“Scotty!”
“Sorry, Eliza, but this time it’s warranted.” I hit Jack’s comm circuit, but got his machine. He was at that damned party so I had to leave a message. “Jack, Scott. I’m in the Old Town. We’re getting hydrogen sulfide in the air ducts at 5 ppm. Repeat: H-TWO-S at 5 P-P-M and climbing. Stewart’s not seeing this in treatment, but I think that’s because the sensors are after the scrubbers, and we’re testing in the wrong ducts. Jack, there’s a flaw in the ionic separators, and I never saw it. You based the calculations on Earth normal atmosphere, which is slightly heavier than sulfide. The sulfide floats in the air but never really rises. When you ionize it, it separates lower. The gas mix in our air isn’t the same as Earth’s; it’s slightly lighter than sulfide. The sulfide still floats but it floats lower. The ionic separator doesn’t send it to the sulfide ducts, not all of it. Some slips into carbon dioxide ducts and eventually into the cleaned air ducts. Jack, it’s pumping the stuff straight into the Old Town. Probably other chambers in the neighborhood, too, but this looks like the epicenter. You have to shut it down, Jack. You have to shut it down!”
I disconnected. Eliza, Adam, Al, and Paul were all looking at me. “So how bad is it? And what can we do?” Adam asked.
“Bad. And we have to shut the CR Units down, which I can’t do from here even with Jack’s credentials. We have to shut them down or … or starve them, create a negative pressure. They run on pent-up gas pressure. If they can’t reach operating pressure, the separators won’t kick in.”
“So we need to cut off the flow?”
“Can’t do that, Al. Way too much flow in the city; it’s constant. But maybe we can go the other way: increase the flow, and get the wastes moving through so fast there’s no chance for pressure to build up. What I’d really like to do is move so much material through that it creates a negative pressure, not just neutral.”
“What, so we have to flush the johns?”
“Paul, that won’t be enough but it can’t hurt. Go ahead: turn on all the taps and start flushing all the johns. Get some help. Adam, how are you on fluid dynamics?”
“Not much fluid flow on the regolith. I haven’t looked at those equations in a decade.”
“Well, dredge them up. You’ve just been drafted into Eco. I need you to pair with me on these calculations.” I checked the meter: 5.6 ppm. “And we’d better hurry.”
I started running through duct diagrams and scenarios, while Adam ran numbers and checked my work. Al’s a hydroponicist, so he knows something about fluid flow. He looked over both our shoulders. “You’re dreaming. No way.”
Adam spoke up from his comp. “The numbers work out, Al. If we get enough flow in a short time, it will create a negative pressure large enough to cut out the ionics. Maybe even kick them into shutdown mode.”
“Yeah, but you’re going to need so much flow … “
“How much?” Eliza was getting nervous. She finally smelled the sulfide too.
Adam checked his comp. “Thousands of flushes in minutes. More like tens of thousands. More would be better.”
I checked another spec. “Yeah, that will do it. It may burst a treatment pipe somewhere, but that will drain the system even more. It’ll be a hell of a mess, but not as bad as … ”
“As bad as what? And how do you plan to get tens of thousands of flushes?”
“Bad, Eliza.” The meter was at 6.6. “Really bad. But I have a plan to get those flushes.”
I held out my comp so Eliza could look at my plan. “No way.” The look on her face was the one you’ll see when she cuts you off after one too many: the pleasant hostess becomes the drill sergeant. “No way you’re pushing that. That’ll kill my profits for the quarter.”
I pointed at Adam: he was starting to look nauseous. The sulfide hugged the floor in the Lunar air, but was slowly pushing up. “And that won’t? We need the negative pressure and fast. Hydrogen sulfide doesn’t just smell—if you get enough of it, it’s toxic. And it burns or explodes if you give it an excuse. Very soon, we won’t just have a stink: we’ll have explosions all over this quarter if we don’t cut it off now.”
Eliza looked at her antique cash register, the symbol of her bottom line, and winced. “OK, push it.”
I clicked PUSH, and I started to hear pops on comps all around the room. And if Jack’s Admin code was doing its job, the same pop was showing up on every active comp in Tycho:
08/26 15:31:00 FREE BEER!
