Altered Seasons_MONSOONRISE

by Paul Briggs

  “Haven’t heard a thing.” At this point, the little microwave at the end of the table turned itself on, the light inside showing a single cup. Roth glanced at it.

  “I set it to start at six minutes before seven,” Isabel said. “When it’s done, the alarm app goes off and wakes me up. That gives me five minutes to drink the chyq and get my brain back in gear before the data comes in.”

  “That’s efficient.” Roth glanced under the desk, where there was a wastebasket with a dozen energy-bar wrappers in it. “Have you been living on those things this whole time?”

  “Since Brian left. Speaking of Brian, when’s that replacement going to come?”

  “It’s hard finding a qualified candidate. If we’re still here on Monday—which isn’t looking too likely right now—and if Brian isn’t back by then, we’ll try to bring somebody in.”

  Isabel was really starting to think it had been a mistake for her to accept this job. To the task of helping the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers keep the Old River Control Structure standing, Eveland-Blades Consulting, Inc., had brought half a ton of computer hardware, two engineers, three supervisors and their in-house “social/interpersonal networking specialist,” a man whose job description consisted entirely of schmoozing with Lieutenant General J.L. Martineau and any other important decision-makers who happened to be in the area. The other engineer, Brian Dalrymple, took a leave of absence two days ago so he could go back to Michigan and help his mother evacuate. He was supposed to have been replaced, but the teams in Greenville, Baton Rouge, and New Orleans swore they couldn’t spare anybody. Which left Isabel subsisting on chyq, meal replacement bars and about three hours of sleep a night in 30-to-45-minute servings.

  She glared out the window again. The skies were still clear and cloudless. You would never imagine that six hundred miles to the north—and nine hundred miles, and twelve hundred miles—such torrential downpours were taking place that all her efforts here were probably futile.

  “Has anybody told the general about the problem with the simulation?”

  “What prob—oh. That thing you keep mentioning in your e-mails. Look, Martineau knows this structure better than anyone alive. He knows how much it can take. I wouldn’t worry about it.” Which wasn’t an answer… which was an answer. “You know, Isabel, you’re really being a trooper about all this.”

  “Thank you,” said Isabel, not sure if Roth was being sincere or if he was trying to convey please don’t blow it by turning whistleblower on us.

  “I mean it,” he said. “I kind of wish we had a provision for overtime pay, just so we could give you time and a half.”

  “So do I,” said Isabel. The microwave’s alarm app started ringing.

  * * *

  The extra hard drives taking up so much room in the RV contained a map of the North American continent and surrounding waters—a map as detailed as the one she’d worked on during the Norfolk Conference. This was the key element of a program designed to predict the response of key pieces of infrastructure to extreme weather events.

  Isabel’s job was to take the updates that came every three hours from the National Weather Service, translate the relevant information into something the program could understand and feed it in. This took about twenty minutes.

  The program then spent an hour and a half running simulations of the next week’s weather. Depending on how much of the cloud the program had access to at any particular moment, it could run between two and five per second. With each simulation, it made a small change in some variable or other—wind speed and direction, duration and quantity of rain in various places. This would have been a good time for Isabel to take a quick nap, except that the program would invariably crash several times and need to be rebooted, so she had to keep a constant eye on it.

  To keep memory demand to a minimum, the program didn’t save the tens of thousands of individual simulations—only certain key results, which were autosaved as they came in. (Which, considering how often it crashed, was a good thing.) Isabel’s next task, once she had an hour’s worth of results, was to compile them into a brief report. This took ten to fifteen minutes. Which gave her as much as an hour to grab some exercise, food, or sleep before the next update came.

  And with every update, the news got a little worse. Right now, the $64-trillion question was how much of the rain that fell in the next few weeks was going to land in the Great Lakes/St. Lawrence drainage basin and ruin everyone’s day in Montreal as it flowed down to the sea, and how much was going to land in the Mississippi drainage basin, make its way down to Louisiana and add to the pressure already on the Old River Control Structure—and, more importantly, whether that pressure would be too much for the ORCS to withstand. That was the question this massive computer was trying to answer, and its answers were getting more and more pessimistic.

