Micah was an Engineer.
Micah was not a something-engineer. She did not have a degree in mechanical enginering or chemical engineering or civil engineering. She most definitely did not have a degree in social engineering. She did not actually have a degree in anything at all, she had passed no standardized fundamentals of engineering exams, and some people might have been severely distraught at the fact that she was known as an engineer at all.
Micah was not the sort of engineer that a degree generally indicated. She did not know how to document her engineering in any formalized way. In fact she was very sloppy and rarely documented her engineering at all. Micah tended to remember things very well without documentation and felt that anyone else should be able to do the same. If someone else wanted to know what Micah had done, they would just have to ask her and be satisfied with her explanation. When she finally went to the Void, there would be a lot of figuring out for other people to make any use of her work. But that did not overly concern her. Micah did not believe in the afterlife, and anything that happened after she was gone was somebody else's problem.
Micah did not entirely understand time tables and gantt charts and prospectuses and proposals. She was not interested in these things and so chose not to entirely understand them. If you got her to build something it was going to get done more quickly than anyone else could have done it, so there was no point in making schedules and planning things and dealing with, as she called it, executive management nonsense. If you needed something by a certain time than she would work on it, and if it wasn't enough time then nothing could have been done anyway.
Micah was not the sort of engineer that was more interested in effects than in causes. She liked to tell an joke involving a rubber ball, a mathematician, a physicist, and an engineer in which the engineer demonstrates that being able to look up answers in a table is vastly superior to knowing why the answer is what it is. This joke made her laugh because it showed how stupid most engineers really were.
Micah was kind of an everything-engineer. She understood biochemical processes just as well as electrical or mechanical ones. In fact there was no field of engineering which she did not understand from the high-level conceptual visualizations right down to the roots in equations and low-level laws of physics. If one out of a hundred of her new filtering systems did not work she did not dismiss it as "fabrication error". Instead she would spend hours or days or longer investigating every single error until she understood exactly why the silicon atom at this point in this chip affected its filtering abilities differently than the silicon atom in that chip.
Micah was also not a chip-away engineer. Chip-away engineers were the sort of scientist who were content to take an existing device they didn't entirely understand, read the tech sheet, make a few tests and assumptions, and then create a version which was 4.35% better. Micah regarded this sort of engineering as Merlin or Gandalf might have regarded you pulling flowers out of your sleeve in your living room to entertain your neice for a bit. Micah made things. She took ideas that had never been entertained by anyone, or at least not seriously, and made them into things you could see and hold and switch on. That kind of an engineer couldn't know just how things work, they had to know why.
To say Micah was an engineer was to say that you had seen Brue Lee down at the gym for a few minutes last night and thought he might be good in a fight. Micah was an Engineer. She might not have had a degree or even any schooling, but she had more technical experience than any engineer from MIT had by the age of sixty, and she was only just starting to experience the joys of puberty.
She was currently hiding in a heating duct and crying. The tears had started by just making a kind of sludge on her face, but had gathered enough of themselves together to give the grime a good run for its money and were now grimly cutting tracks of pale white through the grey-brown layers.
Everything about Micah was grey-brown - her whole body was covered in a thick filmy cake of dirt and oil and smoke and things best left unmentioned. Her clothes had been an ugly grey-brown to begin with, and the grime had only altered the shade somewhat. The Manager did not approve of things like color in his group, and he was the one who gave them their clothes. He also did not approve of bathing, which took time and energy and precious water. What Micah's hair might have originally been colored it was difficult to say, but it was now the same color as the rest of her. The only spot of color on her person was her eyes. A close examination would have shown that the whites of her eyes were not, in fact, white, but were instead a pale, pale blue. Her irises were a very dark violet with flecks of something shiny, possibly gold, although Micah had never seen gold. Her pupils were unusually large, which was natural given that she was currently in a very dark place and had been for some time.
She was crying because something was dripping on to her leg and it burned terribly. From the smell and her location, she had guessed (correctly - if the computer analysis didn't agree with Micah's guesses, the Manager confronted the computer operator) that the substance was a powerful acid which was used to clean certain kinds of residues that tended to accumulate in various places on the station. Micah could have drawn a stick figure of the acid's structure showing each of the 1,229 atoms, along with bond angles and repulsion areas and chirality which would, upon examination, prove to be inhumanly accurate considering that they probably would have been drawn on the floor with her dirty finger. However she did not know what the acid was called, and its name will not be included here due to its length and complexity and, most importantly, its unpronouncability and irrevelance.
