Ahh fuck! Jack exclaims in pain as he
wakes up. He has a terrible headache. While moving his hands up to hold
his head, he realizes that his entire body hurts.
Owwowwowwowwoww... Ouch!
Emergency defrost complete. Entering low power
mode. announces an automated voice.
He thinks: Get it together, Jack!
You knew this was gonna happen. You have trained for this. Where are the
meds again? ...
Waiting for the painkillers to kick in, Jack stays in his preservation chamber until he is fully awake. As he stands there, he looks out of the small window in the door. The bunker looks different from yesterday - not yesterday! That was how ever many years ago... Besides the point. It looks different. Not just things have moved around different, it has the vibe of a lost place. Unexpected but whatever...
The pressurized air hisses in the lines as the door of the preservation chamber swings aside. Jack steps out into the bunker, breathes the musty air, and looks around. The light shining out of his chamber reveals the dirty floor. The table and chairs in front of him, as well as the kitchen across the room, are covered in dust and all exposed bits of metal have rust. The red night lights on the ceiling are dimly illuminating the rest of the bunker. He looks to the left: The wall is lined with other preservation chambers, all except one of them being powered down. In the corner is a minicomputer in a half-height rack and next to it a teleprinter. Along the rear wall are desks holding a radio, a terminal, and some boxes – and above them a phone on the wall – nothing out of the ordinary here. He looks to the right: More preservation chambers. Instead of a wall, there's the bunker door – door is a bit of an understatement, it's a massive gate. A small slither of light passes under it. These fucking idiots... They didn't reseal it properly.
He walks over to the door's control panel. The paint is flaking off revealing the rust underneath. Jack attempts to press a couple buttons but they get stuck and nothing happens. Fuck. He turns back to the inside of the bunker looking for tools, contemplating the tradeoff between waking up a couple years too soon and getting slowly poisoned by the air, and being locked inside a bunker due to a bunch of apparent troglodytes who are unable to close a door properly... Doesn't matter, too late now.
As he passes each of the presevation chambers, he looks into them. Empty,
empty, empty - nothing unexpected here. His own chamber... He presses a
few buttons to fully shut it down. The lamp in the ceiling turns off,
the door closes, the status lights turn off. After passing two other
empty preservaton chambers, he reaches the one that remains active.
Hello Michelle.
He checks the status lights of her chamber.
I think I'm gonna leave you in there
until I find a way out of here. Should be fine...
He continues past the remaining empty chambers to the back of the bunker.
Jack opens the boxes on the desks looking for tools. He also rummages through the cabinets and drawers in the kitchen area. After finding some object that he could use as a screwdriver, he returns to the door, taking off the control panel. He realizes that he has no idea what he's doing so he attempts (and fails) to get the manual from the computer.
Jack returns to the desk with the terminal. He flips the switch on the desk lamp. It flickers for a moment and turns off again. He leans over the terminal and pushes the power switch – Bonk! At least this seems to work. While waiting for the tube to warm up, he walks over to the rack and sits down on the floor in front of it. He inspects the status lights on the various devices thinking aloud: CPU is idle, serials are idle, cryogenics control unit sees one active chamber, primary hard drive is powered up – all good. Secondary hard drive is powered down, let's change that... He pushes the power button and hears the spindle spinning up. The power button blinks. There is some intermittent rattling from the drive, probably a shot bearing. He hears the platters inside accelerate for an unusually long time. Impatiently sitting there, Jack waits for the drive to be ready. Clicking from the mechanism unlocking the heads followed by a ringing scratching noise. Of course. He quickly presses the power button again. The scratching stops and the spindle motor turns off, followed by the platters slowly decelerating. That's gonna be an ugly head crash.
He gets up and walks over to the phone. Maybe, the lines to <dome city> still work. Not exactly excited by the prospect of calling random people, but not seeing another option, he reaches for the receiver. It lifts off the wall with a quiet click and Jack begins to dial. He holds the receiver to his ear - silence. Welp, that's that. He puts it back on the wall.
Need to tie this together - or, alternatively, Jack printing the logs could be moved to after the Annie interaction as something Jack can do to pass time.
He walks over to the the teleprinter and opens the lid to find that something has eaten most of the paper. He removes the remains and opens one of the cabinets under the desks. By some miracle, whatever ate the paper didn't find the rest. He tears off a piece of the stack and puts it into the printer, feeding the end into the tractor mechanism. Then, he sits down at the terminal and logs on. This should be rephrased to indicate that there is some purpose to him opening the lid in the first place, like him wanting to change the ribbon bc it's no doubt deteriorated or something like that.
Tue, 2106-06-01, 18:01 EARTH-53 Login: jack Password: Welcome to INUX! $ █
Over a hundred years, huh...
He types a few commands.
$ ls $ pwd /home/jack $ cd /var/log $ ls cron outpost dmesg.log wtmp $ cd outpost $ ls comms comms_diag event logbook $ cat logbook > /dev/ttyS1 $ █
The printer comes to life and starts printing. Jack gets up and walks over to it. The printer prints. And it prints some more. The paper reaches the floor. Jack picks up the end and holds it, folding the pages along the perforated lines as they reach his hands. Finally, the printer stops to print. Jack turns the wheel on the side of the printer, manually advancing the feed mechanism, until he reaches the end of the page. Then, he tears it off and takes the small stack of paper back to the terminal desk. Trying his luck with the lamp again, he flips the switch multiple times until it stays on.
2000-01-01 Automated Announcement:
Happy New Year 2000!
//TODO: ASCII art of above line with fireworks
The outpost diagnostics suite reports no critical problems at any of
our outposts. The Lunar Biosphere has, so far, not needed assistance
from any of the outposts.
Good work, everyone!
The Future Is Bright.
2002-08-15 Lunar Biosphere:
Crew wakeup command
Message:
//TODO
//TODO: more log messages left by people
Outline of missing section:
Copyright © 2023 Jan Danielzick (aka. BodgeMaster) – All rights reserved.