[OC-Series] I'm the Last Person Who Remembers the Original Timeline. I Have Four Days. | Chapter 23: The Slower Clock

The full audio-drama version on YouTube for anyone who wants to listen while they work!

Index -- Previous Chapter -- First Chapter 

LOG ENTRY: DAY 218

I am calling it day two hundred and eighteen. The chronometer on the main console disagrees with me. The chronometer says it has only been fourteen hours since I woke up.

The chronometer is a cesium atomic clock. It measures the exact transition frequency of the cesium-133 atom. It is the most accurate timekeeping device ever built by human hands. Right now, it is lying to my face.

I sat on the grated floor of the module and stared at the rebuilt antenna. I had cannibalized my second-to-last LEGO buoyancy sensor to make it. It was a perfect, functioning piece of radio equipment. It was also completely silent.

I keyed the transmitter. I waited. The static did not change pitch. I keyed it again. Nothing.

I put the transmitter down on the deck. I forced myself to slide it exactly six inches away from my knee. If I kept holding it, I would keep keying it. I would turn into one of those rats in a behavioral psychology experiment, pressing the lever over and over until I starved to death, hoping the food pellet would drop.

The pellet was not going to drop. Sarah was inside the warehouse. The proximity of Moreau's quantum machinery was disrupting the entanglement field. The tether was a dead line, and it would stay a dead line until she walked out of that building.

I had to wait. Waiting is the one thing I am fundamentally incapable of doing well.

I looked back at the chronometer. The red digital numbers were ticking upward. They looked sluggish.

When this started, my subjective time inside the bubble was running roughly five point five times faster than real time on the surface. The boundary friction was warping the local physics. I was experiencing days while the surface experienced hours. That was my only advantage. It gave me the runway to build the decoherence array. It gave me the time to try and push the world back.

That advantage was collapsing.

The boundary was eight centimeters from the outer acrylic wall. The bubble was shrinking. As the old universe got squeezed into a tighter and tighter physical space, the friction from the incoming timeline was dominating more of my local environment. The math was inescapable. The five point five ratio was decaying.

It felt like walking through waist-deep water. Then chest-deep water. I watched the seconds tick by on the display. A minute felt like a minute now. Maybe even longer. My working hours were evaporating in front of me. The gap between my timeline and Sarah's timeline was snapping shut. We were going to hit the end of the road at the exact same moment.

A sharp, piercing beep shattered the quiet of the module.

I flinched hard enough to bang my elbow against the aluminum desk frame. The alarm was coming from the environmental control panel. A solid red light was flashing next to the life support readout.

My single remaining tank sensor was screaming. The carbon dioxide levels in the module were spiking.

I scrambled up from the floor. I ignored the throbbing in my elbow and hit the diagnostic readout. The scrubber capacity had been sitting at eighty-three percent for a day. It was now dropping in real time. Eighty-two. Eighty. Seventy-eight.

The ambient noise in the room was wrong. The module usually hummed at a steady B flat. That was the sound of the main circulation fan pulling dead air through the lithium hydroxide filters. The B flat was gone. It had been replaced by a low, grinding rattle. It sounded like a garbage disposal chewing on a handful of gravel.

Tabarnak.

I ran to the life support housing bolted to the far wall. I pressed my hand flat against the metal casing of the circulation fan. It was hot enough to burn my palm. I yanked my hand back.

The motor was seizing.

The humidity inside the module was hovering near ninety percent. The pressure was fluctuating wildly because the heavy water outside was being compressed by an advancing quantum wall. The environmental systems were never designed to operate under these conditions. The sealed bearings inside the fan motor had finally given up. The lubricant had cooked off. The metal was eating itself.

If that fan stopped turning, the air would stop moving through the chemical scrubbers. I would suffocate in my own exhalations long before the boundary breached the hull.

I needed to fix it. I had no spare parts. I had used the last of my good solder on the antenna. I had zero epoxy.

I went to my tool kit. I pulled a Phillips head screwdriver and a flathead pry bar from the canvas bag. I grabbed a pair of needle-nose pliers and set them on the desk. Finally, I clamped the flashlight between my teeth and went to work on the housing.

There were four retaining screws holding the fan casing to the bulkhead. I stripped the head on the third one because my hands were shaking. I forced myself to stop. I took a breath. I leaned my weight into the screwdriver and turned it slowly, praying the metal would catch. It squeaked, then gave way.

I pulled the metal casing off. A wave of trapped heat hit my face. The smell of burning ozone and scorched metal filled the cramped space.

The fan assembly was a standard centrifugal blower. The rotor was attached to a central drive shaft, held in place by two steel bearing cartridges. I killed the main power breaker to the fan. The grinding noise spun down into a sickening metal-on-metal scrape. Then silence.

I used the flathead pry bar to pop the retaining clip off the drive shaft. It flew across the room and pinged against the floor grating. I did not care. I grabbed the rotor with both hands and pulled. It was fused tight.

I braced my boots against the bulkhead. I pulled harder. My shoulders burned. The rotor broke loose with a loud crack, sliding off the shaft and sending me tumbling backward onto the deck.

I sat up and spit the flashlight into my hand. I shined the beam onto the exposed motor shaft. The front bearing cartridge was completely destroyed. The rubber dust shield had melted. The steel ball bearings inside were bone dry and covered in fine metal shavings.