What happens when we flush every john in Tycho at the same time? Let’s find out! Flush your toilet in the next 10 minutes and get a free beer at the Old Town Tavern. Just bring your monthly cycler receipt showing a full flush cycle before 15:41, and we’ll give you a beer. Help us give Eco Services a real test! (Flush test approved by Ecology Services Director Jack Brockway.)
FREE BEER AT THE OLD TOWN!
“Will Jack have a fit when he sees you used his code and his name?”
“If this doesn’t work, it won’t matter.”
“Eliza, can I have a beer while we wait?” We used to say Al would stop for a cold one on the way to his own funeral. That day, I learned how true that was.
Then I remembered a chem lecture from the previous term, and I pulled my notes. “Wait! No beer.”
“Huh?”
“H2S will react with the alcohol. Not easily without an acid catalyst, but possible. That’ll make ethanethiol, and that will really stink.”
“Worse than ‘that smell’?”
“Like rotten onions stewed in foot fungus. It’s officially the smelliest substance in existence.”
“Ewww!”
“Yeah, but … ,” I read further. “But it’s less toxic and less flammable. And it’ll settle as a liquid at room temperature, not hang in the air. This may buy us some time.”
“So pour the beer?”
“No, we need a way to mix it with the airborne sulfide. Usually, you make thiols by bubbling sulfide through alcohol. Since the sulfide’s airborne, we need to mix them sort of the opposite way. We’ll want some sort of acidic catalyst … “
“We’ve got lemons, limes, pineapple juice, vinegar … ,”
“ … then we need to maximize the surface interface between the beer and the air. It may not work—this ain’t exactly a reaction chamber—but if we can spread the beer to expose it to the air, spread it fine and spray it through the sulfide layer, it might work.”
“You mean like this?” Eliza uncapped a bottle and poured in some lemon juice. Then she stuck her thumb in and shook the bottle until she couldn’t hold back the pressure. Her thumb popped out, and foamy beer spewed into the air, soaking me, Adam, and the tables around us.
“Oh, yeah?” Adam grabbed another bottle, added juice, shook, and aimed straight for Eliza’s big mop of hair. It’s hard to aim beer foam, though, so he sprayed half the table next to us.
“Adam! Aim higher! Give it some distance!” Would it work? I couldn’t guess, but I couldn’t see we had anything else to try. I poured some juice in a bottle and started shaking it. In one-sixth G and with our lower air pressure … well, Downsiders have never seen how high and how far beer suds can fly. Maybe it would be enough.
And thus was launched the First Annual Great Old Town Beer Brawl. Eliza armed everyone with bottles and citrus, and they filled the air with suds. Adam had the idea—ingenious? flawed? who could tell?—of spraying the beer taps through lemon slices. I don’t know how effective that was, but it sure made the beer foam! And soon, along with the aroma of Tycho’s finest beers, we smelled the pungent odor of the most sickeningly rotten onions you’ve ever imagined. Foaming and spraying makes an excellent dispersal mechanism, and we were actually gaining ground on the hydrogen sulfide in the air. All the while, Paul was back in the latrines, flushing repeatedly.
And somewhere during the Beer Brawl, I heard the sound of water rushing through pipes under the floor plates. Lots of water. “They’re flushing! God damn, they’re flushing!” Eliza and Al both celebrated
by spraying me with some of Eliza’s best weiss beer. “Wait! Let me at the vent.”
I knelt by the vent. Foamy beer ran down the wall and drained in. The smell that emerged was almost too much even for my desensitized nose, but it was drifting out … not gusting. The positive pressure had slowed, almost stopped. The meter read 5.7. The promise of FREE BEER! was working. Toilets were flushing all over Tycho. For good measure, I pushed the pop again, hoping for maximum flushage.
And then through the vent, I heard a soft, low whump! Somewhere deep in CitEng, a seal had finally breached. Wastewater and sludge were draining at high velocity—I didn’t dare think about where, but it would be an ugly mess—and creating a big negative pressure behind them. Instead of ethanethiol odor rising from the vent, I felt a slight but unmistakable air current flow into the vent. The meter actually dropped while I was watching, from 5.4 to 5.3.
