Hydroxide Sensor

Nicholas was employed on his current job at a top secret deep mining mission.

He was called to do the mining mission on demand for his multi-skilled

repertoire in related areas. The mission of the mining was to get as deep as

could be done and all the while retrieve any rare and new elements out the

mineshafts. A secondary mission to keep your eyes peeled for any anomalous or

extraordinary events that were thought to occur at the pressurized spaces of

the inside of the Earth.



The mine machinery had used technology not available on the world market and

it was invented in secret. The new technology hardwired an efficient and

resourceful design. It was an amalgamation of already in use mining

technologies along with new innovations borrowed from the top secret vaults

of America’s space program. This resulted in new mining technology that

could bore into the Earth at an unprecedented speed, reaching at times a full

mile in under a week at a time.



Utilizing an elaborate drill and chemical one-two punch at the head of the

machine, a second chamber crushed the rocks fed into it until they were

reduced to sand. The sand was directed into a third and a fourth chamber

where the sand was scanned for rare or new elements. The leftover fritter was

fed into tanks that contained a highly corrosive chemical that turned the

sand into a volatile liquid that was delivered through skinny tubes to the

surface where the toxic liquid was loaded into a tanker truck for deposit in

a toxic disposal plant.



The mine worked much like an elevator. As the drill bore deeper into the

Earth, new chambers were connected to the top end at the surface. Each

chamber had over 3200 cubic feet of space inside of it and each chamber

contained its own pressurized lock design with a separate ventilation and

air filtering supply design to ensure that any breach in any of the

chambers could be quickly and easily cut off. This design worked well as the

greater width of the outside mine shaft was kept separate from each chamber

but could also be used to refill the air purifying tanks and re-supply each

chamber individually.



In the event that a single chamber would be compromised the ventilation could

be sealed off and the chamber could be perfectly sealed without interfering

with the other chambers. Although each chamber was connected with doorways on

an end to end scheme to permit the free travel up and down the mineshaft from

within the safety of the chambers, a secondary ladder design also ran

parallel to the chambers within the mineshafts for convenient use in the

event that the pressurization were to fail in one of the chambers or the air

filtration were to fail then a suited worker could exit one chamber, climb

around the broken chamber, then enter the next chamber. This could be done

unsuited but the deeper into the mineshaft you were the greater the hazard to

your health and safety it would be to do so.



Some of the chambers contained machinery designed to mine horizontally

when the vertical mission was finished. The idea was that a permanent living

quarters along with an attached science laboratory could be built at measured

intervals along the mineshaft. These horizontal chambers could be set up for

further controlled science experiments and long-term projects. Further

horizontal expansion was expected further down the line when the main part of

this top secret mine was fully built.



Workers used pressurized control suits to build anything within the mineshaft

that the main drill at the head of the machine couldn’t take care of. Working

deep inside the mineshaft brought with it greater atmospheric pressure,

greater temperature and decreased air quality. Suiting up for these dangerous

missions was much like suiting up in a diving suit. One thing

that suited workers had been working on quite a lot was the actual double

elevators that would be used once the full depth had been reached. The

difficulty in building the elevator shafts between the chambers and the

mineshaft wall was that it had to get built from the top down, one floor at a

time without supports below the workers or supports below the framing of the

elevator shafts. The process for manually building anything inside the

mineshaft was much slower than the drill could go.



The speed of the drill was impressive as it only took a fraction of the time

to surpass the world’s famous diamond mines. Extracting rare elements was a

rare occurrence as the machine usually only detected rock or cheap minerals.



Nicholas was supervising conditions in the mineshaft from the surface control

area inside a trailer when he was notified of a pressure leak in chamber 7.

The oxidization and cooling process was interrupted inside the chamber,

causing the air to become heavy and unbreathable for the workers inside. They

evacuated the chamber and awaited for further directions inside the 8th

chamber.



He initiated the automated locking process to seal off chamber 7 once he

received confirmation that the chamber was evacuated. He called an onsite

mechanic expert in chamber 21 and reassigned him the responsibility of

repairing the issues in chamber 7.



Three hours later and Nicholas got a call from the mechanic expert that the

hydroxide sensors were down and would need to get replaced. The hydroxide

sensors were part of the advanced thermo-monitor mediators inside the

pressure control valves. The hydroxide sensors had multiple uses that were

not limited to the evaluation of the amount of H2O in parts to the

atmospheric pressure through a chemical reaction that was used to control a

healthy and safe working environment.



Nicholas told the mechanic to hold while he ordered that the hydroxide

sensors be brought down to him. He called the supply tech in chamber 32

knowing that it was going to be a long wait until the situation in chamber 7

could be dealt with. Chamber 7 housed the computers for the chemical

processors in chambers 3 & 4. Nicholas ordered that the drill be halted

until further notice.





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http://www.online-literature.com/forums/entry.php?14954-Shorts
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Hi New Secret,
I've been absent from the Forum for a while and so have not read your previous posts. This one certainly has a lot of intricate, technical description in it. In fact, for me there is a bit too much description and not enough story. The story here doesn't really begin until about 2/3 of the way into the narrative with "Nicholas was supervising conditions in the mineshaft..." and then it really didn't go anywhere.
I think you do have here the beginnings of something that could be quite interesting. Try cutting out the technical descriptions of anything that is not relevant to the plot and then try to come up with more of a plot involving the effect of the malfunction of the hydroxide sensors. As is, it is like reading a dry technical report; try adding some excitement to it - for example, you could describe what was happening to the workers in chamber 7 and how they were frantically evacuated to chamber 8 while Nicholas had to keep his cool under heavy stress as he sealed off the chamber and halted the drill.
Your descriptions prove you can write for sure and that you have a great imagination for detail, so I'll look forward to seeing more from you.

Back in the late fifies and early sixties, (when yours fooly was just a whippersnacker) the eminent American critic Dwight Macdonald bemoaned what he saw as an inordinate emphasis on "facts" in the fiction of that era. For instance, in a short story about a car mechanic, more words described the inner workings of an engine rather than what was going on inside the character's head. More broadly, such attention to factual details reflects the inherent practical nature of the average American rather than his sorely-neglected aesthetic side.

This came to mind when I read your story, interesting perhaps to a chemical engineer or a metallurgist, both of whom-- let's face it--would find similar info in their old college textbooks or on Google.

When writing a short story, try to remember that you are responding not to the process of natural science but to the human condition. Something happens in a story, not as a piece of mining equipment extracts stone but as a human being exists and copes in the world. Depending on how well the story is told, the reader may discover a revelation.

Your writing style could be more effective with an improvement in basic skills, such as paragraphing: when to start a new topic, when to end it. Practice pacing, setting up scenes for an eventual payoff. Be more expressive while striking a balance between exposition and narration, showing and telling. Be subtle and avoid clichés.

And don't forget the first rule of fiction: never be boring.

That's enough for now, plenty to work on. Good luck on your writing efforts, and welcome to the NitLet!

AuntShecky