Natalie

Natalie had been to all sectors of the energy section, to the administration office, then to the security office, and then back to the living quarters of the New York building, where she spent considerable time knocking on Morgan's apparently empty apartment. He was nowhere to be found and no one knew where he might be except at his workplace in the lab. The administration had even hinted to her that she should not inquire about such matters during working hours, and that if a man was not at his workplace, his immediate superior, namely the head of the energy section, should always know about it.

Natalie didn't say that he wasn't at his workplace either, and that since they didn't know, they should just say so. She'd recently begun to notice that the people around her were more fucked up than she'd realized before. In fact, before she'd met Morgan, before their first night together, she hadn't noticed anyone else's fuck-ups at all. People grumbled when they didn't want to answer or didn't know the right answer. That's how people are. Of course, there had to be some reason behind it, but it had never occurred to her that most of these people had the same reason. So much depended on physiology, and the most primitive one at that… She was also surprised that people of different ages behaved like that, both those younger than her and those older. It manifested itself in a few different ways, but still the same disgusting shade of something inferior was in all these faces at the same time. In fact, it gave away the very general similarity of nervous grouchiness and caustic behavior in all these faces.

– You could have fucked each other," Natalie said, staring at the locked door of Morgan's apartment. – I don't want to be like that.

She turned around and went back to the administration office, after all, Sierra was a close friend of hers, and maybe she could find out something through her. It was also worth supporting her now, after she'd complained about what was going on with Charlie. They were all the same problems, all because of men.

***

Sierra wasn't there either, and her assistant said she hadn't shown up since morning. This was becoming not just surprising, but suspicious. Something was happening on the station that was no longer a possibility, but a given. At least two section chiefs were missing, Morgan, without whom

the life of their only power station was impossible, was missing. The only thing left to do is to kidnap her herself, so that everyone will immediately forget about the new helium-3 possibilities.

The administration building included the main hall, inside of which there were small cubicles of ordinary clerks, and in different corners offices of chiefs. There were almost no people, and it seemed that today the office work at the station was more dead than alive.

What was the point of having so many hookworms anyway? – Natalie thought and turned to leave this seemingly useless mess. It wasn't even the files in the computer, it was the sheets of paper, which took so many resources to produce that it could probably feed a second station. It's a separate block with growing wood, which is worth it. Of course, the materials from there were used not only for paper production, but the fact that people were doing not what was necessary for survival, but for the formation of this fiction, was already disconcerting.

She tried to remember what it had been like twenty years ago, when she was still a little girl, and she remembered the long lines that crowded into this room, waiting for some permits, coupons, certificates. What she remembered well was that at that time more people just stood there and wasted time than did something concrete with those papers, but now there were almost no queues, but the number of papers had grown exponentially. This is a very strange logic – either there are more papers, then there are more queues for all these papers, or vice versa....