4. Joel from Operations
JOEL FROM OPERATIONS
JOEL
Yesterday, my biggest problem was the wave pool pH balance, which at the time felt like a character-building inconvenience and now feels like a gift basket from God.
That was Monday. Monday I had a pH problem, a supervisor problem, and a career problem, which is that I was three weeks from putting in my notice because you can only work at a place called WonderSphere for so long before the gap between the name and the reality starts to feel personal.
Today is Thursday. Today my problems have diversified.
They now include a ruptured intake valve on Tank 6, a generator carrying every critical system in Celestial Bay with no backup if it fails, a security radio network that has deteriorated into overlapping panic and stretches of dead air, and the fact that the thing I just watched eat Phil from maintenance used to be Dana from guest services, who complained about the copier and ate pasta salad next to me on Tuesday.
Homemade. Offered me some. I said no thanks.
Normal interaction. The kind of thing you forget immediately and then remember with terrible clarity when the person is on her hands and knees on the tile of Corridor 7B doing something to Phil that I'm not going to describe because I already can't stop seeing it and putting words to it would make it worse.
So. That's Thursday.
I'm in the mechanical room under the main aquarium tank.
Sublevel 2. It's loud down here, all pump noise and pipe vibration and the constant low thrum of water moving through systems that were designed to keep three million gallons of saltwater at the right temperature and salinity for animals that didn't ask to live in a building in the middle of nowhere.
I've been down here for most of the day.
The ceiling is seven feet, the lighting is industrial, and the air tastes like rust and chlorine.
But the access door is steel, it locks from inside, and the things upstairs haven't figured out doors with locks yet.
They can do handles. They can do push bars.
Locks are still beyond them, which is the only advantage I currently have and I'm leaning on it hard.
The damaged intake line is the priority. If the patch fails, Tank 6 starts emptying into Sublevel 2. Not all three million gallons, probably. Emergency valves should engage before that.
I'm no longer building plans around should.
If the ground floor floods, the only section of this park with intact walls and sealed entry points becomes a swimming pool full of debris and bodies and whatever else is floating around up there.
My evaluation last month rated both my technical performance and workplace engagement adequate. My supervisor is dead now. I watched it happen on Monitor 14 before the cameras failed, and I'm still down here keeping his aquarium alive.
Adequate.
I finish the intake valve repair. The pump noise smooths out.
Pressure holds. Tank 6 lives to see another day, and so do the three sand tiger sharks, the school of amberjack, and the one sea turtle who keeps bumping into the tank like he's trying to get my attention.
I've started talking to him. His name is Lenny.
Lenny doesn't talk back, which makes him the best conversational partner I've had in a long while.
I eat a protein bar on an overturned bucket, drink from the utility sink, and stare at the pump gauges while thinking about nothing on purpose.
I need to do a sweep. I take the crescent wrench. Because it's heavy and I'm used to holding it and it makes my hand feel like it has a purpose beyond shaking.
Sublevel: clear. The steel doors are holding.
Ground floor: I come up through the utility stairwell into the back corridor behind the main exhibits. The aquarium is still running. The jellyfish display is doing its slow, pulsing thing, completely indifferent to the collapse of human civilization.
I check the underwater viewing tunnel. It's the most secure space in Celestial Bay because there's two locked access points, and nothing has figured out how to get in from the tank side yet, although the infected employee who fell into the open-top feeding platform has been drifting past every few minutes, and I've stopped flinching when it bumps the window, which is either adaptation or a bad sign.
Tunnel is clear. Moving on.
I continue into the main aquarium wing. The corridor opens up into the big exhibit hall, the one with the floor-to-ceiling tank that marketing calls "The Ocean Window."
The exhibit hall is dim. Emergency lighting only. The interactive displays along the far wall are dark, their touchscreens frozen on a loading animation that will never finish loading. A stroller is overturned near the shark facts kiosk.
I hear a thud, followed by a smaller thud, followed by a whispered word I can't make out, followed by another thud. It's coming from behind the touch-tank exhibit.
I tighten my grip on the wrench. Move along the wall. Stay quiet. I've gotten efficient at quiet. Yesterday I couldn't walk through a room without my keys jingling.
I round the corner of the touch-tank exhibit.
There's a woman sitting on the floor behind the tank with her back against the acrylic wall, her legs stretched out in front of her, and a tote bag in her lap. She's trying to open a bottle of water by hitting the cap against the edge of a bench.
She's small. WonderSphere hoodie three sizes too big, sleeves hanging past her fingers, and somehow she's made that look intentional, like the hoodie chose her and not the other way around.
Knees skinned raw through ripped leggings.
She has a foam trident leaning against the wall next to her and a purse shaped like a strawberry sitting on the floor.
She looks like she was assembled from the lost-and-found bin of a very specific kind of chaos.
