The Roof and the Rails
Wind rushed past Jo at a hundred miles per hour, yanking at her uniform overalls and threatening to fill her pockets with more air than she really wished to be carrying at the time. She’d learned the hard way that her clothing’s various storage solutions were better employed for holding tools; there was plenty of air back inside the train if she needed it, whereas there were comparatively few tools left loose on the roof. Those that did suffer the fate of abandonment among the junction boxes, mechanical control panels, and various other machinery up there, didn’t tend to stay put for very long.
After completing her engineering training, Jo hadn’t really known what to expect from a life of keeping the RecreationMaster UltraTrains in working order. They were unlike any other rail vehicles in the world, intending to capitalise on the lucrative cruise ship business without having to worry about any of that potential sinking nonsense. It was very rare indeed for trains to capsize and sink, and whenever they did it could generally be laughed off as a humourous mishap instead of a terrestrial maritime disaster. As such, the business model basically sold itself to investors.
The UltraTrains themselves were, in the words of the RecreationMaster promotional materials, ‘testaments to humankind’s arrogance, and beacons of our ability to bend anything to our will for leisure’. As broad as a pedestrian high street and full of just as many financially unviable shops, the trains were precariously balanced upon the standard railway tracks that had already lain like metallic bindings over the countryside. Despite having the silhouette of a civic building riding a unicycle, and although their implementation into the rail system had necessitated the widening of several tunnels and train stations at enormous expense to the taxpayer, the UltraTrains proved to be an instant success. No sooner was one luxury land cruise completed than the next one was to start, and all maintenance was to be completed on the move to maximise both profits and danger to employees. That was where people like Jo came in.
Engineers aboard the UltraTrains could be assigned to any aspect of their upkeep, with each department offering vastly different experiences and threats. Those in the engine room had a high pressure, always-on task of monitoring the status of every aspect of the locomotive’s power source, whereas the under-seat heating specialists had a comparatively banal experience of ensuring rears were warm at all times. Although they gained an in-depth knowledge of how long-term buttock pressure could distort a heating element, and the characteristic signs of what they affectionately called ‘steel butts’, it lacked something in terms of interest and glamour compared to the more critical work.
What she’d been really dreading above all else, quite literally, was rooftop maintenance duty. For reasons that were best described as either ‘putting aesthetics ahead of practicality’ or ‘design choices being driven by those who were least qualified to make them’, much of the train’s electronics and many of its access panels were situated on the rooves of the various carriages. Well out of the way of passengers, this solution maximised the space not only for seats and cabins, but also for swimming pools, squash courts, shoe-shine stands and the eternally oversubscribed trumpet polishing classes. No matter how many dedicated trumpet polishing carriages they added to the UltraTrains it never seemed to sate the thirst of the brass enthusiasts.
What the solution did not maximise, however, was the safety or comfort of the poor souls who needed to perform hours of careful maintenance on the delicate and intricate machinery housed within those panels. All the prospective engineers received their training in the calm and quiet workshops of the RecreationMaster engineering campus, located in a glass dome underneath the English channel due to a mix-up in the planning permission. Although comprehensive, what every rooftop maintenance engineer found out the hard way was that soldering became far trickier when your hand was being perpetually assaulted by turbulent airflow. Couple to that the inherent danger of bird migration season, and the whole exercise was rendered rather difficult indeed.
In her application for work aboard the prestigious Heart Rush train, greatest of all the RecreationMaster UltraTrains owned and operated by the Capital Victimisers Corporation, Jo had made the mistake of specifying that she categorically did not wish to take rooftop maintenance duty. This transpired to be the best way of guaranteeing that she would see no other part of the train for as long as she was employed. It was only because the hiring officer had urgent lunch plans that day that they didn’t put through an application to have Jo’s sleeping quarters moved onto the outside of the train as well. While a few of her classmates who also managed to be accepted onto Heart Rush were able to luxuriate as waterslide testers, mostly by lying about a deathly fear of water on their own applications, Jo was sent ever upwards.
Far below her, down at ground level, steel wheels were rushing along metal rails. Fallen leaves, discarded pennies, and unwanted remote controls were crushed against the tracks, under the enormous weight of the train. The use of their vehicles as emergency waste disposal mechanisms was initially frowned upon by Capital Victimisers Corporation, due to fears of potential damage to the train. However, extensive testing revealed that while the wheels did suffer some degradation, people were willing to pay a lot of money to have their problems disappear, courtesy of the rail network. With their civic duty to become as rich as possible always at the forefront of their mind, CVC nobly allowed it to continue at a vast premium, while paying their engineers no extra danger money to repair and replace the wheels while the train was still in motion.
Jo didn’t need to worry about that drama. All she needed to do was duck the occasional low-hanging sign or branch, keep an eye out for migrating birds, and be careful not to swan-dive off the edge. Aside from an incident in her early days of employment, whereby she’d underestimated the momentum carried by a watermelon rind carelessly tossed from an overhead bridge, those pitfalls and perils were generally easy enough to avoid.
What had brought Jo up to the roof on this particular occasion was a matter of the most dire urgency: a failure of the automatic armrest fragrancing unit in cabin sixteen. As soon as Jo had seen the work order come through on her tablet, she'd grasped the cataclysmic importance of the task. No-one worth their salt could have failed to see it, really, but just in case the self-evident was not evident enough, a note had been attached. It read thus:
‘Jo,
Treat this work as highly urgent, priority negative 3.
I entered cabin sixteen nary a moment ago to initiate my routine wellness enforcement checks on all systems, as is my general preference for Wednesday afternoons. Imagine my horror when I performed a routine sniff test on the armrest, and received a noseful of meadow hyperventilation, rather than autumn sparrow's beak. Not believing my own senses I gave it another go, and then another, but still the appropriate fragrance of a small bird's pecking equipment was denied to me. I was forced to change it manually, using the hands on my arms like some kind of barbarian, leading me to conclude that the automation unit has failed. I needn't tell you that had I been a paying customer, I would have been apoplectic with rightful fury, and would quite possibly have fainted on the spot with shock and embarrassment at RecreationMaster. Resolve this immediately. I don't care whether you're sleeping, using the lavatory or currently clinically dead again, just get it done.
With love and kisses,
Theresa.’
Of course, it'd taken far longer for Jo to read the note than the time she would have spent dithering over the importance of the work order, but that was hardly the point.
Standing there, on the roof of the train as it barrelled along the tracks at maximum speed, she knew that it would all be worth it; all the risks, all the danger of death, all the frightening low branches and biting cold wind, when the work was done. Cabin sixteen’s armrests would have their aroma changed according to schedule again once she had carried out the necessary repairs, and the journey of any occupants would not be ruined. It was, at least, some small mercy that no-one was currently using cabin sixteen, nor was it booked for the next three days, but it was clear to her that no delay could be permitted.
