“Seeping shit!” Another status symbol blinked from yellow to red. Clint dispatched a mole to the source of the signal.

“Who’s rusting idea was it to separate the levels by so much bleeding space?”

This may as well have been Clint’s personal motto. He said it at least 4 times a day now.

He finished insulating the exposed wire causing a ground fault because some blasted idiot left enough slack during the installation for the original insulation to rub off thanks to the vibrating pneumatic tube it sagged against. It was a quick fix but there was no way to detect it until something went wrong and there were almost more components breaking than Clint could keep up with. He had to leave it loose for now. He added another item to his ever-growing task queue before handling the latest emergency.

Switching over to the Mole descending towards the newest critical failure, he unfolded the camera arms and pulled up it’s feed to his main view screen, shunting his status list into a secondary screen. He had important crap to deal with and it wouldn’t do to get distracted by other emergencies piling on his already frayed nerves. A stream of pipes and wires of all sizes and levels of disrepair streamed past Clint’s screen at 20 meters per second. He pointed the camera down and spotted the issue. A brown mist was billowing up from below the mole and it was soon enveloped. He switched over to the IR spectrum and regained a grainy semblance of visibility. The different tubes and wires glowing at temperatures, easily distinguished by his practiced eye.

He understood why these shafts were kept at near vacuum pressures. It would take a ton of atmo to fill them and there’s no one around to breathe it. That didn’t make it any easier on the pressurized vessels spanning the miles between levels. The rupture came into view. It was the waste line, as always. It took a good deal of pressure to pump waste up to the recycling level even with the weigh stations on the way up. That pressure inevitably ruptured the pipes somewhere along the line with too much regularity for Clint’s taste. It made sense he supposed, It’s better to risk losing waste by pumping it upstream and let useful material flow coreward. Unfortunately, his understanding didn’t make ruptures any more pleasant to deal with.

He spotted the heat plume which indicated a rent in the pipe. The pumps would have automatically shut off by now but that didn’t stop the waste from vaporizing and blasting out into the low-pressure environment. Clint wasted no time in clamping a patch around the vent and welding it in place. A few more patches on this line and it would qualify for a complete replacement, just another job that would take way too much time. Next, he focused on the crystallizing shit and piss freezing to the walls, pipes, wires and to Clint’s mole itself.

He rolled the Mole down its tracks till he was out of the cloud, marking his depth and stretching out a tarp to catch the filthy snow which was starting to fall. He rolled the mole back upwards to mark where the cloud ended in that direction. By that time it was mostly a film on the walls, splattering out of the way of his mole as it rolled back up its track. He would have to leave that mole where it was until a swarm of cleaning bots could sanitize the area and reclaim as much of the spilled organic matter as possible.

With no time to waste Clint brought up his list of failing systems. Wishing he could do a routine systems check for once. He soon re-entered the trance that came on from tackling one task after the next, knocking items off of his list as more components fell into the danger zone adding themselves as yellow icons. It was an endless treadmill with no way off. A hand fell on Clint's shoulder.

“Ho Clint.” said a gruff voice from behind him. Clint looked over his shoulder.

“It’s that time already?” he asked

“Ayup” Cranston responded, “Now quit hoggin' the hot seat, I’ve got a task list about a mile long.”

Clint’s back popped as he pushed himself out of the chair. “Have fun in there. The city’s coming apart at the seams today.”

“You know I will” responded his cousin who leaned back into the chair, causing it to groan in protest. He laced his fingers together and stretched them, palms outward, knuckles cracking.

“Let’s maintain this bitch!” With that final comment, he palmed into the workstation and picked up the frantic pace to try and meet the city’s demands.

Clint put his hands on his lower-back and leaned into them, trying to rub some of the stiffness out while looking around the control room. It was a circular room with a dozen workstations ringing the perimeter, facing outward. The air hummed with the familiar chorus of cursing and griping as Builders shouted out priorities and who needed to get the hell over where to fix some rusting component or other. Each station was on a staggered schedule. The shift changes were two hours apart so the whole clan got a chance to see each other. Clint heard there was a time when the shifts changed all at once. That ended a few generations back when ShiftA blamed ShiftB for everything that went wrong and ShiftB blamed ShiftA for the same problems. The crew eventually had to be separated into two separate task groups.

