ingots

 It was cleanup time again.

The plant operator was supposed to be good enough at his job to avoid this, but here I was again, shovelling lumps of waxy rage and slivers of regret and empty bubbles of crystallized disappointment into the crucible.

The heat would slowly soften them, then they would melt. I'd then stir the lumpy goo with a big glass rod until it was just thick goo, and then I'd squeeze it out into the molds. They'd cool there, wafting shimmers of heat into the room and across the ceiling, then solidify. The heat would get pretty awful, but at least they shrank away from the sides of the ingot molds. Stacking came next; the far wall had row upon row of these little ingots, stacked away. No one knew what to do with them; they were inert weight, bending space-time ever so slightly more than their surroundings, crying out to be used and refusing to even speak.

When the last bar was cast, set, and stacked, it was time to cool off and clean up. The bits that splashed, burbled, offgassed, or splattered on me as I worked needed to come off and go in the hopper for the next run--I wasn't allowed to leave the oppressively hot room with it on me, so I started working the intraplant signalling system. It was after hours; the break room only had a few people in it, screaming past each other in an attempt to, what, hear themselves scream? Make the pain stop? Make the pain multiply? Certainly not scrub or scrape someone else's protective gear. The control room was a skeleton crew with far too much to do; no spare cycles there. The engineering bay was noisy with the automatons left overnight to fill the silence, the few nocturnal engineers too engrossed to look up at the plant status lights.

And why should they? I'm a little cog cleaning up a mess that shouldn't, on the face of it, exist.

So I use the self-filtering shower to get most of it off, stopping every few minutes to let the solvent slip through the filters, then emptying the filters into the hopper. After a few cycles of painsstaking scrubbing and filtration, I would cast one last ingot, set the tongs down, and stare at it cooled. I had to wonder if some of it was my own, and not from the industrial processes the plant was charged with.

Still, it was done. I could go listen to the vain shrieking or wander, unseen, through the engineering department. At least the ingots were stacked. For now.