A sign whipped overhead, with a deep whoosh that made her flinch downwards hard. Had she been in any actual danger the flinch would have been far too late to do her any good, but she’d not been able to stamp out the reflex yet. Jo was working hard to overcome the biological shortcuts that had ensured the species’ survival to date, but since CVC wouldn’t pay for the invasive, unnecessary and unproven surgery that might, or might not, have removed them, the progress was slow. In much the same way, her progress across the train’s roof was not expeditious. Constantly battling the pull of the wind, Jo struggled with deeply bent knees and very cold cheeks to drag herself forwards. Every few paces she was able to take partial cover behind some large, metal structure or other, or grab onto one for more purchase; these were welcome breaks from the otherwise complete exposure of her work environment. Even her thick, heavily waxed, CVC-issue overalls were barely able to protect her fragile, fleshy body from the ravages of nature.
“One… two… five…” Jo counted to herself, looking from one indistinct metal outcrop to another. Cabin sixteen’s control boxes were the second ones in, but it would be foolishness not to check all the automatic aroma controls for that carriage while she was up there. That kind of proactivity was what separated the truly great engineers from the perfunctory technicians.
Jo checked the safety cables which connected her tool belt to the railings along the train’s surface. It was mandated for all rooftop engineers to keep their safety cables affixed to both their belt and the rails at all times, but, rather tellingly, the wearing of a tool belt itself was completely optional. Loss of human life, said CVC, was tragic. The loss of company tools, on the other hand, was unforgivable.
Contented that she would not be posthumously accused of losing anything that the company might have to pay to replace, Jo continued her journey to the box under need of repairs. To either side of her, idyllic countryside rushed past as if it had somewhere else to be. She’d often wondered how these vast swathes of picturesque countryside were able to cope with their chronic immobility; if a corn field needed to visit its local GP, or a copse wanted to surprise a friendly cemetery at dinner one evening, they would be wholly unable. It always came with a pang of sympathy for them, one which she’d once tried to describe to a friend of hers. The friend had quickly accused her of spending too much time thinking about the hypothetical desires of farmland, and suggested that she directly ask the question of the next field she walked through.
In lieu of having done so, Jo was forced to keep speculating on how these patches of land coped with their sedentary lifestyles as she hiked her way towards the control box. Underfoot the metal grips kept her steady against the intense torrent of air, and she was grateful that no rain had fallen to make the surface slick and wet.
Apparently paranoid that just about anyone would be able to climb onto the roof and start performing routine maintenance on the control boxes, CVC had fitted each one of them with a cover panel that could only be removed with a proprietary CVC tool. For reasons best known to the CVC branding department, this tool was a screwdriver with a 'CVC' shaped protrusion on the end. While the shape was indeed very hard to replicate, and thus very secure, the delicate lettering was also incredibly fragile. Early attempts to use it had generally resulted in the letters shearing off completely, leaving the engineers with an expensive but useless stick. Unfortunately, all of the panels had been made by then, so they had to go with it and hope for the best. ‘Hope for the best’ was an internal term used by CVC to mean 'blame the engineers if they break things'; consequently, there was an awful lot of hope at CVC.
With an anxious care that had been learned most effectively when reading the policy on punishments for breaking CVC tooling, Jo unscrewed the seven fixing points on the control box, allowing the front panel to swing open. Behind its rain-damaged exterior was revealed the multitude of coloured wires, resin cased components and serialised circuit boards that automated the majority of cabin sixteen.
Although sheltered from the yanking of the air through which the train cut on its high-velocity, relaxing pleasure cruise, there was still a major force with which to contend when it came to maintaining a steady hand, namely the regular, clockwork juddering of the whole carriage as it chugged along the tracks. Within the carriage there were dampeners that shielded the travellers from this turbulent disruption, but out there, on the chassis itself, Jo was subject to all the whims and juggling that the railway had to offer. It was like a heartbeat to an experienced engineer like her, not a distracting rhythm of jostled tooling but a reassuring timepiece that helped her stay synchronised to whatever mysterious rhythms ran through the UltraTrain. She could almost tell where the train was on its route by the vibration of the tracks, but that hypothesis was difficult to test since, from the roof, she always commanded a fairly reliable view of the locale. Few and far between were the times she stood up there with closed eyes, and even on those occasions, the audio billboards which screamed their location as the train rumbled by gave away the location game.
With an expert eye and a keen amateur nose Jo examined the circuitry she'd exposed, searching for any clue as to what might have gone wrong. In her mind she ran over the schematics and diagrams for these elements of the train’s key guest comforters, picturing in vivid detail the intended layout of components. It bore no resemblance to the harrowing reality of what butchery had been committed with soldering iron and apathy in days gone by. Where clean and smooth green boards should have stood untainted, like a verdant lawn between the grand structures of capacitors, she instead saw trails of silver. It was as if molten snails had been slithering this way and that across the surface, with drips and tracks of solder bleeding outwards, threatening to join one piece to another in unholy electrically shorted matrimony.
"My goodness me. This won't do at all." She tutted to herself, even though she was the most blameless in the situation. One hand, half of the pair she had at her disposal, reached down to her belt and grabbed a de-soldering tool. Whatever the problem was with this control box, it would be easier to solve when everything had been tidied up.
As was so often the case with routine maintenance, Jo entered a kind of remedial fugue state. The rushing countryside and cacophonous rail noises faded into nothingness as she worked diligently on the delicate electronics. After a few minutes of efficient tinkering, something started to nag at the back of her mind. It wasn't a big something, for instance the train being ablaze, but nor was it absolutely nothing, like a passing train that wasn't under her care being ablaze. Somewhere in the middle of those two extremes, the poles of how much Jo really had to care about what was happening, one of her senses was trying to make her pay attention to something. It wasn't sight; everything that she could see was the work in which she'd engaged herself. It wasn't taste because it had been weeks since she'd licked the train’s roof. It was, she finally decided, her hearing that tried to grab her notice. It was an additional clang, a thud or bang that held its own consistent periodic beat but didn't belong in the cadence of the train on its tracks.
Deigning to give this clanging sound the honour of peripheral attention, while still focusing the majority of her concentration on the job at hand, Jo tried to account for what this new sound could be. It didn't much sound like a tree scraping the side of the carriage and bouncing along the windows, plus it seemed to be travelling along with her. Whilst a flapping panel might have made such a racket, she had seen the flaps up close on the way to where she was, and she would definitely have heard the noise before now. Her brain kept ticking. As it continued she realised that the sound was familiar. Very familiar, in fact, but alien to what she was doing, or perhaps just to where she was doing it.
There was a click. Not the metaphorical sort that accompanies a revelation but a real, audible one from the circuitry at her fingertips; something had sparked, arced or otherwise embarked on an electrical journey to places where it had no real business, and consequently a small trail of capacitor smoke was rising from the scene of the crime. By sheer coincidence this coincided, tautologically, with the understanding of what the other unidentified clanging sound really was; footsteps climbing an access ladder from the interior of the carriage up to the roof. She span around just in time to see a man’s smiling head pop up from the hatch.
