Alarmed
A warning klaxon sounded loudly above Aaron Rein’s head, but he didn’t bother to look up. The plant had been experiencing a wide variety of malfunctions over the last two weeks, all of them apparently tied to a systemic failure at HQ.
Several more minutes of work passed under the jagged howl of the alarm, and Aaron tried to find his focus, twining yet another string of wire around his fingers. Of course, he wasn’t supposed to be doing his work that way, but what Bilt, his supervisor, didn’t know wouldn’t hurt him, unless Aaron put the wires back wrong. In that case, the next person to open the panel on the Transducer would get a nasty shock, and if they happened to be carrying a Plara torch, they’d die instantly.
Aaron allowed himself a small smile. The last time he’d put a wire back wrong was just out of school, and he was the one who’d paid the price. He didn’t make mistakes – at least not anymore.
Bilt didn’t know it, but Aaron had been offered the supervisor’s job first and turned it down. Sure, the extra pay was nice, but it meant working with other people, and it meant forcing them to do their jobs correctly. He had no problem going behind others and fixing the work they’d done wrong, but he didn’t have the temperament to explain why the needed to do it right in the first place. The few times he’d been a group project leader in his college were unmitigated disasters, and finishing his courses alone had been far easier, even with the missing grades from projects he didn’t complete because they required human interaction.
“Rein!” Bilt’s voice called out over the klaxon. “What the hell are you doing?”
Finishing his last connection, Aaron replaced the panel and tightened all the screws, then pulled the Plara from his belt and made a small mark near the top edge of the smooth metal. He’d gotten to almost every panel in the plant now, and searing the top edge let him know if he was going to find his own work inside or have to correct a shoddy job done by someone else. Standing slowly, he met the angry stare of his supervisor. Bilt was an idiot, but at least he didn’t take Aaron’s obvious technical superiority as a threat.
“Working, Bilt,” he said slowly, “just like I’m supposed to be. Why are you running around like someone lit your ass on fire?”
“Can’t you hear the alarm?” Bilt shouted over the noise.
“Of course! What the hell does that have to do with anything?”
The older man’s face creased in a frown and he took a step closer to Aaron. “This isn’t like the others, Rein,” Bilt’s voice dropped from a scream to a dull shout, “it’s an Inductor Array overheat!”
Aaron felt his head swim as blood pumped hard. He’d been afraid of this since the first day he started at the plant, but everyone had assured him that an overheat was “impossible”. That wasn’t a word he ever used, and he knew better than those telling him that Arrays were unstable at best.
“Get out.” He said quietly to Bilt, already moving for the control booth. “Get out, and take everyone else with you.”
“Rein!” Bilt screamed from behind him. “Let it go! You can’t save the plant yourself – you’ll die up there!”
Aaron ignored him. The other workers in the plant didn’t deserve to die, but that wasn’t the real issue. An Inductor Array meltdown would not only leave a crater twice the size of the building that housed it, but would carry a shockwave down the mountain and kill everyone in the town below. No warning could be given to them – they had no idea the plant even existed.
Bilt’s voice faded behind him as he climbed the stairs to the booth. There was no way an Array could fail without someone tampering with it – no matter what line the company tried to sell. They were made to have no outside access, and to shut down at the first sign of trouble. One overheating meant that not only had a catastrophic failure taken place, but someone had been able remove the vial of Crellian Blue that was supposed to crack open and smother the heat if a problem ever occurred.
Only one person in the company had that kind of know-how, that kind of expertise – him.
The booth was empty, and scanners showed that there only a few straggling personnel left in the building, all headed toward exits. A quick glance at the smooth metal of the Array tube – the only portion visible anywhere in the plant – told him he’d been the one to tamper with it. His mark was obvious.
“Hello, Aaron.” A smooth voice said from his left, and he spun quickly.
The man at the doorway was no plant employee, and no supervisor he’d ever seen. A dark coat covered a broad-shouldered frame, and seemed to flicker in the pulsing warning lights of the plant, shifting between black, copper and a deep shade of red.
“Who the hell are you?” Aaron took a step back – the man radiated a sense of fear, of hate.
“You, of course.”
He frowned. There was something about the face, around the eyes, that was familiar, a twisted reflection of what he saw in the mirror every morning.
“I’m not real,” the man went on, “but your actions are. We have a very disciplined mind, Aaron, one that’s almost managed to push out the impulses we were born with.” A smile slashed across not-quite-his face. “Almost.”
He dove for the exposed metal of the Array, pulling the Plara from his belt. Cutting the surface open meant he’d be exposed to the radiation shunted to the rest of the plant, but there was no other option.
“No!” His shady doppelganger barked as torch struck metal and sheared a rough hole. Heat came blasting out, filling the room and washing over his body. It was warm, but didn’t burn him to a crisp like it should have. Tingling, but not deadly.
What the hell was going on?
- D
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