Down Under Crater Billy

“Anything else shaking?” I asked as I got off the ramp on level 4.

“Just the usual Code D’s, E’s and F’s. Want details?”

I shook my head. “No thanks. I’ll review them later.”

Another twenty meters walk and I’d reached the armored door separating Testing Operations from the rest of the place. As usual, it was propped open with a rock, a sign that read COME ON IN, LIVE DANGEROUSLY! half-covering the one reading DANGER: PROCEED AT YOUR OWN RISK. Gloria, that section’s chief, thinks this is funny.

“Consider it done, Dove. Anything else?”

“It’s Dave,” I said, proceeding on at my own risk.

Here’s a little History 101.

First, and as I’m sure you already know, the term abnotech was coined by the famous-as-Einstein polymath Dr. Sarah Jameson back in ’04, the Newton’s Apple leading her to “discover” it’s life with her husband Dick.

It’s not the prettiest of words, but I guess we’re lucky. I mean, she might have decided to call us all dicks.

Within two years she’d gone on to devise the Jameson Scale and her Ab-notechnia Level Testing series. A lot of people in quite a few different disciplines tried to shoot down the whole concept, but the more data they amassed and the more graphs they made, the more they proved her right. She got her Nobel in Ought-seven, Dick at her side. Her speech was quite moving. His mike refused to work.

The Jameson Scale of abnotechnia runs from 0 to 10. Almost everyone here down under Crater Billy is at least a 7. Most are 8s or 9s. There are a few 10s, though not that many. That’s because they’re fairly rare, they don’t always lead long lives, and the presence of too many 10s in an artificially maintained environment like ours could make keeping it functioning all but impossible. Not letting any of us anywhere near critical systems down on level 6 helps. Frazzled 1s and 0s working out of a deeply buried bunker six klicks away handle all that, commuting and carrying our supplies through their own tunnel.

Most upper management jobs are filled by 7s like myself, since the problems we cause mostly—a word with one hell of a lot of give to it—tend to be simply aggravating.

Being abnotechs means that through no fault of our own, each one of us has an innate negative effect on mechanical, electrical, electronic, cybernetic and nanotic devices, or any combination thereof.

Why we’re the way we are is still a mystery. Some think it’s our magnetic fields which cause devices to wack out in our presence, but the equipment to measure such things can’t be trusted around us. Others think we’re probability benders, our very existence somehow throwing tiny monkey wrenches into the fundamental machinery of quantum mechanics. Some vote the Black Aura ticket. Since it doesn’t seem to be a curable condition—not even by death; a hearse carrying a dead 7 or over is a lot more likely to break down than normal, the odds increasing with the stiffs rating—the reason doesn’t really matter.

Less than .02 percent of the population tests at over 5, and it isn’t until you go 6 or above that life in our technological society starts getting noticeably troublesome. Watching people misuse their electronic toys, screw up their cars, and get bitten by folding chairs might make you think our numbers would be higher, but abnotechnia is not stupidity, clumsiness, plain unhandiness, or an inability to read directions. It’s something deeper and stranger, buried in our genes or wiring and transmitted on a band nobody’s ever been able to pin down.

We may have only become a sociological quantity in ’04 but we’ve always been around. Not long after the wheel was invented one of us got the First Flat. One of us flushed a dead goldfish down the toilet and accidentally sank Atlantis. One of us got the first wrong number, even though there were only three telephones in existence at the time. We’ve blacked out whole cities by making toast, and crashed whole computer networks by simply pressing ENTER. Devices with multi-million hour MTBF ratings go belly up the instant we buy or try to use them, or they do something their designers never conceived: a car alarm beeper causing every nearby Cash Machine to joyfully spit out hundred dollar bills, or conversely, a simple cash withdrawal setting off every car alarm in a twenty-block radius.

Gloria Lunden was our CTO, or Chief of Testing Operations.

Our jobs were intertwined, and our working relationship somewhat complicated and not always friction free. Two cats with their tails tied together might be an apt metaphor.