Prologue
"Hey, hurry up!" called the factory worker from down the hall.
"I'm coming!" answered Geodic, "can't you give an old gnome a little break" He started walking, but realized that he forgot to turn off the secondary power supply to the facility. Normally he would have asked one of his underlings to do it but with the hard times and all he felt he started needing to do as much as possible to help improve the income.
Several of the machines were still up and running, like the instant mashed potato maker making machine. Its mechanical arms were still moving in formation for attaching various parts to the potato makers. Of course by a number of safety standards they were forbidden to manufacture the products for more than twelve hours straight without a complete shutdown of machinery for a complete investigation of the system. They were pushing it at running thirteen hours straight.
But it was time to close up for the night. An inspector couldn't come until the morning and they all deserved some well earned rest. At least as soon as the blasted machine was off.
He was nearing the secondary control lever when he heard something. He glanced over his shoulder to take a look. Nothing appeared to be there.
"Confounded contraption, always having parts break off," he muttered to himself. If he didn't find the loose part soon it could cause a chain reaction in the system.
He had to duck to avoid a stray construction arm, probably an effect from the defective component. If something like that was happening it was a good thing that he heard it. The machinery was very fragile outside the limited boundaries of the construction guidelines. If one part did something unpredictable then it wasn't hard for other components to be affected by the abnormality created. And if something was left unnoticed the end result after the chain reaction was catastrophic.
Geodic recalled the last factory that had stood in place of this one. All it had taken was one loose nut and pretty soon the saw blades are sawing through the support beams, and the whole structure comes collapsing down over you. Of course it would have helped if loose nut hadn't fallen into the gear system that controlled the fuel mixtures. The spark created ignited the whole batch and caused it to explode. A whole factory had been laid to waste on account of a loose nut.
Geodic was bound and determined not to let this happen again. Especially with the hard times on them they really couldn't afford to have the plant blowup and build another one.
Geodic saw the source of the problem: a rock stuck in a conveyor belt. He was just about to remove it when he heard a faint ticking from behind him. He looked behind him to see a gear stripping, against another gear. This confused him. The gears were totally unrelated to the conveyor belt. There was no possible way that the gears stripping could be caused by the rock.
He removed the rock to allow the continuation of the conveyor belts movement. No sooner than he removed the rock the, the stripped gears lost traction with each other, causing the construction arm attached to fall limp. This nearly hit him. Geodic side-stepped not a moment to soon and realized that he had to make his way back to the power control lever. If he could shut down the power it should stop the automations.
He sprinted back to the lever dodging a few hazards on the way. He barely reached the lever before a piece of metal framing fell away. It nearly impaled him. The lever would disconnect a drive gear from the turbine outside and disallow the power to get to the main drive shaft. Geodic tried to pull it without any avail. The lever was stuck, which didn't make any sense. According to the safety standard of emergency shutdown all switched, levers, cranks, etc. had to be lubricated on the hour in the case of an emergency shutdown. He himself had personally applied the lubricant to the lever not even an hour ago.
Giving up Geodic decided to use his last resort. He wound up and kicked the lever with all of his might. The wooden lever snapped and flew back into the gear drive mechanism. There it got caught and halted the system.
All of the machinery slowly came to a halt. The uncontrolled construction arms stopped swinging and the conveyor belts stopped. The whole factory seemed to come at ease with a calming tranquility.
Geodic thought that he did well. Granted a large part of the factory lay in ruin. But at least the factory itself was still intact. For the most part it could be easily repaired. He had single handedly saved the company from loosing their fourth factory in the last five years.
Now he really deserved that rest. He started for the lobby where the rest of the crew was waiting for him, probably blissfully unaware of what had happened. But surely they had heard the entire ordeal. He would ring them new rears when he got his hands on them.
He had just about reached the hallway to the lobby when he heard a footstep followed by a rasping of metal against metal. He turned around to see the dark factory from which he had just emerged. Nothing out of the ordinary. He decided that it was simply an after effect of the earlier commotion. He stared walking again when he heard a whistling noise from above. He looked up to see a crate twice his size and three times his weight come crashing down on him from a snapped pulley. It was the last thing he saw.