H2O (3 page)

I headed down
the stairs and to the end of the hallway and knocked on Benny’s door. No
answer. But I was sure he was in there working on computer code and entranced
by it. I opened the door and stepped into a small room packed with computer
monitors, hard drives, assorted hardware, and a mass of cables. Some of the
hardware was dedicated to the Line, but most of it was Benny’s personal stash.
He’d rebuilt these Remnants himself.

Benny was
sitting in front of a monitor, scrolling through lines of code. He was small
and wiry and his leg jittered when he was anxious. If he was concentrating on
computer code, his leg never jittered.

“Got a problem
with the exec files?” he said, without looking up from his work.

“Nope.”

“Then why the
visit?” He didn’t want to be bothered. Nothing was happening on the Line so
this was a good time for him to work on his own stuff.

“Take a
guess,” I said.

He stopped
checking code and looked at me and I didn’t have to say it. He knew. His leg
started jittering.

“Sending you
out is just plain dumb,” he said, “a losing strategy. Frank knows that.”

“He’s gotta
follow the rules,” I said.

“Not in this
case.”

“They’d turn
on him in two seconds if he sent someone else,” I said, and that was the truth.
The plant workers would vote in a new foreman by the end of the day if Frank
gave me special treatment.

“If you don’t
come back, the plant’s over,” Benny said.

“The plant did
fine before me. It’ll do fine after.”

“We both know
that’s a bunch of crap.”

Benny was
right. But only partially. He was right that I was the only one who had a shot
at fixing a serious breakdown, but it was also a fact that the plant had never
had a serious breakdown. The truth was, that way before I came along, someone
always managed to find a way to make the necessary repairs. Why water plants, refineries,
and electric plants continued to function was a mystery. A lucky mystery that
no one questioned. They didn’t know enough to question it.

“What are you
hearing?” I said. I wanted to know what kind of danger I was heading into, and
the Line was the only source for that.

“Bandon said
they lost a trucker a couple days ago,” Benny said. “A marauder attack.” Bandon
was a truck town.

“What about
the Virus?” I asked.

“Three cases
yesterday. Four the day before.”

“Not bad.”

“Tell that to
the deceased,” he said, and glanced up at me. “Just don’t do any exploring.”

“I’m sticking
to the road and the pumping station.”

It wasn’t that
long ago that Benny and I used to talk about exploring the Territory. We were
sure that there was a bonanza of knowledge hidden out there and we wanted to
find it. But the reality was that we’d given up on ever venturing out of
Clearview. The chance of dying from the Virus or at the hands of the marauders
was just too great. Not to mention that leaving Clearview without a visa was
desertion and the Fibs jailed all deserters. Though we never actually said it,
we were too frightened to leave. Our fears were greater than our dreams.

“Maybe when I
get back, you’ll have figured out what those data packets are,” I said.

“Don’t count
on it. It’s too weird a code.”

Over the last
two years, Benny had noticed mysterious data packets moving through the Line.
At first, he’d thought a fellow Lineman from another town was behind them. But
after digging around a little, he’d concluded that none of the other Linemen
knew enough to pull this off. Like everyone else in the Territory, they knew
how to do their jobs, but that was it. They didn’t even know that the Line was
a stripped down version of an expansive communications network once called the
Internet. Before the Virus, all kinds of information had flowed through this
network. Even video. Back then, bandwidth was big enough to carry a ton of
information. Bandwidth was like the pipes and aqueducts that carried water from
Corolaqua to other towns. But while Corolaqua’s pipes and aqueducts could still
carry plenty of water, what was left of the Internet was barely enough
bandwidth to connect the towns.

“Any sign of
trouble,” Benny said, “and you run as fast you can.” Then he suddenly stood up
and hugged me. It was a rare emotional display of our friendship, and what it
meant was obvious. He knew I might not return.

