Boom Hiss Jane

Boom Hiss Jane is ready for another monotonous day and doesn’t mind at all.

Machine 45 is there as always, a complex, monstrous companion. Jane takes her place beside it, overalls stained from the grease and lubricants that are the factory’s blood. She takes plugs, converters and bolts from various bins and puts them together, making a larger piece that she places on a conveyor belt to be taken to Machine 52. She does it again and again and again. Fits them together, places them on the belt which moves into a small furnace which goes Boom! as the doors close and hiss as it heats the pieces and fuses them and spits them out into a new piece for the next worker.

What do the pieces become? That’s not her concern. Only the functioning of Machine 45. It has been like this as far as she knows.

Supplements drop out of the feeding tube on the wall behind her. She swallows them when the display prompts her to then continues working. Jane simply knows when it’s time to exercise and moves into Room 102 where she stands on her disc before the instructional monitor. It lights up and shows an image of her, Jane, going through today’s exercises and stretches. She squats and jumps, flexing her arms, pulling back her fingers in sync with her computer twin.

At the end of the day, she goes to Chamber 74 and lines up for the shower tunnel. Slicer Liz stands before her, Burning Sara behind. Both are dressed as Jane: dark blue overalls, stained with grease and lubricants. Shaved heads covered by caps. Jane knows Sara by her freckles, Liz by the scar on the nape of her neck. Liz hadn’t always had the scar, yet Jane neither remembers nor cares how it got there.

The three move into the tunnel, disrobe and place their clothes in the laundry chute where they get sucked to somewhere. They step under the sprinklers where a series of pipes and faucets rain water and soap over them. They pass through the wind room where they are dried with pleasantly warm air as they walk to the other end. They collect their nightgowns and go to Chamber 53. Jane lies down on Bed 32, Liz and Sara on each side of her. She closes her eyes and promptly sleeps.

She knows when it’s time to wake up. With her companions, Jane puts on another outfit just like yesterday’s. After that, she goes to Machine 45.

Jane is ready for another monotonous day and doesn’t mind at all.

Boom! Hiss. The machine compresses and steams, making rhythmic sounds. She fits the pieces together and places them on the belt.

On her way to the physical room, she passes Slicer Liz looking at something in a drip pan. The great machine Liz operates continues to slice cables of assorted lengths and colors with its serrated blades and saws. Scraps move on a chute that connects to Burning Sara’s station where they will be melted.

Jane stops and looks into the drip pan with Liz. There’s a strange speck, neither metal nor liquid in it.

“Is it a loose part?” she asks, peering over Liz’s shoulder.

“I don’t think so,” Liz replies. “Should I make a fix call?”

Jane picks it up. It’s very tiny. Even with her grime coated fingers she can feel how soft it is.

“It’s a bug,” she says.

Liz frowns. “A bug? Here? How?”

“I don’t know. These are from outside the factory, aren’t they?”

“I think so,” Liz replies. “I can’t remember, so it mustn’t be important.”

Jane drops the bug onto the gray floor. “The cleaners will get it.”

Later, Jane goes into the physical room and does her stretches and strengthening exercises. She swallows her supplements. Through the shower room. Spray, soap, rinse then to Bed 32 for rest.

While sleeping, she sees the bug. It flies in the air, whirring like a motor, moving sporadically with no pattern.

Jane wakes. There were pictures when she was sleeping. That hasn’t happened before. She had a…dream.

When did she last have one? And when did she last see a bug? The incident would frighten her except that the dream fades even as she thinks about it. She considers asking Liz as they line up for the breakfast rations then decides it’s better not to change the routine. After all, that is what makes everything function best.

Pieces. Belt. Boom! Hiss.

Days later, her hands are fitting two converters together when something jumps in the air and swirls like dust caught in a current.

Another bug.

Jane watches it move in the air without pattern or purpose, its erratic flying mesmerizing. Seeing the bug does something to her mind. It brings forth something other than grease and sweat. An image of a ground with many, small green blades that are feathery, not sharp like the ones that Switcher Mary works with. Bugs fly above the blades against a patch of light. The thought makes her stomach twist in discomfort.

The converter she’s holding slips in her grasp, cutting the edge of her hand. Blood oozes out.