“Get back inside!” Jo told him, waving her hand in a generally downward fashion just in case he was more open to mime than verbal instructions.
“I will in a minute.” He assured her unconvincingly, whilst continuing to climb and dismount the ladder.
“Wow, it sure is windy out here!” Laughed the man, clothes nearly being torn from his body by the air. “It’s no wonder there are all those ‘Access Forbidden’ signs on the doors.”
“What are you doing up here? It’s dangerous, please leave.”
"Oh it’ll be fine, I'm just exploring a bit! I was seeing what's around, finding what activities and things there are, you know, and I just wandered up here." Came the cheery reply.
"Just wandered up? The ladder is behind a locked door." Jo said, seriously questioning whether she’d remembered to lock it behind her when she’d climbed up to the roof.
"It was simple to pick that.” Dismissed the man. “That's one of our forms of entertainment, right? Just like that heavy chain I broke with my bolt cutters to release the ladder."
"I definitely didn't leave any bolt cutters behind... I don't even have...” Jo muttered to herself. “Did you bring your own with you?"
"Never leave home without them." He beamed. “Left them at the bottom of the ladder so that I’d have both hands for climbing though, so you can see that I’m being perfectly conscientious about my own safety and you needn’t worry.”
Jo stared at him in disbelief for a moment, and then shrugged. She’d done her duty of care and shown diligence enough to advise the man of the perils of the rooftop. The rest was up to him. "So what are you up to up here? Fixing something important?"
"Just routine maintenance. Nothing to worry about."
"Seems worth enough worry to climb onto the roof of a moving train." He observed.
"The comfort and enjoyment of our passengers is the number one priority here aboard the RecreationMaster. We work to keep everything on the rails." Recited Jo. Her delivery lacked the empty warmth and false sincerity of the adverts, but in fairness it was harder to let those shine through when shouting the words over the rushing of air.
"I see. Well, thank you very much then!" The man shouted back happily. Jo nodded and turned back to her circuit board. No-one had thanked her for her work in a long while, and it took her a moment to reconcile how it felt. It was sort of like putting on an old jumper and not really knowing whether it had been laundered or not, but eventually she determined that it was still comfortable enough regardless.
Accepting that the passenger would be on the roof for as long as he pleased, Jo started to dutifully fetch some spare components from her belt and repair what had just exploded. Frustrating as it was, there wasn't much sense in trying to find the old fault before fixing the one she'd just caused. Over the course of many years as an engineer on these trains, she had learned to factor in time to break and repair at least three other parts of what she was maintaining, just to be on the safe side.
Behind her, she was acutely aware of her rooftop guest pottering around and investigating thing, including the various junction boxes and control mechanisms that littered the train.
"Door lubricant dispenser temperature control." He read aloud. "Seems useful enough. I know that I wouldn't want over-chilled lubricant on my doors at home, let alone on a relaxing train holiday."
Jo continued soldering. There was no contradicting such a reasonable statement.
"Adjustment of track dampening... so we can have a very smooth ride indeed or a very bumpy one? I might request that things get a bit shakier in the 'house of cards construction carriage', just to make things a little more interesting." He said towards Jo, hopefully. She offered no reaction.
"What does this one do?" He then asked directly. She sighed.
"Sir, it would be best if you returned to the carriage interior. It really isn't safe for passengers to be up here and the wind looks like it might be on the cusp of tearing your eyebrows off."
The man, looking surprised by virtue of the wind's effect on the eyebrows under discussion, but not necessarily feeling that way, pondered the insinuation.
"Well... I don't suppose I need them much anyway. It's nice to get some fresh air, you know? Those artificial scents getting pumped out are nice, don't get me wrong, but they're intense. Very intense."
Jo nodded. Part of her considered turning the cabin sixteen scent intensity, scentensity as CVC labelled it, down a little bit to accommodate the man’s concerns. However, that would have been a breach of the company policy on minimum acceptable scentensity levels. Whether they knew it or not, the passengers needed the fake aromas to be that strong, so that they wouldn’t pine for home or try to use their own air fresheners.
"Tunnel ahead." Declared a sign which was rapidly charging towards Jo. It was worth another punt to get the man to leave her alone.
"Sir, we're about to go into a tunnel. It would really be for the best if you head back inside; headroom will be limited, it'll be dark and it'll be very noisy. I don't think you'll like it very much."
"Limited headroom? All that means is that there's something between me and the sky." He replied.
"There might well be something between your shoulders and your nose if it's a low one."
The man laughed jovially.
"That's just my neck and my mouth. No need to fret about those. I'd say they've never done me any harm but it'd be quite the fib." He chuckled.
Jo sighed and lamented the good nature of idiots as the promised tunnel rushed to greet them, like a toddler barrelling towards a parent. With a howling "thwoom" of non-consensually displaced air, Heart Rush rattled into the hillside in the only way that didn't warrant a national news report. Hungrily, the hillside’s gaping maw engulfed them. Darkness consumed everything that their vision had been merrily observing, and the throat of the hill roared with echoing track noise and the blaring of engines. If the passenger had been making any conversation at Jo, benign, malign or otherwise aligned, it was lost in the rushing and crashing noises of the tunnel. All that the engineer heard in her head was the practiced countdown until she could see her work again, but she turned instead to face the roving passenger. With any luck he would have been pushed below deck and she could stop worrying about a salary penalty for damage to CVC guests. The moment of blindness becoming vision and the return of relative quiet, or at least the calming of a cacophony, would arrive in five, four, three, two, one...
The man was still there, and now there was a woman standing with him.
"You're right! It really is windy!" She laughed.
"What?!"
"It was dark inside so I thought I'd pop out for some fresh light." She beamed. “And it was dark out here too, to begin with… but now it’s light! And windy!”
“Very windy. Old hands at being on the roof like me and this engineer here know that all too well.” Explained the man, much to the continued delight of his new friend. “Apparently these boxes all control important things that we don’t need to worry about. I’m Basil, by the way.”
“Moira. Lovely to make your acquaintance.”
“Basil is quite right, they’re important and they’re all delicate so please be careful and take yourselves back indoors.”
“We won’t touch anything we’re not supposed to. Will we?” Moira asked Basil. It sounded less like a request for agreement and more like a genuine question than Jo really liked. The firm grip that Moira currently had on cabin fourteen’s curtain regulator did nothing to help matters.
“We won’t.” Basil confirmed. The regulator was released.
Jo looked wearily at them both, then shook her head and returned to her circuitry. Nothing could be done without risking a complaint, and Jo had no intention of donating the regulation pint of blood as penance for poor customer service. A small amount of easy soldering, rendered tricky by a moving vehicle, restored the functionality that she herself had removed by detonation of a component, and she resumed her troubleshooting.
“What did you say the nice lady was up to, Basil? It looks interesting.”
“It does, doesn’t it? I’ve been assured that while it’s nothing of which I need the details, it is nevertheless something of the utmost importance.” He relayed, with a tone that was just ambiguous enough that Jo couldn’t chastise him for sarcasm.
