Mindwarp by James Follett

Author:James Follett
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Published: 2017-04-20T04:00:00+00:00

There wasn’t much mystery about the next room. The sign on the double doors proclaimed:

DNS C. AIR-CONDITIONING PLANT

Ewen cautiously pushed the doors open and turned up the discharge tube to maximum brightness. The rows of giant filter housings, heat-exchangers and heat pumps extended into the darkness. All the machinery was still and silent.

“It’s weird,” Ewen commented. “It all looks old-fashioned and yet it doesn’t look as if it’s ever been used.” To prove his point, he crossed to a pump motor and peeled off a strip of thin, clear protective plastic. Everything was covered in the stuff, even manually-operated switches. He showed it to Jenine. “Sprayed on and allowed to harden. You’d have to do a lot of preparation work in here before you could get anything started. It looks like this plant is meant to last hundreds of years before it’s used.”

“And maybe it’s been here for hundreds of years?” Jenine ventured.

“Well it certainly looks like it,” Ewen agreed. “It’s all so old-fashioned. Look at those air-ducts. Welded steel. Why bother when they could be made of extruded plastic?”

The next room was identified by the legend on the door as a water purification plant. Like the previous room, all the machinery was hermetically sealed under a protective coat of spray-on plastic. Ewen added the location and contents of the rooms to his sketch maps, and they continued exploring.

Set into the wall halfway along the corridor were the closed concertina-like doors of what they assumed was a large freight elevator. Ewen reasoned that because there was a lot of machinery down here, a large elevator would be essential for carrying spare motors and the like. A sign on the wall near the folding doors solved one mystery but provided several more:

DEEP NOVA SHELTER C. LEVEL 20. Ancillary Guardian Environment and Life (A.N.G.E.L.) FACILITIES.

“Well now we know what DNS stands for,” Jenine commented. “But what does nova mean?”

Ewen consulted the datapad’s dictionary. “It’s a religious term. It says here that a nova is a new light in heaven.”

“Nothing more?”

“No.”

She pointed to the sign. “And that word looks like angel.”

“Not quite. Let’s press on.”

The double doors at the end of the corridor opened onto another ascending flight of stairs which they climbed without hesitation.

DEEP NOVA SHELTER C. LEVEL 19. RESTAURANT.

Restaurant wasn’t in the dictionary.

The pair of sliding doors opened automatically as Ewen moved towards them. He crossed the threshold and stepped back hastily when the lights came on. They promptly went out again. In the brief explosion of brilliance they caught a glimpse of rows of tables and chairs.

“This place seems in working order,” Ewen muttered uneasily. He was about to suggest that they leave it when Jenine walked into the room. The lights came on again. They stared at rows of bare tables and chairs. The design of the furniture was starkly functional: tubular steel frames with plastic seats and tabletops in pleasing pastel shades.

“Why would so many people sit so close together and at such small tables?” Ewen wondered. “There’s too many tables for this to be a study area.

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