When proceedings resumed, Victor offered a compromise. The ribbon-cutting would go forward. The barrier would close only in supervised demonstration mode, and the public would be told that the full automated program would begin after routine final checks. Applause broke out among the observers invited by the developer.
Yui objected that the physical distinction between demonstration and operation depended on settings she had not verified. The mayor thanked her for the recommendation. The committee voted five to two to permit the event. It did not order a new test.
Outside, Camila asked Nia how she felt. Nia watched city workers drape lights over the steps, preparing the entrance for television cameras.
'Like someone asked whether a bridge was sound,' she said, 'and they voted on whether the answer would be inconvenient.'
Camila wrote the sentence down, then crossed it out. 'Too neat,' she said. 'People will think you prepared it.'
Nia laughed for the first time in two days. Then her phone rang. Eli was calling from the North Barrier, his voice distorted by the noise of machinery.
'They're running an unscheduled night test,' he said. 'Martin's here with a private crew. I looked at the generator room before they locked me out. Someone has disconnected the backup feed to the bypass pumps.'
At the hall's exit, a volunteer folded chairs while the committee members departed through a private corridor. She had watched the entire meeting without being invited to speak. She pointed toward the doors through which the officials had gone. 'They're very good at managing,' she said. Nia carried that sentence into the rain.
Nia stopped laughing. 'Is the channel still open?'
'For now. But the forecast just got worse.'
She looked up at the dark clouds moving over City Hall. Tomorrow's cameras would show the great gates closing like the doors of a vault. No one in the audience would know what happened to the water behind them.
CHAPTER 06
THE TEST NO ONE ORDERED
Nia reached the public observation platform at the North Barrier just after midnight. From there she could see the control building, a row of maintenance vehicles, and two contractors moving equipment under floodlights. She could not see Eli. Her access badge had been suspended, so she stayed beyond the turnstile and called his mobile.
He answered on the fourth ring. 'I'm in the workshop. They've told everyone except the contract crew to leave.'
'Who ordered the test?'
'Martin says it came from senior management. I asked to see the work permit. He told me to mind my own business.'
A pair of red warning lamps began to flash on the barrier towers. The steel gates moved a few feet inward and stopped. Across the channel, a tug sounded its horn. A maintenance truck crawled toward the generator building, where the backup feed had been disconnected.
'Can you see the panel from where you are?' Nia asked.
'Only the external indicator. It's showing bypass available, which doesn't make sense if the feed is off.'
'Photograph it with the timestamp visible.'
Eli hesitated. 'I could lose my job.'
'You could also be the only person who documented what happened.'
A long pause. Then a shutter clicked through the phone connection.
He always kept the windows clear so passersby could see machines being opened and examined rather than replaced without explanation. A shelf of repaired radios carried small labels recording what had failed and how it had been tested afterward. Nia asked why he documented such inexpensive objects so carefully. He said the discipline was easiest to maintain when the stakes were small. If you allowed yourself to guess while repairing a radio, you were more likely to guess when inspecting a system that served a thousand households.
He took a defunct relay from a drawer and demonstrated how a tiny movement could create an apparently convincing signal while leaving the power path open. The example made Nia uncomfortable because the indicator light looked so reassuring. She had spent years interpreting printed instructions but still had much to learn about the machines behind them. Samuel urged her to keep asking engineers for demonstrations. 'Nobody becomes qualified by pretending they understand every box on the diagram,' he said. 'Qualification begins when you can identify the box you're not willing to guess about.'