The point was that it had been dripping on a spot just below her right calf muscle for some time now and was extremely painful. It had slowly burned through her uniform and her undergarments and was now slowly burning its way through her leg. Intermixed with the smell of the acid and a dozen other mechanical smells was the smell of her own muscle cooking. It was not a frantic drip - it had time and it seemed to know this. It was a patient drip, drip, dripping that had a touch of the random to it - she had for a time tried to deal with the acid by estimating the time between drops, and had identified at least three conjuctive periodicities combining with more complex elements to make the drops almost, but not quite, unpredictable. The unpredictability made the anticipation of each drop that much worse - she knew when one was about to come, but not exactly - and it got worse and worse and every muscle in her body would tense and her teeth would press against each other, and then, just when some obstinant hope in the far corner of her prodigal mind would blossom, it would fall. Drip. And she would fight and fight to make her body still as it crackled and hissed and subsided to silence and began to gather itself for another go.
The reason that she absolutely could not move was that if she did, even just a little bit, the metal material which formed the structure of the heating duct would shift and make noise, and the men standing in the room below would kill her.
Micah did not believe in any deities, but if she did she would probably have been praying that she did not sneeze or in any way make noise.
The men in the room below her were only just barely that - only just barely men, and only just barely below her. The station had been designed for efficiency before comfort and Micah was close enough to the men below her that she could have touched them without having to seriously alter her arm's position on the floor of the duct. Through the grate below her she could examine the tops of their heads in much greater detail than she cared to.
They were not quite as dirty as she was, but they did not have the opportunity to bathe either, and tended to partake of activities which left them sweaty. The men on the station had one job and one job only, and that was to hurt people. Human females were used for breeding and for engineering and for menial tasks, but human males were clearly far superior to females in military matters and so this was what they were made to do.
Humans were not actually all that proficient at hurting people or at engineering or even at breeding, compared to most other races, but humans were cheap to make and buy and replace if you happened to lose one in a fight or a construction accident. The men below her were the lowest sort of expendable physical enforcement and not one would be missed for an instant if he should disappear. They had been modified, hormone injections and quick, easy surgeries that killed a horrifying percentage of the patients, but left the survivors as great hulking beasts. The predatory, domineering instincts in the men were brought to the surface of their minds and souls, accompanied by dramatic increases in bone density and muscle mass and sensory ability. The cost to their brains and lifespans was as horrifying as the numbers of rejections, but no tears were shed. Humans were the gutter trash of the galaxy, the ideal slave race. The early days of genetic engineering had proven vat-grown slaves a thousand times more efficient and cheap than robotics, much to the dismay of the long-forgotten robotics vendors.
The men below her, like all humans, had short hair, shaved off their heads once a decan to cut down on parasites. The shavings were collected and rendered into organic paste like all human waste, and would later be used to grow new babies for the station when these humans were all in the Void.
The man below her sniffed the air for the hundredth time. He could tell that Micah was close or had been here at some time, but the mask of filth on her body made her smell difficult to find, and the air currents in the heating duct carried most of it away to another place. If the man's creators had thought to include a few more vestiges of intelligence in him, he might have realized that the smell had not diminished in the several minutes he had been standing there, which meant that she in fact had not gone somewhere else. However males were not nearly as good at thinking as they were at killing things, so those attributes had been sacrificed long ago. In fact the level of genetic engineering and selective inbreeding at this point insured that the males would probably have been uselessly stupid even if they had not been subjected to enzymatic and surgical lobotomization, just as Micah's genes had been selected to make her an even better engineer than her predecessors.
The man looked at another man and growled. From Micah's view point it was not possible to say what expression the man had, but she could guess. They didn't have many to choose from, and they almost all involved frowning and baring teeth.
The other man growled back, and a third man grunted from his position, leaning against a set of lockers in a side wall. Micah could not see this man very well but he seemed to be examining his hands and occasionally picking his nose with a long, yellow fingernail.
These and other men had been searching for Micah for almost two secahs now, and like all the others they had become bored with the task after not immediately finding her.
Micah tensed and gritted her teeth, and after a time which was small and random and seemed to last forever, the drop hit her leg. Crackle, hiss, silence. The noise was hidden from the men among the countless dripping and creaking noises that the station was constantly filled with. Their hearing was quite impressive by Earth standards, but was rarely used to track anything in the station. Smell worked much better. Biological entities normally stood out in the background smells of metal and plastic and industrial chemicals, and humans were exceptionally good at tracking other humans, for some reason.
The man below Micah growled again, and then pointed a fingernail at the second man and said something. Micah did not understand man-speak, so she did not know what was said, but like most things in man-speak it was either a challenge or or a demand for something. The second man showed his teeth with a terrific growl and shifted his stance to something wider that suggested a readiness to fight anyone and anything interested. The third, relaxed man grunted again, but when no one seemed to pay attention, he became more interested and stood fully up, watching the other two. A fight was vastly more entertaining than his fingernail, apparently.
