Caesium Flare woke with a moan… Her alarm went off, a clunky device, like everything else… It bore more resemblance to a wire-covered metal brick than any clock she had heard about, not that she had ever heard of a clock in anything but the vaguest description… Apparently, a device to tell time, meanwhile her alarm would simply make a series of loud clicking sounds at given times. Her bed was nice and warm, and she didn’t want to leave it, but she did.
Pulling herself from the pool of heated solvent, she walked on the tile floor of her sleeping chamber and toward the drier… Her bed was a tub that had a constant flow of heated liquid pass through it, mostly water, although it contained some diluted nitric acid to help keep her clean, it even helped keep her fur short, it also left a wonderful metallic taste in her mouth that made her crave the tangy taste of iron oxides in the morning.
The drier was a simple cylindrical chamber with a powerful turbine in the ceiling that, at the click of a button, blasted her with searing hot air that felt wonderfully refreshing and made her smell of carbon, “The furnaces must be running hot today,” She muttered to herself, all the drier air came directly from the blast furnaces, a good use of the waste fumes.
Next, after walking out of the drier she put on her barding, a heavy thing, with lead plates held together by a fabric made from carbon fibres. The air was dreadfully cold after her ten minutes in the drier, and all the tastes in the air were making her hungry, so, right after getting dressed, she headed out to get a meal, but paused to look at herself in the mirror… She wanted her mane as neat as possible.
The mirror showed a tall mare, with a scaled back and nose, a puffy and curly mane coloured gleaming dark silver with highlights of shiny titanium-white, her coat a shimmering metallic black, her eyes the colour of uranium oxide crystals, one a bright yellowish-orange, the other a yellowish-green.
The hydraulic door opened silently as she walked into the hallway of her apartment block, everything in the Boiler Pit was lined with asbestos and gave everything a musty smell, steam rose from the vents, it wasn’t as warm as the blast of furnace air she had gotten in the drier, but it was still nice, and calmed her muscles a bit. The warm glow from the arc-lamps lit the hallway, and she walked off in the direction of the mess hall.
Trotting down a few flights of stairs and passing some more hydraulic doors, she came into the mess hall of her wing of the boiler pit… A massive room, with hundreds of her fellow kirin sitting on their steel-plated pews and drinking from the troughs, seeing them made her mouth water, and she walked over to the smell that drew her the most. Arriving at a ceramic channel filled with glowing liquid metals, she drunk the wonderfully warm fluid… Another kirin spotted Caesium, and came by to sit and drink with her.
“Yum,” She muttered, “What’s in this today?” She asked her friend, Oxide Leu, “I can taste nickel and iron, and it has that amazing tang of actinides…”
Leu said, in her quiet and kind tone, “Invar alloy with a seasoning of thorium and americium… I hear for lunch we’re getting a treat of lithium and boron…”
Caesium’s mouth watered at that thought, it had been ages since last she tasted boron, but she returned to gulping down the molten metal in the trough, not stopping until she was pleasantly full, Leu sipping daintily from her side of the trough. Finally, Caesium stood up, wiped the last bit of metal from her face, already starting to cool and harden, and marched off, walking outside for a breath of fresh air… It was still an hour before she had to report to her job at the MOX refinement plant.
She walked down another hallway, and walking through another hydraulic door, she found herself in the true bulk of the Boiler Pit… A massive metal sphere filled with all sorts of buildings. At the very bottom was a hatch into the mines, with constantly excavated metals, mostly for food and power… Iron was the standard ration for every single kirin in the boiler pit, it was common enough, and no kirin really had any other use for it, all the buildings were made from tungsten and asbestos, uranium went directly to the MOX plant to be refined into fuel, and no kirin was permitted to eat those resources, as they were needed for other purposes, although the depleted fuel, that which couldn’t be reprocessed, would always be mixed in with the food stock, the isotopes were delicious.
The air was a pleasantly cool one-hundred-and-eighty-three celsius, and her breath fogged in the breeze, trotting down the path she slowly made her way in the direction of the MOX plant, feeling the electrical tingle in the air as she passed under a large superconducting fibre-crystal cable, and feeling the ground rattle as a train passed underneath her. Actinic lights lit every square centimetre of the Boiler Pit, and cast strange shadows that seemed to turn the entire one-thousand-kilometre sphere into a monochromatic kaleidoscope of light and darkness.
Below her somewhere was the central reactor, the MOX-11, cooled by eutectic sodium-potassium mixture, powered by a mixed oxide fuel comprised of uranium and plutonium, just walking over the thing made her feel warm and fuzzy, most likely all the radiation the thing emitted, and she was tempted to simply stand there and absorb the neutrons… She really needed more isotopes in her diet… After her monthly checkup at the medic office, the doctor had recommended that she get some more radiation exposure, it was unhealthy for a kirin to go for too long without exposure, it helped regenerate their muscle tissue, and the nucleophyll in their scales meant that lack of exposure caused them some malnutrition… Perhaps that was why she was so hungry?
She continued trotting along the scaffolding, letting her mind wander… There was no recorded history before the construction of the Boiler Pit, but every kirin knew that they didn’t always live in the pit, and she briefly wondered what was outside, but pushed that thought away, it was said that the Boiler Pit existed for their safety and that something great and dangerous lived outside… The only piece of history that was know about that time was, apparently, kirin would have to eat gold and lead, since they didn’t have the vast forges in the east side of the pit to get their food from, and they got their radiation exposure from sitting out in something called the sun and soaking up UV rays, it sounded terrible, Caesium couldn’t imagine what it must be like, living off UV and Lead, it tasted disgusting.
Finally, she found herself at the door to the MOX plant and stepped inside.
