Chapter 11 The Snare in the Server Farm
The intake was a two-meter concrete throat at the waterline on the north face, screened with a bar grille that Mang Rey’s cousin cut in eight minutes with a battery grinder under a tarpaulin, in the rain, at ten to three on Friday afternoon, while four men fished off a boat forty meters away and made a great deal of noise about a fish they had not caught.
Mina went in at three o’clock exactly.
The last thing Hal said to her before she did was: “Comms check at fifteen minutes, then every ten. If I miss two I am coming in.”
“You are not coming in.”
“Mina.”
“Say it back to me properly.”
“If I miss two,” Hal said, “I will get Rey to move the boat, and I will not come in, and I will hate it.”
“Thank you.”
That was the whole of it. There was a thing he wanted to say and a thing she wanted to say and both of them were aware of both, and there were thirteen people in three boats within nine meters of them, and the tide was at one o’clock in the morning, and so neither of them said anything at all.
She went into the pipe.
They had built the plan in four hours that morning, on a whiteboard that had a flood manifest on the other side of it, and it had been the worst four hours of the operation.
Not because the plan was bad. The plan was the best available.
Simone had the below-grade access on the northeast from the site registration, Rey had the barge ramp from two months of complaining about the wash, and the intake was Mina’s, because the intake is always the answer in a building that has to drink.
It was bad because they had run it like professionals.
Hal had done the movement schedule. He was better at it than anybody in that room and everybody in that room had known it by the second hour, and he had stood at the whiteboard with a marker and laid out four boats, five people, three departure windows and two abort triggers, and he had said Ate Mina twice, in front of the barangay, in a voice that was completely correct and entirely closed.
And Mina had said thank you, that is good work in exactly the same voice.
Mang Rey had watched all of it and said nothing, and at eleven o’clock had taken Hal outside on the pretext of the boats and had not come back for twenty minutes.
So that was the morning: the two of them being flawless at each other for four hours, in front of forty people, on the day.
She had gotten one thing. At about noon, going past her in the doorway with an armful of rope, Hal had stopped for exactly as long as it takes to say six words.
“That arm is not fourteen days.”
“No.”
“Okay,” he had said, and gone on with the rope.
Two hundred meters of chilled water intake, at a gradient, against a current, in the dark.
It was survivable because the plant was drawing at a reduced rate on standby power and the water was at thigh height instead of overhead, and it was awful because of the noise.
The intake ran under the whole southern half of the campus, and above her, through a meter of concrete, ninety-odd megawatts of load was doing what ninety-odd megawatts does, and the pipe carried it.
Not a hum. A pressure, arriving through the water and the walls and the soles of her boots.
There is a specific loneliness to a pipe.
Mina had been in worse places. She had spent nine hours in a laundry chute in Jakarta and a night in a chilled shipping container in Busan and neither had bothered her, because in both of those she had been waiting, and waiting is a thing she was built for.
A pipe is not waiting. A pipe is committed. You cannot turn around in a two-meter throat with the water at your thighs and a current against you, and so every meter you make is a meter you cannot unmake, and the only two things in the world are the way ahead and the count.
So she counted, and she thought about a plywood room.
Not the fight. She had gone over the fight enough on Thursday night to have worn the shine off it.
What she kept returning to, dragging herself through cold water in the dark under ninety megawatts, was a thing Luz Ramos had said to her at five o’clock that morning, in the doorway of a flooded store, while handing her a cup of coffee and refusing to make eye contact.
Ate, may I say one thing, and then I will not say it again.
Say it.
You did not lie to him. You did a worse thing. Luz had put the coffee in her hand. You made a decision about him and then you carried it around for two days and you were kind to him the whole time. He has been going over every kind thing you did since Tuesday and checking it.
Mina had not had an answer at five in the morning and did not have one at three in the afternoon in a pipe.
She counted the manholes. There were four. She came up at the fourth into a pump room, and lay on the deck plate in the dark for ninety seconds letting the water run off her, and then did the thing she had been putting off for two hundred meters, which was to look at her arm.
