Tunnel Rat

A timer ticked down to 0:00, and the cover of his gaming pod slid back, releasing cold air. Milo slowly opened his eyes. Rather than feeling refreshed, he felt irritable and tired. He had passed out in the game, exhausted. Instead of waking up immediately, the pod kept him asleep for two hours.

Climbing out of the pod, he felt unsteady and reached with his tail to keep himself upright.

He was using the mechanical appendage more and more. Habits from the game and ways of moving were following him back into the waking world. It wasn't just a tool anymore, but a fifth limb. Or was that fourth limb? He flexed his mechanical leg; it felt slow and awkward. He was used to having two legs now, and out of the game, he could feel the difference. Maybe it was time for an upgrade?

He looked at his hands. They were normal human hands, with no claws and no coating of armored bone. He would have to remember that. In the game, he could grasp rock and slow a fall by digging his claws into a wall. Here, that would just make him go splat at the bottom of a big drop. And no respawn in this world. Maybe his hands needed an upgrade too?

A sudden dizzy spell hit him, snapping him out of thoughts about designing a wearable set of mechanical gloves and back to reality. He needed food; he'd been in the pod way too long. And some cheese. He didn't have the addiction to cheese that his character seemed to have in the game. He just liked the taste. Processed food cubes tasted horrible. He ate a lot of cheese now to savor the various flavors.

Sadly, his choices of cheese were meager. His once-filled larder was down to just a few choices. He grabbed a pear-shaped chunk of smoked scamorza. Not his favorite, the smoky flavor dominating the mellow cheese. It would have gone well with several foods or wine, none of which he had. His diet before discovering cheese had been the bland, processed food cubes delivered by the food processors.

Munching on the scamorza, he got to work. There were several alerts from failed mechanical systems, but the first task of the day was ordering more cheese assortments. He went to the suppliers he'd used before and ordered twice as much. Most of them also had 'recommendations' for him or special deals. He clicked on all of them and added the various assortments of cheese, crackers, and snacks to his orders. You could never have too much cheese. He'd probably try the other foods, but he had doubts.

Next up were repairs and fixes for new problems. There was a water leak on level 37 in one of the main tubes. His systems had shut down that section of pipe and routed fluid around it. Long term, it needed fixing, and that entire section of pipe might need replacing, but it was good for now.

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More annoying were the power outages. What the hell was going on? After an hour, he found the problem down in section H. Section H always seemed to be a pain in his butt. Section H had been designed as a recreational area for the habitat. Whole floors had been set up for gardening with artificial light. There was a park, a swimming level, running tracks, and many other activities that would add to the quality of life for people living in the cave-like environment of the habitat block.

Those activities looked great on paper and were highly photographed when the hab opened. They were also the first areas to get their budgets cut when things started to sour. The power, water, and other resources were needed in other parts of the hab. Repair crews were sent to keep the industrial areas running, and gardening was a low priority. Within 20 years, section H was dark and abandoned, one of the first sections to be declared dead.

And now H was pulling a ton of power from the adjacent sections. If they had left his section alone, Milo would have been curious and would have taken a look to see what was going on but not cared much. But he wasn't letting them steal his power. He worked too hard, keeping the lights on as it was. This was going to be tricky. He needed to find out what was going on in section H if this continued. For now, he shut connections between H and E and then rerouted power evenly from the other sections.

The next problem was also section H related. The waste disposal systems in section H had been quite robust at one time, designed to handle the extra load from the hydroponics and animal farms. Waste would normally be recycled into fertilizer and water. All of those systems were long broken down. Waste was being dumped from H to sections S and E, probably via temporary pipes.

Section E was handling the extra and would actually benefit since the water would be reclaimed and the waste converted to fertilizer or burned for power. S wasn't. The systems in section S were already backed up, and it would only get worse. With a deep sigh, Milo spent an hour setting up routes for his clog eaters to clear out section S. More of his resources were being wasted. He was definitely going to do some investigating, but not right now.

Right now, he needed to get back into the game. He had no idea of how the dwarves fared and needed to head up top before Squint sent something to find him. But that didn't mean he couldn't set up some investigation while he slept. If the people in section H were using a data-net link anywhere in the hab, Milo could get into their system. For now, he just had his programs collect data passively. He'd look into it the next day when he logged out.

Time to go pick up the pieces after his battle with the snake.

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