Markos is not a terribly patient person on a good day. And today is not a particularly good day. Watching progress bars is not the most fascinating of ways to pass a few hours. Sweat drips down his back and pools in the indentation in the center of his poorly upholstered rolling chair. The room continues to be significantly warm.

A chime dings from one of the several terminals at work on the task. Tessa beats Markos to the terminal and hovers over the open window, kneeling in the wheeled chair and leaning over its back.

“What’s it mean if it says ‘initializing subsystem’?” Tessa reads off the screen, its green light reflecting off her pale face.

Markos breaks into a bright grin, lighting up like a nearby star cresting over the arc of a planetary horizon. Oh happy day! The vent’s sensor and control unit successfully connected and became available to the network.

“We’re back in business!” Markos decries, exalting in the glory of success. Some success anyway. This is not exactly a fast process.

Tsim rolls over on the chair he claimed as his own, interested in seeing what the fuss is about. The plumber watches the progress bar drag across the screen slowly.

Markos jumps from one device to another, kicking off one process at a time as each one finishes. He only has so very many hands. There is a long queue of work for him to complete and he can only do one thing at a time, unlike the computer itself.

Tsim and Tessa find themselves mostly in the way. Markos is the only one with a real task. As the processes complete, he checks their codes against a physical list. This involves a lot of scooting from one end of the room to the other and checking on charts and completing small tasks on his clipboard.

Tsim does not enjoy being in the way. Tsim is a man of action. Tsim is the hero of his own story. Tsim doesn’t see any way for him to be useful at this particular moment. Tsim opts to spin in his chair and make himself dizzy because he just isn’t really living up to his full potential at the moment. Tsim is aware of his shortcomings as an individual living and working in a highly technical and modern profession without the foggiest clue of how the actual vital systems for supporting human life around him actually function.

Tsim is a plumber. Tsim plumbs.

Right now, Tsim contemplates the possibilities of finding other tasks to work on that play to his strengths instead of his one and only weakness.

Tessa sits and watches as Markos pushes his chair back and forth across the room. Back and forth. Back and forth.

Forth and back.

He reads a line of text from one screen, checks a box on his clipboard, then rolls away to enter it into a different screen.

Back and forth.

Tessa observes quietly.

Markos mutters something over the wire to Tiphanie and gets a mumbled reply.

“Is there anything we can do to help?” Tessa includes Tsim in the question, assuming that obviously he would want to assist. There is no real reason he couldn’t.

Markos stops to consider. He ponders his process. He contemplates his choke points. He seeks a solution.

And he recognizes the revelation when it arrives. With a few quick instructions, he gets both Tessa and Tsim stationed at terminals in the room. They call out serial codes to him and he enters them in the manual cross referencing log to verify that every one of the monitoring processes recovers from the reboot as it should.

There are hundreds of processes. This is not a swift action that can be completed in less than a few seconds. The team spends several long, hot, sweaty hours at the task. The control room reeks of sweat and poorly circulated air as they continue the work.

Taking a break for biology, Tsim grabs lukewarm drinks for the three from a break room nearby. Tsim is pleasantly surprised that there even is a break room, much less one with a stocked vending machine. He was starting to think that this sector had been completely forgotten by anyone but time itself and there he found a vending machine with actual drinks in it. Unfortunately, with the environmental systems all still offline for the reboot, there’s not any chance that the drinks could possibly actually be at all cold. But liquid nourishment of a lukewarm sort is much better than horrible dehydration over the course of a whole shift without fluid intake.

Tsim does know all about fluid intakes and outtakes. And still pleasantly surprised at this change of fortune he double checks the expiration date on the drinks he snags from the vending machine.

Even the water has expired, and not remotely recently.

There are many risks that Tsim is willing and able to take. He’s climbed mountains in lower gravity with snow falling all around. He’s gone hang gliding on a higher gravity world with dense atmosphere thick with cloyingly sweet smelling fog. He’s even stepped into a fighting simulator ring with a robotic opponent with the holographic safety weapons exchanged illegally for the real thing.

That last cost him a few broken bones and a very expensive replacement metal ankle, but the thrill was worth the pain to him at the time. And he did win. After all, Tsim does not give up easily. Expired water seems like a minimal risk item. Expired sugary berry flavored carbonated drink does not seem like as small of a risk. Even if it has not actually fermented and does not actually contain horrible sepsis causing bacteria, it probably does not taste very good any more. That is reason enough to discard the tin bottle directly into the recycling chute.

Surprised by a sudden thought, Tsim peeks down into the chute after the bottle, illuminating it with his still-useful headlamp.

The chute is clear, still functioning, and not, as he would have expected, clogged with debris.

Tsim sticks a hand into the chute.

Tsim feels a gentle breeze as the automatic pneumatic functions detect an object entering the waste disposal chute. The breeze increases in intensity as it automatically works to clear the object away from the sensor pinging an obstruction of the chute’s doorway. Tsim retracts his hand.

Something has started working.

It might not be an important something, but it is something.

Tsim grabs more expired water and then runs to spread the good news.