Юджин Фишер - Adrift

Laurent pushed his food away and dropped his forehead to the tabletop. He laced his long fingers together against the back of his head and said something pained and angry.

“Laurent! What are you doing?”

“It is my fault!” he said. “It is my fault that we did not get to the United States! If I had not done anything to the battery, we would not be stuck here!” He pounded the heels of his palms against the table next to his temples. “We are stranded in the ocean and it is my fault.”

Janet put a hand on his strained wrist. “It’s okay. There’s no way you could have anticipated what would happen. Hell, Henri isn’t sure exactly what did happen yet. You can’t blame yourself.”

“No. No. I did not understand what it was that I was working on, and so I broke it.” Laurent abruptly stood up from the table. “I have to go back. I must tell my sisters what has happened.”

Janet helped Laurent fill two trays for his sisters, entrees and desserts in about equal quantities, and escorted him back to the visitors’ quarters. She didn’t stick around to watch him deliver his bad news.

Later, in accordance with the instructions from her superiors, Janet composed an email detailing the results of Henri’s examination and her interview. She referred frequently to the service report as she typed. On the first page was a table of the routing information downloaded from the node, and when the realization of what that information implied hit her, it sent her running across the platform back to the Mokinas’ room, report in hand. She was surprised to find Henri there, sitting very close to Therese and reciting from a volume of Nerval.

“I feel I have a duty to entertain these young ladies,” he explained. “There is no one else on the platform they can talk to.”

Leaving unexamined for the moment the degree to which she believed her chief technician’s stated motives, she said, “Laurent, I have something else I have to ask you. How long did you expect it would take to get to America?”

Laurent was seated on the floor with his back against the wall, and still seemed weighted down by failure. “The men said that we would be in the container for less than two weeks. Maybe only one.”

“I want you to look at this,” said Janet, proffering the report. “This page is the routing data for your container. See here? It says, ‘service priority: 4.’ The lower that number is, the faster the shipment gets delivered. If this were service priority one, then for a transatlantic shipment you might have gotten there in two weeks. Maybe. But you were priority four, which is the bottom of the scale. A priority four shipment averages nine weeks to get across the Atlantic.”

She could tell by the look on his face that he was processing what she was saying, and he would probably get to the conclusion she had reached on his own, given time. But she carried on and spelled it out for him.

“The men you paid to get in that container lied to you. They took your money and sent you out to die. And you would have. You and your sisters would have died, except that you rewired the battery. You didn’t strand your sisters in the middle of the ocean, you saved their lives.”

Janet did not call her husband that night.

She spent nearly an hour in the visitors’ quarters as the Mokinas worked through multilingual waves of shock, betrayal, and relief, with Laurent and Henri alternating fluidly in the role of translator. When she finally returned to her office to resume the work she had left unfinished, there was another email from Caxton waiting for her. She chose to let it sit in her inbox, unread, until her report was complete. Then she let it sit until the following morning.

It was just a reminder of his availability to chat, but still demanded some response. She replied with a note recapitulating the events and discoveries of the previous day, which she felt were plausibly distracting enough to support her decision not to call. Now that the weekend was over there would be five days of jobs and time zones conspiring to make extended communication impractical, and the freedom of their incompatible schedules felt expansive. Liberating. Like a gasp of air after being held underwater.

It wasn’t long before Janet decided there was no danger to the platform in allowing the Mokinas to leave their room. The girls were harmless, and Laurent had been nothing but accommodating. And given how many new things relevant to his interests there were to be found on Platform Beryl, it seemed cruel to keep him locked away from them. Though he could not be allowed to work with the maintenance crews — something he did express interest in — there was no reason he could not watch their activities, and ask questions.

Henri began taking all of his meals with the siblings, and Janet often joined them as well. It was still ostensibly part of her job to monitor the activities of the platform’s uninvited guests. And it was definitely part of her job to monitor Henri. She sought him out in the maintenance bay break room one day and said, “You are aware, I hope, that DAMSCo would frown on one of its employees creating an international incident with a sixteen-year-old refugee?”

Henri barked a laugh and shook his head, sending the graying curls at his temples bouncing. He was the longest serving member of the platform staff, and, while he deferred to her professionally, he had always treated Janet with the easy humor of a social equal. “What kind of person do you think I am? She is a lovely girl, and like a sister to me. Besides, I would never want to anger her ferocious big brother.” He gave her a sly smile. “I think, if you are worried about incidents, you should be keeping an eye on him. He is keeping an eye on you, after all.”

Laurent’s probing curiosity had made him friends all over the platform. He asked questions of everyone. As soon as Janet received a complaint, she would have a talk with him about interaction with people who were on the clock. But no one complained. It was possible that he was cleverer about who to ask questions of and when to ask them than she feared. He often came to Janet with questions about things he had seen; questions that perhaps others could have answered just as well. But perhaps, as Henri suggested, he was seeking her out for reasons of his own. If so, Janet felt herself untroubled by it.

Once, when he asked her how big the FloatNet was, she took him to her office, sat him in front of her computer, and loaded up a map of the globe. Millions of dots representing FloatNet nodes covered the Atlantic, bunched together in some areas and sparse in others, like a great flock of birds frozen in flight. Janet pointed out the rectilinear smudges representing Platform Beryl in the south and Platform Grouper in the north. She showed him the spindly flower shapes that represented the deep water ocean thermal energy conversion installations, surrounded by dense clouds of charging nodes. She told him that each node communicated with every other; it was a network that moved information as well as physical objects. She found him suitably impressed by the enormity of it.

“It is your job to administrate how much of this?” he asked.

“Well, I’m directly responsible for this facility,” she said, waving at the ceiling, “and I’m part of the routing efficiency oversight team for the whole ‘Net.” Janet thought for a moment. “Here, I can show you some of what I do.”

She zoomed in on one of the spindly OTEC installations and drew her fingernail across the screen, pointing out a nearly straight line of nodes stretching away from it to a small island.

“This island was hit by Hurricane Louise on Thursday. We do disaster relief projects during hurricane season pretty often. Usually it’s expedited routing for consumables. Food, medicine, what have you. But here the hurricane knocked out the island’s power plant, which happens occasionally. So we set up what we call an ant trail. See this line of paired dots? Those are nodes carrying other nodes — just like the node that brought you here, actually. In this case they are carrying charged-up nodes from the power station so that aid workers on the island can use the batteries.”