Brim settled into the chair of the cockpit and let all the air escape his body. The stink of whiskey still lingered on his breath from the night before. He had a headache—but that was nothing new. Lately his head had been a constant thrum of pain of one sort or another. The reasons varied from moment to moment but the pain remained the same. Tonight the reason was an encroaching hangover. He pawed for his flask. Where was it? He had to get ahead of this shit.
The Roamers cockpit was built for someone of a much lower weight class than Brim had ever been a member of, and he spent the first five minutes of his shift trying to find a position that was not comfortable, but tolerable. He was cramped—the very definition of confinement. The seat reminded him of a toy car his daughter once played around with in their backyard. Back when he had a backyard, back when he saw his daughter.
He found his flask, took a drink, set it between his legs. He had to make it last. This was going to be a long shift.
The toy car had been molded plastic in the shape and texture of a vinyl seat. It had been pink—bright fucking pink and it was always in the way—always in the kitchen. It eventually made its way outside. It became an outside toy. But not before Brim had complained at the top of his lungs for all to hear—including the neighbors. Some of them even got to see him throw the fucking thing from the back porch and onto the grass. All the while, his little girl stood there crying, then sobbing—growing comfortably numb with the world he had provided for her.
What he’d give to go back to that house and that stupid pink car.
He was surrounded by buttons and switches, reminding Brim of something out of an old NASA film—the inside of the space shuttle. So many switches. What the hell did they all do? How the hell was a forty-five year old divorced drunk, who couldn’t get his damn iPhone to work half the time supposed to operate this walking bulldozer?
But Brim learned. He’d found the manual under his seat. He forced himself to memorize every stained and tattered page. He dreamed that damn book in his sleep. The manual, which was the size of a phone book—remember phone books? And the pages were so old and crispy that they had cut him on several occasions. He’d not been the only one. The manual was stained in places, whole sections had been torn out. When he asked about it, his supervisor dismissed it as unimportant material. How could there be unimportant material in an instruction manual for a three-thousand ton walking machine that could uproot a skyscraper like a child plucking a dandelion?
But Brim had been able to understand how the Roamer functioned and that the switches on the overhead console needed to be switched on from left to right with a ten second pause between them in order to safely open the fuel rods in its nuclear core. He’d figured out on his own that he only needed to wait five seconds between each switch, which was a big deal because there were thirty of them running along overhead console.
Once that had been done, Brim would begin to feel the distant hum of some far off engine in his seat. It was nothing compared to what would happen once the reactor had reached maximum power.
The buttons over the console were system fail-safes in the event that one of the rods went south—wonky, or didn’t fully extract or was reacting too much. Visions of that Chernobyl documentary Brim had watched years ago flashed through his head every time he had to push one of those buttons. He was sitting on a Chernobyl reactor, sealed in a cockpit and there was nothing he could do once the top hatch had closed.
With the reactor humming away and his hangover in check, he closed his eyes and tried not to remember all that had happened.