The Last Shift

A side story. Dongguan, 2029, thirteen years before the novel opens. No spoilers.

The main gate at the eastern plant had been under repair since the typhoon in August, and in October it was still under repair, so on his last morning Lao Xu went in the way he had been going in for two months, through the gap behind the chlorine store where the chain-link had come away from its post. He held the wire up with one hand and ducked under it with his lunch tin in the other, and when he straightened on the far side he saw that somebody had cut the weeds along the path since yesterday. He supposed it was for the visitor.

The visitor was a young woman from the contractor, and she was waiting for him in the control room with a tablet on her knees and a paper cup of tea she had not touched. She stood when he came in and told him her name, which he lost at once, and said she was sorry to take up his morning.

“It’s the last one,” he said. “Nobody else was using it.”

She laughed a little late, the way people did when they were not sure they were allowed to, and he was sorry he had said it. She had not written the letter. The letter had come from the bureau in September, two paragraphs long, thanking him for nine years of dependable service and giving him the date, and he had read it standing at the kitchen counter at his sister’s while she pretended to be busy with the rice.

The operations controller had been running beside him for seven weeks. It lived in a grey cabinet in the corner of the control room that hummed a little lower than the old equipment, and on the main screen its readings sat next to his own. For the first two weeks they had disagreed by small amounts, a few kilopascals on the eastern feed, a pump it wanted to rest that he wanted to run, and he had gone out to look each time and come back and entered what he had found. For the last five weeks they had not disagreed about anything.

“I don’t need much,” the young woman said. “It’s a walk-through for the handover file. You show me the plant, and anything you think the system ought to know, you tell me and I’ll put it in. Honestly, it’s a formality. The controller is already running everything.”

“Then what am I telling it?”

“Whatever you’d tell the next person,” she said, and then heard what she had said and looked at her tablet.

He took her around. It was cooler in the pump hall than outside, and the noise came up through the soles of his shoes the way it always had. He showed her number three, which shook in the wet season if you let it run above eighty percent, and she checked her tablet and told him the vibration was logged, with a ceiling already set. He walked her down the eastern manifold and told her that every March the Guanghua blocks ran red with spring rust for about two weeks, and that the complaints came in on the third day, never the first, because people assumed it was their own pipes. She scrolled, nodded, and turned the screen so he could see the complaint history laid out year by year with the March bars standing out above the rest.

At the end of the manifold he stopped by the old bronze coupling on the bypassed feed line and ran his thumb along its face. It collected salt from the air if you left it bare, he said, and then the dust got into the seat, and he brushed it every week whether the line was carrying water or not.

She looked it up. “It’s on the inspection schedule,” she said. “The controller monitors the seal and reroutes if it fails.”

“If it fails, you have already lost the coupling.”

“I’ll add that as a note,” she said, and he watched her type it with her thumbs, carefully, the way his nephew typed.

On the way back to the control room he asked her where the controller had learned the March rust, since it had only been in the building seven weeks. She seemed glad to have a question she could answer, and she opened the source list and held it out to him. Most of what the system knew about the eastern plant had come from the operator log. She scrolled, and he saw his own entries go past, nine years of them, the pump that shook and the red water in March and the complaints on the third day, each one under his name with the date and time he had typed it at the end of a shift. He had written them for whoever came after him. He had pictured a young man with a wire brush.

“It reads everything,” she said. “That’s why the handover is so easy. You did a very good job on the logs.”

He signed the form on her tablet with his finger, and the signature came out looking like somebody else’s. She thanked him and asked whether there was anything in the control room he wanted to take home. He opened the second drawer of the desk and took out the short-handled wire brush and put it in his lunch tin, and she pretended not to watch him do it.

The gate was still under repair when he left at four, so he went out through the gap again. On the walk home through the eastern blocks he passed the standpipe at the end of the Guanghua blocks, where a woman was filling a red plastic bucket, and he slowed down long enough to see that the water was running clear before he went on.

His sister had the kettle on when he came in. She asked how it had gone, and he told her it had gone fine, that the young woman from the contractor had been polite and that the machine had known everything already.

“So tomorrow you can sleep,” she said. “Like a normal person.”

“I’ll practice,” he said.

He woke at ten past four, the hour he had checked the overnight pressure for nine years, and lay in the dark without getting up. Somewhere above him a neighbor ran a tap, and he heard the water come down through the building’s pipes, steady, at the pressure he had set in the spring.