Karen is panting, climbing up the round staircase to the monitor hall; she is accompanied by RJ the brunette with a mustache. He is wearing a pair of round glasses now.
Karen hates awkward silences and usually breaks them by explaining her favorite scientific topics. Right now, for some reason, she feels perfectly calm walking up the stairs in silence with the mustached man.
"So, elevators..." RJ breaks the silence. "We have them here but they are so high maintenance we keep them only in working areas. The resting blocks have none, you have to walk up and down stairs all the time." RJ finishes with an awkward smile. Karen smiles back "He must be uncomfortable with awkward silences too."
"Batteries don''t last here too, I hope your friend''s headphone batteries are special because lithium batteries die in the magnetic field in just a few hours."
Karen stops on her step. RJ stops to look back. "Her batteries are cesium, they last longer." She looks at her watch and resumes climbing. "The headphone batteries have failed by now." She pinches a stream of her hair on her right shoulder and starts curling it around her index nervously. "I hope her pocket flashlight doesn''t fail."
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<td style="width: 93.7586%">For unknown reasons, CASTEL does not allow the Cosmic Mirror to reflect sunlight on plasma rigs for longer than a few hours. Some assume that it has to do with reflecting energy onto a volatile rig.</td>
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Damn thing is waking up." The jittering stops a few seconds later and the worm returns to looking lifeless again.
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<td style="width: 90.495%">The doctor''s equipment has protection against magnetic radiation but its half-life is limited.</td>
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"Where do you think they are?" asks RJ.
"I don''t have a clue. The doctor always does this part of the extermination alone." The two of them are facing the metallic entrance door of the monitor hall.
Karen has never accompanied the doctor in the final procedure of any past Vermillion worm mission. The doctor never took an assistant with her. She only needed remote backup from the center to calculate the exact ejection site of the worm, "The location must be AI-calculated live. That fucking overflow killed the connection." Karen suddenly realizes she just spoke loudly.
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<td style="width: 91.4743%">Karen and most of the CASTEL employees are completely AI-dependent, Rayne and her everyday assistant, Jane, are some of the few trained to go offline if necessary.</td>
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