“Here, let me help.” Broken Man sprawled on the floor and used his arms to drag his body across the room. He wriggled into a sitting position and held his hand to me.
I handed the supplies to him, and he made a pile next to his legs. When the skid was empty, I hopped off the chair and carted the food into the kitchen.
“Hungry?” I asked from the kitchen.
“Very.”
I brought him a spoon, and he dug into one of the yellow vegetable casseroles. When everything was put away, I stepped onto the chair again.
“I’ll be back after my shift with fresh clothes,” I called. He waved his spoon in goodbye. I climbed into the duct, turned the troll on, and completed the air shaft.
When I finished my assigned ducts, I headed to the washroom. Fresh laundered uniforms, jumpsuits, sheets, towels, and under clothes were always stacked in large canvas bins on wheels. Empty bins were then used for dirty garments.
I collected a bunch of jumpsuits, linens, soap, and bundled everything together with a towel. At my next stop I added somecleaning supplies, hoping to reduce the black dust coating every surface of Broken Man’s rooms.
He had returned to the corner when I plopped down with my bundle. I showed him what I had brought. He smiled in relief, but I cringed over the black grit between his teeth.
“Shower?” I asked.
“Please.”
I hesitated for an awkward moment. How to go about this? Fortunately, he had thought ahead. Poor man, he had hours alone with nothing to do, and I didn’t think to bring him anything to do.
“Get a chair from the kitchen and put it in the shower,” he said. He set a business-like tone as he gave me instructions.
As I placed the seat under the nozzle, he pulled his body into the washroom and began to undress. His short commands only faltered when I tugged off his pants and underwear and hoisted him into the chair. I turned on the water and gave him the soap and the washcloth, leaving him to wash in private.
As I cleaned the dust, I wondered how he had gotten the long jagged scar stretched across his lower back. Shorter scars marked his arms and torso. His withered legs had flopped when I had moved him. I stopped wiping for a second to try to envision his life before the accident. One insight I did have while helping him into the shower. He was a natural blond, and I should probably apologize for my harsh comment I had made when I first met him about going back to the upper levels to have his hair dyed.
When I checked on Broken Man, he had turned the water off and sat dripping. I handed him a towel and assisted in drying and dressing. I debated how to move him. Despite my smaller size, all the time spent climbing through the ducts and pipes had strengthened my muscles. Not wanting him to drag his clean jumpsuit over the floor, I wrapped his arms around my neck,pulled his weight onto my back, and in a hunched over shuffle managed to get him into the chair in the living room.
“Thanks,” he said as he combed his fingers through wet hair.
“Food?” I asked.
He nodded. I brought him a bowl.
As he ate, he pointed to one of the walls where a rippled pattern was the only notable feature.
“See that? I bet it’s a computer terminal. I couldn’t reach it from the floor. Can you lift it?”
I studied the pattern. It consisted of horizontal sheets of metal about two-centimeters wide connected like a curtain. A dent at the bottom allowed my fingers to slide under.
“That’s it,” he said.
I pulled up, then stepped back in alarm as the metal curtain disappeared under the wall with a rolling sound. Behind the sheet was a flat computer screen and a console of buttons and plugs.
“Yes!” Broken Man said. For the first time since we had rescued him, he face glowed with excitement. “Help me get closer.”
I pushed his chair next to the wall. He reached out to touch a button.
“Wait,” I said in alarm. “If you turn it on won’t the Controllers know about it?”
“No. It’s only when you hook up to the internal system. The basic public system for the scrubs doesn’t require a port. Besides, I just want to see if it works.”
He pressed a series of switches. His hands moved with a practiced grace. The computer screen brightened, and the symbol for Inside appeared. Typically unimaginative, the symbol looked like a three-dimensional cube with a capital I on the front panel. As the children in the care facility would say, “Boring.” Little did they know the activities and schooling in theCF would be the most interesting part of their lives. I shook my head of the gloomy thoughts as Broken Man changed the image on the screen.
After awhile, he said, “It’s still connected to the main command system. We could access my disks from here.”