  The Corps had done what it could, opening every floodgate on the structure, the Bonnet Carré Spillway and 50 of the Morganza Spillway’s 125 gates. It was looking like it wouldn’t be enough. The four to six inches of rain that had hit most of Iowa a week ago would begin making its appearance tonight.

  If the ORCS failed, the Atchafalaya floodplain would be flooded—much worse than it was already. Whole towns would be washed away. Highways, bridges, and gas pipelines would be severed. The initial damage would make Hurricanes Katrina or Harvey look like scattered showers. That was the bad news.

  The really bad news was what would happen when the Monsoon finally ended and the river returned to its usual volume. The Mississippi at New Orleans was at sea level. Only constant pressure from the flow of the river kept the ocean out. Without that pressure, the drinking water of New Orleans would become as brackish as the Chesapeake. And Louisiana wasn’t California. It didn’t have nearly enough desalinization plants to provide it with the water it needed. People were starting to accept that New Orleans would have to be abandoned sometime this century, but it wasn’t supposed to happen this year. Baton Rouge would be a little better off—it would keep its water supply, but its branch of the river would either be reduced to a trickle or disappear entirely. And between them, dozens of petrochemical plants that needed all that fresh water to operate would have to move or shut down.

  The loss of the ORCS would have been a blow to the United States at any time. If it happened now… well, it looked like they were going to find out.

  * * *

  Not long before noon, Isabel was getting ready to compile the findings from the 10 a.m. report when she got a phone call.

  It was Hunter. “Guess what?”

  “What?” Hunter, I love you, but if this has something to do with Enginquest…

  “I’m coming.”

  “What?”

  “The mayor got a bus and asked every business in Marksville to send somebody to help out at the ORCS—sandbags and stuff,” said Hunter. “So I mentioned to Joan that my girlfriend worked there and asked if I could go, and she said yes.”

  Isabel was briefly surprised that Hunter had done this, but then reflected that it made a kind of sense. Three days ago, he’d installed a new toilet seat all by himself, and he’d been feeling like a Manly Man ever since. This was the next logical step in his leveling up. No child of Clark Bradshaw would think anything of such a simple act of household maintenance, but Hunter hadn’t been brought up that way, poor guy.

  “Cool. What time are you going to be here?”

  “We should get there about quarter after.”

  “I’ll be done here about twenty after.”

  * * *

  Eveland-Blades’ RV was parked just off the southeast end of the Low Sill Control Structure, the oldest component of the ORCS. Louisiana Highway 15, which ran over the ORCS, was closed to most traffic at the moment—except for things like a busload of volunteers. Stepping outside, Isabel saw the bus parked at the northwest end.

  It was ninety degrees outside—a bit warm for this part of Louisiana in October, but not too unreasonable compared to the weeks of hundred-deg
ree-in-the-shade weather they’d had this summer. The water going through the structure was a constant, low rumble, like distant thunder that never died away.

  The ORCS was designed to allow 620,000 cubic feet of water to flow through every second. (Just to put that into perspective, 85,000 cubic feet of water normally flowed over Niagara Falls every second—although God only knew how much was flowing through Niagara right now.) Isabel wasn’t sure how much of that flowed through the Low Sill rather than the other two structures, but as soon as she stepped onto it, she felt the asphalt of the road vibrating under her sneakers. The chain-link fence to her left was also shaking. This thing weighs 200,000 tons, and it’s shaking. That’s kind of scary.

  The ORCS was a product of a different America than the one Isabel had grown up in. It was planned and built in an age of big dreams and big projects—the interstate highway system, the Apollo program… the Chesapeake Bay Bridge, come to think of it. It reminded her a lot of the Bay Bridge—massive, strong, purely functional but with a kind of unintentional beauty. As she looked at it, she couldn’t help thinking Maybe we’ve been underestimating it. How many “hundred-year floods” has the ORCS been through in less than a century? It’s survived all of them. There’s a reason they call this thing “the old soldier.” But the numbers didn’t lie. Well, okay, the numbers were lying, but not in a way that gave her any hope.

