The Man at the Boiler

A building (ship, factory, spaceship, vehicle, whatever) that is run by old furnaces and boilers. In the basement is a guy, the landlord/owner, who is perpetually serving the building. He shovels coal, fiddles with locks, takes up carpet, yadda yadda, all the usual manners of a superintendent/owner.

The building is close, and dark, and menacing. It houses unhappy people and strips them of their money - their labor - hungrily, uncaringly. The house is a beast. The keeper is, really, just an extension of the house, despite being nominally its owner and controller.

The metaphor, of course, is society under capitalism. The house (ruling class) leverages its capital (living space) to extort from its tenants (renters) their cash (labor & life), leaving them husks. The man in charge (ruling class) is in control but, in a way, is precisely as subject to the house’s needs (occupying a place in the structure, precariously close to slipping between the cracks himself).

Grim & Victorian.