"Important enough that we should have a panic, do you think?" She asked earnestly but calmly. "I'm always ready to have a panic should the need arise, of course, but I wouldn’t like to do so unnecessarily. Feels like an awful waste of time and effort when I could instead be having a lovely relaxing ride on the train."
"Or its roof." Added Basil.
"Or its roof." She agreed with a smile. "So, miss? Do you think we need to have a bit of a panic about what you're up to?"
"No!” Jo cried, turning around with incredulity carved on her face. Or it might just have been the effect of strong winds on a weak face for sustained periods. “No of course not. When would panic ever be helpful?"
"For attracting attention, for getting the heart rate up, for simply feeling alive... the list goes on. A lot of people talk panic down but I'm a real champion for it under the right circumstances. If I hadn't panicked about that beetle I saw across the road the other day then I'd never have made that nearby bus conductor stoop to pick it up, and then he'd never have put his back out." She explained, gravely. "Can you imagine going to work with your back almost out? The notion doesn't even bear consideration, and my panic saved him from that."
"It feels like an assumption or two has been made there regarding the likelihood of a bus conductor injuring their back at work." Jo assessed.
"A very good assumption." Praised Basil, labouring under the belief that he was agreeing with both Jo and Moira.
"Thank you."
"No, that's... you know what? Sure, why not."
"Why not panic?" Moira asked, lifting her arms out to the side and squatting a little in preparation to have a great flap.
"No, why not… nevermind what I’m why notting. The point is that there's no reason to panic."
"You're sure? It's no trouble to me." Moira assured. She had the look of someone with all too much practice at forging mountains from the endeavours of moles.
"I'm very sure."
"Well, you know best. It's your train after all. But if the circumstances happen to change then you will let me know, won't you?"
"You'll be the first to know." Jo lied.
"Great, thank you. We'd best let you get back to what you're doing, I suppose" She laughed. A flash of hope burst like a firework in Jo’s chest at the notion of the two passengers getting back into the safety of the train’s interior, but then, much like the same colourful explosions, it turned into nothing but a rain of embers. Far from leaving the roof, Moira had instead taken her phone out and was idly tapping away at something or other. Visions ran through Jo’s mind of the light, fragile electrical device being torn from her hands by the rushing air, spinning discus-like down the length of the train, and either disappearing off the side, or embedding itself into something very expensive.
“Please don’t drop your phone!” She pleaded. “There’s no way you’ll be able to get it back, and it might damage something.”
“I have no intention of dropping my phone, fear not. It isn’t even in my hands!” Replied Basil.
“I was talking to Moira.”
“I don’t plan to drop my phone either.” She confirmed.
“Of course, but it’s easy to lose your grip on things up here.”
“If you were addressing Moira then does that mean that I, in fact, can drop my phone?” Basil asked, apparently unwilling for any conversation to occur without his direct insertion into the middle of it. “It’s still not terribly appealing to me, but it’s nice to know what options one has available.”
“No phones are to be dropped. Not mine, not yours, not Moira’s, not anyone else’s.”
“Gotcha. Nobody’s phone is to be thrown along the roof of a moving train. Feels like that should be in the FAQ about the trip, to be honest.” Basil summarised, helpfully.
“What’s your position on phones that aren’t owned by anyone?” Moira enquired.
“Just as bad.”
“Noted. Thank you for clarifying, but we really will let you get back to work now. Wouldn’t want the brakes failing because we distracted you.”
“Sounds like you could get a really good panic out of that one though.” Basil chuckled, elbowing Moira jovially.
“Ha! You’re right there. What a lovely silver lining you’ve found!”
Despairing at the futility of it all, Jo returned to her work. With the partially detonated circuit board now repaired, she was able to unscrew it from the metallic casing and move it out of the way to continue her investigations. She rested it against the wall of the control box’s enclosure, and the wind wasted no time in snatching the board away, flying it kite-like using the long, suspiciously thin wires that connected it to the train’s main electrical ecosystem. Although frowned upon by the electrical engineering purists, who feared that old, weak solder joints were not designed to hold the load of a hundred mile per hour wind pulling against them, Jo quite liked how cheerful the makeshift kites made her workplace. The tell-tale sound of a shutter’s clicking behind her revealed that Moira felt the same way. It also gave evidence to her aggressive disregard for Jo’s warning about dropping her phone.
With more of the internals of the control unit exposed, Jo began to suspect that she’d identified the source of the original malfunction. The remnants of several dozen cable-ties spilled out onto the roof of the train, immediately being swept up by the wind and barraging Basil and Moira in a hail of tiny plastic debris, leaving behind an impenetrably dense morass of multi-coloured wiring. Woven and tangled like the roots of an electrically insulated mangrove, the cables and wires had formed more of a nest than a circuit. It was a fundamental truth of the universe that, within a matter of moments, any cables, when left unattended and unsecured, would be knotted together in the way that no human hands could ever replicate. A chasm of bubbling dread opened within Jo, and all of her hopes of a quick job poured into the fissure of awful reality and dreadful familiarity.
Upon her appointment to Heart Rush, Jo had inherited jurisdiction of the roof from an engineer known among the crew as ‘Negligent Alan’, for reasons which became obvious upon even casual and apathetic inspection of his work. While many others held beliefs such as ‘if a job is worth doing then it’s worth doing well’ or ‘if a job is worth doing then it’s worth doing badly’, Alan’s philosophy was more along the lines of ‘no job is worth doing, and even if it was worth doing, why should I bother?’. It was widely speculated, and generally accepted, that Negligent Alan had only remained an employee of CVC for so long because he held devastating blackmail materials against one of the directors. This assumption was only proved to be false when it came to light that Alan had never been employed by CVC in the first place, and therefore firing him was impossible. He was just a confused passenger who’d got his metaphorical wires as crossed as his literal ones, and now effectively worked for room and board alone. Although his work was poor enough to require two more employees to fix it, he was a convenient insurance scam because any harm he did could be classified as vandalism.
Under Negligent Alan’s reign of utter disinterest, the various control units and electrical junction boxes of Heart Rush had been amalgamated into Gordian monstrosities, formed from interlocking strands that were easier to replace entirely than try to tease apart. Of course, upon Jo’s appointment to roof duty, CVC had insisted that she pick them apart anyway, because they weren’t paying for replacement parts and her suffering was ‘a cornerstone of the Heart Rush experience’. Spending so many long days and nights on the roof, wrist deep in the warren of high current power lines, had given Jo an almost instinctual ability to trace wires and pull them apart, as well as several severe electrical burns. Seeing that she’d somehow been able to miss this control unit during her early days on Heart Rush had brought the memories of every spark and shock back to her. In a word, it was not a welcome development.
“Just rip it all out, I reckon.” Said a young lady behind her, making Jo jump enough to hit her own sternum with a spanner. “That looked painful. Wouldn’t do it again if I were you.”
“Who are you?” Asked Jo, rubbing at the newly forming bruise.
