The Levee Dries Out

Rachel felt the sweat breaking out early. A hot, early spring – normally it wasn’t until the beginning of the fourth steep and narrow flight that she felt the first beads, and that not until June. In early April, and only midway through the second flight already dripping from the tip of her nose…? “Absurd,” she thought.

She took a break and adjusted her backpack while she glanced at the panorama over the absent guard rail. Normally, she did not view-gaze on the way up, but normally, she could make it up in one forced climb, without having to stop and wipe the stinging salt out of her eyes.

Burnt yellow with bands of blue- the contrast of the desiccated earth and intense shine from the aqueducts caused her eyes to ache as well as tear. She was still not inured to the dry harshness of the furnace-like air and the bright barrenness of the landscape. The canals sliced through ochre rock and sand so barren it was almost void of texture,

the flimsy gray green spikes of desert plants spread so sparsely that they were insufficient resting points for weary eyes.

She looked up from the precipitous vista of desolation to a sight she knew would at least provide mild relief . Three-quarters our the way to the horizon a

a linear ridge, too regular to be natural, held back a dark gleam that was startling in its extent. Shocking those without forewarning with its incongruity, an inland sea stained a full 120° of the horizon circle, a vast inundation in the middle of a desert. Known only as Sprawn City Hydration Asset Five, SCHAF was the newest and largest of five reservoirs, each titanic in its own right, spread through the dusty wastelands beyond the farthest Sprawburbs, as the outlying bedroom communities of the City were fondly known. The liquid quintet of artificial lakes, impounded by mammoth earthen dams of unique design, comprised the central, crucial component of the primary supporting pillar of the so-far successfully actualized master plan to birth the Sprawn megalopolis from the desert sands. This (to use an alternate metaphor) deeply embedded cornerstone of the existential foundation of the pre-planned linchpin of the entire north east quadrant of the Associated Republic was technically known as “water security.”

Rachel was now high enough to feel a mild breeze replace the stagnant air at the base of the tower. The welcome chill on her cheeks and brow lifted her to resume her ascent. Strengthened, she left flight after flight behind her without slowing. 77 meters above the base of the tower, Rachel set both lightweight boots on the doorstep of the lookout’s cabin. It was a vertiginous platform so mini that for two people to occupy it, they would have to perform an intimate embrace or go plummeting off the tower for simple lack of room. Fortunately, and as always (up there), Rachel was by herself, and thus able to perform her arrival ritual: an unflinching gaze straight down 77 meters to the base of the tower, then another 228 meters down the cliff of the mesa to the entrance to the elevator which had spirited her to the Mesa top, to begin her 22-story climb. She had taken this glance every workday for almost 3 years now, and it was admirably fulfilling its purpose: she no longer felt even a hint of acrophobia.

As though to demonstrate that to the reader, Rachel now pivoted nimbly to face the lookout cabin door, as though she were standing on a flat pharmacy floor tile rather than on a divingboard-wide guardrail-less plank

intentionally placed so high in the sky that, with proper magnification, Rachel’s perch could be seen for scores of kilometers around.

Of course, the “real” reason that Rachel demonstrated an almost inhuman level of nonchalance on the tiny doorstep of her cabin was not that she was performing for unseen readers (whether Rachel is aware that she is a character in a story is an unresolved question), but because her mind was entirely devoted to a different concern and in her impressive pivot to the door she was acting unconsciously and/or automatically. In fact, Rachel feared the challenge of accessing the watch-person’s cabin far more than the prospect of falling 1000 1/2 feet. The door in front of her barred her way with a combination lock, and that combination was changed weekly. She viewed the dreaded day on which she forgot her combination as certain to arrive as the entrance of Mars into Scorpio, just less precisely predictable. On that ill-starred day, she would put in the wrong guess three times in a row, and be permanently locked out, with nothing left to do but slink down the stairs and down the elevator in abject defeat. If she got away with simply immediate termination as her only punishment, she would be getting off lightly.

Since the password changed every week and the criteria for the minimum 12 character sequence were strict, access was a true challenge. On the day we are observing our hero(ine), she was armed for the task, as she had repeated the magical phrase that would give entrance the ritual 13 times immediately before starting the climb.

There was nothing more to be done. She could not prepare any more, she was at the gateway and ready to do or die-figuratively, or perhaps literally. She figuratively girded her loins, (not literally, as due to the unseasonable heat nothing was covering her actual midriff), literally clenched her teeth, and thus prepared, turned her attention to the back-to-basics-pushbutton-combination lock, which represented the last obstacle in the real ordeal that was virtually a heptathlon-her daily bid to get started at her work.

She took a deep breath and entered 38O0W7\*1234. [*Note: the period at the end of this password is not part of the password, but a punctuation mark. However the asterisk is part of the password, NOT meant to direct your attention to a footnote]

Drum roll… Muffled click… Turn… Yes, got it right!