“Everyone!” I stood on the bar for attention, and Eliza glared at me. Then I almost lost my footing in the beer foam. “Everyone, keep spraying! We’re settling ‘that smell’ out. Adam, Al, get mops. Push the foam down the kitchen and bathroom drains. Eliza! We can open the door now. Pressure in the tube should be higher than in here. Let’s set up fans and get the sulfide moving in. And keep flushing those toilets!”
And so the Beer Brawl continued in earnest. We call it the First Annual Great Old Town Beer Brawl because every year since, we’ve celebrated the day the Old Town didn’t blow up. When you’re here for Beer Brawl, don’t drink the beer. Paul saves up his failed batches all year long, keeps them in a storage locker for the Brawl. You’ll think you’re drinking liquid wastes.
When CTU Security showed up, they didn’t know what to make of the place. A pair of floor fans blocked the doors open, blowing fresh tube air in. When Security got past the fans, they found bar patrons and staff spraying the place and each other with beer—the citrus had long since run out, but the Beer Brawl had become a purpose unto itself—while Al and Adam and Eliza mopped around them. And in the far corner, leaning over a vent, I alternated between calling out readings from my meter and trying to raise Jack on his comm.
They would’ve arrested the lot of us on drunk and disorderly. Wouldn’t you? But I flashed my Eco credentials and hoped they were convincing. Plus, Eliza offered them whiskey, beer being in short supply at that point. I don’t know what persuaded them, the whiskey or the creds, but they postponed arresting us long enough to hear the story. Then they contacted Security Central and told them we had an explanation for the Third Level Flush. I abused Jack’s code some more, ordering up overtime for Eco Services cleanup crews to clean out the Old Town. Adam had already called in Rescue medical teams. I doubt anyone there had had a serious exposure, but sulfide poisoning is nasty stuff so we took no chances.
The Flush could’ve been much worse. Not through any planning on my part—as luck would have it, the breach was directly over the Bader Farms Co-op plots. Yeah, a lot of crops were washed away and the Baders filed for damages, but for the most part, the Farms were exactly where that sludge was headed anyway. At that stage of treatment, what was left was destined to be fertilizer once most of the liquids were filtered and baked out. So the Farms were a mess, and the sludge was wetter than usual. The clean-up took weeks. But if the breach had been 100 feet further east and north, the Flush would’ve been in an entertainment or a restaurant district. That would’ve been a much larger PR disaster.
Not that the incident wasn’t a PR disaster as it stood, you understand. The Old Town got the worst of “that smell”, being closest to the refresh pumping system, and a lot of residences had to be cleaned. The CR Program was written off as an unmitigated failure and Jack was written off with it, naturally, since CR was his baby.
He received a brief burst of sympathy: when he got my message, he rushed to City Services, assembled a crew, and tried to dismantle the CR units. They were still on duty when the Flush hit. There he was, in a tuxedo, standing his ground in the face of a river of raw sewage, trying to save the city. It briefly made him a hero; but, once the journos learned that his miscalculation was at the root of it all, the story changed. “A looney wouldn’t have made that mistake,” the story went, even though I never noticed the mistake myself. And eventually, someone coined the name “Jack Blockage”. Once that name stuck, it was only a matter of time before Jack was asked to resign.
Jack’s last official communiqués were a letter of commendation in my file, which also retroactively approved everything I’d done with his code, and an invoice to Eliza for 20,000 liters of beer. He didn’t figure she should save Tycho Under and pay for the privilege. That invoice covered everything we used in the Beer Brawl and all the free beers she had to give out for my pop, and there was plenty left over. And that, rookie, is how me and the rest of the Beer Brawl Brigade drank free for the next month. Eliza said we deserved it. After all, with enough beer and a few thousand flushes, we saved Tycho Under.
Fruitful
By David Steffen
Monday
Nora jumped when she noticed the door of the lift opening into her office.
“Midge! You scared me.”
“I apologize, ma’am,” Midge said in the soft, motherly voice that grated on Nora’s nerves. “You appeared to be deep in thought, and I didn’t want to interrupt.”
