Down Under Crater Billy

When people weren’t going through it she and her staff shot first rocks and then bullets into the barrier, squirted the control pad with soft-drink, whiskey, solvents, boiling water and liquid nitrogen. She ran a big piece of pipe through it, then taped twelve chairs together and ran them through to see if something that long would confuse the thing. When it didn’t, she tried it with a conga line, complete with musical instruments.

The lock performed flawlessly every time. Only once did it do something unexpected. That was when she tried to throw a bucket of water through it.

The water came out the other side as a smooth black eight-liter balloon, the liquid coated with a thin layer of enties. Since the lock enties were distantly related to Hydrofilm type enties this made a certain amount of sense.

I came in to consult with them on this one, but couldn’t see how it could cause a safety problem unless someone shot a firehose through it long enough to take away enough enties to weaken the barrier past the point where it would hold pressure.

Gloria, Anna and Manny put their heads together for a few minutes, and shortly afterwards they tried just that.

An hour later the bottom half of the evacuated chamber was filled with a bulging black sack of water, and the barrier was still well over three centimeters thick. Manny reported a slight rise in resistance as the barrier thinned. Sorry extrapolated the trend and predicted that the lock would become completely impermeable before it thinned to the two-centimeter mark.

When we brought that first water balloon back in to examine it the enties reabsorbed themselves into the lock itself, and it turned back into a bucket of water—sans bucket—in Gloria’s hands. We wouldn’t have been able to run this test if Anna hadn’t figured out how to run a hose through the lock and into the water bag to pump it dry.

The plan was for the testing to continue for ninety days—longer if there was some sort of mishap. That had evolved into the rule of thumb for abnotech testing. If an item didn’t go abnanas in that period of time then it was probably perfectly safe for the general public.

The mishap occurred at 1:19 AM local of day 43.

At this point Gloria and I were still together. Normally before a month had passed we’d have some sort of fight that knocked us off on mode. Our working relationship was always ready to provide that kind of deal-breaker. Even if we somehow avoided that pitfall there was another argument cycle we’d repeat, a variation on our working relationship.

We are two very different people. I like things stable and certain, with identifiable rules and goals. Gloria gets bored easily and resists commitment. What I find comforting, she finds confining. The more seriously I’d treat her and our relationship, the more she’d treat it—and me—as a joke. Friction would build. The process had started again, but hadn’t reached the blow-up point yet.

43 days together was an all-time record for us.

Records are, as they say, made to be broken.

I was spending that night with Gloria in her messy cubby at one end of the Testing section. She’d gotten all heavy-eyed and yawny not long after dinner and gone to bed early. I read and ignored the tube until almost midnight, then turned in myself. She never stirred when I crawled under the covers beside her.

We were both sound asleep when just over an hour later our wristlets began to shrill the emergency signal and Sorry’s voice came blaring from every output device in the cubby.

“CODE 1 EMERGENCY WITH AIRLOCK TEST! CODE 1 EMERGENCY WITH AIRLOCK TEST! CO—”

“I hear you!” I yelled, trying to get out from under the arm Gloria had flung over my chest and sit up. “Report!” Beside me she groaned and stirred groggily, more asleep than awake.

“It’s Jenny Montez! She’s in the test chamber and I think she’s choking to death!”

“Oh God no,” I whispered, kicking the covers aside and leaping out of bed. Behind me Gloria was trying to struggle to a sitting position with a drunken slowness. I wasn’t going to wait around for her to get her shit together. “Did you Code 1 Bob and a medical team?” 1 asked as I bolted for the door.

“I’m trying/” He wailed, sounding as desperate as I felt. By the time I reached the cubby’s front door he had it already open for me.

“What about the tech on duty?” I demanded as I went out the door and started running down the corridor, barefoot and bareassed. Staying at Gloria’s had been a stroke of luck. The test chamber was barely a hundred meters away.

“He doesn’t respond to the alarm!” I could already hear it in the distance.

Vowing to have the duty tech’s head on a platter I ran as fast as I could, not even wasting breath on cursing. Crater Billy is like a small town. You know all of your neighbors. Jenny Montez was eleven years old, a 7, the only child of Pete and Luz Montez, and too goddamned young and pretty to die.