There’s a lot to take in during a really good panic.
That sudden ripple of falling and the ground rising up from beyond where you stand, two beats of a heart leaping upwards and the bookend of adrenaline clutching at an edge you hadn’t yet noticed.
As if she were a thumb cast across the edge of a flip book, the head engineer of receiving station thirty-eight saw an entire ream of unread schematics flutter past her eyes and embody the whirling caricature of profound regret. An immense squall of wind had burst into her office as if from the bellow of a titan, pushing out the glass of the window and carrying dozens of loose wiring diagrams into the ether beyond. The sheets of paper twisted in the air in murmuration, a score of doves leaping into the sky and departing over the horizon.
‘Bugger.’ Lori spat at the detritus that was now her office, the only copies of far too important electrical plans had just been lost and the pain of having to start from scratch managed to sink in enough that it almost felt inconsequential by now.
The small fern the lived on her desk had become unseated and lay on its side with a cracked pot, a small pile of dirt strewn across the power supply that she was trying to resolder.
This was weather on the salt plains. A lone standing receiving station, built far enough into nowhere that it was impractical to fully staff. Lori could see distant static when the storms were bad out here. Reckless curiosity took her to the roof and in full view of the haze of electrical distortion that flitted alike no thing that could ever be natural. An engineer had once told her that the station was too close to the static to transmit anything legible, it was just an expensive way to get rid of nuts and bolts, adorned with a sign that read: we regret to inform you that the system is operating as intended.
Almost as if sensing the quieting storm, the shortwave radio crackled into life beneath an overturned cupboard, its simple speaker sounding as empathic as a parking fine.
‘Operator, come in please, operator.’ Lori recognised the voice of the signal worker, a faceless voice but a welcome one.
‘A storm looks like it’s due to hit your location thirty-eight. Better close the passive ventilation.’
‘Copy that,’ Lori replied into the receiver with as much emotion as she was capable of, adding ‘could I put in an order for a broom?’ to herself with a defeated levity.
It wasn’t Signal’s fault that the radar was on a delay, with enough signal loops you could read a weather report from seven years ago and swear it was your horoscope.
‘Looks like it just passed though,’ Lori continued, fighting against the urge to return to bed. There was going to be a long repair shift ahead of her, ‘it would have been either an eight or a nine, but it’s taken the weather station off the roof again, I’ll send a parts request after inspection.’
Hearing no reply within the static of the shortwave, Lori wondered for a moment if the voice had been there at all. So many transmissions were caught in storms and never delivered, their ghosts caught as whispers released as they brush past an antenna.
Righting her fern, Lori took a deep breath and then began to write a list of things that she needed to check. The power was still on, good the fridge would keep cold; the relay banks were usually fine–so long as sand didn’t find its way into the clickety clackety parts. On the whole, there was only one piece of equipment that she was truly worried about, the one limping piece of irreplaceable importance that she had most likely just lost the plans for.
Lori watched as a solitary error light began to multiply. Whatever indicator light that wasn’t now illuminated could be safely considered blown as the stone silence of the transformer room felt irrevocably wrong in every way.
Station thirty-eight was big, receiving stations usually were, the labyrinth of hums and buzzes usually took on a life that a clock maker would describe as intricate.
So, she always felt out of her depth while looking at the damaged transformer; it was a collaborative marvel of engineering that was never expected to be broken. A few years ago, Lori was just a quiet student who was quite good at soldering, now, she had been left as the lone station keeper in a perpetually worsening section of the salt plains. It felt like too short of a step to fix the transformer and the lack of contactable support made the hopelessness luminous.
The keeper before her, a gruff, adjustable spanner kind of chap, was dogged enough that he could rewire a terminal with only his shoestrings, and he had eyed the transformer bitterly as he showed her around during the handover.
‘It’s a moody kind of thing,’ he said, while adjusting a dial that Lori had been too afraid to touch since, ‘you clean the windings and the overloads pack it in, you kick it in the wrong spot and oil leaks into the switchboard.’
Lori wanted to kick everything in the station, it would be so easy to give up and hide under bed as she would when she was a child, memories of her itchy woollen blanket bundled into a barrier felt like a safety that nothing could find her through.
But no, the salt plain didn’t let you hide. Pulling out the main switch, Lori snapped the motorised clutch into gear before racking it back in at dead-load.
Light, sound, noise, energy.
Enjoying the familiar hum of an A-flat, the stubborn engineer of station-38 paused for a moment. proud of how far she’d come from her first days in the plains, Lori lay on the cold floor and waited for her sight to return, mentally noting down to clean the arc dust from her uniform when things where fixed enough that she could sit down.
Elsewhere, a lone schematic drifted in the wind.
J. McCray
2022
Sunday Short Stories 