  On her right, the river had risen so close to the top of the dam that if the fence weren’t in the way, she could have reached down and touched it. On her left, the water flowing through the gates looked almost solid, like curving gray-brown buttresses that hit the “stilling basin” at the bottom in a churning white maelstrom.

  Down near the river on the other side, not too close to the stilling basin, Isabel could see people at work, mostly in Army or National Guard uniforms. They were piling up sandbags in pool-sized rings on the slope. Sand boils, she thought. The weight of water on the upstream side was forcing itself down, into the ground underneath the ORCS, worming little paths through the seven thousand feet of clay, loam and compacted silt between the riverbed and the bedrock. That wouldn’t do. The Low Sill was strong, but it could be ten times stronger and it wouldn’t matter if the ground beneath it washed away. The only remedy was to build a small levee around the boil wherever the water hit the surface, so the water would form a small pool, creating just enough counterbalancing pressure to slow the flow and prevent further erosion.

  When she spotted Hunter in the middle of a small group headed for a truckload of sandbags, Isabel gasped a little. She hadn’t realized just how little face-to-face human contact she’d had since Monday. Without even intending to, she broke into a run.

  Isabel got there just in time to see Hunter reach down to pick up a sandbag that had just been thrown off the back of the truck. “Stop!” she shouted—too late. Hunter wasn’t exactly weak, but no one had ever taught him the basics of manual labor, including the rule “always lift heavy objects with your legs, not your back.” Even as she was shouting, he was trying to lift the bag. With an abrupt little yelp of pain, Hunter dropped it and fell to his knees.

  There was a first-aid station under a tent not far from the truck, for people who’d thrown their backs out or gotten heatstroke. Isabel escorted Hunter there. With every step, he apologized for having screwed up their reunion and for leaning on her like this.

  And once he was there, Isabel barely had the chance to speak two words to him before she got another phone call.

  “Hello?”

  “Isabel? Where are you?”

  “At the first-aid station.”

  “Are you hurt?”

  “No.”

  “Then what are you—never mind, just get to the navigation lock on the double. We’re meeting Martineau and the governor in half an hour.”

  “What?”

  “General Martineau. He’s called a meeting with us and Giovanni, and he specifically requested that we bring whoever was giving us these figures. That would be you. Get back here now.”

  * * *

  The car Isabel and Hunter shared was back in Marksville, but Isabel had her bike. And she needed it, because the navigation lock was ten miles from the RV. By the time she got there, she was feeling a little light-headed. This might have been dehydration—she’d run out of water halfway there. The caffeine in her system wasn’t helping either. Getting herself together, she stepped onto the gangplank that led to the tugboat in the lock, where Martineau’s office was.

  Isabel stopped to look at herself in the mirror, and wished she hadn’t. She was soaked in sweat, wearing jeans, a Rodomontade T-shirt, and a total absence of makeup. As usual, her hair was threaded through an O-ring, but nobody would be able to see it because her bike helmet was still on. Who cares? Are you planning to seduce the governor? You’re here to work! She adjusted her sweaty T-shirt in a desperate attempt to hide her bra and nipples under folds of cloth. She could already hear people talking in Martineau’s office. The door was open a crack. His secretary pointed her in without a word.

  As soon as Isabel stepped into the office, six people turned to face her. There was Luke Roth, her morning-shift supervisor, and Lydia Horrocks, her afternoon supervisor, both looking at her like teachers looking at a favorite student who’d just gotten a D. Worse, standing just past Horrocks was a thirtyish, somewhat pudgy man in an Oxford shirt. This was Chuck Eveland—the Eveland of Eveland-Blades Consulting. Mike Blades would probably also have been there if he hadn’t been helping evacuate his own family from Omaha.

