It's quiet out here when I wake up, like always. Sometimes you can hear the quiet pneumatic hiss of a door opening somewhere else, but that's the extent of it. It's not like there are any neighbors to keep us awake at night, after all. I slap the alarm button to stop that painfully annoying beep that all alarm clocks seem to share.
I swing off the small bed and land on the metal floor with a dull thump. Thankfully, it's not cold; the engineer must have managed to fix that problem with the heating today. I walk to the door and press a keypad to open it, and it does as its told with a quiet slurp of pressurized air. I look out into the hall before I step into it, but there's no one coming from either direction. With only the three of us up here, it's pretty uncommon to run into someone else.
The walls are a sort of dull gray metal, closer to white than black, but still pretty ugly to look at. The monotony of the walls is broken up by a few tiny, shaded portholes to the outside, but even those seem to blend in once you've walked by them enough times. A year of living in the same place tends to do that to you, I've found.
