The Data Refinery Favor

My name is Casey Lowenstein, I'm fifty-two years old, and I came to New Ghent colony on Teth to disappear. This is the entire plan. Quiet desk, quiet work, nobody asking about the mess I left behind at Juniper Station. Four weeks in, the plan was holding pretty good, right up until the morning I found my desk had been moved.

I walked into the analysis bay at 0700 sharp, coffee in hand, and stopped dead. My desk was six inches closer to Louis Nash's than it had been the day before. Six inches doesn't sound like much, but it meant my knees wouldn't fit under the console anymore. The man had shoved a thousand pounds of furniture toward me in the night, or paid somebody to, and left not a word about it.

"Morning, Casey," said Baron Petersen in the corridor, pushing his cart of air filters past the door.

"Morning, Baron."

I set my coffee down and stood there looking at the gap, which was no longer a gap. It was more of a suggestion. Louis was already at his station, back straight as a ruler, pretending to read a sensor log. Fifty-eight years old and he still combed his hair like he was going to a job interview every day.

"Louis," I said. "My desk moved."

"Did it," he said, without turning around.

"It moved six inches toward yours. Funny thing, that."

"Funny thing, indeed. My reference binders moved too. Funny thing, that." Now he turned around. He had that pinched look on him, as if he had been constipated since the colony was founded. "Someone went through my files last night. Section seven of the humidity correlation set was out of order."

"Out of order," I said. "Louis, nobody on this colony has touched your binders but you. You alphabetize them by week. Who else would alphabetize humidity data by week?"

"That's exactly the kind of disorderly thinking that leaves things out of order," he said, and turned back to his screen like I'd been dismissed.

I stood there a second with my mouth open. Then I pulled my chair out, banged my knee on the console mount, and said a word I probably shouldn't have said in a shared workspace.

"There it is," Louis said loudly. "Profanity. On day one of the requisition audit, no less."

"It's day twenty-eight of my transfer, you absolute walrus."

He stood up. I want to be fair here, so I'll admit I was loud. He was louder. We went back and forth about the desk, the binders, the requisition form for filter seals that I had supposedly misplaced, which I had in fact filed on Tuesday, in the folder, where forms go. He claimed it wasn't there. I pulled it out and waved it at him and he claimed I'd fabricated it after the fact, which is not even a thing you can do with a paper form, but logic was never the point with Louis.

That's when Ayesha Kingston came around the corner. She's the colony resources manager, forty-seven, patient the way a person is patient with children who keep setting the same fire. She stood there with her arms crossed until we both shut up.

"Wow," she said. "Just, wow. I could hear you two from the mess hall. Both mess halls."

"He moved my desk," I said.

"She moved my binders," Louis said, at exactly the same time.

"Okay. Stop!" Ayesha pinched the bridge of her nose. "Neither of you moved anything, and even if you did, I don't care. I genuinely do not have the hours in my week to care about this. What I care about is that I have a quarterly inventory due on the oxygen recycler, and nobody wants to do it, and I just realized I have two analysts who clearly have too much energy."

Louis went pale. I'll say that for him, he knew what the recycler was. It's a clattering maze of pipes and condensation tanks behind a sealed pressure door, and the inventory means crawling around in there with a scanner for a whole shift, logging every valve and gasket.

"Ayesha," Louis said carefully. "The recycler inventory is a two-person job, historically."

"Yes," she said, smiling. "Yes it is. You two are a team now. Team-building exercise. Consider it ordered." She started to walk off, then turned back. "And Casey, if I hear one more raised voice out of this bay, I'm assigning you both to the waste reclamation report. Together. For a quarter."

She left. Louis and I stood looking at each other.

"Well," I said. "This is your fault."

"This is objectively your fault," he said, gathering his scanner and his log tablet with these sharp little motions, like even his hands were annoyed. "And we will do this efficiently and without conversation, and then we will never speak of it."

"That's the first smart thing you've said all month."

* * *

Baron Petersen met us at the pressure door at 0900. He's the oxygen recycler tech, fifty-five, tall and slouchy, with the tired look of a man who's been listening to pipes complain for twenty years. He had his tool harness on and a thermal mug in one hand.

"You two are doing inventory together?" he said. "Huh. Ayesha must be madder than she let on."

"We're a team, Baron," I said.

"Sure you are." He keyed the outer door and it groaned open, all rust-smell and warm humid air rolling out at us like a mouth breathing. "Rules are simple. Scanner logs every valve. Don't step on the condensation lines, they're slick. And if the inner door cycles, stay clear of the jam lever, it's temperamental."

"Temperamental how?" Louis asked.

"Temperamental like a mule," Baron said, and waved us through.

Inside, the recycler was loud and wet and dim. Pipes everywhere, running every direction, fat ones humming with airflow, skinny ones dripping. The condensation tanks sat along the far wall, warm to the touch, sweating like a glass of iced tea. We got to work. Louis took the east pipe run, I took the west, and for about two hours it actually went okay. Quiet. He'd call out a serial number, I'd log it, no commentary. It was almost peaceful.

Then I got to the junction where the big humid-air main splits into three condensate lines, and the floor was slick, and my boot went sideways, and I grabbed the nearest thing to catch myself, which turned out to be a lever.

It moved maybe four inches with a clunk I felt in my teeth.

Everything changed pitch. The fans up top slowed, the pressure seals around the junction hissed, and the inner door, back the way we came, dropped with a boom like a vault closing.

"Oh no," I said.

