skonen_blades

The strike hadn’t been effective. They didn’t care about us.

The geothermal shafts went down and down into the earth’s core. Machines took the bulk of the drilling but humans were always needed for cheap grunt work. We were expendable but we dealt with surprises better than the machines.

There’s a feeling that heat-miner gets, for instance, just before a pocket is going to catch. It’s intuition that can’t be matched by a computer.

We’ve been bioengineered to withstand the heat at these depths. Our skin is made of overlapping shingles, heat baffles to dissipate the scalding temperatures. Our bodies are dry inside like sponges and our blood is like molasses. We’re still basically human but we are a breed apart.

It makes it easier to demonize us and treat us badly. We all entered into this nightmare with the idea of high pay.

It turns out that geothermal energy isn’t as cost effective as they led us to believe.

Right now, me and a few of the workers that have been on strike for three weeks are crammed into an elevator.

Curled into a ball on the floor of the elevator is a human supervisor. He’s bleeding and groaning, regaining consciousness. There’s a sock in his mouth and he’s tied up. All of our shoes are pointed towards him. We’re looking down at him with a mixture of fear and anger.

The strike hasn’t been effective. We’ve taken a hostage.

We’ve crossed the line. There’s no doubt that we’ll be fired if not killed for this but hopefully it will bring our plight to the news.

The elevator descends to subsection 126. This is as far as we can legally take a baseline human. We don’t find the heat here very hot but for the human, it’s like being in a pizza oven set to warm, survivable but highly uncomfortable.

At this depth, he can survive for two days. He'll need some supervised re-hydration in a hospital afterwards and probably a new pair of lungs.

We don't feel the heat but we're worried. Our red eyes meet each other’s nervously and our shingles shift and flutter, waffling away the heat. Our slowly beating hearts feel sympathy with the moaning creature on the hot floor of the elevator but we can’t stop now.

We left a note upstairs that for every hour that goes by that our demands are ignored, we will descend another level.

I estimate that we can probably go eight or nine levels before the human’s clothes combust. We have a fire extinguisher here for that.

Another six levels after that, and he’ll be ash.

The radio in our elevator is working but so far, nothing.

I hope they get in touch with us soon.



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The hedgehog scientist shuffled over to the oven-incubators and peered through the small circle of safety glass at his burning children. The portal flickered red and yellow. The creatures inside the incubators were too hot for this world.

They were only fetuses at the moment, twisting red weasels made of volatile radioactive flesh. They flickered in the heat haze through the glass. The retardant insulators baffled the heat inside the cylinder.

The incubators were circular and thick. They looked more like furnaces. The furnace hides were pockmarked and ancient-looking from high-temperature premature aging. Heat bled out through the rivets on the portholes and through the giant fanned sheets of metal on the top. There were hundreds of the furnace incubators along the walls of the lab.

This was a ‘hot lab’. It’s where the Salamanders were made.

The scientist, Dr. Rengler when he was human, was what was called a ‘hedghog’. To combat the heat, Rengler had been given a back full of refrigerated radial spines to help keep the heat away from his internals. The spines eventually gave him a stoop that make him peer about. The hundreds of spines poked up, steaming cold in the heat. He resembled a hedgehog to the English bastard scientist who’d invented his genus and the name had stuck.

His job was to check the tanks for irregularities and make notes. In the heat of the room, normal plastics and ink melted. You could forget about paper. He had a proper terminal insulated with layers of heat-retardant molecular spreaders.

If Rengler wanted to write something down, there were small sheets of metal and an etching spike. When he used it, he felt like a caveman using his own version of post-it notes.

He turned back to center of the room to make his hourly check-in assignment. He heard the sound of tinkling glass off to the left.

In a panic, Dr. Rengler spun towards the sound, his spines bristling. What he saw chilled his blood.

One of the Salamaders had its head poking out of one of the chambers. The glass was sizzling on the floor. The Salamander was too fat to get through the porthole and was trying to wiggle through. The hole around him was turning red and melting.

Dr. Rengler thumbed his emergency button and ran for the gloves and the emergency canister off to the left.

The lights went off and then snapped up again to emergency levels.

For that one second while the lights were off, Dr. Rengler the hedgehog saw a tiny, wiggling sun trying to free itself.

He walked forward, protective gear at the ready, and aimed a blast of the cold extinguisher at the beast’s head.



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