Shine Out.
Saw an article about how the nuclear industry is having trouble competing with natural gas because The Gas owns more Congressmen and Senators and Hit Men than almost anybody, and that’s why Xylene is coming to your drinking water soon.
And there was this picture of a bunch of guys in yellow hats all standing around looking glum. And I thought, all right, someone just got laid off from the biggest reactor in the world, and so that’s it — drug test me, motherfuckers, I’m blowing this spleef right next to The Core. And so he has a little private party with the other laid-off workers while he’s on his last shift inside the hot zone; he’s got chips and dips and what not, and some Juicy Jack, and some good beer, and maybe even some tequila with lemons and salt.
Well. He started off the day with a hash capsule right before he hits the first checkpoint, so by the time they’re all locked in and Doing The Job one last time, security’s in with them, and the cameras go down awwww. So for eight hours, these people are rocking the reactor, dancing, gettin’ a little out of control –
But our guy, the guy we’re following, gets a little introspective, maybe because of the hash, maybe because it’s the last time he’ll ever see Margaret again, and he’s having trouble accepting that. So he goes in through the Big Door and shuts it behind him, and he sits close to the humming cap of The Glowing Core, and he has a little pipe.
At some point, he starts to feel like he’s becoming one with the reactor core. He can feel the heat, taste the uranium, roil with the water. He can see through the entire distance of the perfect thickness of the cap, and the crystal lattice of the metallic compound that stretches to the Inside, and he starts to feel as if he can control the whole thing with his mind, and he tries –
And it works. Really, it was just the AI spooling the core up on a programmed cycle, but this guy thinks he did it.
Maybe. He knows how stoned he is, though. So he doubts himself. He spends the rest of the day hugging the cap, talking to the reactor, trying to get it to rise for him again. But it won’t, and thus ends the last day of his employment there. On to the solar farms of liberal Iowa for this guy.
The reactor thought about it later, felt some regret, and called his name as the late shift began the full-on shutdown; but the man had gone away, and the late shift was no collection of pansy-waist partiers, no. They were the serious product of good childbeating homes, truly religious and hypersexual environments where everything good in the world happened Under The Bed, and they weren’t about to get friendly with The Thing on the last day, so when it tried to talk to them, they ignored it completely, like it wasn’t even there.
And that’s why it decided to Shine Out.
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