"What was that." Louis came around the pipe run at a speed I didn't know he had. He looked at the door, then at the lever, then at me. "Casey. Casey. What did you touch."

"There was a lever. I was falling. It was there. It's a very bad layout, frankly, who puts a jam lever where a person would grab it."

"That's not a jam lever, that's the isolation lock! That locks the junction for pressure testing!" He was already at the door, pounding on it. "Baron! BARON!"

We heard boots, then Baron's voice through the steel, muffled. "What'd you do in there?"

"The isolation lock tripped," Louis shouted back. "Full junction seal. Can you release it from your side?"

There was a pause. A long one. Then Baron said, "Well. Here's the thing."

"I hate when technicians say that," I muttered.

"The release servo on that lock's been on my work order for six weeks. It's manual-only from the inside. There's a wheel on the far junction, past the tanks. You'll have to crank it."

"How long?" Louis called.

"Six hours, maybe. The pressure cycle has to run down before the wheel'll even turn. I'll log it with Ayesha. You two just, uh. Sit tight. Do the inventory. Real thorough-like."

I looked at Louis. Louis looked at me. Somewhere above us a pipe dripped, slow and regular, like a clock ticking off our sentence.

"Six hours," I said.

"Six hours," he said. "In here. With you."

"Don't sound so thrilled, you'll make me blush."

He sat down on a pipe support with all the dignity of a man sitting on a toilet in public, and got out his log tablet. "We will do the inventory," he said. "Every valve. And we will not speak."

I leaned against a condensation tank, warm as a sleeping cat against my back, and looked at him, and for the first time in four weeks I laughed out loud in that colony.

"Louis," I said. "What exactly do you think we've been doing?"

We did the inventory for another hour, which is how long it took me to admit the wheel wasn't going to help us yet, and how long it took Louis to admit he was talking to himself. He was standing by the door doing something to the lock panel with a multitool, muttering, and I caught enough of it to be insulted.

"Say it louder, Louis, I can't hear the insults over the fans."

"I said nothing about you."

"You said 'total protocol violation' twice and 'this is why vetting exists' once."

He put the multitool away. "Fine. Yes. You touched an isolation lock without authorization. You triggered a full junction seal in a life-critical system. On your first joint assignment. That is not a small thing, Casey."

"It's a lever, Louis. I slipped. Baron literally told us it was temperamental."

"Baron told us to stay clear of it. There's a difference between 'temperamental' and 'do not touch.'"

"Oh, well, forgive me for not memorizing the Baron Dictionary of Mechanical Adjectives while falling on my ass."

He paced. He was good at pacing, I'll give him that. Four steps, turn, four steps, turn, in a space the size of a walk-in closet. The junction was maybe ten feet across, pipes on three sides, the sealed door on the fourth, tanks along the far wall dripping onto the floor. Humid as a greenhouse. My shirt was already sticking to my back and I could see sweat at his collar too, which was the only satisfying thing happening.

"You should have watched where you were going," he said. "You should have been reading the valve tags, not wandering into the junction. This whole incident is a failure of attention. Which, frankly, is the story of your transfer."

I stopped logging. "Excuse me?"

"Your transfer. To this colony. A mistake was made somewhere. Somebody in personnel owed somebody a favor, or somebody misread a file, because you are not equipped for New Ghent. We are a small crew. We are precise. We do not have room for analysts who trip over levers and then blame the layout."

That's about where my whole chest went hot. I've been called a lot of things in fifty-two years, some of them earned, but there's a specific flavor of that sentence that always finds the bruise.

"You don't know one damn thing about why I transferred here," I said.

"I know enough. Four weeks. Four weeks of misplaced forms, of requisitions logged wrong, of you asking questions that were answered in training. You know what your first week was? You put a supply requisition in the wrong queue and it delayed Baron's filter cartridges by nine days. Nine days, Casey."

"Because the queue system in this colony is a relic and nobody would explain it, because apparently asking questions is a crime here!"

"It is not a crime, it is called reading the manual!"

"The manual is forty pages of acronyms written by a man who hates people!"

He threw his hands up, and I mean really threw them, sweat flying off his wrist. "You want to know what I think? I think you don't read the manual because you don't think the rules apply to you. I think you came here because you thought a small colony would be soft. Easy. Somewhere nobody would notice you can't do the work."

"Oh, that's rich. That is rich coming from a man who's spent four weeks tripping over himself every time I finish a log before he does. You know what your problem is, Louis? You're threatened. Anybody under sixty walks in that door and you treat them like a virus. Ayesha said it took three years for the last new hire to get a civil word out of you, and she transferred out. She transferred out because of you."

"That is not," he said, and his voice cracked in a way I pretended not to notice, "that is not what happened with Sara."

"That's exactly what happened with Sara, Ayesha told me the whole story our second week, over drinks, laughing, she thought it was funny, and I'd have thought it was funny too if I weren't living it. You can't stand new people. You can't stand change. You've been here so long you think the colony is your apartment and the rest of us are squatters."

"I have kept this analysis bay running for fourteen years. Fourteen. Do you know what that's worth?"

"Apparently about six hours locked in a pipe junction with someone you can't stand!"

We were both shouting by then, full volume, right up in each other's space near the sealed door, and it felt honestly fantastic, like wringing out a towel I'd been carrying around for a month. I got one more in, something about his posture, and he got one more in, something about my file, and then the lights flickered.

Not like a bulb dying. Like the whole grid took a breath. The overheads dimmed to a dull orange, came back, dimmed again, and