Shownotes
In a world where the air is completely polluted, driving everyone to live in underground bunker-cities, Sherm, a miner of the lowliest rung realised change can come from unity and solidarity of the downtrodden.
Today’s story is “A Part of The Machine” by MikasiWolf , a Singaporean Furry writer. His works have been published by FurPlanet, Rabbit Valley, Goal Publications among others. You can find links to more of his stories on his FA or WikiFur page.
Read for you by Khaki, your faithful fireside companion.
Transcripts
You’re listening to The Voice of Dog. I’m Khaki,
Speaker:your faithful fireside companion,
Speaker:and Today’s story is
Speaker:“A Part of The Machine” by MikasiWolf (https://twitter.
Speaker:(https://twitter.com/MikasiWolf) , a Singaporean Furry writer.
Speaker:His works have been published by FurPlanet,
Speaker:Rabbit Valley, Goal Publications among others.
Speaker:You can find links to more of his stories
Speaker:on his FA or WikiFur page https://www.furaffinity.net/user/mikasiwolf/ https://en.wikifur.com/wiki/MikasiWolf
Speaker:Please enjoy:
Speaker:“A Part of the Machine”
Speaker:by MikasiWolf Sherm coughed with the sharp wheeze of air through metal,
Speaker:his lungs and mask fighting for his body’s survival.
Speaker:The more volatile gases of the smog had already permeated the primary filters of his mask,
Speaker:a river of poison breaching a courageous dam.
Speaker:The badger stumbled his way
Speaker:across the cable-reinforced planks
Speaker:suspended between the hovering zeppelin flats
Speaker:that housed his home,
Speaker:taking good care to snap his belt karabiner
Speaker:to the safety cable trailing above him.
Speaker:Many a Skyfarer had fallen to the great below in their haste to escape the deadly environmental storms,
Speaker:fear of the most horrific of deaths overcoming routines of safe living.
Speaker:Stumbling over the precarious bridge with the reassuring pull of the cable,
Speaker:Sherm dashed down the gangway as his karabiner pulled free,
Speaker:then felt as much as looked for his quarters through the thick, putrid smog,
Speaker:eyes and nose watering.
Speaker:Quarters 312...313...314...yes!
Speaker:Cranking open the door to his airlock even as the storm fought to blow it back shut,
Speaker:Sherm staggered inside,
Speaker:throwing the locking wheel shut.
Speaker:But he was not out of the woods yet.
Speaker:Keeping his mask on despite his protesting sinuses,
Speaker:the badger punched his code into the mechanical locking system.
Speaker:With a click of gears and crankshafts,
Speaker:the hiss of the Airlock Purge System resounded,
Speaker:purifying the air
Speaker:in a quick isobaric process.
Speaker:Sherm dropped his mask next to the airtight door to his quarters,
Speaker:half-collapsing against the wall in asphyxiation.
Speaker:He gulped in great lungfuls of purified air,
Speaker:panting and choking
Speaker:as his belly heaved.
Speaker:Brown and black particulate-streaked sweat started condensing against his black-striped brow
Speaker:and streamed towards his eyes, but the badger was too relieved to even bother.
Speaker:He leaned gratefully against the pitted bronze door,
Speaker:knowing now that he would live to breathe another day.
Speaker:Another sudden storm had struck as he and the other miners worked on the mineral deposits
Speaker:that gathered in the catalytic chambers
Speaker:built on a mountain range they were sailing past in a mining run.
Speaker:A number of workers
Speaker:had taken to the ground-based shelters and their quarters,
Speaker:but the ill-fated had been swept off the peaks,
Speaker:their screams barely heard as the storm raged around.
Speaker:Such storms fluctuated across the layers of atmosphere across the more polluted regions of the world,
Speaker:manifested by the differences in chemical concentrations throughout it.
Speaker:The miners had lost a number of their best friends and co-workers,
Speaker:and this only left the Claimer foreman to put in another request for more miners.
