In the Fifth circle, below the women, ran a long tunnel that stretched through the circle from a center hub by the elevators. The tunnel was the only way in or out of the Spire and stretched out into the covered fields and electrical mills that supported it.

Grunt workers were busy transporting waste from the city and the labs out, while farm workers were transporting food and resources in. Both the grunt and farm workers lived outside the Spire and would be locked out once their work was done. They also were not allowed access to the elevators, only to rooms nearby where either the waste or food was stored, ready for transport.

The people who made up the grunt workforce were those who the Lords referred to as “Rebels”. These were people who refused to obey, refused to fit into the boxes laid out for them, refused to obediently fit into their assigned, gendered, roles. In the beginning days of the Spire, Lords carried out mass killings of all said Rebels, but soon the birth rate started plummeting, and the mass killings failed year after year to rid the Spire of all Rebels. At that point, the Lords decided these people were of more use alive and exiled them. The Rebels weren’t completely free however, even though they didn’t have to comply with the same roles they would have in the Spire, they were treated like animals for every second they were within the Spire. They were heavily guarded along their work routes from the second they entered the tunnels leading to the Spire, through their work of burying and burning the collected waste, and to the second they left the tunnel. If any tried to fight back or take a step out of line, they would be killed instantly. Outside the Spire, they had full freedom, but nowhere to go, and no resources to create any kind of “resistance”. The Earth was far too destroyed to live on independently, although many had tried, and died in vain. Even if any Rebel somehow got their hands on a weapon of any kind, the dome and the walls protecting the Spire were resistant. They were even resistant to nuclear weapons, they had to be, if it wasn’t people trying to break through, it was the radioactive dust storms that would whirl past during a particularly windy day. Instead, they had to be content living within their small domes and creating a community there.

Electricians walked back and forth along the tunnel, some coming home from a long shift working in the mills, while others were heading out for their day. The Electricians coming home would walk along the tunnel until they found a capsule hotel where they would rest until their next shift started. The Electricians, unlike the other people around, were just another kind of Worker, mindless robots who only knew their assigned jobs and nothing else.