Daniel Wilson - Robopocalypse

Well, since you ask so nice, Lucy… our goal is to drop a groundwater monitoring sonde at the bottom of a five-thousand-foot borehole, three feet in diameter. About the size of a manhole cover. It’s a good-sized hole, but this rig can go to ten thousand. Should be a routine operation, except for the ice, the wind, and the isolation. I’m telling you, Lucy, we’re putting one heck of a deep, dark hole out here in the middle of the big, frozen nothing. Some job I got, hey?

It was not a fun ride to get here. Came in on an old Sikorsky heavy transport chopper, big as a house. Some Norwegian company in charge. None of ’em spoke a lick of English. You know, I may be a Texas boy, but even I can carry on with the Filipinos in Spanish and spout some Russian and German. I can even understand those boys from Alberta, eh? (LAUGHTER) But these Norwegians? It’s sad, Lucy.

Chopper carried me and seventeen others from our base in Deadhorse. Barely. Wind levels were higher than I’ve ever seen. ISA plus ten, storm-gale level. One minute, I’m looking out the window at the blue-tinted wasteland below and wondering if the place we’re going to really exists, and the next we’re dropping straight down, like on a roller coaster, toward this wind-blasted little flat spot.

Now, I’m not trying to brag, but this site really is extremely remote, even for an exploratory drill site. There’s nothing, and I mean nothing, out here. Professionally, I know that the remoteness is just another factor that makes the operation more complex and, heck, more profitable. But I’d be lying if I said it doesn’t put me on my toes. It’s just such an odd site for a monitoring well like this.

But, hey, I’m just an old roughneck—I go where the money is, right?

Hi, Lucy, this is Dwight. November third. Been a busy few days getting the surface operation up and running. Clearing the area and setting up the facilities: dorms, mess hall, med station, communications, and so on. But the work has paid off. I’m out of my tent shelter and bunked up solid in a dorm, plus I just hit the mess hall. Food is good on this rig. North Star does it right on that score. Keeps the help coming back. (LAUGHTER) Generators are going strong here, keeping the dorm real toasty. Good thing, too. It’s about minus thirty degrees Fahrenheit outside right now. My shift starts early tomorrow. So, I’ll need to get some shut-eye pretty soon. Just sayin’.

We should be here a month or so. I’ll be working swing shift, from six a.m. to six p.m., and spending the nights on call in this dorm prefab. It’s just an old retrofitted shipping container, faded orange when it’s not covered in snow. We’ve hauled this hunk of junk all over the North Slope and beyond. My guys call it our “hell away from home.” (LAUGHTER)

Had a chance to review the drill site this morning. The GPS leads to a conical sinkhole about, uh, sixty feet across. Sort of a dimple in the snow, just a short walk from the prefabs. I think it’s kinda creepy how this man-made pit has been waiting out here in the wilderness, looking like it’s ready to suck down a caribou or something. My guess is that another borehole was dug here before now and that it’s collapsed. I don’t understand why nobody told me this already. It definitely bugs me.

I’d ask the company man on this job, Mr. Black, but the kid was delayed by the storm. (NERVOUS LAUGHTER) Well, he sounds like a kid over the phone. In the meantime, Black says he’ll direct our progress remotely by the radio. That leaves me in charge with my lead driller, Mr. William Ray, taking night shifts for me. You met Willy down in Houston once, at the training rig. He was the one with the big old belly and those twinkling blue eyes.

Like I said, this should take about a straight month. But, as always, we’ll be here until the job is done. (INAUDIBLE)

Thing is—I know it’s dumb—but I can’t kick this worried feeling. There’s extra complications to drilling in a hole that’s already there. Could be equipment abandoned in there, leftover from the old days. Man, nothing jams up a drill like blasting into old pipe casing or, god forbid, a whole abandoned drill string. You know, somebody went to a lot of trouble to put a big hole out here. I just can’t understand why. (SHUFFLING NOISE)

Damn, I guess I’m gonna have to let it go. But I can already tell that figuring out why this hole is here is gonna be like a puzzle my mind won’t let go of. Hope I can sleep.

It doesn’t matter, anyway. We’ll stay safe and steady like we always do. No accidents, no worries, Lucy. We’re gonna earn that safety pay.

Hey, baby, it’s Dwight. November fifth. The last of the major drilling equipment modules were choppered in yesterday. My team is still spraying down the well site. The water comes from a lake about a quarter mile away from here. The layer of permafrost up here traps water on the soil surface, which is why Alaska is covered in lakes. The lake was frozen over, but we were able to cut a hole in the ice so we could do a direct pump.

After about a week of freezing, we’ll have an ice pad that measures a solid four feet deep. Then, we’ll set the whole drilling rig right on top, steady as concrete. Next springtime, we’ll be long gone and the pad’ll melt away and there won’t be any trace we were ever here. Pretty slick, eh? You tell those environmentalists about that for me, okay? (LAUGHTER)

Okay. Here’s the roster. We got me and Willy Ray running the drill. Our medic, Jean Felix, is also in charge of camp operations. He’ll make sure everybody gets watered and fed and keeps their little fingys attached to their hands. Me and Willy each got five guys on our drill crews: three roughnecks and a couple Filipino roustabouts. Our crew is rounded out with five specialists: an electric man, a drill motor man, a pipe casing man, and a couple welders. Finally, we got a cook and a janitor wandering around here somewheres.

We brought a bare-bones crew of eighteen, company man’s orders. I’m comfortable with it, though. I guess. We’ve all made money together before and we’ll all make money together again.

Next week, when the drill is online, we’ll keep going nonstop in two five-man crews for twelve-hour shifts until the hole is drilled. Should be four or five days of drilling. The weather is a little bit foggy and a whole heck of a lot of windy, but, hey, any weather is good drilling weather.

That’s it, Lucy. Hope all is well in Texas and that you’re staying out of trouble. Good night.

It’s Dwight. November eighth. Company man still isn’t here. Says he won’t be coming, either. Says we’ve got it under control. He just told me to make sure the communications antenna was steady and out of the wind and to bolt it down extra tight. Said if comms get knocked out between us he’s gonna be real unhappy. I gave him the regular roughneck response: “Whatever you say, boss. Just make sure your checks keep cashing.”

Other than that, uneventful day. Ice pad is coming along faster than expected, what with the wind blasting through here hard enough to push a grown man down. All our buildings are huddled up next to the well site, close enough to eyeball. Still, I told the men not to go wandering off. Through this nonstop howler you couldn’t hear an atom bomb detonate from a hundred yards away. (LAUGHTER)

Uh, one more thing. I had a chance to check out that groundwater monitoring package this morning. The thing we’re supposed to install? It’s out back, on pallets and wrapped tight in a black tarp. Honest to god, Lucy, I never seen anything like it before. It’s this big pile of curved wires, yellow and blue and green. Then, there’s these spiral pieces of polished mirror. Each one is light as carbon fiber, but razor sharp around the edges. Cut my sleeve on one. The thing is like one of your grandmam’s crazy jigsaw puzzles.