A bit shaken, she hurries into the nearest healing chamber. It’s no bigger than the room where she relieves herself, yet it has shelves, tubes and a basin with pipes hanging over them. A monitor reads STEP ONTO THE DISC. She spots the disc on the floor then does so. A ray covers her in blue light. The monitor shows layers of her body — bones, muscles, fluids. It beeps then reads PLACE YOUR LEFT HAND INTO BASIN 2. The pipes over the basin open. Blue and yellow liquids fill it, forming a green solution. Green like the blades.

Grass.

The word makes her queasy. She steps off the disc and plunges her hand into the solution. The cut tingles as it’s repaired. She withdraws it when the monitor prompts her to. From a tube by the door a pill falls out. TAKE BEFORE SLEEPING. Jane pockets the pill then goes back to work.

Pieces, soap, rinse. Boom! Hiss.

At bedtime, she swallows the pill as Slicer Liz watches her. “What’s wrong?” Liz asks.

“I don’t know.” The pill goes down smoothly. “I think I had a dream last night.”

“A dream? Those aren’t good,” Liz notes.

“Did something happen today?” Burning Sara asks, adjusting her nightgown.

“Nothing to stop production,” Jane replies.

Sara nods. Production must go on.

Janes lies down in her bed. Sleep comes faster than usual. She doesn’t dream. The next morning, she goes to her machine. It’s a comfortable, usual day — until the afternoon when she sees another bug. She thinks again of grass and again feels nauseated. The bug swoops and glides over the belt then around a corner. How did it get here? There should be nothing in the factory other than machines and workers.

Jane glances to the healing chamber. If the bugs keep coming, she’ll just get ill again.

She decides to follow it. Around the corner is a narrow corridor formed by the backs of Machines 48 and 57, where Sweeping Beth and Burning Sara work. Jane walks between the behemoth contraptions and comes to an end, blank except for a large ventilation fan. The fans are all over the factory, their humming as regular as the rolling pieces and the boom hiss of necessary functions.

This fan has stopped.

She looks at it, unsure of what to make of this irregularity. The layer of grime coating the vent’s insides is smeared as if someone had touched it. She moves closer, eyes blinking in the dark, and sees a word scrawled into the muck.

Nalani.

Under it, an arrow points down the shaft.

She stares harder, thinking perhaps she’s seeing the marks wrong. The letters are exaggerated, warped. They look like a serial code or designation.

Jane hurries back to the comforting boom hiss of her station.

Someone should make a fix call. Her hand glides over the red maintenance button. One press and Maintenance Julie would be over to solve the problem.

Yet she does not press it. An anxious thought presents itself. What if she were blamed? How would she explain how she found the fan? Jane does not know how much she believes this will happen, only that she should let someone else do it. She tucks it into the back of her mind. It’ll probably be fixed tomorrow.

It’s time for bed, and she still feels jittery. She goes to the healing chamber once more and stands bathed in the blue light. Another pill is assigned to her. She picks it up and goes to Bed 32. She sits on her mattress.

Liz walks by. “Do you remember grass?” Jane asks impulsively.

Liz looks like she’s trying to figure out what the word tastes like. “No,” she says as she gets under her sheets. “I don’t need to remember. Neither do you.”

“I remember the word grass,” Sara says, “but not what it looks like. Is it part of your requirements now?”

Jane’s cheeks flush. “No. I think…I think I may have had a dream. I have a pill.” She holds it up to assure Sara.

“That’s good.” Sara lies down, turning her back to Jane.

The lights go out.

Jane is about to place the pill on her tongue. What are the pills for? Did the one she took last night have something to do with what happened today?

Over and over, she wonders until she finally goes to a refuse chute and tosses the pill in.

That night there are more dreams. Of running on grass, of a strange blue ceiling. Someone calling her name. The voice is coming from the ground. Jane gets on her knees and parts the grass to find the word Nalani. It’s not a designation code. It’s a sound, a word.

The dream shifts to the factory. The workers are all skeletons, pulling levers and switches, wiping and sweeping. Her own fingers put together plugs and converters that clink against her finger bones.

She awakes to find herself vomiting. She rushes into the healing chamber. The disc, another pill. A new message on the screen. GO TO THE ROOM TOMORROW.