Clint turned his back on his workstation and climbed the ladder set into the middle of the control room to get into the Barrax. It was a different kind of loud in the main cavern of the barracks. Where the control room was filled with the sharp staccato of commands and curses, the living quarters of his crew was filled with the rumbling of a half a dozen men engrossed with their favorite pastime. Complaining about work.

Clint lumbered over to the feed chute and palmed the adjacent pad. An unflavored nutri-paste slid into the chute a moment later. He didn’t particularly dislike the flavored varieties but it wasn’t worth the heckling of his crewmates to order anything different. He took his paste, folded a stool down from the wall and settled in to enjoy the conversation. It sounded like Jared was pretty wound up today and he considered griping to be high art. This should be good.

“Every day it’s the same I tell you, and not a lick of difference. Sure we keep the place from imploding most of the time but where’s the satisfaction? We were trained to build great big things. Boring out new tunnels and caverns, building nice, spacious digs, top-o-the line mind you. Not a spot of rust or a faulty system. Did you know I even had aspirations to build a server bay in the springtime of my youth? High aspirations I had. Now look at us, glorified janitors we are.”

This was met with the low rumble from his audience which indicated unanimous agreement.

“I went and had me a little chat with our glorious under-lords today. Told them we don’t have the manpower to keep up. Let them know how were barely holding on. You know what they had to say about that? They say barely is good enough. Good enough! Can you believe that? They have no appreciation for preventative maintenance. What if something big pops while we're barely holding on? Hmm? What then? So next I tell ‘em all ‘bout my plan to replace the old pneumatics with mag lifts. Showed ‘em how those rustin’ pipes eat up 27% of our time. They were mighty impressed with my initiative I tell you, mighty impressed indeed. Anyhow when I got around to the material costs they got real cold real fast. ‘We can’t divert those resources’ they says. So I try and show ‘em how we save in the long run but they weren’t interested. ‘The core takes priority’ they says. I try and explain that the core needs its water like everyone else and it carts it’s waste even farther than anyone else so the lifts are for the core. They wasn’t havin’ none of it. They logged off without so much as a thanks but no thanks.”

The rumble that resonated in the room this time expressed irritation.

“Typical,” Cal said “those bucket heads can’t see past their precious servers, they forget they still need air and food and someone to wipe their asses for them”

“Don’t you start blaspheming Cal” interjected the oldest Builder in the room after Clint “If I’ve told you once I’ve told you a hundred times. That sort of attitude is what landed us with the shit shafts in the first place. If you showed a little respect we might even get a decent commission or two”

Jerry’s voice was reedy but held substantial sway in the crew. He was the main reason their tongues stayed as civil as they were.

“And I’ve told you that you sound like a rustin’ A Shifter. Where do you get off tellin’ us how to talk. It’s one thing in the command room but a builder’s supposed to be able to cut loose in his own barracks.”

“That’s enough.” Clint stopped the argument before it could get out of hand

“Were a crew. Were in this together and if you start snapping at each other, this hole we're stuck in is gonna start feeling a lot smaller. Let the keepers fuss over their servers. So long as there’s room for us in Arcadia when our tour is up, I’ll do any dumbass job they care to dish out.”

The crew rumbled their agreement, well, most of them did. Cal glared in silence from his stool. Clint let him have his defiant moment. So long as he kept his mouth under control he could glare all he liked. Clint heaved up from his stool securing it back against the wall.

“I’m gonna get some rack time.”

He was getting tired. The shifts were taking more out of him and he wasn’t getting any younger. He palmed open the only door in the Barrax, walked past the hygiene station and into the row of sleeping blisters. He pulled himself up into a vacant one and slid the soundproofing lid shut. He rubbed his eyes and murmured to himself.

“Just three more years.”