“450’,” A cigarette sporting mouth mutters as another drill core reaches max depth. “Set?”
Glancing at the few other faces running the complex machine, the man yanks a pair of levers, locking and reversing the direction of the drill as another core is arranged into place. They’d done this procedure thirty times already, so even though it wasn’t in their typical job description, they’d found a good rhythm by now.
Thirty times or not, that didn’t stop the gathered crowd from being amazed by every movement of the machine. None had seen anything like it obviously, but beyond that, they understood that they were witnessing something massively impactful to their lives.
Each time a length of pipe was pressed into the ground they caught themselves shaking their heads, how many weeks would it have taken them to make this same progress in depth?
A few dozen minutes later a final pipe was added to the stack and pressed firmly into the ground with the help of vibrations and the assistance of a large hydraulic press.
“That’s all of ‘em” A voice from behind the cigarette-smoking man shouts.
Nodding to himself as an acknowledgment of the shout, the man slowly releases a lever on the massive machine halting its vibration and finally putting it to rest.
He was a bit excited about this next part. Wrenching a few levers seemingly at random, a few components of the machine begin groaning as they shift and move into different positions away from the borehole that remained packed with a thick core of dirt and soil.
As soon as the heavy metal components rested into their safety positions. Two workmen arrived with a pair of firehoses which they hooked to either side of a manifold atop the outer jacket of the borehole’s casing.
“Everyone might wanna back up.” The man explains walking over and putting out his cigarette a few dozen steps away from the crowd of onlookers.
Trusting his intentions, the crowd took a careful dozen or two paces backward until the man nodded his head and returned to join his crew where they had hidden behind the accompanying firetruck.
Once he was well clear of the drill site he nodded to a man in the cab of the truck.
“Fire in the hole?” The man asks as he slowly cranks up the rpm of the truck.
The two hoses which had been limp moments ago instantly surged with energy and became rigid with pressure. That sudden movement caused alarm in a few of the townspeople watching, but they didn’t realize that it had only just begun.
After a few seconds of patient silence on bated breath, a tremendous sound poured from the packed borehole as countless tons of water pressure forced the earth out of the hole and into a huge geyser of mud and packed dirt and stones.
The sudden emergence of so much water from the newly drilled well immediately shocked all the villagers into silence, but within moments they were shouting and cheering as they celebrated all this new water.
The men seated in and hovering around the firetruck felt a bit guilty as they lowered the pressure on the pumps, but rinsing out a well doesn’t require that kind of flow and they had to think pragmatically.
After waiting for the water to rise from the well-casing completely clean, they finally turned off the truck and went to retrieve the two hoses which were now sufficiently buried in mud and chunks of dirt.
Another dozen minutes later the drill was towed away and a small skid-steer loader began cleaning up the mess made in the process.
All the villagers were extremely anxious to come and see the new well, but the workers kept them shooed away as they prepared the plumbing and pump system.
An outhouse-sized building was reassembled easily out of pieces carried in with the drill and simple footings were poured around the well.
A few hundred feet of low-voltage wiring, and half a can of purple PVC cement, later; they finally put a seal of approval on the well.
It had been safely capped with a thick steel manhole and with a few hours of sunlight a day it could easily pump a hundred gallons an hour all day long.
Nothing crazy, the focus was on efficiency rather than pure output. It was still a huge improvement over rope-towed buckets which could barely do a gallon a minute let alone a hundred in an hour.
A small manifold with a dozen spigots sprouted out from the back side of the building and a few of the workers spent some time explaining how they worked to some of the gathered villagers.
They all took turns practicing turning the spigots on and off being careful not to leave them dripping. To the Employee’s, the situation was rather strange, they’d never felt such pride over such a mundane project.
Some of these men built crafts for exploring distant planets, or flying machines capable of moving faster than sound itself. But here drilling a 6-inch well and teaching villagers to turn on and off a spigot would be the memory that would never leave them. This would be the legacy they left proudly.
The narrative has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.
As promised, the trucks arrived with the makings of a well and left loaded with enough grain to feed them all for a month. If this was rationed, along with the food already stockpiled amongst Arna and Reynolds’ various cafeterias and breakrooms, they now had around 6 months' worth of calories.
And with the deal to lend machinery and operators to help reorganize the farmland, they had established a source directly.
The only problem was they didn’t possess machinery capable of reorganizing farmland or farming in general for that matter.
Sure they had a few bulldozers and excavators, but they didn’t manufacture tractors or harvesters.
“We have subsidiaries who do.” Gary reasons scrolling through a directory on his computer. “Churchill Lee, we bought ‘em in 2013. But that doesn’t help us now.”
“Sure it does.” A meek-looking man seated in the far corner mutters under his breath. Realizing a moment too late that his breath was heavier than anticipated he glances up to see a dozen eyes piercing him. “Sorry, ignore me. I’m not here. I’m just troubleshooting this thing.”
Returning his attention to the laptop in front of him he tries his best to ignore the stares.
“We have their designs. All backed up in the vault.” The IT technician explains cursing himself internally for mentioning it.
“Is that right?” Gary asks around the table.
“We have encrypted off-site backups but that shouldn’t be of much…” Jeff begins to explain before noticing a shift in the Technicians expression.