Midge was a tiny little thing, a Nandroid Series Three. She looked human, but she was built on a smaller scale so she would be less intimidating to young ones.
“It’s okay,” Nora said. “You startled me, that’s all. Come in. How are the children?”
Midge stepped in, folding her hands together demurely. “They’re fine, ma’am. You have twenty children total, seven under my direct care, and they’re growing like weeds.”
“Twenty? I must’ve missed a birth announcement.”
“Perhaps I forgot to send you one.”
Nora nodded, though she was certain Midge could never forget something so vital to her function.
“Good news, ma’am. Your son Robert turned thirteen today, and was approved for pilot training.”
A stab of jealousy, guilt, and grief struck Nora. She looked back to her terminal to avoid Midge’s eyes. “That’s … good.”
“You don’t seem so sure, ma’am.”
When Nora had been a child, her eight siblings had been chosen for pilot training on their thirteenth birthdays, but she was declared unfit because of her lazy eye. She had been so furious about it at the time, but she later realized that defect had saved her life.
The average pilot only lived to eighteen years of age defending Gorana, a fuel-rich planet that comprised the only sane corner of the known universe. The rest was populated by thieves and thugs who would just as soon stab each other in the back as do anything else. Many pilots died when they were barely adults, but their sacrifice was the only way to ensure the safety of the population as a whole. Androids could do nearly anything, but they had proved unable to adapt to the chaos of combat. Even novice human pilots could consistently outmaneuver them.
“Ma’am? I’m sorry, is this a bad time?”
“No, it’s okay.”
“Would you like me to bring the children by? I’m sure they’d love to meet you.”
“No, no. I’m sure you’re doing a wonderful job.” Nora tapped her stylus on her desk, her mind already drifting back to work. She jumped when she realized Midge was still there. “Did you need something from me?”
“No, ma’am. You’ve looked very fatigued lately. Would you like someone to talk to? The children are watching an instructional video: ‘Fulfilling Your Role in Society.’ I have thirty-one minutes to spare.”
“I’m too busy just now.”
“Of course, ma’am. I’ll leave you to yourself.” Midge left quietly.
Nora wished she could afford to change Midge’s voice. It was the same voice as Nana, the Series Two that had raised Nora. Every time she heard the voice it brought Nana’s image to mind, silvery with empty black eyes. Tha
t thing had scared the living daylights out of her.
Nora shook her head to clear the clinging cobwebs of memory. Midge had said she’d had another baby—that meant an incubator was available. She decided to take a few minutes off work and took the lift down to the nursery level. The door to the incubator room had a sticker attached, a Lifestyle Enhanced ad with a picture of an apple tree and a caption: “Through Modern Technology, Personal Freedom and a Happy Family Are No Longer Mutually Exclusive.”
Incubators lined the walls of the narrow room, stacked two high. As always, they made her think of a Laundromat. Through glass windows on the fronts of them, she could see each fetus in its particular stage of development. As she walked by, she heard snatches of songs hummed by the incubators to the developing children they contained. That and the gentle swishing sounds from the pipes as the incubators adjusted their amniotic fluid.
And one vacant incubator, in the middle of a row—dark, empty, forlorn. She’d better make use of it before she had to pay penalties for wasting equipment.
She pressed a button on a wall panel. “Call Tom.”
A holo-display popped up in the center of the room, and she grunted in frustration when the government commercial came on. She didn’t have time for this. The commercial showed a man working at a computer terminal. He looked up, flashed a smile, and said “I did my part.”
Next, a young woman riding in a shuttle. She was looking out the window at the planet below, all swirling reds and purples. She turned to the camera and said “I did my part.”
One after another, a half dozen other everyday people repeated the same statement. The slogan appeared on the bottom. “Be fruitful.”
“Yeah I’m trying,” she grumbled. “Come on, come on.”
Tom appeared.
“Tom,” she snapped. “I want to have another baby.”
“Yeah?” He sounded annoyed. “What’s it worth to you?”
Therefore I Am - Digital Science Fiction Anthology 2 Page 13