Chapter Ten – The Stink

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.