Abandoned world: the Awareness - стр. 5

How many other areas of the station's life could there be, where in reality he had no control over anything? He didn't want to truthfully answer that question, but the answer came forward on its own – everywhere. It could just be everywhere. Here's the problem. He allowed himself to break the rules and not be afraid of it, because, as everyone knew, even for a Felony the punishment was a stay in Tosca, where you might be lucky enough to become a warden.

The only thing that can fix this is a visual demonstration of death. Fear and death. They quickly sober the mind, the body, the soul. When everyone sees that they have something to lose, and that it could be any of them who break the rules. All that's left is to come up with a louder name for it than felony. And for that, there's Peyton Cross, capable of creating the necessary, showing everyone that it's new.

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.

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