The IT tech eventually shakes his head with a hesitant sigh. “We had to break those encryptions when we started compiling The Database.”
“You what?!” Jeff fumes nearly knocking over his chair as he bolts upright.
“Sir, it wasn’t my idea.” The technician quickly reiterates before stammering out the rest of the story. “Tons of important knowledge was locked up behind encryptions and Top-Secret clearance levels. We decided it was in the best interest of everyone…”
“You guys don’t decide what is in the best interest of everyone!” Jeff shouts gripping his fists to calm his fury.
“Knock it off.” Gary chastises with a roll of his eyes. “Indeed, they weren’t thinking but I can see their reasoning.”
“And if this means we have a better chance of surviving what’s the harm.”
“The harm is nuclear missile schematics, weaponizable gain-of-function research data, synthesized immuno-restricting proteins, Hell, do I even need to list another? And you think it's just fine to brute force that pandora's box?”
“Isn’t it worth it if we can survive?” Third asks bluntly after the chill in the boardroom settles. “I’m not saying those things aren’t dangerous, but should we hobble ourselves simply from the fear of bringing those things to this world?”
“Restrict access to it at least. And add a logging system.” Jeff relents after calming himself and returning to his chair.
“I’ll tell Ted and the guys when I get back.” The Technician says throwing thankful eyes to Third and turning his attention back to the laptop.
“Well this means farming will go a bit easier at least. Let’s have those designs sent over to the Vehicle teams and see what they can do with them.” Gary says flipping through the notes his secretary had compiled for the day to see if he had forgotten anything. “Right, regarding the school. They just got done with their second trial session yesterday. For the most part, it sounds like things are going as planned. Class sizes were large but manageable. They’re hoping to get permission to branch into vocational training and maybe even get firsthand experience for some of the older highschooler.”
“As long as things are handled correctly and materials aren’t being wasted I think it’s a great idea.” Jeff nods after considering it for a moment. “It’ll have to be brought up to the department leads directly of course.”
“Course.” Gary nods making a quick note on paper and scanning it for any other important developments.
“How easily could the school be scaled up?” Third asks abruptly, just as the topic left the minds of the group.
“How do you mean?” Gary asks with an inkling of the direction Third was pursuing.
“While yes, we have a ton of students to take care of, we aren’t the only people around anymore. If we want our partnership with the Ruker County to be worth anything we should educate them into something that can be of more value to us.”
“That’s… Dangerous” Jeff explained while measuring his words carefully. “If we educate them and there comes a day when they use what we’ve taught them to…”
“Really?” Third asks with a raised eyebrow. “By teaching them mathematics and chemistry they will rise up and kill us all? There is this massive elephant in the room that none of us want to talk about called complete and utter powerlessness. We could snap our fingers and have this entire planet at its knees. But none of us want that, so we’ve become so terrified of the prospect of ever needing to protect ourselves that we’re forgetting what good we can bring.”
“You’re the boss,” Gary says with a shrug throwing a glance at the CSO.
Jeff didn’t seem to give up the thoughts in his head, but he knew he had no choice but to shake his head and begin to redesign the company security structures in his head. He knew things would just get more complicated from here he just couldn’t fully picture the scope to which it would change, and what the pace would be.
“I think that’ll do it for today,” Gary concludes tapping his stack of paper together in rhythm then turning back to the assembled group. “Everyone remember to touch base with your assigned team leads and forward any of their concerns to HR Laura, her email’s attached. And for anything else we’ve got Tuesday's Shareholder call so that’s an option too.”
A few nods and sounds of jotting on papers answered the comment and with that, the group broke off back towards their respective residences. Leaving the IT tech to finally have a moment to work on the network in peace.
At least a moment.
“The whole idea for the database was finding and gathering movies stored in the encrypted personal files from all the networked computers, right?” Third asks, sitting opposite the IT tech and staring daggers into him.
“I mean…” The Tech stammers thinking about how to explain the whole sequence of events. It had indeed started innocently enough. They programmed a scrapper that was designed to rip every video file it found as it crept through the network. A few too many heads got involved in the project and soon it was using a squad of computers to brute force through all encrypted files in search of an ever-expanding movie library. Originally it was just a side effect that it sorted everything not considered ‘a film’. But after a hastily implemented SQL injection system, it became something dangerously beyond simple file scrapper. “We did find a bootleg copy of ‘Old School’ on a DARPA subnet-system. It is technically still working as proposed.”
“Not exactly the database I envisioned.” Third chuckles, “Well at least make something to show for it. You guys told me programming this ‘Netflix 2’ thing would be a breeze. I know I’m not the only one who wants it.”
Swallowing audibly the Tech nods his head rapidly “I… I’ll tell Ted.”
“We gotta get these priorities straight.” Third reminds him with a pat on the shoulder. “Keep up the good work Sven.”
Again being left alone in the board room the IT tech takes another deep breath. Why did he have to volunteer for this one he wondered with a shake of his head as he buries himself back into the fractured network.
Turns out that shutting down eighty percent of your network infrastructure to save power can cause some fairly significant issues with the network stability. Surprise, surprise.