Human Resources by Salena Casha

The first message on Elana’s iCom pulsed red as she stepped out of harassment training. This job gave her no time to breathe. When she’d signed on, they’d told her the cadence would be intense, like drinking water from an Old World firehose. Ironic, for obvious reasons. Just the thought of filtered droplets made her throat hum. Given the time, given her title as Head of Human Resources and Logistics, making jokes about water wasn’t ever in good taste.

It was her tenth day.

She clicked into the notification and watched her ecologist counterpart, Marty, blink into focus.

“Blue Room, now. There’s a situation.”

If she hadn’t been on edge, she might have laughed at the movie-quality of the order, the dialogue. Also, blue room? Who came up with names in this place? As much as she would have liked to laugh, her heart slipped up her throat as she pulled up the department map they gave her at onboarding.

Three flights down and two right turns. Her last job had quieter edges. Not like this, where there wasn’t enough water in Savannah, not enough sunlight in Denver, and a new strain of bacteria eating through wheat across Iowa. She’d thought a governmental agency like this had things under control because, when she’d been a civ, they looked like they had it handled. Like there was the chance of rain in your lifetime.

As she scaled the stairs, she worried about needing a nervous pee once she arrived, but they couldn’t stop you from using the bathroom, she reminded herself. That would turn into a different kind of HR situation. The door to the Blue Room wasn’t open, but the moment her hand touched the knob, the barrier evaporated and swept her inside. There were only two people in the room, Marty and someone who looked like an operator. Both stood in front of a screen, studying the shifting colors.

“Corum achieved,” a robotic voice said overhead.

The fine lines around Marty’s mouth shifted into furrows. He motioned Elana over. All pixels in indigo, chartreuse, scarlet. But mostly blue.

“Brief her,” he said.

Elana watched the operator watch the screen, waiting for the emergency to click for her. She hoped, though she doubted it, that it wasn’t anything serious. At her last job in waste management, they’d joked about how they weren’t saving lives here. She couldn’t make that joke now, even if she wanted to just be ironic, to be tongue in cheek, to lighten the dark and heavy mood that had descended upon the tiny room in the basement of the resource’s headquarters.

The operator took a deep breath before they began.

“Rain algorithm went a bit rogue last night. It was on its way to Kansas City to get the wells working, half an inch tops, and move north. But something jammed. Got stuck by a town called Lucas. We’ve got some casualties,” the operator paused. “It drowned the place.”

A nervous laugh bubbled out of her throat. She looked at Marty. “Drowned a-a what? A town? A whole town?”

Marty didn’t say a word and instead, Elana focused on the way his heart pulsed against his skin at the base of his neck.

Shit.

From what she knew in the limited time she’d been here was that they had to be strategic with every last drop they had to keep things in balance. Weather patterns took years to plan. The room settled into a mechanical silence.

“It’s bad,” Marty said.

He looked back at the screen and Elana followed him. Red heat blips in a sea of blue. Something in her chest cracked and she leaned forward, fingertips on the desk to keep her upright as it dawned on her what they were. The last people of Lucas floating in a water wasteland that used to be a town of two-hundred.

“How did this happen?” she asked when she really meant, what do I do with this? What am I supposed to do with this?

If it had been earlier in history, maybe even a few decades ago, the focus would have been on the people. But the water had slammed her in the gut first. Sweet, fresh, limited water. She licked her lips. If anyone found out, there would be a collective mourning. Someone would have to pay.

“We’re still running diagnostics,” the operator replied. There was a sheen of sweat on their forehead. “But it looks like a freak accident.”

The part of her that had grown up in towns with dry wells didn’t believe them.

“How much water did we lose?” Elana asked. “Can we ask for a loan from Greenland? Just to get us back on pattern?”

“Elana,” Marty said softly. “It was millions of gallons.”

The room settled back into machine clicks. A hundred swimming pools. A reservoir. Spilled on the streets of Lucas, pouring through windows, breaking glass with its sheer volume. It had been five years since Elana last saw rain. Even longer since she’d felt it on her skin. It must have looked like judgment day, a reckoning, water like a solid sheet of glass. Civs tried to guess where the next drizzle would be, sat on thickening salt plains, waiting for it like holy water. She’d signed documents saying she would never leak the next location, never reveal where they’d helped.

Who they couldn’t save.

“The Exec wants containment and salvage on the ground immediately. Lucas won’t be the only town impacted but, if we don’t work quickly, there’ll be a domino effect,” Marty continued. “Less water, less crops, tighter rations. We’ve got to move fast or the patterns will be so thrown off, we won’t be able to catch back up.”