  “Come in,” said Joe Hickman, a reassuring look on his tanned and squarish face. He was the company’s “social/interpersonal networking specialist,” which sounded like a job for a world-class weasel. People who met Hickman, however, were pleasantly surprised that he came across as not only friendly but solid, honest, and reliable. With good reason—he was paid five times Isabel’s salary to come across that way. And Isabel had to admit that while she could possibly be replaced by a few well-written apps, no software could ever do Hickman’s job.

  At the big desk, General Martineau—a tall, white-haired man who looked like he hadn’t smiled in a long time—gave her a quick glance. Then he returned his attention to the man hovering beside him, who Isabel recognized as Governor Giovanni, and to the tablet computer propped upright on his desk. Judging by the screen, he was videoconferencing with four other people, but Isabel couldn’t make out the faces from this angle.

  “The point is, the lower the river is today, the lower it’ll be when it crests tomorrow,” Martineau was saying. “This is the only chance we have. I’ve made my decision. At three p.m. today the Morganza opens all the way. Get everybody ready.” According to the briefing Isabel had gotten, only three times in its history had any of the Morganza's gates been opened—in 1973, in 2011, and during the flooding two years ago. No one had ever opened all of them at once.

  Then he turned back to Isabel. “So you’re the analyst,” he said. “What’s your name?”

  “Isabel Bradshaw, sir.” Her mind raced. Had Martineau called her in here because he didn’t trust Eveland and the others anymore? Or was it just that the news was so bad he needed to hear it from as many different people as possible before he accepted it?

  “Get over here.”

  Isabel stepped over to his desk, trying to ignore the unmistakable aroma of real coffee coming from the cup on his desk. Then she glanced at the computer screen and made an involuntary noise in the back of her throat that sounded like “eep.” The screen was divided into four parts. The silver-haired man watching from the upper right, bronze-framed reading glasses perched on his nose… You have got to be kidding me, she thought. She’d just barely managed to work herself up to speak in front of the governor of Louisiana and the head of the Corps, and now they’d brought in President Pratt himself… and whoever those other three guys were? But then, the ORCS really is this important.

  Martineau quickly introduced them. They were the secretary of the interi
or and the mayors of New Orleans and Baton Rouge.

  “It’s an honor,” she said in a voice that came out a lot smaller than she’d intended. From the looks of the wall behind him, Pratt was on Air Force One right now. She thought about telling him she’d voted for him, but decided not to.

  “You’re the one who’s been collecting the info and running the simulations?” said Martineau.

  “Yessir.”

  “Tell everybody what the situation is.”

  “All right,” she said. “With near one hundred percent certainty, the water will crest over the top of the Low Sill tomorrow. As of noon today, we estimate a sixty-four percent chance some part of the ORCS fails.”

  There was a long, long silence after that.

  “This is the worst-case scenario, right?” the governor finally said.

  Isabel glanced at Martineau, hoping he’d say something. He looked expectantly at her. She glanced at Roth and Horrocks. Roth kept his face neutral. Horrocks shook her head.

  Crap. They hadn’t told him. Isabel sighed. For her next trick, she was going to make her career disappear. At least she had a hell of an audience.

  “Actually, sir, this is the best-case scenario,” she said.

  As one, Eveland and Hickman rose to interrupt.

  “What she means is, it’s an aggregate of possible—”

  “Our analysts are trained to think in terms of—”

  “Quiet,” said Martineau, not loudly but firmly.

  As one, Eveland and Hickman shut up.

  Martineau stood up and clapped a hand on Isabel’s shoulder. “I want everybody but this young lady out of the room now.”

  Roth fled at once. Eveland opened his mouth to speak, then closed it again and left, stopping only to give the young lady in question a long, vengeful glare. Hickman nodded, shrugged as if to say no skin off mine and stepped out as calmly as if going for a walk.

  “Sit down,” said Martineau, pointing at a chair right in front of his desk. When she sat down, he turned the computer screen so the President and everybody else directly faced her. Isabel could have done without that.