With tremendous relief she entered the tiny lookout station. Microwave, foam pad, coffee maker, tiny refrigerator. Peeing and pooping arrangements were similar to those on the airplanes of days of yore-conveyances that Rachel had only examined in museums. She had thus never given thought to the sanitary arrangements in aircraft, but knew that on the watchtower, she was high enough that no one need worry. Indeed, shift after shift of observing the extreme desiccation of the landscape had at times given Rachel the facetious wish that less of her precious bodily fluids would dissipate before reaching the ground.

(It was a deservedly little-known fact that a behavioral investigator in need of a thesis had rigorously demonstrated that the extreme aridity

of the Sprawn City hinterlands predisposed both men and women to impulses to water the landscape with their personal fluids.)

Military intelligence or training was not necessary to reach the conclusion that the hydration asset system was a point of extreme vulnerability for Sprawn City, which may be why Associated Republic Security (ARS) had in fact utilized numerous highly-trained and well-paid analysts to come to that conclusion.

As these dedicated professionals pointed out, possibilities for villainous deeds were legion in the arena of Sprawn’s fluid assets – from the elaborate, such as introducing various toxins, infectious agents, or psychoactive substances into the water supply, to the most basic-simply dynamiting the channels so that the city died of thirst. High-tech monitoring systems were, as always, in place, for there were multiple technology firms in the province of Sprawnia that thrived on the very fact of the region’s thirst, and whether their contributions were truly needed, they were not to be left out.

Indeed, for any concerns but the most blatantly existential, ARS focused exclusively on technological solutions, and if it were ever suggested that they broaden their repertoire to include primitive approaches such as boots (worn by humans) on the ground or human eyes in the watchtowers, the reaction of the top Brass of ARS would be the amused condescension the “modern” man reserves for the superstitious “native.” However, in effect acknowledging that failure was not an option in the protection of the water supply for the Republic’s only metropolis and only true holdfast in its entire contested Northeastern quadrant, the wise women and men of ARS made an exception and implemented a redundant system of failsafes, from the most basic to the most “sophisticated”, to reinforce “hydro-security” for Sprawnia.

Although it would be loath to admit it, ARS had realized that the technology-dependent warning systems would be the first to go in an all-out attack. Thus, a multimodality surveillance system had been deployed. It ran the gamut from isotopic waste product analysis to boots-on-the-ground human sentries and tank treads-on-the-ground robot sentries. In glamor, the fallible human Rachel, in her desert eyrie 1000 ½ feet up, was below any of the robots, and barely one step above the literally on-the-ground humans.

Despite the unfavorable comparisons with robots that are always looming over any human sentry’s head, Rachel was proud to have developed a well -defined surveillance routine that she followed consistently.

Returning to the Semiramidean “present”: after setting foot in her lookout station, Rachel paused only to gulp some iced coffee from a thermos she extracted from the refrigerator, she began her shift, following the aforementioned disciplined routine.

First: binocular survey of potential hotspots.She settled into the swivel chair and brought her eyes to the tripod-mounted 20X70’s. Focused on the SCHAF forebay, she cursed inwardly. Her last look was only a week ago, yet the decrease in water level was quite apparent to her trained eye.

To monitor water level electronically is elementary. Rachel knew that ARS was aware of the loss of every cubic meter. Our lookout wondered why she had not been briefed on the loss in any way.

For that matter, no high-ranking officer (or low-ranking officer) had ever taken Rachel aside to explain her role as a cog in their vast security apparatus.

She was essentially a very low ranking servant, paid a little bit to add a minuscule sliver of additional security, without the inconvenience of actual training or interaction being placed on the higher ups. On her own, she had deduced that human monitors were employed to deal with causes (for example, sabotage) rather than effects (water shortfall.) Rachel had just seen a dramatic effect with her own eyes, but the cause was unclear.

It was common knowledge that water consumption was at an all-time high, higher than could be explained by the population increase alone. Even the authorities had acknowledged the panic due to the Renavirus pandemic had caused a large segment of the population to engage in home hyperhydration. The same authorities were firm that this had no preventive effect, and reiterated that the procedure was of use only in established, critical cases of Renavirus disease

Rachel was not a hydrologist, but intuitively the startling fall in the “mother of all reservoirs” seemed unexplainable by any of the usual mechanisms, even when the new Renavirus-related behaviors were factored in.

When in doubt, document!

She turned away from the binoculars to attach the camera to the spotting scope. As no notice had ever been taken of the rote reports she had to file after every lookout session, Rachel had no expectations of any official interest in her primitive visual documentation of water level snapped from kilometers distant, but she had plenty of both boredom and curiosity to motivate her.

The 4 fold advantage in magnification afforded by the scope affirmed her concerns. Dark liquid sloshed in the forebay, but its surface line fell over a meter below the obviously fresh high watermark.

“Just a map and some basic geometry and I’ll quickly calculate loss…”, Rachel thought.

“Later. For now just get the photos…”. The camera clicked.