There's churro sugar on her chin and a streak near the corner of her mouth. I know exactly why I'm still looking. I just don't have time for it.
She's focused entirely on the water bottle, which she's now holding up to her face and glaring at.
"The tamper ring is caught," I say.
She screams. The water bottle launches out of her hands, arcs through the air, and lands in the touch tank with a splash that startles the two remaining stingrays into the far corner.
A stingray investigates the water bottle.
"Who are you? Are you... are you okay? Are you one of the..." She makes a gesture that I think is supposed to indicate the undead but looks more like someone doing a bad impression of a scarecrow. "The wrong people?"
"The wrong people," I repeat.
"The ones who are walking wrong. The..." She gestures again. "You know."
I know exactly what she means. "I'm not one of them," I say. "I'm Joel. Operations."
"Operations." She says it like she's testing the word for nutritional content. "So you work here."
"Unfortunately."
"Oh, that's... I mean, before all this, that's... was it fun? Working at a theme park?"
"No," I say. "It wasn't fun."
"Right. Yeah. That tracks." She sticks out her hand, then seems to realize she's sitting on the floor and I'm standing above her and the angle is wrong, so she pulls the hand back and does a sort of wave instead. "I'm Grace. I'm... not supposed to be here."
She looks past me at the wall of glass and her face does something I don't expect. It goes soft.
"That's a really big fish window," she says.
I look at the tank. Big fish window. I spent six months sitting through meetings about the name Ocean Window. There were mockups. Surveys. A consultant. She fixed it in three words while looking at three million gallons of water like it was doing her a personal favor by being beautiful.
"Yeah," I say. "It is."
"Do the water stairs still work? The ones outside, near the splash area?"
"No," I say. "Power to the exterior systems is down."
"Okay. What about the glass hallway? The fish tube, tunnel thing under the big..." She points at the tank. "Under this. Is that safe?"
"The viewing tunnel. Yes. One entrance, reinforced acrylic and nothing's gotten in."
"Can we go there?"
"We?"
She looks at me. Brown eyes, wide and irritatingly direct, the kind of eye contact that doesn't let you steer around it.
"I'm not going to go away," she says. "I know you probably want me to.
I know I'm not supposed to be here. Craig made that very clear.
But I'm here and I'm not leaving because the outside is worse and...
" She pauses, searching for something. "I don't want to be by myself anymore.
In the dark. With the wrong people and the mermaids. "
"The mermaids?"
"I was hiding in the mermaid room. With Brenda and Sheila. They're very supportive but the conversation is one-sided and I need someone who talks back." She looks at me. "You talk back, right?"
She's ridiculous, but she's not stupid. She came here because the park has walls. Then picked the aquarium because it has fewer entrances. Now she's asking about the tunnel because somewhere under the panic and churro sugar, she's building a map of survivable spaces. Or she's just really lucky.
"When required."
"Great. That's... yeah. Okay."
She stands up. Or tries to. Her foot catches in the tote strap, and she pitches forward.
I catch her around the waist. Her hand lands flat against my chest, fingers knotting in my shirt, and for one strange second neither of us moves.
Then her elbow clips the foam trident. It skitters across the tile and cracks into the base of the touch tank.
The sound travels through the empty exhibit hall.
Something answers from the corridor. One hard impact against a wall. Then a dragging step.
I pull Grace behind the tank and hold one finger to my mouth. She presses against me without argument, eyes fixed on the corridor. Her hand is still twisted in my shirt.
The dragging sound comes closer, stops, and then slowly recedes.
Grace releases my shirt. "Sorry."
"You almost called every infected person in this wing."
"I know. I said sorry. It was the stabby fork's fault."
I look at the foam trident on the floor. "The what?"
"The stabby fork. The..." She picks it up, holds it out. "It's for protection."
"From what?"
"Things. General things. It's a deterrent."
"It's foam."
"It's a deterrent, Joel."
I look at this small woman who broke into a theme park during a crisis and just nearly killed us both with a foam trident she calls a stabby fork.
She's a liability of a magnitude I've never encountered and I once watched a summer intern pour concrete mix directly into a storm drain.
But she said she doesn't want to be alone anymore and neither do I.
"Come on," I say. "I know a place that locks."
"Oh thank God. I love locks. Locks are my favorite thing about buildings. Locks and also walls. And ceilings. The whole structure situation, really. I'm very pro-structure right now."
She collects her things. She follows me toward the corridor that leads to the viewing tunnel.
"Watch the cable."
"It's fine," she says, stepping over it. "The ground and I have a whole thing. Shared custody. It gets me every other step and most holidays."
I hold the door to the corridor and wait for her to pass through and then I watch her navigate a flat, obstacle-free hallway like it's an active minefield and I think: this woman is a catastrophe in a hoodie.
She's going to die in four hours. Maybe three.
Not if I can help it.
I follow her into the corridor and I close the door behind us.