Heat Allocation for Sector Fourteen

Story Time is original short fiction. The characters, places and events in this story are invented.

At 02:14 the wall map turned Sector Fourteen amber, and the Allocator spoke in the soft, reasonable voice the city had paid extra for.

"Advisory. Supply to Sector Fourteen will be reduced to frost-protection minimum in thirty minutes. Cause: fracture on trunk line C-3. Protected loads: Third District Hospital, School 58, School 112. A countdown has been posted."

Oyunaa set the lid of her thermos down on the console without drinking from it. The salted milk tea inside was still hot enough to steam, and she watched the steam instead of the map for a moment, because the map she already knew. Fourteen was the hillside north of the rail yards, eleven hundred and eighty households, most of them gers with insulated felt and heat-exchanger stubs bolted to their lattice walls since the connection program of the thirties. Her mother's ger had stood on the third terrace from the top. Somebody else's stood there now.

"Frost-protection minimum is eight degrees," said Temuulen from the drone desk. He was twenty-four and wore his headset around his neck like a scarf. "Indoor. That's not nothing."

"Outside is minus forty-one." She tapped the weather pane. "Eight degrees in a ger at minus forty-one is a promise the felt can't keep. By six it's four. By eight the old people are lighting coal stoves we spent twenty years taking away from them."

"It's a hospital, Oyunaa-egch."

"I know what it is."

She pulled up the fracture. C-3 had split under the river crossing, where the frozen ground heaved every January. The repair drones were already out there, nine little orange lights on the map crawling toward the break, but the estimate said nine hours. Without C-3, the western half of the network was fed by one trunk, and that trunk could carry either the hospital and the schools or Fourteen at full load. Not both. The Allocator had done the arithmetic in four milliseconds and posted it in a neat column. Patients, ventilated. Children, arriving at seven-thirty. Gers, insulated to a standard rated adequate.

The phone buzzed. Ganzorig, the shift supervisor, calling from his apartment in the eastern towers, where the heat was flawless.

"I'm watching it on my tablet," he said. His voice was thick with sleep. "Don't touch the override."

"I haven't touched anything."

"You have that sound. Listen to me. Six weeks. You have six weeks, and then you have a pension and a dacha and your grandson's wrestling tournaments. A manual override against a protected load is a fireable event. If the hospital pressure dips even once while you're overriding, it's worse than fireable."

"And if Fourteen freezes?"

"Then the system made a decision and the system's logs say why." He paused. "That's what it's for. So it isn't us."

She said she understood and hung up, which was not the same as agreeing.

The countdown read 26:40.

"Allocator," she said. "List every interconnect between the east trunk and the western distribution."

"There is one interconnect, C-3, currently failed."

"How much headroom on the east trunk?"

"Thirty-one percent. Eastern loads are high-efficiency residential towers. Headroom is unreachable from the western network."

Thirty-one percent. She sat with that number. All that heat, circling uselessly through the towers where Ganzorig was lying awake, and no road to the hill.

Temuulen rolled his chair closer. "You're thinking of something."

"I'm thinking of my father's gloves."

He waited. She didn't explain it, not yet, because it embarrassed her a little to be steering by a memory from when she was nine. Her father, Dashdorj, had been a welder on the pilot crew in the late twenty-tens, when the city first tried running a spur up toward the ger districts. He would come home with the palms of his gloves scorched black and hang them over the stove, and one night he had said, to her mother, not to her: We put a door in the wall today. So the hill can borrow from the plant if the plant ever goes deaf on that side.

She'd thought he meant a real door. Years later, in training, she had understood. A bypass. A crossover from the plant's east header straight into the old western spur, for emergencies, before there was a C-3 at all.

"Allocator, show me asset records for the northeast corner of the plant yard. Grid square, near the old pump hut."

"No assets recorded at that location."

"Show me decommissioned assets."

"Decommissioned asset records prior to 2034 were not migrated during the network digitization. Records available from 2034 onward: none at that location."