I headed south. To my right,
rugged gray cliffs ran down to the ocean. To my left, a dark green forest ran
inland as far as the eye could see. The road was worn and for long stretches,
the lane lines were gone. Then, out of nowhere, I’d see a few, patchy and
faded, like mysterious hieroglyphics from an ancient culture.

Decent roads
meant trucks could haul goods up and down the Territory, so some towns used
road repair to trade for goods. Percy, a mid-size town, took care of this
stretch of road, but I was sure that lane lines were its last priority. Over
the last couple of years, five men from Percy had died from the Virus. They’d
caught it while working on the roads, but every town did what it could to
survive.

The road soon
veered away from the ocean and deeper into the wilderness, an endless forest of
lime green, black green, and hues of green I’d never seen before. I wanted to
see trucks on the road, but I didn’t and that made me wary. Everyone in the
Territory knew the wilderness was home to the marauders. They’d found pockets
of land without the Virus and these sanctuaries became the base camps from
which they’d ambush truckers and workers on the roads.

I kept my eyes
on the forest looking for signs of an ambush and stayed hyper-alert for the
next three hours until the road veered back toward the ocean. As soon as I saw
the blue Pacific, I felt safer and calmer. I knew a lot about the ocean and
about water.

A few years after the marauders
murdered my father, I began to teach myself as much as I could about water. I
had decided that the time had come to find out why my father had impressed on
me that water was important.

I studied the
science books which he’d salvaged, and I verified what he’d said on the beach
that day: There was a finite amount of water on Earth. Earth never gained nor
lost water. I learned the water cycle in detail, going way beyond what my dad
had taught me. I learned about oceans, rivers, streams, lakes, glaciers and
underground aquifers. I learned that humans, themselves, were seventy percent
water. Then I taught myself exactly how the Corolaqua plant purified seawater
and I studied the chemistry of water, a compound, not an element, made of
hydrogen and oxygen, which
were
elements. I continued on with chemistry,
then biology and physics. I was building on the foundation that my father had
laid down.

But I went too
far. At least, according to everyone in Clearview. They thought I was obsessed
with useless knowledge, and they thought it was because I didn’t want to face
losing my dad. They said that I was obsessed with learning because I was trying
to fill a hole in my life. A bottomless hole that could never be filled. To
everyone in town, I was crazy. Psychologically damaged beyond repair.

So, as I got
older, I decided to keep what I knew to myself and I made more of an effort to
fit in, like Rick Levingworth and Ellen Sanchez did. It took a while, but it
worked. Most people stopped thinking I was crazy. Unfortunately, they instead
started to think I looked down on them and started to resent me again. Still,
that was better than it’d been and it would’ve been a good way to leave it, but
I made things worse.

I discovered
that there was something going on with the water.

A few years out of school, I
decided to compile a kind of almanac about the Territory. The number of towns,
their populations, the amount and kind of food they produced, the goods and
services they provided, how much they traded, etc. I wanted to gather together
as many facts about each town as I could.

But
information was hard to come by. Much harder than I’d expected. So I enlisted
Benny’s help. He tried to verify information through the Line. But the people
who ran the Line in other towns were suspicious. Answering these questions
wasn’t part of their jobs. The Line was for trade, reports about the Virus and
marauders, and communication between the towns and the Fibs. Most of his
requests never received answers at all, like they’d completely disappeared from
the Line.

At first, my
plan was to build an accurate portrait of the Territory, but that soon changed
into something else. I started crunching numbers and then I took those numbers
and referenced them to what I knew about Corolaqua’s water output. That’s when
I began to see that things didn’t add up.

Under any
possible scenario, Corolaqua was pumping out way more water than needed.
Corolaqua provided water for the towns from Port Orford to Astoria, and those
towns’ populations couldn’t possibly consume all the water we pumped out. And
the desalination plant in Willapa Bay, which served the towns north of Astoria
up to Moclips, wasn’t needed at all. Between what we pumped out and the
rainfall and aquifers up there, they had plenty of water.

