M3.231.730

At a Glance

Narrative

I. The Moon Train

There is a particular flavor of despair that belongs to the company transport, and the three men riding out to Pump Eleven had all of it. The car sat four and carried three. The trolley was automated. The window showed forest, then more forest, then a mountain range far enough south to be scenery rather than geography, and the track lifted off the ground after a while and ran above the canopy like a thought nobody had finished.

Will worked security and had decided before boarding that this was nothing. The previous crew were lazy. Three hours of silence was three hours of a long lunch. He had been with Atlas a year, he needed the money, and he was going to win back his wife — Sparkle, lost at cards, along with a dog named Lucky and a goldfish whose fate changed every time the story was told.

Steuben did IT and agreed it was nothing, and resented it more precisely. Hours out, hours back, to watch men do nothing. They probably told us jack shit before we got on this here train.

Luigi fitted pipe. He checked his torch, his saw, his first aid kit, and told the others he got injured easily and would be counting on them. Then he ordered a coffee and a beer from the trolley and shuffled a deck nobody would play against him.

None of it was true. All three of them believed every word.

II. The Clean Room

The station was a tower in a clearing and a lift shaft going down, and the ride down took fifteen minutes because the cage was slow and the shaft was deep. At the bottom, a landing pen and a security hatch.

The hatch was dead. Not locked — dead. Steuben pulled the panel and jacked in his slate and found no power reaching it at all, not a fault, not a break, just nothing arriving.

While he worked, Will looked around and found the thing that mattered and did not know it. No footprints. No bags. No dust. No cigarette ends, no coffee cups, no grease — nothing at all in a room that fifty ordinary shifts should have marked.

Not only were they not here, he said, it doesn't look like clearly anybody's been here at all. It's too clean.

Luigi cut the latches off with a torch, which freed the hatch and also removed the mechanism that lifted it, and left them a two-thousand-pound steel door lying in the floor and three men with no machine. So he cut a six-foot lever out of a wall pipe, and the first one shattered, and the second one held, and they heaved it up together and jammed a third length of pipe underneath to hold it.

It took the better part of an hour to build a door out of scrap. It would buy them their lives, and not one of them would notice.

III. The Water Gives Them Back

Below, the lights came on as they walked, and the water was black and ankle-deep and got deeper as they descended. It smelled faintly chemical, faintly of fish, and told them nothing.

The chemical store nearly ended Luigi before the animal ever saw him. He was turning a drum to read its label when it burst, and antifoam — the stuff built to hold back a flood — came up and out and set around him and pushed back when he pushed. He cut himself free with the torch and took a lungful of what burning it produced.

But he had read the drums first, and one of them was alum, and alum clears murky water.

They rolled it to the head of the stairs and punched a hole in it and let it bleed. It took time. They stood in the dark waiting for the water to tell them something, and the small creatures came up out of it to see what the noise was — heads breaking the surface, little bodies scurrying over, one of them rubbing against Luigi's leg until he reached down with a welding glove and scratched the top of its head and got something like a purr.

Then one of them turned and took a chunk out of another for no reason anyone could see, and the wounded one went into the water trailing blood, and the one that had done it came back to be petted.

And the water cleared, and there were shapes along the walls.

Will hooked one with the lever and pulled, and it was heavier than he expected, and an arm came up out of the flood before the rest of it did.

The face was gone. The body had been opened. And the back of the skull was missing entirely, and so was what had been inside it.

There were two more along the far wall, and a third in the control room, in worker clothes exactly like the ones they were wearing.

IV. The Tape

Steuben got the terminal open in a single motion — a roll so far past what the task needed that the room simply surrendered. Video, error codes, command logs, live cameras, control of everything.

He went backwards through the footage, and the setting told them what it was.

The last crew, in the room they were standing in, taken apart and dragged down into the wells. Then a crew before that, the same. Then another. Then another.

Four.

The pump error said jam. The bodies were the jam.

And the command log said the facility was fine. System reset. Every process checking out. No failures. A clean, unremarkable restart, timed each time to just after a crew stopped moving.

The logs make everything look as if everything's fine, Steuben said. But we can clearly see it's not.

Will asked the question that mattered, and it was a good one: who knows this happened and sent four crews anyway? So they went back as far as the tape survived, to the last frame before the delete cycle ate it — and saw people in lab coats walking out to the train and leaving.

We're set up, Will said. We've been burnt.

V. Ten Minutes

They watched the thing work on the live feed. It came up into the main room, took a body, and went down into the wells with it. Ten minutes later it came back and took another.

That was a clock, and they used it. They let it take the second body, waited, and went.

Luigi hit his own six-foot pipe against the wall on the way out, because that is what a six-foot pipe is for. A pup started howling somewhere they could not see. And then the gallery behind them opened up and the thing was in it — long and quadrupedal and built for water, moving three spans in the time it takes to think about one — and it screamed, and the scream went in through the ears and landed somewhere behind the eyes.