“I’m Tracy, a friend of Moira’s. She invited me up here on account of how windy it is.”
Jo frowned, finally working out what Moira had been doing with her phone.
“What a selling point.” She said flatly, rubbing at the impact mark.
“Yeah. Pretty great to feel fresh air.” Tracy agreed, looking around herself with her tongue jammed into her bottom lip, thoughtfully. “What’s this whole mess about then? Looks like someone hasn’t been managing their routings. It’ll make your life a whole lot easier if you do, you know?”
“I’m aware. This isn’t my handiwork.”
“It doesn’t matter who’s it is if you have to work with it.” Tracy advised. “Sometimes we all need to take a bit of ownership and just fix the problems in front of us.”
“Yeah, I get it. I’m going to fix it.” Jo snapped.
“Probably want to tear the whole lot out and start from scratch. My television remote was a lot like this inside until I opened it up. Improved the whole thing in a matter of minutes with nothing but a soldering iron. That’s what you get when you have sixth sense for these things like I do. I just get electricals, you know?”
The only thing that Jo was sure of knowing, in that moment, was that she’d love to ram Tracy’s soldering iron somewhere that would need a lot of improvements shortly afterwards.
“That’s very impressive, but I can’t rip this all out. I’m under instruction to detangle and re-tidy, besides which this is a very complex control system.” Jo replied, as diplomatically as she could. It was true, at least, that everything in the control box was unnecessarily complicated thanks to years of reckless optimisation. If mistakes were made or parts were damaged then the automatic scoreboard in the squash court might fail or, worse still, the brass-polish dispensers might turn onto emergency manual mode, reducing their throughput by a devastating 8%. Jo would not let herself be responsible for inflicting such terrible fates on the passengers below.
“Ah, so you’re really under the thumb of the suits up above then? It’s awful to see people stripped of their initiative and any independent thought like that. I’d hate it, myself, but I’ve always been a very influential and disruptive person. Been pushed out of many institutions for my radical ideas and refusal to kiss the ring of corporate overlords.”
Jo crossed her jaw and looked at Tracy. She couldn’t have been any older than twenty. The only institution she could have been kicked out of was school. Or maybe her local discount electrical goods store.
“Right.”
“Canape, madam?”
They both looked up to see a waiter holding a tray of tiny vegetable samosas. He was leaning steeply into the wind in order to keep his precious cargo steady, with the wind flapping furiously at his black suit jacket and previously neat hair.
“I’m afraid they might be a little cool from the breeze up here. I’ll speak to the maître d and see if anything can be done about it.”
“Great, thank you.” Tracy said, taking a samosa from the tray.
“And what are you doing up here?!” Jo demanded.
“Serving canapes. There are guests.” The waiter clarified, indicating towards Tracy, Moira, Basil, and a small crowd of other people who had formed around them. “The drinks are following closely behind me.”
“All of you go back inside!” Jo bellowed at them. “This area is off limits to all guests and staff members other than me!”
“Moira said you were letting her stand up here.”
“And Basil.”
“I’m not ‘letting’ them do anything. They just ignored me when I told them to go downstairs again. I’ve done my due diligence.”
“They’re all sheep, you won’t get through to them. Flocking to the roof like lambs to the slaughter.” Tracy tutted. Jo restrained herself from pushing her off the train, and considered that response to be sufficiently gracious that vocalising anything was unnecessary.
“I can’t get down while there are guests here. What if they become hungry or thirsty?” Lamented the waiter and, to be fair to him, he had the best excuse of anyone.
“Look, it’s dangerous up here. I’ve told you all, now. I advise you to go back inside while I finish this up.” Jo said, with enough finality to signal that she was going back to work but not enough to make anyone else obey her. It was the eternal struggle.
Over the course of the next hour Jo squatted, knelt, crouched, sat and stooped in front of the control unit, pulling the tangles apart one by one and poking various metal things with a multi-meter. There were a few near misses as the train lurched this way and that, with Jo almost trying to steady her falls by pulling on the pathetically thin wires. Years of practice had thankfully taught her to overcome those instincts, and instead slam her body hard onto the metal roof of the train. A pair of waiting staff were on hand each time to pick her back up, and one of them even snuck her a glass of aubergine juice. Since it was a rather unpopular choice among the guests, no-one really noticed that it was missing. The gesture, however, turned out to be far nicer than the experience.
By the time she was done with her cable tying and general tidying, the inside of the control box had been transformed. No longer did it resemble the kind of undergrowth of which an ancient jungle would be proud, but it was a neat, spacious paradise. This was starkly contrasted by the utter state of Heart Rush’s roof, which now acted as a kind of elevated, fenceless pen for the majority of the passengers aboard the vehicle. Adding to the existing perils of moving around the roof, namely the gale force air resistance, obstructions and falling debris, it was now nearly impossible find space to move. Accessing the hatch would require pressing herself through the dense crowd of people, who were huddling like absent-minded penguins.
“Oh my goodness me.” Jo muttered to herself, but she’d given up on trying to make anyone listen. If the serving staff and the tennis coaches were going to insist on staying up here, then there was very little she could do. Reluctantly, she was forced to admit to herself that it was quite impressive for anyone to serve a tennis ball hard enough to out-speed the train, and doubly so for no balls to have been lost so far. The courts inside were constantly surrounded by lost balls, but apparently the risk of real loss out here gave them the incentive they needed to take care.
With a shake of the head Jo tried to make herself focus on the task at hand. Although she’d made tidiness where only mess had lurked before, and despite the successes of replacing something she herself had broken, nothing she’d done would mend the automatic armrest smell dispenser in cabin sixteen. After so long working on it, it would be terribly embarrassing to admit to Theresa that no real progress had been made. Besides, she’d also be punished for wasting CVC time. Allowing paranoia to take over where rational thought had drawn nothing but blanks, Jo once again took out her tablet to check the work instruction. Perhaps she’d misread which cabin number needed attention, or maybe the whole thing had been a convincing and banal hallucination. The times in her life that Jo had wished to have serious sensory problems were scarce, but this one was a real giant of the genre.
In time with Heart Rush bouncing on the tracks, Jo’s heart skipped a beat when she saw two notifications awaiting her, both marked urgent. She swallowed, and got a faint reminder of the taste of aubergine juice when she did so.
The first message was a follow-up from Theresa, presumably containing no modest quantity of fury regarding the aromatic calamity still ongoing within the carriage. This gave it a very low score on Jo’s informal ranking system for the order in which to read her messages; those which would likely involve awkward work, a severe dressing-down, or a request to attend a social gathering all gained very few points, and those which could be answered with ease or completely ignored scored very highly indeed. Sufficiently low was the score of Theresa’s message that Jo scrolled down to the next one, and saw that it was from Commodore Rush himself, the highest ranking member of CVC aboard the train.
Jo swallowed again, and the taste of aubergine was no better this time. It seemed clear to her that the ranking system needed to include strongly negative scores for personal messages from corporate members of CVC staff, because she was now actively looking forward to Theresa’s telling off.