The dressing had come off somewhere in the pipe.
Under it the outer run had opened along about four inches, which Tita Baby had told her on Wednesday would happen, in those words, in that order.
It was not bleeding much. It had gone white at the edges from the water and it was not going to close again by itself and it was, in a way she found almost funny, the least of her problems.
She taped it with what she had, and got up, and went to work.
“Comms check,” she said.
“Fifteen minutes on the nose.” Hal’s voice came in dry and close and absolutely level. “Say a number so I know it is you.”
“Fifteen.”
“That is not a number, that is a personality trait.” A pause. “Everything okay?”
“Everything is fine.”
The pause on the other end went about a half second longer than it should have, and Mina understood, standing in a pump room in a facility with eighty-two men in it, that he had heard the lie, and that he was not going to say anything about it, and that this was what they had instead of a conversation now.
Hall 3 was the wrong hall.
She knew it at the door. Simone’s site registration had put the below-grade access on the northeast, and the northeast structure was three halls away, and the route on the drawing went along a service corridor with a painted gray floor and a yellow line down the middle of it and stenciled numbers at intervals.
She got seventeen meters down that corridor and stopped.
Because the corridor was clean.
Not tidy. Clean. On a live construction and commissioning site, on the fourth day of a typhoon, with eighty-two men on shift, there was no mud on that floor. There were no boot prints. There was no water tracked in from anywhere.
Nobody had walked on it.
Mina stood in a corridor she was not supposed to be able to reach and understood, in the way you understand these things, which is somewhere at the base of the skull about two full seconds before the rest of you catches up, that she was inside a shape somebody else had drawn.
Then the lights in the corridor went out, and the lights in Hall 3 behind her came up to full, and a voice she had heard for the first time three days ago on a recording said, over the public address, in English, unhurried:
“Ms. Hermosa. The corridor is a dead end. Please go back into the hall.”
She went back into the hall, because it was that or stand in a corridor.
Hall 3 was two hundred and eleven meters long, and the racks went away from her in contained rows under a ceiling of cable gantry until perspective closed them, and every light in it was on.
“You are in a great deal of trouble,” said Hansel Brand.
He was not there. His voice came from everywhere, out of a hundred ceiling speakers, at a volume calculated to sit just over the roar of the plant.
“I want to be honest with you,” he said, “because I am told you are extremely good and I do not think either of us benefits from theatre. I have known you were coming since Wednesday afternoon. Not you personally. I have known that somebody would come, because I have been running this site on the assumption that the thing we are doing is the sort of thing that people come about, and I would be a fool to have assumed otherwise.”
Mina moved down the row. The aisle containment doors were at each end and both were shut.
“I have read your file, incidentally,” Hansel said.
“Not a real file. There is no file. I mean the other one, the public one, which is enormous. Eleven films. A telethon in 2019 that raised four hundred million pesos.” A pause that was almost pleasant.
“I watched about forty minutes of your programme last night with a translator, and I want you to know that I thought it was extremely good, and that I did not expect to.”
She was counting doors and finding all of them shut.
“Here is what I think,” said Hansel Brand. “I think you have been told that I am a man who is going to drown forty thousand people for a building. And I want to put something to you, because I am reasonably sure you are the only person in this country who will follow it.”
The plant roared.
“There is a girl in Rotterdam,” Hansel said.
“Nineteen. Glioblastoma multiforme, which as of four years ago was a sentence with a number attached to it, and the number was fourteen months. She was in our second cohort. She is in her second year of a marine biology degree and her mother sends me a photograph every Christmas, and I have that photograph, Ms. Hermosa, and I look at it more than is healthy.” His voice had not changed at all.
“There are seven thousand of her in the first year at full build. Not twelve thousand hopes. Fourteen thousand people who are going to be alive who are otherwise not, and I can produce the arithmetic and I have, every night, since February.”
Mina reached the fourth door. Shut.