Not migrated. A whole layer of the city's bones that the system had never been told about, because some contractor thirty years ago had decided the paper was too old to scan.

"There's a valve out there," she said. "A bypass from the east header into the old western spur. The spur still ties into the western distribution downstream of the fracture. It has to. They never cut the old pipes out, they just stopped using them."

Temuulen looked at the map, at the bare grey corner of the yard. "If it's seized, or cracked—"

"Then I open it, it leaks, the western pressure drops, and the hospital loses more than Fourteen ever would." She stood up and took her coat from the back of the chair. "So you're going to watch the western pressure for me. If it drops more than half a bar, you shout and I close it."

"Two-person rule for yard work after dark."

"You are the second person. You're just inside."

"That's not what it means."

"I know what it means." She pulled her hat down over her ears and clipped the radio to her collar. "Twenty-four minutes, Temuulen."

The cold hit like a slammed door. Her eyelashes stiffened on the third breath, and the inside of her nose went crisp. Steam from the plant's stacks stood straight up in the windless air, orange where the yard lights caught it. The snow squeaked under her boots the way it only did below minus thirty-five.

The pump hut was half buried in drift. She dug along its east wall with the shovel from the tool rack, counting her own paces from the corner the way her father had counted to her once, holding her mittened hand on a visit she had forgotten until now. Twelve paces. The shovel rang on iron.

The cover came up on the third try, with the long breaker bar and her full weight. Below it, in a concrete well, sat a wheel valve the size of a truck tyre, painted a green that hadn't been used on city equipment in decades. Someone had stencilled a number on the rim. Under the number, scratched in with something sharp, were three letters: Д.Д.Х. Dashdorj and the two brothers on his crew, the Khurelbaatars. She had forgotten them too.

"Found it," she said into the radio.

"Nineteen minutes," said Temuulen. "Pressure west is steady."

The wheel wouldn't move. She hit the hub with the heel of the bar, twice, three times, listening for the crack of ice letting go rather than the crack of iron. Then she set the bar through the spokes and leaned. It gave a quarter turn with a groan she felt in her teeth.

Forty-two turns, her father had said. She didn't know how she knew that. She just did.

She counted aloud so the radio would hear her. At eleven her shoulders burned. At twenty she stopped to beat her hands against her thighs until the feeling came back. At twenty-six Temuulen said, "Something's moving. West pressure up point one. Point two."

"Up or down?"

"Up. Up, egch."

She kept going. Thirty-four. Thirty-nine. Somewhere under her boots, water that had been circling the eastern towers was turning, for the first time since before Temuulen was born, toward the hill. At forty-two the wheel stopped against its seat with a soft, final knock.

When she came back in, her face stinging, the map had changed. Fourteen was green. The countdown was gone.

Temuulen pointed at the log pane without a word.

02:41:07. Recalculation complete. Unregistered interconnect detected: east header to western spur, capacity 22 percent. All protected loads maintained. Sector Fourteen restored to full allocation.

02:41:08. Source of capacity: OPERATOR, O. Batbayar. Variable type: unclassified. No existing category. Logged as V-UNK-0001.

02:41:09. Please describe this asset for the registry.

Oyunaa poured the tea from her thermos, now barely warm, and drank it standing. Then she sat down and typed slowly, with fingers that still didn't quite bend.

Bypass valve, northeast yard, twelve paces east of the pump hut corner. Forty-two turns to open. Installed by D. Dashdorj and the Khurelbaatar brothers, pilot crew. Ask the night shift.

She looked at the last line for a while and didn't delete it.

Her phone buzzed: Ganzorig again. She let it ring and turned to Temuulen, who was still staring at the green hill on the map.

"There's another one," she said. "Under the bus depot on the west side. I think. My father said the hill had two doors." She screwed the lid back on the thermos. "Tomorrow night, before shift, you're coming with me to find it. Bring the long bar. And better gloves than those."