They ran through waist-deep water, which is to say they barely ran at all.

And then Will turned around and made a hand gesture at it. Not a weapon, not a threat — the flat, brisk, dismissive motion of a man correcting a dog.

The thing stopped. It cocked its head to one side. It stared at him, and it stepped aside.

They made the stairs on that. At the top, with the animal coming up behind them, Will kicked the empty alum drum down the stairs — and it went bump, bump, bump the way a drum does in a cartoon, and collided squarely with the creature's head.

A pup came at him and he dodged and kicked it down the steps, and saw the tendrils part and the lamprey ring underneath open, once, before it went.

Then they were at the head of the shaft, and Luigi kicked the prop out, and an hour of pipefitting came down behind them all at once. Two heavy impacts landed against the far side. The door held. The lift took them up.

VI. Experiment 325-2-36

Somewhere else, a man sat at a screen with his glasses on, and another leaned over his shoulder with a cigarette.

What happened to this crew?

Huh. They made it out.

Shit. That's a first for this round. Did you already update the profile?

No. Doing it now. And then, flatly, for the record: Experiment three-two-five, dash two, dash three-six. Result: failure. No terminations. Implications: collect and retrieve.

Damn it. That's gonna cost us.

The lift reached the top, and the doors opened onto daylight and a clearing and a stand of forest, and men in suits with weapons already raised. Will, Steuben and Luigi went into custody without a shot fired, because the men had been waiting and knew exactly how many to wait for.

Behind the screen, the second man put out his cigarette.

Well, I guess it's my turn to do the memory wipes. I'll take care of it.

They did everything right. They read the room, they cleared the water, they found the bodies, they broke the terminal wide open, they spared the animals, they timed the predator, they improvised a door out of scrap and they got out alive when four crews before them had not.

None of it was ever going to matter, because the wife and the dog and the goldfish were written, and the card game never happened, and the hour on the train was the only part of any of their lives any of them had actually lived.

And tomorrow, three men who have never met will ride an automated train an hour out to a pump that has stopped working.

Summary

• The briefing was four sentences and a train ticket. A manager named Steve sent three low-level employees — one computer guy, one trades guy, one security guy — to a facility the previous crew had vanished from. No drone, no backup, no information. The hour-long ride out was spent inventing each other: a pipefitter who had lost a wife, a dog and a goldfish in escalating card games, an IT tech who had already decided this was a wasted day, and a security guard who thought the missing crew were simply lazy.
• The station was clean, and that was the first wrong thing. No footprints, no bags, no dust, no cigarette ends. Will called it out early and correctly: "This is a shit facility in the middle of nowhere, monitored by entry level grunts. There should be something." Sanitized, not abandoned.
• The security hatch was dead and they cut it open. No power reached the panel at all. Luigi torched the mechanical latches off, which freed the door and also removed the thing that lifted it — leaving three men to raise a two-thousand-pound steel slab by hand. They levered it with a six-foot section of cut pipe and propped it with another. That prop decided the ending of the session and nobody knew it at the time.
• Below the hatch, the facility was flooding and the water was black. Ankle-deep on the first level, waist-deep on the second. Lights came on by motion as they descended. Nothing was running.
• The chemical store cost them, then saved them. Luigi identified the drums by their symbols and knocked one over doing it — an antifoam burst that sealed the room and stuck him in place. He burned through it with the torch and took three Might of gas doing it. They then rolled a drum of alum to the head of the stairs, punched it, and let it bleed into the flood.
• The water cleared, and the bodies surfaced. Three of them, along the walls and in the control room. Worker clothes like their own. Faces destroyed, bodies mangled — and the back of every skull opened and the brain gone.
• Small creatures kept turning up, and they were not the threat. Armadillo-kudu-cat things the size of small dogs, with tentacles where a mouth should be and a lamprey ring underneath. They purred and headbutted for attention. One bit a chunk out of another for no reason at all. The crew corralled three into a storage room and marked the door with three X's rather than kill any of them — a decision Will argued for explicitly, on the theory that a dead pup would tell the parent something was down there.
• Steuben opened the control room completely. A natural 20 with a cipher on top — a 26 against a task that needed far less. It bought video, error codes, command logs and live camera control in a single roll.
• The footage was the session. Scrubbed backwards: the last crew torn apart in the main room and dragged into the wells. Then another crew, the same way. Then another. Four crews. The pump error read jam, and the crew assumed the bodies were the cause — but nobody ever went down to the wells to look, and it was never confirmed. And the logs said everything was fine: system reset, every daemon OK, no failures, a clean restart timed to just after each crew died.
• The last frame before the tape ran out was people in lab coats boarding the train. Not workers. Observers, leaving.
• They chose to leave, and timed it by the predator's routine. It surfaced every ten minutes to collect one body. They watched it take two, and moved.
• The escape went loud immediately. Luigi clipped his own pipe against the wall. A pup started howling. The thing — quadrupedal, aquatic, reading to them as some kind of water tiger — came up the gallery behind them and opened with a scream that hit as an Intellect attack.
• Two things saved them, and neither was in the plan. Will turned around and gave the creature a flat Cesar Millan hand gesture; it stopped, cocked its head sideways, and stepped aside. Then, from the top of the stairs, he kicked the empty alum drum down onto its head for an 18 and bonus damage.
• They reached the head of the shaft and Luigi kicked the prop out. The two-thousand-pound hatch they had spent an hour opening came down behind them. Something hit it twice from the other side and did not get through.
• Men in suits were waiting at the lift. Armed, expecting them, and unsurprised.