Containment? She agreed with salvaging what they could, pushing whatever water they could get back through a filter to ensure the patterns could return with little delay.

“What do you mean?” she asked.

She’d never noticed how sick Marty looked until they were in the artificial underground light and staring down the barrel of human existence. What she’d taken for freckles were amoeba liver spots across his chin. The veins in his nose and down on his lower cheeks had burst, leaving red tracks. Fingerprints smudged his glasses. She wondered when he’d last had a good night sleep, given he’d been here for over twenty years.

She wondered if there were other towns they didn’t know about.

“It took eighty days to pump Chalmette clean after Katrina in the 2000s. We could probably do Lucas in thirty-six hours, but we’ll need to start now. Most of the water isn’t reusable, but we’ll filter what we can. We just…,” Marty ran a hand over his bald pate. “We need to deal with who is left.”

She looked back at the screen, hearts pulsing on a sea of blue.

This was not an Old World firehose. This was a house on fire and she was burning alive. Maybe she could quit. She began to pull the chip out of her thumb, but she couldn’t even remember everything she’d signed or, worse, what they’d do to her if she just walked out. All she did know was that her new “important people rations” kept her throat from closing up at night. That the color had returned to her daughter’s face and so had the ability to pause and breath and think about something outside of her basic human needs.

It was unfair and not her fault and goddamn it didn’t she also deserve to feel human again? Didn’t they all?

She wondered, briefly, at what it would feel like, floating in the Lucas water, below body temperature, looking up at a smogged sky. Her skin prickled.

“Can’t we just let them go?” she asked. This hadn’t come up in her training: what to do in these sorts of disaster situations caused by their own attempts to keep the human race alive.

Marty frowned. The operator moved their head slightly in a way that made her think they were looking at her, horrified, below the tinted helmet.

Don’t judge me, she thought. They were all in this together, in some sort of fucked up way. They needed to be together on this. That and, screw you, Marty, for not telling me. She wasn’t responsible in the way that people normally think about it, though she was sure if the press got wind of it, it’d be her face plastered on the front cover.

New Head of Human Resources Kills Lucas.

“What if we can get one of those NDA things in place,” she said, her voice cracking. She wanted to know who every single one of those red dots were, what they did, what their life had been like before, what it would be like after. Marty’s eyes widened and rolled.

“Don’t be ridiculous, Elana,” Marty said, his voice gruff. “If you can’t hack it, leave. Every second we waste is another millimeter of water evaporating that we won’t be able to get back.”

It wouldn’t matter if there was no one left to enjoy it. To use it. It clicked then, why he hadn’t taken the position, why the last lead had left with no overlap. She wondered if they’d walked out.

Still, she thought about the people in history with blood on their hands. People who dropped the atomic bomb on Japan, the people who had left Flint, Michigan with lead seeping through its veins. The ones that pumped waste into the oceans. The real ones responsible for the credit card worth of plastic swimming through their aortas.

She would not have her daughter wonder which side she’d been on in the end. She would not have someone stand up at her funeral and say, people make bad decisions but some are worse than others and we cannot forget what Elana did to Lucas.

She remembered when someone saved her from starvation when she’d be a teenager on the outskirts of Annapolis. Shared half of a frozen pizza with her. How gestures like that got her from one day to the next until she’d somehow, after all of it, made it to this room. To this moment. To this decision.

“No,” she said. “If it’s my call, we’ll do a rescue and salvage operation.”

The silence stung her ears and she balled up her fists. Something buzzed through her, a strangely basic human reaction of flight or fight, to put her hand through a computer screen. To reach across the space and shake someone.

The operator balked and looked at Marty. Marty’s eyes swiveled from the operator, to her, and as he turned again to the screen, she caught it. How his shoulders fell an inch, how his body seemed to relax for a moment before he put back on the mask.

“You heard her,” he said to the operator. “Boots on the ground.”

“I want them there within the hour,” Elana said, her heart unfurling into her fingertips. It took everything she had to keep herself standing.

Maybe it would be a moment she’d regret, or one she’d hold with pride. After Marty and the operator finally left, she let her body collapse into the chair. Exhaustion radiated from her cheekbones, rippling through the skin on her neck.

She stayed in the control room all night that night as the sea of blue receded, but the red lanterns did not flicker out. At the end, no matter what lay on the other side of day for her, she wanted to make sure someone had watched it all. That someone would remember.

Salena Casha

Image: Torrential rain falling into a flood from Pixabay.com