Squirrels: Chapter 8: Part 06: The Big Flush

Please enjoy the next post in Murdertrout, Chapter 8 of Attack of the Lesbian Activist Squirrels. Comments are welcome. Tips via the PayPal link to the right are also welcome but always optional.

Merry Christmas and happy reading.

An additional note, please don’t read any synchronicity between the glorious holiday of Christmas and a post about sewage treatment. It’s how the text broke and nothing more.

Jimmy was the best employee at F-SPEWT, the Facility for Sewage Processing and Ecological Waste Treatment. He was also the only one working that shift. Mostly automated, there usually wasn’t a whole lot to do.

The facility was proof that people will spend lavishly to avoid interacting with their own shit. It had been carpet bombed with Federal funds some years ago and was now officially a coveted and photogenic “Green Investment”. It had a beautiful front lawn featuring patches of native vegetation with interpretive signs explaining each plant and its role in the ecosystem. It had a giant mural on its three story concrete wall facing the road. The mural was an artist’s interpretation of a third grade elementary school project. It implied that rivers full of fish came directly from clouds, cascading into a giant clockwork of happy stick figures wearing hard hats, which did something with lots of big red hearts. From there the water emerged into a pond where a blue whale swam in circles.

The building smelled like shit; because it was where shit goes.

Jimmy was pleased to have landed a “trainee level” job at F-SPEWT. He was a probationary hire, destined to work at half pay another two full years while he completed a degree in environmental studies with a minor in chemistry. Environmental studies was a breeze. All you had to do was pretend that blue whales lived in ponds and you’d get an A. Organic chemistry was a lot harder, but Jimmy was a hard worker and a good student. He’d earned a steady series of good solid B grades. This made him smarter than virtually the entire population that flushed their shit into his workspace. Jimmy owed a fortune in student loans.

He’d had a busy day. Someone or something was sending terrifying levels of… everything his way. He’d been titrating this and sampling that in a desperate attempt to tune the treatment facility to manage incoming chemistry that was literally “off the charts”. It was like someone had flushed a pharmaceutical plant run by space aliens.

It wouldn’t do to let this witches brew flow through the plant under “default” procedures! There were substances in there that weren’t mentioned in even his most advanced textbooks. There was no way a residential sector should contain, much less offload, gunk this complex. Yet here it was. It was overwhelming the system!

In desperation, Jimmy consulted Operations Manual 3.02b. Removing it from it’s place of honor among the the manuals and guides in the operations room made him worried, but also excited. He turned to the dreaded and almost mythical Appendix R. He’d had hours of training on Appendix R. His provisional certification in Appendix R procedures had taken months of paperwork.

He frowned. Appendix R was clear. This was a time to file an “Exceptions Buffer Emergency Approval”. He’d never expected to file a EBEA so soon in his career. Maybe someday, if his career took him to greater heights, but not yet! (He’d heard stories about Buffalo NY and one particular EBEA near Niagara Falls that kept him awake at night.)

The thing about understanding chemistry is that you know things nobody else knows. It was Jimmy’s burden to know what’s in our water. Having such dark knowledge, you can’t blame him for being a bit high strung.

Dutifully, he filled out the EBEA. It took him an hour. He added test results he’d been accumulating over the last few hours. He checked boxes. He cross referenced the Catchment Permit specifications. He was filling out the kind of paperwork that made people quit the military and become monks.

The facility had dozens of computers but only one was usable for the EBEA. An decrepit, long ignored, computer that had the words F-SPEWT / NOTAT scrawled on the old putty colored monitor with permanent marker. This was the “notable transmissions terminal”, affectionately nicknamed NOTAT. It was the only legal and official channel for communicating protected data about the State’s water supply. No other computer was officially accepted.

He turned it on.

“Updating, please do not turn off while updates in progress.”

Oh no! The computer hadn’t been used for months, maybe years. As soon as it hit the Internet, every component demanded the newest software patch and security upgrade. This could take hours!

Jimmy looked at a display on the wall. It represented incoming effluent. He’d stopped outflow in accordance with step 11 in the Appendix R checklist. A green bar was rising, rising, rising… soon it would turn red. And then what?!

