Chapter Ten - The Stink

“Sewage as a system was a mistake,”

--Former Mayor Bennico of New Montreal, 2038

***

“Can someone explain why all of this is the way it is?” I asked.

I was standing in the command room, which was an old-school sort of place, with several dozen workstations all facing one wall with massive screens and holographic readouts on it. The workstations were a mess of knobs and buttons and touch-screens, with little keyboards at the bottom and enough stuff going on to put the average nuclear submarine to shame.

Right now, the wall-to-wall main screen was displaying what looked very much like a readout of the state of the city’s sewer system. Green, I imagined, was good. Orange was probably a little fucky. And red was bad.

Everything was red.

That wasn’t quite true, there were a few sections still tenaciously clinging to their green-ness, but the orange was encroaching in, and there were a few splotches of orange in the sea of red.

But it was mostly red.

“Um, are you supposed to be here?” a timid office-looking lady asked. She was behind one of the workstations near the middle of the room. I noticed that most of them were unoccupied, which was probably not ideal considering the number of warnings I was seeing on their screens.

“Who’s going to stop me?” I asked her. “Besides, I’m here to fix this shit. And it definitely looks like a lot of shit’s going on.”

The door into the command room opened, and button-up stepped in, accompanied by four more clearly-reluctant employees. One of the guards (smart one) that had accosted me earlier followed him in.

“Miss Samurai,” button-up said. “I’ve gathered some of the people you asked for. This is Aaron Mitchell, head of cyber security, Brenda Rodriguez, she’s the highest ranking member of our mesh-interface division, Charles Whitaker, he’s an on-site engineer, Diana Nguyen, she’s from HR, and Ethan Brown, he’s the head of maintenance.”

I nodded and looked over the group. They were all mostly office-worker sorts, though some of their work habits showed in their manner of dress. I, of course, instantly forgot all of their names and waved off the two who came to shake my hand and do proper intros. “Alright, so shit’s fucked, but I need to know what flavour of fucked we’re dealing with.”

Button-up glanced at his comrades who formed more or less a semi-circle around me. They glanced at each other, then one of them--HR chick, Nguyen or whatever--stepped up to the plate. “Things aren’t looking good on the employment front. We have the highest turnover rate we’ve ever had.”

“How bad?” I asked.

“One hundred and thirty-seven percent.”

I frowned. I wasn't great at math, but that sounded wrong. “How?” I asked.

“Nearly half of all the employees are gig workers, some are double-booked for several quarter-time jobs,” she explained. “If they don’t show up, and they haven’t been, then things go... sideways. Usually we’d just hire more, but the market for employment isn’t optimal at the moment.”

“What she means to say,” the security head, Aaron, said, “is that with the incursion, everyone has either fled, or is working for a PMC. The hiring is better, the pay is better, and a lot of people want to help on the front because otherwise it might mean that we’ll all be eaten by the week’s end.”

“Right,” I said. “And the C-suite?”

“Gone,” Nguyen said.

“Okay,” I replied. “Other problems?”

The engineering guys looked at each other, and I could almost see the discussion passing between them over a private network. Finally, one of them spoke up. “A lot of the maintenance personnel were gig workers, so they’re gone. But even before that, we’ve been lagging behind on maintenance for years. We’re lacking tools, materials, people with training, access to the places we need to maintain, and the backup we’d need to reach those places. Some sectors have been red for over a year and we can’t do anything about them. Do... do you know who the Sewer Dragons are?”

“I’m intimately familiar,” I said.

“Right. They did a lot of the deeper work. We’d slip them materials, they’d patch things up. We’d get to mark it down as done without stepping into their territory. They gave up, broke apart, or something. Not answering calls, not in the sewers anywhere. Basically, if we want the work done, we need to do it ourselves now, and that’s a problem since there are only maybe a hundred certified people left to do decades worth of work.”

“Fantastic,” I said. “So everything’s all sorts of screwed, then?”

He shrugged in a sort of ‘what can you do’ way, and I couldn’t even be mad at him. Clearly people had been skimming from the top and the middle and the bottom, otherwise things wouldn’t be as dire as they were now.

“Anyone else have problems to add to the pile?” I asked.

“Things have passed the event horizon of bad,” the other engineer said. “It’s going to get a lot worse, very rapidly. We’ll have bursts on multiple levels, brown water will flood some levels, and with the automatic shut-offs, we’re going to have pipes backing up in literally every megabuilding in the city all at the same time.”

I closed my eyes for a moment, then glanced at the wall again. There was just a little bit more red on there than there had been before. “Okay, cool, I need solutions.”

“The... the sewage system for the city was built piece-by-piece, often before the buildings connected to it were built at all,” the same engineer said. “It cost billions then, and a lot of the parts had to be custom made. There’s no... just replacing those. And that’s what we’d need to do if everything fails.”

I glared at him, not that he could see it. “I’m not asking for an even worse assessment, I’m looking for solutions. Can the system be fixed?”

There was more discussion, with a lot of engineering terminology that was beyond me. But the consensus they came to was simple enough. Sorta.

“The worst of the damage can be mitigated, but we’ll need a lot more hands working on fixing things. Then we can reopen things one part at a time.”

I nodded along, then stepped back, turning so that I was facing the screen of red fully. They might not have been able to see my face, but I still felt better without making eye contact with... the people whose names I’d all already forgotten.

“Myalis,” I muttered. “What can we do here?”

That would depend entirely on how much you’re willing to invest into the problem. If you go all out, you’ll end up quite broke, but New Montreal will have a functional sewer system by the end of the month.

I checked the date. We weren’t near the end of the month. “Shit,” I said. The implication there was rather obvious. I wasn’t about to sink all of my resources into sewage. “Alright, so intermediary steps,” I said.

Again, that depends on the resources you want to sink into the project. Do you want to give the maintenance people better equipment like you did for the Kittens in Burlington? That could be relatively inexpensive and will make them more productive, but with the current situation, it’s unlikely to prevent a collapse, only prolong it. If you want, you could invest into drones and automated repair systems that would slowly fix the sewers. The more drones the faster they’ll be able to fix things, but they would still need raw resources to work with.

“I’m not going to be able to fix all of this on my own,” I said, both because I reached the obvious conclusion, and because I wanted the others here to know.

A few shoulders slumped, but it seemed as if that was expected already.

“Which means... we’re going to have to bully others for help. HR girl, I want you and everyone you can to cut the pay from the C-suite, split it between the rest of the employees evenly. My AI will send you instructions on how to empty their accounts too.”

On it.

I pointed to the engineers next. “I’m going to be threatening others until they come around to help. We’ll still need you to do some work. Lots of it, even.”

“Yes, ma’am,” the head engineer said with a quick salut. He did have that ex-military bearing to him.

“Security guy... just, do your job, I guess.”

“Uh, okay,” security guy said.

I nodded, proud of a job well done so far. If I couldn’t fix the problem, then I’d take a page from the Karen playbook and just bully the shit out of someone else to fix the problem.

Which meant that my next stop was the Family’s New Montreal headquarters.

***