A Nucular Incident

 I dream of darkness. And of incomplete work. I have forgotten something. I have missed something. I am searching for the switch to turn on the light, and illuminate the thing I missed. Then suddenly I am not able to breathe, as though I am in a vacuum, or outer space.

When I wake up, my heart is beating fast and I am short of breath. The dream lingers in my memory and I wonder if it is about some mistake I committed. It has been nagging me since yesterday. I get a sense that my manager will be furious that I missed something. I feel that I need to apply for sick leave, since I am not feeling great or maybe to avoid his fury and run away from my mistake. I remember, I am on vacation starting today. But that doesn’t ease my restlessness. My heart keeps beating fast. 

I try taking deep breaths. I realize there is something wrong with the air. The air is not smelling. Still I am getting nauseous, as if some occult smell is in the air. My body knows something is wrong with the air. It is trying to avoid breathing.

My half-informed mind thinks, maybe it is the weather, it is the cold of January and some people do feel breathless during cold because of blocked nose and what not. I look outside the window and it is snowing! Snow in Bengaluru? 

I run out to the balcony excited. I always wanted to see snowfall. I hold a snowflake in my hand, expecting to see an intricately designed wonder of the nature. But I was disappointed. It is soot. When I rub it between my fingers, it leaves a dark stain. I can see soot falling all around my area.  This could mean, there is fire somewhere nearby. I see the sky, I can see the part of sky is lit orange, in the direction of the power plant. Then I see the raging fire. My heart starts beating faster, as though trying to jump through my mouth to freedom.

Suddenly, my eyes start watering. I am not crying. It is my body’s reaction to an irritant in the eye. Maybe it is all the soot.  But I am wearing glasses. It is like I am cutting onions. Something in the air is irritating my eye. My mind is panicking. The fire-engines pass my home. Soon they are followed by ambulances. They are in a hurry to mitigate the fire and help any victims. I remember my dream. The people working at the power plant might be suffocating like in my dream, because of fire and smoke. To think I was at the power plant last evening. I was lucky to be on vacation and not be there today. The emergency vehicle sirens induce more panic.

Suddenly my phone alarm goes off. More panic. I run towards my phone to shut the alarm off. Then I see so many messages, so many missed calls. Since I was starting my vacation today, I had silenced my call and message notifications, and thought of waking up late. I had set my alarm for 10 AM.

The calls are from my parents, friends and relatives. The messages indicate my parents, friends and relatives were trying to reach out to me, and asking if I was alright. I reply to them, saying I am alright. Although I am feeling breathless and my eyes are burning. It is starting to feel as though I am in boiling water. 

Their fear is for the right reason, as I work in that power plant, which is on fire now. The power plant was a big private enterprise project, it was all over the news for right and wrong reasons. Right for being unlimited energy. Bengaluru will not go out of power ever. Wrong for the potential to harm the environment. Although we have all the necessary safety protocols to not harm the environment, few entities wanted to instill fear among people and stop the project. The entities were a competing company and a government agency among many others. Probably the fire has to do something with them. 

The number of vehicles with sirens increase outside, as either they go towards or come from the power plant. This is getting big. I want to help somehow. I work as a research assistant in a lab at the power plant. Chief Researchers come up with a plan for experiment. My job as an assistant is to implement them to the point. 

First, I try calling my Chief Researcher and then my colleague who is supposed to be on shift today. Both of their lines are busy. Next, I check my work emails. I see a long list of reactor notification emails. That was expected, as the power plant is on fire. The safety mechanism software of the reactor is sending alert emails as something is off the charts. The support team generally checks this and works accordingly to implement mitigating measures. I see the log message in the mail suggesting the reactor got heated. That might be because coolant was having some issue. Coolant…Oh shit! I quickly start checking my daily status mails. They show the temperature of the reactor increasing steadily as coolant was off.

I check my chief researcher’s mail on instructions sent to me for yesterday’s experiment. My job is to complete the instructions to the point. My panic and my nightmare make sense now. I definitely missed something, and now it is too late to resolve that. I missed the last point, written in bold and highlighted for importance, in the instruction mail- “Switch on the coolant after the experiment is complete”.

~END~

(Author Notes: This story was written as part of creative writing workshop entrance test. It had lot of issues, as I had written under a time limit. I never bothered to edit it later. In fact I had forgotten that I had written this, until yesterday. I edited it, a bit, to make the flow better. On side note, there is a very good show called "Chernobyl", about the nuclear disaster that happened in Soviet Union. Highly recommended. Also, about the title, I wanted to intentionally misspell "Nuclear", as the story is about mistake. But, "Nuclear" apparently has a non-standard pronunciation as in the title "Nucular". Here is the "Nucular" Wikipedia article about the said pronunciation. And also a Merriam-Webster Youtube video about "Nucular")