He shuddered, things were getting serious. In accordance with Appendix R, step 11d, he’d have to move to the “NOTAT Interruption Protocol”. This was not good! The whole system was obsolete, stupid, and convoluted but entering a second order layer of obfuscation surrounding “interrupted communication” was a far deeper bureaucratic rabbit hole. Originally instituted during the Cold War, the “Interruption Protocol” was written in 1954 to deal with the effects of nuclear war. The protocol predated cell phones. It predated FAX machines. It predated everything. Nobody in 1953, freaking out about Russkies and ICBMs, could have anticipated a future society where everyone had a portable communications device stashed in their pocket! As he flipped through the instructions, he found a spot where it literally referred to sending a Telegram! He was doomed!

The door opened and Jimmy breathed a sigh of relief. Longtime F-SPEWT employee Francis sauntered in. Francis was twice Jimmy’s age, had no education, and didn’t know a titration from a Bud Light. However, he’d been at the plant since it’s inception. Rumor had it he was a union pipefitter on the original construction site. Supposedly, he’d stayed there because his car had been repossessed while the building’s footings had been poured. When the rest of the crew left to build other things, Francis simply put down roots and became a founding father of the F-SPEWT family.

Jimmy was delighted to hand over this terrible responsibility to the older, more experienced fellow. Francis knew every valve and pipe in the facility. Francis never panicked.

Hurriedly, Jimmy explained the situation. The incoming effluent was “hot”… filled with more chemicals that Jimmy had ever seen. It was far worse than the meth lab incident of last Easter weekend! He’d checked the outflow to keep untreated pollutants from exiting the facility… but that wouldn’t hold for long.

Catching a breath in his worried monologue, Jimmy glanced at a nearby poster. It showed a bear catching salmon with the inspirational message “this is why we do it”. He paused for a second, feeling the weight of the world on his shoulders. Then he continued; the checked outflow was only a stop-gap measure. He’d bought a few hours at most. The NOTAT wasn’t responding. Appendix R wasn’t helping. What were they going to do?

“Relax kid.” Francis patted Jimmy on the shoulder. “When’s your shift over?”

Jimmy glanced at the clock; time sure does fly. “An hour.”

Francis smiled reassuringly. “It’s gonna’ be fine. Open the ‘buffer pool B’ valve in sector seven. Then report back here.” He ordered.

Jimmy hopped to it. Ninety seconds later he was back, still worried, bouncing from one foot to the other.

Francis steered him away from the F-SPEWT / NOTAT computer. He had no idea what it did. The thing was never on. If it managed to boot up, which he doubted, all it probably could do was play Pac-Man. He pictured some abandoned Cold War bunker with skeletons sitting at the seats and chuckled.

Gently, like a mentor ought, he led Jimmy to the staff room where they rested on the old couch. He regaled Jimmy with a racy tale from the time his ex-wife had sent a repo-man after his car. Stories about that bitch always got a laugh.

As the hour wound down he accepted the form Jimmy was waving about and sent him on his way. He had no idea what the hell EBEA meant but he wasn’t about to let Jimmy know that. The poor kid would probably hyperventilate.

He watched until he saw Jimmy pedal his ass out of sight. (The poor kid still considered bicycles a legitimate form of transportation!) Then he walked back to the control center. He spent a while on the catwalk, watching a Technicolor chemical soup flow from the main pond to buffer pool B. Unlike usual effluent, which stunk to high heaven but predictably so, this had a different and oddly disturbing scent; like Axe Body spray had become sentient and eaten burritos for lunch. It stung his nose. He felt a little dizzy. He caught a glimpse of something floating. Was that a cat in there? Best not to think about it.

Whatever was in there was an unholy mess he didn’t want in his vicinity. So he got to work. By “getting to work” he meant sauntering in no hurry at all to the F-SPEWT / NOTAT computer. It was making whirring sounds and still trying to update. He unplugged it.

Then he fed Jimmy’s form into the shredder.

In the main room he glanced at all of Jimmy’s careful calibrations. The kid must have been working his ass off to do all the… whatever it was. Francis shrugged, clicked “reset to default”, then “flush b-p B”, then “flush main”.

He rubbed his hands together. Everything was fixed!

Satisfied, he kicked back on the couch to watch a repeat of Bonanza. Tomorrow he’d tell the kid his stuff was approved and he’d applied some exotic protocol from the book. The kid would eat it up. If there’s one thing he’d learned from a steady flow of more or less identical environmental studies students was that they were invariably gullible. He could tell the kid that Men in Black had arrived by helicopter to ship everything to Guantanamo and it was classified so he couldn’t explain further. The kid would buy it. He wondered if any of them ever paid off their student loans.

Half an hour later he was engrossed in Bonanza. Meanwhile, the first wave hit the waters where a trans species raptor had recently been recorded.