“Jo.” It started. “I don’t know what you’ve been up to on the roof all this time, but I have had another check in cabin sixteen, sniffing hard from the moment I walked in the door.” Jo raised one hand to her head and tried to push her fingers through her hair. The hood from her overall made it rather difficult.
“Is everything alright?” Basil asked her. His mingling through the crowd had led him back to the engineer, and given her state of apparent distress he felt it necessary to check in. “Are you sad because you’ve finished the rewiring? I’m sure there’ll be some more around here for you.” He speculated blindly.
“If anything I’m all too happy to have finished the wiring Basil. Sorry, but I need to read the rest of this.”
“No problem at all, I’ll be here when you’re ready.” He said, folding his hands in front of himself and smiling earnestly.
Jo sighed, and continued reading while Basil waited politely for her.
“At first, suffice to say, I was mortified that the scheduled aroma of molten wicker did not rush to greet me. What did I in fact smell, you may ask? It was helmet sparkle. Helmet sparkle! Can you imagine?” Jo could imagine, and it was horrifying. “To receive helmet sparkle, the smell of how a freshly polished helmet looks, but not the smell of helmet polish itself, at that time of day, was a shock. But it made me wonder if the problem was more localised. So I checked in the dispensing nozzle and would you believe it? Would you? I found a pencil jammed in there, blocking some of the scent ports and putting everything out of line. There was never a problem with the control unit, so you can come back inside for now.
With no apologies,
Theresa.”
An old mattress bounced off the side of the train, dropped from a bridge overhead.
“Huh.” Jo said.
“Was it about your shoes?” Asked Basil, gravely.
“No? What’s wrong with my shoes?” Jos asked, looking down at her CVC issue roof-walking boots. They were a little scuffed but that was to be expected with a job like hers.
“Nothing at all, I just wondered if someone else might have feelings about them.”
“Are we talking about Jo’s shoes? Because I have opinions!” Said the waiter who had given her aubergine juice, rushing over. “I think they’d be much better with laces going all the way under the sole, in case you need to take them off sole first.”
“Great, thanks for the input.” She said flatly. “But the message was nothing to do with shoes, least of all mine. It was about the repair I was sent up here to make not actually being required in the first place. But I’ve got another important one, hang on.”
“But I have thoughts to share as well.” Moira cried from beyond a group of milling retirees.
“Me too.”
“Does anyone else’s opinion focus on the heel? I feel like we could have a heel focus group before we give our feedback.”
Ignoring everyone else as best she could, which was normally a lot easier during roof duty, Jo opened the message from Commodore Rush.
“Engineer. I hear that you are responsible for luring the majority of our guests onto the roof. I scarcely need to tell you that if a low-flying group of geese pass over the tracks at the wrong moment, then we could stand to lose several of these people in one terrible, feathery tragedy, but I am not writing to lecture you on safety.” The commodore’s message opened, meandering its way around the point without ever having to make contact with it. “Nor am I writing to point out how dragging our serving staff outside the train could lead to losses of CVC assets including glasses, trays, miniature baguettes, or even lowly staff. I’m not even writing to tell you that performing repairs in front of the plebs could give away certain industrial secrets surrounding how we make the pottery carriage so calming.”
Jo looked up for a bit and stared at the sky. He’d done a great job of explaining in great detail the things he wasn’t writing to explain in any detail at all. It was a wonder anything got done under his command.
“I am, in fact, writing to congratulate you. Your efforts in tricking these people to pay for a carriage, and then having them stand on the roof instead, have given me the great idea for a new class of ticket, one which will revolutionise Heart Rush and push revenues ever higher. You, Jo, are the inspiration of our new Chaff Class! Get used to having company up there when you work, because our Chaff clientele will not be permitted indoors under any circumstances! I’m sure that a visionary like yourself will find a way of coping with the change.
Humbly,
Commodore Rush.
P.S. I assume you’ve been told already, but sort your shoes out.”
After completing her engineering training, Jo hadn’t really known what to expect from a life of keeping the RecreationMaster UltraTrains in working order. They were unlike any other rail vehicles in the world, intending to capitalise on the lucrative cruise ship business without having to worry about any of that potential sinking nonsense. It was very rare indeed for trains to capsize and sink, and whenever they did it could generally be laughed off as a humourous mishap instead of a terrestrial maritime disaster. As such, the business model basically sold itself to investors.
The UltraTrains themselves were, in the words of the RecreationMaster promotional materials, ‘testaments to humankind’s arrogance, and beacons of our ability to bend anything to our will for leisure’. As broad as a pedestrian high street and full of just as many financially unviable shops, the trains were precariously balanced upon the standard railway tracks that had already lain like metallic bindings over the countryside. Despite having the silhouette of a civic building riding a unicycle, and although their implementation into the rail system had necessitated the widening of several tunnels and train stations at enormous expense to the taxpayer, the UltraTrains proved to be an instant success. No sooner was one luxury land cruise completed than the next one was to start, and all maintenance was to be completed on the move to maximise both profits and danger to employees. That was where people like Jo came in.
Engineers aboard the UltraTrains could be assigned to any aspect of their upkeep, with each department offering vastly different experiences and threats. Those in the engine room had a high pressure, always-on task of monitoring the status of every aspect of the locomotive’s power source, whereas the under-seat heating specialists had a comparatively banal experience of ensuring rears were warm at all times. Although they gained an in-depth knowledge of how long-term buttock pressure could distort a heating element, and the characteristic signs of what they affectionately called ‘steel butts’, it lacked something in terms of interest and glamour compared to the more critical work.
What she’d been really dreading above all else, quite literally, was rooftop maintenance duty. For reasons that were best described as either ‘putting aesthetics ahead of practicality’ or ‘design choices being driven by those who were least qualified to make them’, much of the train’s electronics and many of its access panels were situated on the rooves of the various carriages. Well out of the way of passengers, this solution maximised the space not only for seats and cabins, but also for swimming pools, squash courts, shoe-shine stands and the eternally oversubscribed trumpet polishing classes. No matter how many dedicated trumpet polishing carriages they added to the UltraTrains it never seemed to sate the thirst of the brass enthusiasts.
What the solution did not maximise, however, was the safety or comfort of the poor souls who needed to perform hours of careful maintenance on the delicate and intricate machinery housed within those panels. All the prospective engineers received their training in the calm and quiet workshops of the RecreationMaster engineering campus, located in a glass dome underneath the English channel due to a mix-up in the planning permission. Although comprehensive, what every rooftop maintenance engineer found out the hard way was that soldering became far trickier when your hand was being perpetually assaulted by turbulent airflow. Couple to that the inherent danger of bird migration season, and the whole exercise was rendered rather difficult indeed.