Then, by
carefully tracking trade on the Line, Benny and I suspected the same thing was
going on in the southern part of the Territory. We couldn’t confirm it, but it
looked like there were three desalination plants south of Port Orford, in what
used to be California. But the towns down there required only one plant, if
any. There just weren’t enough people in the Territory to justify five plants
operating at full capacity. Way more water was being purified and shipped than
needed, including water required for farming. No matter how you added it up,
the numbers didn’t make any sense.

So where was
all this extra water going? Was it being shipped inland? But there were no
towns inland. At least that’s what we’d been taught all our lives. It was
rumored that there might be a string of towns on the east coast, but no one had
ever confirmed that. And even if that were true, it didn’t make sense that
water was being purified on one coast and trucked across two thousand miles of
dead land to the other coast. Was it possible that some towns in the Territory
were using the water for something that the rest of us didn’t know about? I
didn’t have an answer to that question, but I became obsessed with finding one.

I should’ve
kept my discovery to myself because, when I brought it up to others, I was
branded a troublemaker. Clearview considered itself lucky to be a supplier of
water. Water was a precious commodity. Why ask questions about it?

And late at night,
when I was lying in bed, I’d stare up at the ceiling and wonder if everyone
else was right and I was wrong. Was I psychologically damaged? Was I obsessed
with water because of my father? He’d said that water was important and now I’d
found out that there was something weird going on with it. A secret? Or was I
just trying to keep him alive? I wanted him alive. I missed him.

I hadn’t passed any trucks. The
road had been empty the entire way. The only sign of life had been the white
seagulls skimming the gray blue ocean.

I entered the
Swan Peninsula and focused more closely on my surroundings. The pumping station
would be somewhere just up ahead. My simple map didn’t show the exact location,
but it’d be easy to find. Here, the aqueduct channel ran inland parallel to the
road and about a quarter mile to the east of it. And I knew that pumping
stations were installed where water had to run uphill. Otherwise, gravity did
the job of pulling water through the aqueducts.

So I started
to look for a rise in the terrain. The pumping station would be where that rise
began.

Corolaqua’s water distribution
system wasn’t complicated. The plant delivered its water through open channel
aqueducts, covered aqueducts, and pipes directly to reservoirs up and down the
coast. Towns used the water from those reservoirs for themselves or they
shipped it in tank trucks to towns not served by the reservoirs.

Once in a
while, the flow of water would stop. A pipe would break or a tree branch would
crash into an open channel or, as now, a pumping station would fail. Whatever
the problem was, Corolaqua would have to send a worker out to fix it.

Ten minutes into the Swan Peninsula, I saw the treetops rising, which meant that just to my east, I’d find the
pumping station. So I swung across the road and pulled over onto the shoulder.
The shoulder was covered in vegetation which had grown out from the woods. I
looked into the dense forest and every shade of green stared back at me.

I didn’t
unload any tools. I’d check the pumping station first, find out what the
problem was, then return with the right tools. For now, a gas lantern to light
up the inside of the pumping station would be enough. I also didn’t take any
protective gear. Over the decades, such gear had proved useless against the
Virus. Even the few Remnant biohazard suits that had been salvaged over the
years didn’t do any good. That fact alone should’ve clued people in that
something didn’t make scientific sense about the Virus, but, again, no one knew
enough to get that.

I hiked through the thick woods,
leaving the warmth and light of the road behind. The Western Hemlocks’ thick
canopy blocked out so much sunlight that it left the underbrush starved and
thin. I was surrounded by a cold, damp darkness and that meant marauders, so I
tuned in to the sounds around me. I heard birds chirping, small animals
skittering, and branches rustling. Sounds I’d heard before. They weren’t
ominous sounds, but without human sounds to engulf them, they were harshly exaggerated.
(The Virus had killed humans but spared animals and no one knew why. But at
least, this made scientific sense. There had been other viruses with that
characteristic.)