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Michael and the supervisor continued down their last hallway, they were silent, briskly walking. They approached a large metal door that had AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY on it. The supervisor began typing something in the door controls while Michael waited. The door was at the end of the hallway that continued by branching both left and right. Turning left revealed a poorly lit hallway with another single door with dim, red glowing lights.

Michael focused on the dark hallway while the door continued to cause issues for the supervisor. Michael could hear a faint buzzing coming from the hallway and began to silently approach. Walking closer, the buzzing became louder. Michael covered his nose and gagged, the smell was putrid. It smelt of sulfur, copper, acrid smell. The smell became an awful taste that would stick with him for the remainder of his days, it was a smell he first came familiar with in the factory he worked in. He continued closer, the red lights now made all shadowed areas seem endlessly dark. Peering into the window at the door Michael could see the red light was coming from the dreaded warm-up room he had only been exposed to when he was first brought to the Outpost.

The Warm up room, in combination with the cool down room were artificially climate controlled rooms meant to break the resolve of any rowdy prisoner, worker, or dissenter. The management had learned that medication, hunger, and cold/heat can break a human’s spirit faster than terror or threats. Michael remembers being cooked alive until he passed out, only to be thrown into the cool down room, drenched in sweat, convulsing. He remembers being fully conscious for the cool-down room. Time slows down when you’re that cold, he remembers her, the woman who gives them their pills smiling at him as he shivered on the floor. This happened countless times in an unknown time frame, Michael remembers being resuscitated just to be returned to one of these rooms, given essential minerals to maintain life and consciousness. This was his punishment for refusal to work when he first arrived, it broke him. Any existence, even one of forced labor with food rations, was better than constant waking exposure, starvation, and torture. They hadn’t even put him in isolation or any of the many other methods they had to enforce compliance.

He was allowed to eat 6 meals a day and rest as he desired for a week after agreeing to comply, the warm-up room was held in a dark, secluded but not repressed part of Michael’s brain. He peered into the window and saw three people seemingly glued to the ceiling made of glowing red heat producing wires. The bodies were still sizzling and remained still against the hot ceiling. He could tell by the people’s placement, that one of them had been management, while the others were prisoners. The gravity had been removed while the manager was away from the controls, they were all cooked alive.

The supervisor had opened the door at this point.

‘Get over here!’ He shouted, Michael ran over to meet him.

They entered the room, in it sat a single metal box about 5 feet tall. The supervisor unlocked it and lifted a heavy door that swung above them and was held in place by a metal brace. The supervisor squatted down, Michael followed. The box itself was unimpressive, but inside had an assortment of wires, board, computers, a tube with a faint blue glow.

‘Shit!’ The supervisor said.

‘We got really lucky we didn’t die. There’s no more cryogenic fluid, it burnt off, if it was still in this small room, we would have asphyxiated’

‘What do we do?’ Michael asked.

‘The code says a Magnet quench happened to the superconductor magnets used in this thing. That means that the magnetic field was too large or the field was changing too much, or both. That happens sometimes, but it has a loud bang as all that energy build up converts to heat and sometimes arcs. This time it’s fried these two boards.’ He explained pointing.

‘We need to repair and solder these two boards back in. Both began work on their own boards, Michael’s was almost fully disconnected from the greater device.

‘Once I remove mine, there will be no gravity at all.’ the supervisor stated, proceeding to remove the gravity.

The room was still hot from the heat fluctuations but they worked diligently on their repairs, sweat began to pool from their skin into large blobs that would cling to their foreheads and armpits in zero gravity. Michael had connected his board back in within ten minutes.

‘You’ll need to flip the power for this.’ The supervisor gestured to the switch for Michael to float over to it.

The supervisor connected his board, and tucked it back into the box, smiling, his teeth illuminated by the blue glow from in the box.

‘Alright, toggle it!’

Michael pushed hard on the toggle as there was nothing to push against. With a grand chunking sound nothing happened, the supervisor pulled his body back into the box to take a look, poking his head back out. He jammed just his hand back into the box.

‘This fuckin’ wire came disconnected!’

With a slight movement of his arm, his body, Michael’s body, and everything on the Outpost came tumbling to the ground. The door on the box also came down on the supervisor’s arm, he screamed in pain. Michael ran over and lifted the heavy door just enough for the supervisor to slide out before dropping it. His arm was limp with a visible depression in his arm between his shoulder and elbow, his forearm was purple and swollen his fingertips on the brink of rupture. Michael was terrified and froze.

‘Grab my device and tell them I need a doctor.’

Michael had never been permitted to use a supervisor’s communications device, but did as he was instructed, sitting next to the supervisor’s good arm.

‘Hello. Supervisor needs medical help.’ Michael said into the device.

‘What supervisor and what’s your location?’ The voice responded.

“Levi. Gravity. Regulator.’ Levi said, eyes closed with his head up trying not to focus on the pain. Michael repeated.

‘We’re sending medical staff now. Who am I speaking to?’

Levi reached up and snatched the device from Michael.

‘Just. Get someone.’ He interjected, throwing the device to the ground.

‘Mike… There are escape pods not too far from here. Some have probably already left after the hangar.’ Levi said.

‘What?’ Michael said in amazement, he knew attempting to run away from the Outpost would certainly mean capture and death, but he also knew Levi was right, he could possibly slip out undetected.

‘You go, I have a family on the Outpost, I’ll be fine.’ He continued, smiling through his shattered arm.

‘I read your file when you came in, you don’t deserve to be here. I would have done the same thing to that dirt dweller.’

‘I have to make sure they find you.’ Michael said, half heatedly.

‘It’s now or never.’

Michael received quick directions from Levi and thanked him. He left the room looking one last time at the warm-up room, he could now see smoldering piles on the floor through the small window on the door. He sprinted to the escape pods and got in one of the few available, Levi was right, some of the Outpost residents had left. Michael hurried in, and followed the launch procedures, launching away from his prison.

Michael floated away from the Outpost, watching it disappear into obscurity. He waited in silence, in the darkness of space, certain that within seconds he would be obliterated by the Outpost’s defense systems or that the security team’s boarding party would be visiting. It never came, instead Michael floated through space, left alone to contemplate his newfound freedom.

Levi was taken to one of the Outpost’s many medical bays where he received treatment for his broken arm. When he awoke from surgery his arm was put in a cast, he was greeted not by his family but the Outpost’s security forces. They questioned him about the events surrounding the malfunction and the whereabouts of each person on his detail.

‘One last thing, who called for help?’ The security officer asked.

‘Me.’ Levi said.

‘It’s just, the voice pattern matches most closely with a criminal labor engineer on your detail named Michael, Number 953-‘

‘I told you, that was me who called.’ Levi interrupted.

‘This is you?’ He said, replaying the audio, it clearly wasn’t.

‘Yes. I mean, my arm was crushed, sorry I sounded slightly different.’

‘Remind me what happened to him, again? Engineer Michael.’

‘I told you, he was the first one to die! He shoved me through the door and tried to escape, the gravity malfunctioned and crushed him to death. Everyone else died in the hangar explosion.’ He said.

The officer looked suspicious of that answer, but conceded with himself that he didn’t care enough to dig further.

‘Figures as much, criminals come here and continue to commit crime, we shouldn’t be surprised.’

Levi was awarded for his efforts with medals, celebrations, and a promotion to management where he ran all maintenance operations for the North East quadrant of Outpost M2-2495. For the rest of their days, Levi and Michael would think about each other and never forget how each one saved each other’s lives.

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