In her application for work aboard the prestigious Heart Rush train, greatest of all the RecreationMaster UltraTrains owned and operated by the Capital Victimisers Corporation, Jo had made the mistake of specifying that she categorically did not wish to take rooftop maintenance duty. This transpired to be the best way of guaranteeing that she would see no other part of the train for as long as she was employed. It was only because the hiring officer had urgent lunch plans that day that they didn’t put through an application to have Jo’s sleeping quarters moved onto the outside of the train as well. While a few of her classmates who also managed to be accepted onto Heart Rush were able to luxuriate as waterslide testers, mostly by lying about a deathly fear of water on their own applications, Jo was sent ever upwards.
Far below her, down at ground level, steel wheels were rushing along metal rails. Fallen leaves, discarded pennies, and unwanted remote controls were crushed against the tracks, under the enormous weight of the train. The use of their vehicles as emergency waste disposal mechanisms was initially frowned upon by Capital Victimisers Corporation, due to fears of potential damage to the train. However, extensive testing revealed that while the wheels did suffer some degradation, people were willing to pay a lot of money to have their problems disappear, courtesy of the rail network. With their civic duty to become as rich as possible always at the forefront of their mind, CVC nobly allowed it to continue at a vast premium, while paying their engineers no extra danger money to repair and replace the wheels while the train was still in motion.
Jo didn’t need to worry about that drama. All she needed to do was duck the occasional low-hanging sign or branch, keep an eye out for migrating birds, and be careful not to swan-dive off the edge. Aside from an incident in her early days of employment, whereby she’d underestimated the momentum carried by a watermelon rind carelessly tossed from an overhead bridge, those pitfalls and perils were generally easy enough to avoid.
What had brought Jo up to the roof on this particular occasion was a matter of the most dire urgency: a failure of the automatic armrest fragrancing unit in cabin sixteen. As soon as Jo had seen the work order come through on her tablet, she'd grasped the cataclysmic importance of the task. No-one worth their salt could have failed to see it, really, but just in case the self-evident was not evident enough, a note had been attached. It read thus:
‘Jo,
Treat this work as highly urgent, priority negative 3.
I entered cabin sixteen nary a moment ago to initiate my routine wellness enforcement checks on all systems, as is my general preference for Wednesday afternoons. Imagine my horror when I performed a routine sniff test on the armrest, and received a noseful of meadow hyperventilation, rather than autumn sparrow's beak. Not believing my own senses I gave it another go, and then another, but still the appropriate fragrance of a small bird's pecking equipment was denied to me. I was forced to change it manually, using the hands on my arms like some kind of barbarian, leading me to conclude that the automation unit has failed. I needn't tell you that had I been a paying customer, I would have been apoplectic with rightful fury, and would quite possibly have fainted on the spot with shock and embarrassment at RecreationMaster. Resolve this immediately. I don't care whether you're sleeping, using the lavatory or currently clinically dead again, just get it done.
With love and kisses,
Theresa.’
Of course, it'd taken far longer for Jo to read the note than the time she would have spent dithering over the importance of the work order, but that was hardly the point.
Standing there, on the roof of the train as it barrelled along the tracks at maximum speed, she knew that it would all be worth it; all the risks, all the danger of death, all the frightening low branches and biting cold wind, when the work was done. Cabin sixteen’s armrests would have their aroma changed according to schedule again once she had carried out the necessary repairs, and the journey of any occupants would not be ruined. It was, at least, some small mercy that no-one was currently using cabin sixteen, nor was it booked for the next three days, but it was clear to her that no delay could be permitted.
A sign whipped overhead, with a deep whoosh that made her flinch downwards hard. Had she been in any actual danger the flinch would have been far too late to do her any good, but she’d not been able to stamp out the reflex yet. Jo was working hard to overcome the biological shortcuts that had ensured the species’ survival to date, but since CVC wouldn’t pay for the invasive, unnecessary and unproven surgery that might, or might not, have removed them, the progress was slow. In much the same way, her progress across the train’s roof was not expeditious. Constantly battling the pull of the wind, Jo struggled with deeply bent knees and very cold cheeks to drag herself forwards. Every few paces she was able to take partial cover behind some large, metal structure or other, or grab onto one for more purchase; these were welcome breaks from the otherwise complete exposure of her work environment. Even her thick, heavily waxed, CVC-issue overalls were barely able to protect her fragile, fleshy body from the ravages of nature.
“One… two… five…” Jo counted to herself, looking from one indistinct metal outcrop to another. Cabin sixteen’s control boxes were the second ones in, but it would be foolishness not to check all the automatic aroma controls for that carriage while she was up there. That kind of proactivity was what separated the truly great engineers from the perfunctory technicians.
Jo checked the safety cables which connected her tool belt to the railings along the train’s surface. It was mandated for all rooftop engineers to keep their safety cables affixed to both their belt and the rails at all times, but, rather tellingly, the wearing of a tool belt itself was completely optional. Loss of human life, said CVC, was tragic. The loss of company tools, on the other hand, was unforgivable.
Contented that she would not be posthumously accused of losing anything that the company might have to pay to replace, Jo continued her journey to the box under need of repairs. To either side of her, idyllic countryside rushed past as if it had somewhere else to be. She’d often wondered how these vast swathes of picturesque countryside were able to cope with their chronic immobility; if a corn field needed to visit its local GP, or a copse wanted to surprise a friendly cemetery at dinner one evening, they would be wholly unable. It always came with a pang of sympathy for them, one which she’d once tried to describe to a friend of hers. The friend had quickly accused her of spending too much time thinking about the hypothetical desires of farmland, and suggested that she directly ask the question of the next field she walked through.
In lieu of having done so, Jo was forced to keep speculating on how these patches of land coped with their sedentary lifestyles as she hiked her way towards the control box. Underfoot the metal grips kept her steady against the intense torrent of air, and she was grateful that no rain had fallen to make the surface slick and wet.
Apparently paranoid that just about anyone would be able to climb onto the roof and start performing routine maintenance on the control boxes, CVC had fitted each one of them with a cover panel that could only be removed with a proprietary CVC tool. For reasons best known to the CVC branding department, this tool was a screwdriver with a 'CVC' shaped protrusion on the end. While the shape was indeed very hard to replicate, and thus very secure, the delicate lettering was also incredibly fragile. Early attempts to use it had generally resulted in the letters shearing off completely, leaving the engineers with an expensive but useless stick. Unfortunately, all of the panels had been made by then, so they had to go with it and hope for the best. ‘Hope for the best’ was an internal term used by CVC to mean 'blame the engineers if they break things'; consequently, there was an awful lot of hope at CVC.
With an anxious care that had been learned most effectively when reading the policy on punishments for breaking CVC tooling, Jo unscrewed the seven fixing points on the control box, allowing the front panel to swing open. Behind its rain-damaged exterior was revealed the multitude of coloured wires, resin cased components and serialised circuit boards that automated the majority of cabin sixteen.
