Page 9 of One Adult, Please

It leads deeper into the fish part. Toward the aquarium. Toward the big fish window and the glass hallway and whatever else is waiting in the parts of this park that I haven't seen yet.

Behind me, the speakers warble. Wondie's voice, stretched and distorted, barely recognizable.

"WonderSphere... welcomes... you..."

"Your timing is dogshit, Wondie," I whisper.

I step through the door.

The ground doesn't get me this time. Small victories. I'll take it.

4

JOEL FROM OPERATIONS

JOEL

Yesterday, my biggest problem was the wave pool pH balance, which at the time felt like a character-building inconvenience and now feels like a gift basket from God.

It was off by .3. Point three. A number so small most people would ignore it. Most people shouldn't be trusted with water people put their children in.

I spent forty minutes recalibrating because the manual says .3 is within tolerance but I don't do within tolerance. I do correct. I wrote it up. Filed the maintenance log. CC'd my supervisor, who's never once read a maintenance log in his life but who will absolutely blame me when something goes wrong and the log is missing.

That was Monday. Monday I had a pH problem, a supervisor problem, and a career problem, which is that I was three weeks from putting in my notice because you can only work at a place called WonderSphere for so long before the gap between the name and the reality starts to feel personal.

Today is Thursday. Today my problems have diversified.

They now include a ruptured intake valve on Tank 6, a generator carrying every critical system in Celestial Bay with no backup if it fails, a security radio network that has deteriorated into overlapping panic and stretches of dead air, and the fact that the thing I just watched eat Phil from maintenance used to be Dana from guest services, who complained about the copier and ate pasta salad next to me on Tuesday.

Homemade. Offered me some. I said no thanks. Normal interaction. The kind of thing you forget immediately and then remember with terrible clarity when the person is on her hands and knees on the tile of Corridor 7B doing something to Phil that I'm not going to describe because I already can't stop seeing it and putting words to it would make it worse.

So. That's Thursday.

I'm in the mechanical room under the main aquarium tank. Sublevel 2. It's loud down here, all pump noise and pipe vibration and the constant low thrum of water moving through systems that were designed to keep three million gallons of saltwater at the right temperature and salinity for animals that didn't ask to live in a building in the middle of nowhere.

I've been down here for most of the day. The ceiling is seven feet, the lighting is industrial, and the air tastes like rust and chlorine. But the access door is steel, it locks from inside, and the things upstairs haven't figured out doors with locks yet. They can do handles. They can do push bars. Locks are still beyond them, which is the only advantage I currently have and I'm leaning on it hard.

The damaged intake line is the priority. If the patch fails, Tank 6 starts emptying into Sublevel 2. Not all three million gallons, probably. Emergency valves should engage before that.

I'm no longer building plans around should.

If the ground floor floods, the only section of this park with intact walls and sealed entry points becomes a swimming pool full of debris and bodies and whatever else is floating around up there.

My evaluation last month rated both my technical performance and workplace engagement adequate. My supervisor is dead now. I watched it happen on Monitor 14 before the cameras failed, and I'm still down here keeping his aquarium alive.

Adequate.

I finish the intake valve repair. The pump noise smooths out. Pressure holds. Tank 6 lives to see another day, and so do the three sand tiger sharks, the school of amberjack, and the one sea turtle who keeps bumping into the tank like he's trying to get my attention. I've started talking to him. His name is Lenny. Lenny doesn't talk back, which makes him the best conversational partner I've had in a long while.

I eat a protein bar on an overturned bucket, drink from the utility sink, and stare at the pump gauges while thinking about nothing on purpose.

I need to do a sweep. I take the crescent wrench. Because it's heavy and I'm used to holding it and it makes my hand feel like it has a purpose beyond shaking.

Sublevel: clear. The steel doors are holding.

Ground floor: I come up through the utility stairwell into the back corridor behind the main exhibits. The aquarium is still running. The jellyfish display is doing its slow, pulsing thing, completely indifferent to the collapse of human civilization.

I check the underwater viewing tunnel. It's the most secure space in Celestial Bay because there's two locked access points, and nothing has figured out how to get in from the tank side yet, although the infected employee who fell into the open-top feeding platform has been drifting past every few minutes, and I've stopped flinching when it bumps the window, which is either adaptation or a bad sign.