’s fault. Venner knows that because he missed a loose heat feed cable once and somebody woke up with dead black fingers and they gave him a lash (death's teeth, they were serious!) and he'd went quiet for a month and now he doesn’t do podwatch anymore but Eliza doesn’t want that kind of 'lucky'.

The pods did still do a bunch of things, even running Basic Mode. They would tick and beep and hiss and burble all timed to the minute. Eliza's big checklist was just to keep the pods honest, mostly.

Pods 2,6,7,8 (every 30m): Check rear inlet feed hose connections for looseness; if loose, re-tighten gasket until secure. (Even little babies know righty-tighty lefty-loosey.)

INITIALS:___ TIME:______

All pods (every 45m): Wipe condensation off the two square black sensor panels on front. If froze over, report. If mold growth, report. (Easy  sneezy, swipe with glove. Humidity got extra-funky in the podbay though, it had this weird sour smell.)

INITIALS:___ TIME:______

All pods (as needed): If a pod chimes twice, write down which pod and the status code and report immediately. (The nurses always praise you, even if only a tiny bit, for this one.)

INITIALS:___ TIME:______

Pods 6,7 (check at 1hr): Re-warm saline feeds. (For these Eliza would drain them and coil them up and tuck them under her coat and squeeze them for a minute or three before plugging them back in. This was an important one, because if the line got slushy an alarm would sound and whoever the nurse was would burst in mad, that's what happened to Venner.)

INITIALS:___ TIME:______

All pods (as needed): If a pod starts playing its unlockable features advertisements, skip/bypass immediately. (This wasn't on the checklist but everyone fucking hated them. Everyone on podwatch knew the fastest key combination.)

You're not even allowed to do homework on podwatch. Eliza knew she could do homework and also keep track of the clock but the nurse would cuff her or worse if she got caught. So she sat on the step stool, kicked her legs, peered into the pods and watched various frosted blue-tinged faces twitch and tic.

Or she watched the people walking by. The podbay was jammed between medbay and a big corridor and it had big windows out because Eliza thinks it used to be shopspace but the door frame was a bulkhead now. Some people avoided looking in and some people stared. Eliza would watch what happened on their faces. Interesting things often happened on their faces. Just remember to keep an eye on the clock. Never lose the time.

Later Eliza wanted to hang out with Marin because they found a bunch of tossed vid-reels last night while poking around in the maintenance shafts and wanted to try playing them to see what they were.

Edited March 5 by zha everything broken