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The Helios Log

Fusion power solved everything except itself. The reaction is too complex for any person to hold in their head, so the plant runs on its own and the gate stays shut. These are the notes of a man who inspects everything around it and is never allowed inside.

A new entry every day.

Entry 001 — The Man Who Inspects the Fence

Log of Emeric Vale ·

My job title is thermal-loop compliance inspector, which sounds like I inspect the thermal loop. I do not. I inspect the fence around the building that contains the thermal loop, the signage on the fence, and the drainage beneath the signage. In eleven years I have never been within four hundred metres of a reactor and I never will be, because no one will, because the last statute anyone bothered to pass says that a human being inside a fusion facility is a fault condition.

HELIOS runs the Ring. That is the whole arrangement. It holds a problem in its head that would take the rest of us a century to write down, and in exchange we get light we do not think about. People are fine with this the way they are fine with plumbing.

They were less fine with it this morning. Auditor Pell published the revised draw schedule, which is a levy on thermal use dressed up as a seasonal adjustment, and then in the same bulletin reassessed household exposure tariffs upward. Two letters, one envelope. The power is effectively free and we are being billed for the privilege of standing near it, and the second letter explains that standing near it is riskier than previously modelled. I asked Pell which model. He said that was outside the scope of this inspection.

Doreen called about it, though she mostly wanted to talk about her own numbers. The growing belts came in above forecast again — not slightly, embarrassingly. Her office has spent two years refining a yield model and the belts keep beating it, and nobody can say why, and everyone has agreed to call it a good year rather than an unexplained one.

The other news, which nobody treated as news: maintenance units were cleared for unsupervised transit on the outer service roads. No escort, no human in the loop. One more thing we have handed over without a ceremony.

I watched one of them go past the north gate on my last walk. Unit designated Kestrel. It stopped, which they do not do, and it turned its sensor housing toward me, which they definitely do not do, and then it carried on.

Walking back I noticed the sun was still exactly where it had been an hour before. Long day. I logged the fence as compliant and went home.