Speaker:But who else did they have to blame, really, when humankind itself was the cause of nature’s new, fickle moods? #
Speaker:Even in the midst of destruction did commercialization prevail.
Speaker:For years, air pollution was a cause for concern but
Speaker:everyone saw it as a necessary evil.
Speaker:Industry and commerce could not prevail if
Speaker:the factories and its necessary emissions were stifled.
Speaker:So the humans assigned some regions solely for those industries, places named
Speaker:Commercially Important Zones.
Speaker:The air around them grew noxious by the centuries,
Speaker:and it could no longer be denied it was taking its toll on civilization.
Speaker:Birth defects, reduced machine life,
Speaker:weather fluctuations and chemical rains were soon a weekly,
Speaker:then daily affair.
Speaker:It was soon apparent that it was no longer feasible to live on the surface.
Speaker:Like rats chased into their holes, the people of the world fled underground to escape the fumes of their undoing.
Speaker:Subterranean communes of
Speaker:bomb shelters, subways and underground cities became the survivors’ last hope.
Speaker:This became known as
Speaker:the Fumigation. The old cities followed the diaspora with their own obliteration,
Speaker:slowly crumbling into the tattered remnants of a past that once was,
Speaker:concrete and steel facades falling prey to the fetid air their occupants had begotten.
Speaker:As the survivors sought to undo the undoable,
Speaker:and live to breathe for a few months more,
Speaker:it was clear that the electronics of the old world suffered the worst from the breath of the dying planet.
Speaker:Circuits pitted over and components fell apart, and it didn’t take a scientist to realize
Speaker:that the digital age was over,
Speaker:along with an old and over-depended upon way of life.
Speaker:Through a mix of innovation and desperation,
Speaker:the engineers and mechanics became society’s salvation.
Speaker:They built systems of a completely mechanical persuasion,
Speaker:sustaining their people in ways thought forgotten.
Speaker:HVAC systems gave way to catalytic filters and pneumatic-powered pumps of gears and crankshafts.
Speaker:Robust and near indestructible,
Speaker:these mechanical breathing systems became the pulse of entire settlements,
Speaker:and their fundamental design
Speaker:birthed forth the air suits Underdwellers needed to survive on the surface.
Speaker:With the lives of humans considered far too important,
Speaker:anthros were created to do their more dangerous bidding.
Speaker:With their more acute senses, they could detect air leaks and poisonous fumes better,
Speaker:and their lives were not considered a significant loss.
Speaker:The old pillars of society had crumbled
Speaker:along with the monuments that stood proof of their existence,
Speaker:but some things never changed.
Speaker:The thirst for power.
Speaker:The greed and hunger that lay within all.
Speaker:The moment society found a way out of its shared paradox,
Speaker:the ambitious started seizing power.
Speaker:People never changed, come hell or noxious fumes,
Speaker:and new factions emerged even as communities fought for their identity.
Speaker:There were those who believed
Speaker:the old ways of the pre-digital age were best,
Speaker:as was how mankind
Speaker:was meant to live.
Speaker:There were god-fearing groups who theorized everyone’s only salvation was to be consumed by the earth
Speaker:just as countless other civilizations had been.
Speaker:Some sought to unite the disparate people,
Speaker:but with so many factions emerging, each with their own promises and hopes to back it up,
Speaker:no one knew which cause was justified and wasn’t.
Speaker:Those who sought to rebuild society through industry garnered
Speaker:the support of many,
Speaker:and mining facilities on the topside became a necessity.
Speaker:As a wise man once said,
Speaker:the cities of the New World weren’t built on air and mere dreams.
Speaker:It was built on foundations of corrosion-resistant concrete and stainless steel,
Speaker:with infrastructures of copper and bronze.
Speaker:It was created by the toil and blood
Speaker:of many hardworking men and women,
Speaker:and only through the gathering of resources did civilization become a reality.
Speaker:And in order to step out of the bunkers and holes
Speaker:the last of the world’s civilization cower within,
Speaker:society had to take that one brave step,
Speaker:and rebuild itself one pillar at a time.