Micah had had her interest in violence chemically supressed a long time ago. If human females were going to be used for sensitive scientific projects then there was no need to leave them with the knack for destruction that made the men so useful. Not taking risks was what had kept the stations running as long as they had been, and intelligent fighters were risky, even if they were only human. Consequently, the thought of watching the men below her tear each other apart, as they no doubt were about to do, made her violently ill. Her stomach clenched and squeezed painfully and her throat filled with bile, and the self-control which had kept her still during a seemingly infinite number of acid drips fought desperately to keep her from moving. She clamped shut her eyes and concentrated on being safe and quiet at her desk, debugging some other engineer's code (Micah's code generally worked the first time), or examining some sample of tissue or metallics under the scope. Her breathing came in short bursts and she was dangerously close to hyperventillating. Come on, come on...the cube root of the first three five digit prime numbers, to seven decimal places, that usually works...seven...multiply...reiterate... Just as she was beginning to calm down, three things happened to destroy her mental focus.
First, another drop of acid hit her leg. Crackle. Hiss.
Second, just as she jerked from her mathematical utopia, eyes flashing open in pain, she saw the man below her swing his hand blindingly fast and carve his opponent's throat into a mushy red mass. Blood splattered on the floor and sprayed in thick slimy streams and drops, and part of the man's throat flew through the air to smack wetly against the third man, who squealed enthusiastically and beat his chest. Micah's stomach heaved and she realized that in less than a peh-secah she was going to be noisily vomiting through the grate and onto the head of the man below her. The pain in her head and chest instantly overwhelmed the burning feeling in her leg as various biochemical reactions occurred, creating the sensation of a simultaneous migrane headache and heart attack.
Third, a klaxon sounded throughout the base, announcing to the hunters (and to the hunted) that the search was being given up, at least for now. The sound was piercingly loud this close to the ceiling panel it eminated from, and Micah felt actual physical pain in her ears.
The klaxon was long and arhythmic, designed to be heard by anyone and everyone and to be unmistakable. The men straightened and dashed out the door, their companion's body sitting in a confused heap next to the entrance, blood still coming from the ruined neck in spurts. The man's eyes were unfocused and did not seem to notice when Micah began uncontrollably retching into the grate, spewing the feeble contents of her stomach along with a disturbing amount of blood. The liquids splattered on the floor in a slowly widening pool. Her convulsions continued well into dry heaves and threatened to intensify whenever she thought about the dying man by the door.
Eventually she stopped, and managed to crawl back down the duct a few feet until she was no longer in sight of the carnage or in danger of lying in traces of her vomit. She clutched at her stomach uselessly as her gag reflex continued spasmodically. After some time she collapsed, feeling too wrung out and tense to move. The pain in her head and chest faded slowly, pulsing with her blood as the chemicals were gradually washed from her system.
But Micah was a tough kid, and her last thought before her mind swum into a dizzy, spinning oblivion, was one of triumph. She was still alive.
Micah dreamed about nice things. In her dreams she wasn't in pain, she was somewhere safe and doing things she liked. Sometimes she was working on projects, finding out why things worked or what was wrong with things that didn't. Other times she was with her friends, telling jokes about stupid engineers and stupid men and stupid Managers.
Her favorite dream was about her mother. She had never seen her mother. But her friends had told her what a mother was, and she knew that the person she dreamed about was her mother. She was nice and soft and she smelled good. She was incredibly beautiful - Micah didn't know what the word "beautiful" meant because nothing in her life was, but she understood the concept and that is all that counts in dreams. Micah's mother was all white and gold and shone like a star. Micah thought she was too bright to look at sometimes. If she had been seeing her with real eyes then they might have been hurt, but dream eyes could see anything.
Micah's mother held her for a while and she was safe.
Micah's chest contracted painfully and she coughed herself awake. She blinked for a while, trying to remember where she was. Then she remembered the dead man and smelled her vomit and almost added to it. Her reaction to the violence below had left her body weak and stiff. She tried to move her joints in the small amount of space she had, and cringed as pain flashed up her legs. Something was tickling her neck. She reached with a trembling hand and brushed at her ears. Her fingers came away sticky with drying blood. Her nose seemed to be dripping too, but examination found that it was only snot. She could hear her movements in the flimsy duct, but they seemed to be coming from the other side of a wall - her ears had been damaged. Micah hoped it was temporary.
Her mouth was dry and tasted terrible. Salty and pukey. Her stomach felt as though it was cut, but it also growled to remind her that the little food she had stolen was now decorating the room below. She made a dry, itchy sound that was a product of both sigh and whimper and began inching back down the heating duct to the last junction, not wanting to risk seeing the bloody carcass below the grate.
In the duct junction she performed a strange, painful manuever which very nearly required her to crawl between her own legs, and reversed her direction. The space in the ducts was small and not easily traversed by a growing girl, but she was flexible - well, normally - and she managed. Some of the strength returned to her limbs and her head felt a bit less clogged full of fluff, and she decided it was time to steal some more food and see about finding a permanent place to hide.