Decisions Made

• Cut the hatch rather than restore power to it. Fast, and it destroyed the mechanism — which should have left them with no door to close. They rebuilt one out of a pipe by accident and it held.
• Clear the water instead of wading it blind. The alum was used exactly as intended: not as a weapon, as visibility. It is what turned an unseen flood into three bodies and a countable enemy.
• Do not kill the small ones. Argued deliberately. "Luckily we didn't kill any of the little ones, because if we did, they would know for sure there is something here."
• Abandon the job. The instruction was to restore the pump or assist the crew. They did neither, correctly: the pump was jammed with the crew.
• Take the data and run. The diagnostic slate held the error codes and logs. The video — the only real proof — was too large to carry.

NPCs Encountered

• Steve — the manager who sent them. Gave three hours of context and no support.
• The thing in the wells — a large quadrupedal aquatic predator. Hunts by scream and by rush, adheres and drags rather than bites, and returns for bodies on a ten-minute cycle. Never once went for a head.
• The small ones — four encountered. Sociable with humans, violent with each other. The crew's own theory, unconfirmed: juveniles of the larger animal.
• The two men at the screen — the closing vignette. Logged the run as experiment 325-2-36, result: failure · no terminations · implications: collect and retrieve. One of them remarked that he guessed it was his turn to do the memory wipes.
• The men in lab coats — on the oldest surviving footage, boarding the train out. Never identified in play.

Factions Encountered

• Atlas HydroCorp — owns the pump, sent the crew, and does not know what the station is being used for. Standing: negligent by ordinary budget logic, not by malice. This is "the unrest that never makes the Feed" at its smallest possible scale — three employees, one line item, no article.

New Worldbuilding

• The moon is terraformed to near-Earth standard. No suits, breathable air, forest and mountain range, and an automated monorail network running between unstaffed remote installations. Infrastructure is distributed in isolated chunks — a pump here, a solar facility down the line — each left alone until it breaks.
• A facility can be reset. Sanitized rooms, a clean boot log, and a pump error that clears itself once the obstruction is removed. The record says nothing happened, and the record is not lying — it was told nothing happened.
• The Instanced can be run as labour and not know it. Programmed memories, instanced separately, believing in full the lives they were written. This is the first time the setting has shown the category from the inside.

Continuity State

Characters

None carry forward. Will, Steuben and Luigi were fresh Cypher 2e Real World builds — descriptor plus profession, Effort 1, no type and no focus — made in ten minutes at the top of the session under the stated contract that survival was not assumed.

                 ROLE            STATE AT CLOSE
Will             Site security   Alive. Minor Intellect wound from the scream
Steuben          Systems tech    Alive. Pools heavily burned
Luigi            Pipefitter      Alive. -3 Might (gas). Welding rig intact

All three in Atlas custody at the head of the shaft. Memory wipe ordered.
Carried out: error codes and command logs on a diagnostic slate.
NOT carried out: the video. Too large for the device.

No pool character was risked and no pool character was touched. This is the rotating table doing exactly what it exists for — a whole crew, a whole station and a whole reveal, at a cost to the campaign of nothing.

The world's next move

• Atlas HydroCorp still does not know. Pump Eleven is a low-priority asset that keeps going quiet, and the record will keep saying nothing happened.
• The station is not fixed. The pump is still jammed, the lower levels are still flooding, and the animal is still in the wells with four crews' worth of bodies.
• Three lattices go back in. Same roles, same station, a new set of invented lives.

Open threads

• Who was on the train in lab coats, and when? The oldest surviving frame in the system, and the crew never got to ask.
• Why is the brain tissue missing? The table's working theory is that the animal eats them.
• Do the small ones matter? Sociable with humans, savage with each other, and nobody has explained why a predator's nest is full of things that want to be petted.
• Does surviving change the protocol? Eleven clean runs and one failure. The next crew may get a different chamber, a different animal, or a different number of people.

Related

• M3.231.640 — played previously, running concurrently: three operators boarded a month out from Mars while this was happening on a moon
• The Instanced — the category these three belonged to
• Characters — the pool