The Room. Hardly anyone gets called there.

After she is clean and in a new nightgown, she goes back to her chamber. This time she does not hesitate to swallow the pill. She wants it to go away, needs to get back to producing. Soon she sleeps a sleep that is painless and without dreams.

The rest of Chamber 45 is getting dressed when Jane awakes. She does the same, putting on her jumpsuit. As the others take their supplements and head to the exercise room, Jane goes the other way, down a corridor. At the end is a black door. No one she knows has been into The Room.

The door slides open. Inside are two chairs. A thin, pale woman sits in one working on a translucent tablet in her hands. She looks up. Her eyebrows are thin like her eyes. “Sit, Jane.”

Jane does so. “I’m Counselor Abby, though here I am just Abby like you are just Jane.” the woman says. “Here there is only one of us. We have our names and our duties, all for production, right?” Jane nods. “Do you know how many Janes work here?” Jane shakes her head. “Five in this sector. Two of them work on forging. You are one of the two.”

“At Machine 45.”

“Right. You are Boom Hiss Jane while the other is Melting Jane.”

“We picked our names.”

“That’s right. Do you know when?”

“No.”

Abby’s fingers dance on the pad. Numbers and symbols pop up and slide around. “I understand you’ve been requiring aid recently. Your cerebral scans indicate your sleep cycle has been interrupted. How have you been at night?”

“I’ve been dreaming,” Jane says.

The woman manipulates the pad. “Have you been taking your pills?’

“Yes. Except one.”

“Why didn’t you take it?”

“I don’t know.”

A chart with many lines pops up on the pad. Abby tilts her head as she reviews it. “You’re confused. This happens with body irregularities. That’s why it’s important to take your medication. A person is very valuable. Numbers are important, Jane, especially the number one. It’s small, but it is whole. Ones make up other numbers, added, stacked and grouped together. You are one. Your workers are each one. Together you are 156 in this sector. Without one, there is no bigger number.” She reads something on her pad then smiles at Jane. “You are a one. That’s important. This is what you agreed to.”

The smile seems strange, perhaps because Jane can’t remember the last time she had seen the expression. “I remember, Abby.”

“Good. Recall is important. Come here if you feel sick again.”

“I will.”

Jane goes back to Machine 45. Boom! Hiss. She plays the meeting with Abby over in her head to ease her mind. She is one. That is valuable.

In the afternoon, she pulls out one of the pans to wipe it down. It’s filled with grime. Like the shaft of the fan that had stopped.

Nalani.

The rag falls from her hand. She sits against her machine and tries to breathe. An aching thought struggles to surface, but it’s suffocated by the machinery, the noise, the pills. By Abby. It won’t come forth because it can’t — it’s not supposed to. She wants it to even though it would be wrong. Her conflicting wants pound her head, sting her eyes. Her hands clench into fists until the stub of her nails make scarlet lines in her palms.

And suddenly she hates. Hates everything. The factory, with its never-ending motion. The lack of voices and grass and blue ceiling. No blue at all here, no…weather. If there was weather in the factory, it should be…rain. Acidic. It would erode the metals and plastics of the giant machines. Jane would dance in the corrosion, laughing as the downpour sizzles her flesh.

The fan. It calls to her.

Quickly yet discreetly, she returns to the blank end between Machines 48 and 57, careful to avoid Sweeping Beth or Burning Sara. The fan is still broken. The word is still there.

Jane sticks her head into the vent. It’s dark and smells like pungent mold.

“Is it broken?” Sara’s head shows around the edge of Machine 57.

“Call a fix,” Jane says automatically.

Sara leaves to do so. It will be a matter of minutes now before the fan is functional.

Almost before she’s aware of it, Jane is sitting inside the shaft past the blades. They start spinning, whirring beyond distinction as they gain speed. She shuttles away from them, more scared of what lies down the shaft then being caught in the blades.

Sara calls to her.

Instead of answering, Jane crawls down the shaft, away from the machines and towards something else.

She moves, hands and knees making tinny echoes. The shaft starts vibrating as she passes an air recycler, its spastic activity rattling her teeth.

A vent lets in slits of pale light. She hurries past, feeling her way around bends. The tapping of her knees and hands becomes a welcome pounding, the repetition familiar and comforting. Onward. Darkness.