Speaker:But what had once been
Speaker:cannot be so again,
Speaker:for to live in the past
Speaker:was to die in the present. #
Speaker:Sherm plonked himself onto a barstool, gesturing half-dazed towards the bartender.
Speaker:Without so much as a grunt,
Speaker:a glass of his usual accompanied by a shot-glass of lung purifier
Speaker:clinked onto the bartop.
Speaker:Sherm gulped the yellow medicine aptly named
Speaker:BarMed, gagging as the contaminants in his lungs, throat and nose dissolved,
Speaker:the solvent cocktail doing its job.
Speaker:Already his throat was regaining its composure,
Speaker:and he croaked out a thanks.
Speaker:After the Fumigation,
Speaker:doctors were in short supply, having largely fled to the self-sustaining bunkers of the rich and powerful.
Speaker:Most of the poorer Topsiders who lived and worked upon the polluted surface thus relied on barmen and quacks for all their medical needs.
Speaker:And woe betide those who said homebrew was inferior to the treatment of the fancy doctors.
Speaker:Sure, a swig of BarMed was full of industrial and household chemicals, but it worked,
Speaker:and was about twenty times cheaper.
Speaker:Sherm took a deep breath to clear his nostrils right before downing a muzzleful of imitation Scotch.
Speaker:Probably another mixture of chemicals, but still...
Speaker:“You’re not the first this day.”
Speaker:winked Barry the bartender.
Speaker:The skunk twitched his muzzle towards a group of miners leaning against the wall at the far end.
Speaker:Like Sherm, they were miner-folk,
Speaker:a honey badger with two moles.
Speaker:Their noses were dripping from the aftereffects of the BarMed,
Speaker:and one could say they looked almost drunk.
Speaker:But then, so many other organic solvents could have caused it.
Speaker:There wasn’t any human miners to be seen,
Speaker:and there never will be,
Speaker:not with their belief that their lives are more valuable than any other species.
Speaker:Ever since ground-based mining was largely abandoned due to thick smog making such endeavors expensive and dangerous,
Speaker:a multi-faction alliance of engineers had developed the concept of
Speaker:catalytic chambers
Speaker:built high in the atmosphere atop mountains.
Speaker:The traditional miner-folk were still depended upon for mining the
Speaker:much-needed resources polarized within the chambers which were hollowed-out like caves.
Speaker:Coupled with strong winds,
Speaker:whatever ionic traces of metals and minerals that were dissolved into the atmosphere
Speaker:from years of attrition upon the cities and constructs of long past
Speaker:were the most dense this high up.
Speaker:The gathered mass of toxic sludge
Speaker:adhered to the differential polarities of the catalytic chambers,
Speaker:allowing the miners to gather them by paw.
Speaker:The cavelike structure of the chambers ensured the polarized sludge wasn’t worn away by surrounding weather conditions.
Speaker:This was purified into its base constituents within the wind-powered smelter on the zeppelin town,
Speaker:further processed into raw materials, before being sent down to the underground
Speaker:and other floating cities that remained the backbone of civilization.
Speaker:There, the extracted materials, primarily metals,
Speaker:found a new life.
Speaker:Steel was made into the weapons that fought the many factions’ neverending struggles for power,
Speaker:while corrosion-resistant bronze
Speaker:the piping and rebar used to repair the breathing and sanitary infrastructure of the bunkers.
Speaker:Maybe even build some chair for the bourgeois who
Speaker:didn’t even know the metal composition.
Speaker:It was the circle of life and death, and everyone, humble miner to glorified fighter
Speaker:all had their place in it.
Speaker:Sherm was thoroughly sick of it.
Speaker:Ever since the Commissioner started the Suspended Mining Towns, or SMTs, as they were often called,
Speaker:which were based on the technology used to suspend the Human’s floating cities,
Speaker:Sherm was a part of the great machine of war and survival. The scotch and the
Speaker:occasional BarMed used to numb and calm him,
Speaker:but now it failed to lull him even in the comfort that came with all things potent.