I needed lubricant.

I went to the galley station. I tore through my ration crates. I dug past the dehydrated chili and the instant coffee. There were vacuum-sealed crackers, but absolutely nothing that resembled machine oil.

I stood in the center of the module. I looked at the destroyed bearing. I looked at the desk.

My eyes landed on a yellow mechanical pencil sitting next to my logbook.

Graphite.

Graphite is a dry lubricant. It is highly heat resistant. It is not ideal for high-speed centrifugal bearings, but it was the only friction-reducing compound I had left in the entire facility.

I grabbed the pencil. I dumped the spare lead refills onto the desk. There were maybe twenty thin, fragile sticks of graphite. I needed to crush them into a fine powder.

I propped the flashlight on a ration crate to illuminate the desk. I found a heavy steel wrench in my kit. I laid the graphite sticks flat on the aluminum metal. I brought the flat side of the wrench down. I ground the metal back and forth, crushing the brittle sticks until they turned into a pile of fine, dark grey dust.

My breathing was getting heavier. The module felt incredibly stuffy. The air was turning stale. Without the fan circulating the atmosphere through the lithium hydroxide, the carbon dioxide was pooling around me. Every breath I took was making the problem worse. My heart rate was climbing. A dull, pulsing headache was starting to form at the base of my skull.

I scooped the graphite powder onto a folded piece of paper. I carried it over to the exposed motor shaft.

I used the tip of my knife to carefully scrape the melted rubber and metal shavings out of the bearing cartridge. It was agonizingly slow work. My vision was starting to blur at the edges. The CO2 buildup was accelerating. I had to blink hard to keep the flashlight beam in focus.

Once the cartridge was as clean as I could get it, I tapped the folded paper. The dark grey graphite powder slid down the crease and packed into the dry steel bearings. I used my thumb to press the powder deep into the housing. My hands were covered in dark, greasy stains.

I picked up the rotor. I slid it back onto the drive shaft. I shoved it hard, seating it against the packed bearing. I grabbed the metal casing and lined it up over the assembly.

I reached for the four retaining screws I had set on the grated floor. My fingers brushed the pile. One of them rolled. It slipped through the gaps in the steel grating and vanished into the dark sub-floor.

Tabarnak.

If I did not secure all four corners, the casing would not seal. The high-pressure air would blow straight out the side instead of pushing through the lithium hydroxide filters. The repair would be worthless.

I dropped to my hands and knees. The sub-floor was a shallow, cramped crawlspace filled with wiring conduits and cooling pipes. I shined the flashlight down through the grate. The beam cut through the dust, reflecting off a dozen silver bolt heads and aluminum shavings.

My lungs were burning. The carbon dioxide was pooling down here near the floor. Every second I spent looking was a second I was not breathing clean air. Black spots swarmed the edges of my vision.

I pulled my multi-tool. I popped the grate loose and shoved it aside. I reached my arm down into the tangle of wires, sweeping my hand blindly across the cold metal deck. Dust caked my sweaty palm. My fingertips brushed something small and threaded.

I pinched it. I pulled it up into the light. It was the screw.

I jammed the grate back into place. I slapped the metal casing over the fan assembly and drove the four screws home, stripping the last one completely just to make sure it held.

I staggered over to the breaker panel. The black spots were dancing in my peripheral vision now. My lungs felt like they were trying to pull air through a wet wool blanket.

I threw the breaker.

The motor whined. It hesitated. Then it caught.

The fan spun up. It did not sound like a B flat. It sounded like a dying lawnmower. The graphite was grinding against the steel, protesting the speed. But it was turning. I felt a weak, pathetic breeze of air push out of the ventilation grate, cycling through the chemical scrubbers.

I collapsed backward onto the floor grating.

I lay there in the dark. I stared at the ceiling. I focused entirely on the mechanical act of breathing. In. Out. I let the scrubbed air wash over my face. The black spots in my vision slowly dissolved. The pulsing headache dulled to a manageable ache.

I had fixed the fan. I had saved my air. But the physical exertion of tearing down a motor in a high-CO2 environment had cost me. I had burned through a massive amount of oxygen to do it. The environmental readout on the wall was no longer flashing red, but the capacity number had permanently dropped. I had shortened my own runway just to keep the machine running.

I rolled over onto my side. The rebuilt antenna was sitting exactly where I had left it.

The silence in the room was suddenly broken by a sound that did not come from the fan.

It was a deep, resonant groan. It came from the outer hull. The acrylic wall of the containment vessel was protesting. The sound vibrated through the heavy water and passed straight through the metal walls of the module.

I no longer had a boundary sensor in the tank. I had cannibalized it to build the radio. I could not look at a screen and read the distance in centimeters anymore. I just had to listen to the physical structure of my world dying.

The boundary was moving. The probe was searching.

I reached out. I pulled the antenna transmitter toward me. My thumb rested on the heavy plastic key.

I pressed it down.

Silence.

I sat alone on the floor of a buried submarine, listening to the grinding fan and the groaning wall. I held an open line to a woman who could not hear me. I was completely out of moves. I was entirely dependent on someone I could not reach.

I keyed the transmitter one more time.

"Please," I said to the empty room. One word.

The static did not answer.