Oh, what is she doing? Does she expect to find grass? A blue ceiling? There is none of that. Only the factory. Ever darkness. Ever machines. Jane is one.

Then a scent. Not oil, grease or a cleaning solution.

The shaft dips then disappears.

Falling —

Jane lands on a mound of wet metal and wood which yields under her weight. It’s dark except for speckles of orange light that glow through gaps as if the mound lies over a thousand bulbs. Heat touches the undersides of her legs and arms.

Slowly, everything sinks.

Jane scurries over the refuse, scrambling to stay above the furnace. There is no place to go.

Nalani.

Who’s that? Abby?

This way.

She claws her way to the voice. There’s a square patch of darkness set in the wall. Her hands grab at scraps and rags…slip — they burn! She lets out a strangled cry. Her eyes and cheeks are wet.

Here.

Jane reaches the darkness and crawls onto a conveyor belt.

Stop. Wait.

She does as instructed, lingering in oblivion, all hope on the faint voice. Something falls from above, blocking the way back. It pushes her forward. Wherever she’s being goaded to, she resigns to it and shuffles ahead.

And then she’s out. The smell, or lack of it, signals the change in her environment. The walls vanish and there’s sudden openness.

Someone lifts her and pulls her into an embrace. There’s crying. Jane can only stand there as a strange woman squeezes her.

“Mother!”

Jane stiffens and pushes the stranger to arm’s length. It’s a woman, years younger than she. Jane takes in the slender neck, the slightly large upper lip and the outturned earlobes. A version of her own reflection.

“Do you remember your name? Nalani. That’s your birth name.” Fingers seize Jane’s elbows. “I’m Arabel. Can you remember? You couldn’t have forgotten me. No one can forget family.”

She seizes Jane’s hand and pulls her past high-rise walls. “Hurry. The virus will run its course soon. There’s a dampening field on your tracer.”

They round a corner and Jane suddenly becomes rigid.

Before them the floor drops to an ocean of machines, buildings and metal boxes, all easily twenty times larger than any chamber in the factory, expanding on and on beyond sight. Enormous stacks of iron stick out of the industrial landscape. They look like fingers of a mechanical hand, billowing great clouds of gray ash and smoke. Then Jane sees that there is no ceiling, that the rolling smoke and ash climb higher and dissipate into a charcoal slate without edges.

Sky. Not blue, but still a sky with no boundaries or depth.

Her head throbs. She squeezes her eyes shut, feeling dizzy.

“Mother! Hold on. I can undo the conditioning. Please don’t — ”

Pressure builds in her head. The kill switch that was placed in her hippocampus is activated. Jane goes limp.

#

Nalani stood on the grass under the crisp autumn sky. Beside her, Arabel, newly turned eight, played with her puppy. Cane moths flocked about, the blight-carrying bugs that ruined the crops, their fluorescent wings bearing the crook-shaped mark of their name. She had waited until her daughter’s birthday to break the news, wanting Arabel to be able to look back on this day with some pleasant memories and hopefully see this birthday as a time of maturity.

“I’m going, Arabel,” she says.

Her daughter stares at her. “I thought you weren’t.”

“I have to. The blight still ravages the countryside. Our farm is dying. Uncle Silas will look after you.”

“But Central Immigration is sending the modified seeds.”

“They won’t get here in time. It took us two weeks to get the new harvesters. It’s not economical. Uncle Silas will teach you what that means.”

“No!” Arabel cried out. There were other words said that could not crack Nalani’s resolve. She went to the man in the gossamer suit waiting beside the shuttle. Everything about the representative was shiny: his hair, pasted smile and promises. Yes, we will relocate your family. The farm will be revitalized. Just come work for us. For the bigger economy. You are one supporting many.

Nalani separated herself from Arabel’s arms and walked towards the shuttle.

#

Jane comes to, cradled in her daughter’s arms.

“The transport is one level down,” Arabel says, her cheeks red and wet. “We can go home.”

Jane focuses on her daughter, tries to guess her age. At least ten years have passed since that day. “Are you safe?” she asks.

“Yes,” Arabel coos.

Jane’s eyes feel so heavy. As they close for the last time, she realizes that it had been all done for one.