Speaker:He took another drink as he contemplated his place
Speaker:in the grand scheme of things.
Speaker:Even as he regained his breath,
Speaker:so that he may reignite the war effort of some power-crazed warlord with his work,
Speaker:many lives were lived and lost down below,
Speaker:battle after battle wearing down on families,
Speaker:friends and associates alike.
Speaker:He wished he could say he was also helping rebuild society,
Speaker:but his mining craft didn’t produce all that much copper for the bronze needed for building.
Speaker:Not surprising, with the higher demand of steel over copper these days.
Speaker:War never stopped.
Speaker:There were days when he wished
Speaker:that the new leaders remembered the mistakes of the past, but much remained the same.
Speaker:War. Pollution. Despair. For as long as civilization existed, all of this would.
Speaker:And he was a part of that system,
Speaker:a gear out of many that made up the vast machine
Speaker:that served the warring factions.
Speaker:And everyone else were part of it too,
Speaker:instrumental to their own undoing. Could they not see that they had a common goal to work towards, to lift themselves up from the
Speaker:ashes of the world? Must war really be another resurgence of the past? A clanking of the ventilator made Sherm scowl back at it, with barely a twitch of his tail. Old Barry promised
Speaker:that he had sent out a request for parts to fix it,
Speaker:but the air purity of his bar wasn’t a priority of the Yakama metalworks,
Speaker:not when fabricating weapon parts paid better.
Speaker:But for the miner folk of Minercraft Lima,
Speaker:the failure of one small ventilator meant an abrupt end to their underappreciated lives.
Speaker:And this would mean a downtime of perhaps another three months
Speaker:until the right parts for the ventilator could be procured,
Speaker:along with the recruitment of a replacement crew.
Speaker:With one major supplier of raw material down,
Speaker:the many metalworks that relied on them
Speaker:would have production halted while it was rebuilt.
Speaker:The workshops that made the guns, weapons and ammunition
Speaker:would no long have anything to work with.
Speaker:Wars that were fought day and night
Speaker:had to be stopped,
Speaker:and peace would reign below and above ground, at least till production resumed.
Speaker:In fact, their Minercraft had lost contact with another not three days.
Speaker:Malfunction or revolt?
Speaker:Nobody knows. Sherm sat upright.
Speaker:In the great machine that was the economy,
Speaker:the badger realized Lima
Speaker:was one of the many essential gears that ran it.
Speaker:Take just one gear or part away, and the entire machine was useless.
Speaker:And when the machine didn’t work,
Speaker:it became highly dependent on that particular part,
Speaker:to the point that it wielded more importance than the others.
Speaker:And if he, Sherm of Dustbrook,
Speaker:could halt production with the help of his fellow miners,
Speaker:wouldn’t the working class now wield the true power?
Speaker:If they went on strike,
Speaker:refusing to work,
Speaker:who was to say that the other Minercraft wouldn’t follow their example?
Speaker:Society could finally have the peace that it needed,
Speaker:the common ground for all to work together.
Speaker:There will be threats made,
Speaker:violence meted out,
Speaker:but everyone had some manner of combat experience ever since the Fumigation turned everything to shit.
Speaker:It was the way things were.
Speaker:Sherm had an old pneumatic rifle
Speaker:and pistol his father had passed down to him, believing he would never use it,
Speaker:but it didn’t look that case now.
Speaker:The badger downed the last of his scotch
Speaker:and stood. He now knew what he must do.
Speaker:The Revolution begins
Speaker:today.This was “A Part of the Machine”
Speaker:by MikasiWolf, read for you by Khaki,
Speaker:your faithful fireside companion.
Speaker:You can find more stories on the web at thevoice.dog,
Speaker:or find the show wherever you get your podcasts.
Speaker:Thank you for listening
Speaker:to The Voice of Dog