All the green lights were on the second floor.
I placed my finger on a black square on the capsule. There was a whirring sound, and the lid of the capsule moved silently upward, revealing a six-foot-deep niche with a soft-looking bed inside. It was easy to get in — too easy. My arms and legs already knew where to go, what to grab onto, how to move my body. I even did it with just my one good arm, mentally stopping my left one from moving like it wanted to.
I lay down. It wasn’t as soft as it looked...
The capsule lid closed, and a dull yellow light came on above me. My right hand reached out instinctively to press it, and it turned off. I moved a little to the side and put my gum on a shelf I hadn’t noticed before. I must have spent the night in a capsule like this quite a few times before — the memories in my brain may have been blocked, but my muscle memory was intact.
Balance: 0
Debt status: in debt.
Debt details (5 most recent):
Second meal: 1 sol.
Second water ration: 1 sol.
Third meal: 1 sol.
Third water ration: 1 sol.
Individual habitation capsule: 1 sol.
Total debt owed: 11 sol.
The darkness worked like a sleeping pill, and my eyes drifted shut.
Chapter 4
STATUS:
Number: Eleven.
Rank: Nullform (volitional).
Current status: GBL. (three standard meals per day and standard water ration).
Balance: 0
Debt status: in debt.
Total debt owed: 15 sol.
Game Challenge Complete.
Outcome: Win.
Reward: 3 sol.
Winstreak: 1/3.
Reward Bonus (GC): 0%
GC Selection Chance Bonus: 0%
Extra Prize Chance: 0%
Job: Handle 7. 100 full rotations.
Current time: 08:20.
I WAS IN SOME KIND OF MOOD. A fierce, amped, vicious, doomed, positive mood.
As this complicated mix of emotions ran through me, I stood at the cleared epicenter of an explosion. I realized that as soon as I went through the doorway and walked down the ramp. Everything around me literally screamed: ‘We got blown up!’ It looked like someone had done their best to clean things up, but in the most basic way possible.
I was in a small rectangular room, with the corners rounded off. I had noticed all the architecture here avoided right angles as much as possible. There were two doors on opposite walls, and a buzz of activity in the middle. It was like a highway, a hub used to get from one hallway to another. One wall was solid, silvery metal, but the other... it looked like there had once been a similar wall there, but a bomb had gone off behind it and tore it open, turning it inside out like an ugly flower. The repair crew had been working hard for a while after the explosion, cutting off the twisted, torn metal and getting the wall mostly back to its former state. But they didn’t completely plug up the hole — they left a long gash that let you see part of a complex mechanism behind it, a mechanism that had only been partially destroyed by the explosion. The parts that couldn’t be fixed were removed. Part of the casing was missing, and individual parts of the mechanism were joined with primitive tie-in connections. Apparently, they hadn’t been able to find spare parts, or just didn’t have the skill to fix it.
It seemed to me like they had thrown away all the electronics and mechanical drives, then used the undamaged remnants, gears, metal rods, and cheap labor to build some weird surrogate powered by slaves and extraterrestrial technology. Eight handles spaced unevenly two or three yards apart protruded from the wall. They were sturdy steel, polished to a shine by the workers’ hands. Something behind the undamaged sections of the wall rumbled periodically and a short, demanding signal would sound. Each time it went off, whoever was standing next to the corresponding handle would grab it and turn it one full rotation. From what I could see, it didn’t look like an easy process. Everyone looked far too tense. To make things worse, they all had two arms, and used both hands to turn the handles, putting the weight of their entire body into it.