Although sheltered from the yanking of the air through which the train cut on its high-velocity, relaxing pleasure cruise, there was still a major force with which to contend when it came to maintaining a steady hand, namely the regular, clockwork juddering of the whole carriage as it chugged along the tracks. Within the carriage there were dampeners that shielded the travellers from this turbulent disruption, but out there, on the chassis itself, Jo was subject to all the whims and juggling that the railway had to offer. It was like a heartbeat to an experienced engineer like her, not a distracting rhythm of jostled tooling but a reassuring timepiece that helped her stay synchronised to whatever mysterious rhythms ran through the UltraTrain. She could almost tell where the train was on its route by the vibration of the tracks, but that hypothesis was difficult to test since, from the roof, she always commanded a fairly reliable view of the locale. Few and far between were the times she stood up there with closed eyes, and even on those occasions, the audio billboards which screamed their location as the train rumbled by gave away the location game.
With an expert eye and a keen amateur nose Jo examined the circuitry she'd exposed, searching for any clue as to what might have gone wrong. In her mind she ran over the schematics and diagrams for these elements of the train’s key guest comforters, picturing in vivid detail the intended layout of components. It bore no resemblance to the harrowing reality of what butchery had been committed with soldering iron and apathy in days gone by. Where clean and smooth green boards should have stood untainted, like a verdant lawn between the grand structures of capacitors, she instead saw trails of silver. It was as if molten snails had been slithering this way and that across the surface, with drips and tracks of solder bleeding outwards, threatening to join one piece to another in unholy electrically shorted matrimony.
"My goodness me. This won't do at all." She tutted to herself, even though she was the most blameless in the situation. One hand, half of the pair she had at her disposal, reached down to her belt and grabbed a de-soldering tool. Whatever the problem was with this control box, it would be easier to solve when everything had been tidied up.
As was so often the case with routine maintenance, Jo entered a kind of remedial fugue state. The rushing countryside and cacophonous rail noises faded into nothingness as she worked diligently on the delicate electronics. After a few minutes of efficient tinkering, something started to nag at the back of her mind. It wasn't a big something, for instance the train being ablaze, but nor was it absolutely nothing, like a passing train that wasn't under her care being ablaze. Somewhere in the middle of those two extremes, the poles of how much Jo really had to care about what was happening, one of her senses was trying to make her pay attention to something. It wasn't sight; everything that she could see was the work in which she'd engaged herself. It wasn't taste because it had been weeks since she'd licked the train’s roof. It was, she finally decided, her hearing that tried to grab her notice. It was an additional clang, a thud or bang that held its own consistent periodic beat but didn't belong in the cadence of the train on its tracks.
Deigning to give this clanging sound the honour of peripheral attention, while still focusing the majority of her concentration on the job at hand, Jo tried to account for what this new sound could be. It didn't much sound like a tree scraping the side of the carriage and bouncing along the windows, plus it seemed to be travelling along with her. Whilst a flapping panel might have made such a racket, she had seen the flaps up close on the way to where she was, and she would definitely have heard the noise before now. Her brain kept ticking. As it continued she realised that the sound was familiar. Very familiar, in fact, but alien to what she was doing, or perhaps just to where she was doing it.
There was a click. Not the metaphorical sort that accompanies a revelation but a real, audible one from the circuitry at her fingertips; something had sparked, arced or otherwise embarked on an electrical journey to places where it had no real business, and consequently a small trail of capacitor smoke was rising from the scene of the crime. By sheer coincidence this coincided, tautologically, with the understanding of what the other unidentified clanging sound really was; footsteps climbing an access ladder from the interior of the carriage up to the roof. She span around just in time to see a man’s smiling head pop up from the hatch.
“Get back inside!” Jo told him, waving her hand in a generally downward fashion just in case he was more open to mime than verbal instructions.
“I will in a minute.” He assured her unconvincingly, whilst continuing to climb and dismount the ladder.
“Wow, it sure is windy out here!” Laughed the man, clothes nearly being torn from his body by the air. “It’s no wonder there are all those ‘Access Forbidden’ signs on the doors.”
“What are you doing up here? It’s dangerous, please leave.”
"Oh it’ll be fine, I'm just exploring a bit! I was seeing what's around, finding what activities and things there are, you know, and I just wandered up here." Came the cheery reply.
"Just wandered up? The ladder is behind a locked door." Jo said, seriously questioning whether she’d remembered to lock it behind her when she’d climbed up to the roof.
"It was simple to pick that.” Dismissed the man. “That's one of our forms of entertainment, right? Just like that heavy chain I broke with my bolt cutters to release the ladder."
"I definitely didn't leave any bolt cutters behind... I don't even have...” Jo muttered to herself. “Did you bring your own with you?"
"Never leave home without them." He beamed. “Left them at the bottom of the ladder so that I’d have both hands for climbing though, so you can see that I’m being perfectly conscientious about my own safety and you needn’t worry.”
Jo stared at him in disbelief for a moment, and then shrugged. She’d done her duty of care and shown diligence enough to advise the man of the perils of the rooftop. The rest was up to him. "So what are you up to up here? Fixing something important?"
"Just routine maintenance. Nothing to worry about."
"Seems worth enough worry to climb onto the roof of a moving train." He observed.
"The comfort and enjoyment of our passengers is the number one priority here aboard the RecreationMaster. We work to keep everything on the rails." Recited Jo. Her delivery lacked the empty warmth and false sincerity of the adverts, but in fairness it was harder to let those shine through when shouting the words over the rushing of air.
"I see. Well, thank you very much then!" The man shouted back happily. Jo nodded and turned back to her circuit board. No-one had thanked her for her work in a long while, and it took her a moment to reconcile how it felt. It was sort of like putting on an old jumper and not really knowing whether it had been laundered or not, but eventually she determined that it was still comfortable enough regardless.
Accepting that the passenger would be on the roof for as long as he pleased, Jo started to dutifully fetch some spare components from her belt and repair what had just exploded. Frustrating as it was, there wasn't much sense in trying to find the old fault before fixing the one she'd just caused. Over the course of many years as an engineer on these trains, she had learned to factor in time to break and repair at least three other parts of what she was maintaining, just to be on the safe side.
Behind her, she was acutely aware of her rooftop guest pottering around and investigating thing, including the various junction boxes and control mechanisms that littered the train.
"Door lubricant dispenser temperature control." He read aloud. "Seems useful enough. I know that I wouldn't want over-chilled lubricant on my doors at home, let alone on a relaxing train holiday."
Jo continued soldering. There was no contradicting such a reasonable statement.
"Adjustment of track dampening... so we can have a very smooth ride indeed or a very bumpy one? I might request that things get a bit shakier in the 'house of cards construction carriage', just to make things a little more interesting." He said towards Jo, hopefully. She offered no reaction.
"What does this one do?" He then asked directly. She sighed.
"Sir, it would be best if you returned to the carriage interior. It really isn't safe for passengers to be up here and the wind looks like it might be on the cusp of tearing your eyebrows off."
The man, looking surprised by virtue of the wind's effect on the eyebrows under discussion, but not necessarily feeling that way, pondered the insinuation.
"Well... I don't suppose I need them much anyway. It's nice to get some fresh air, you know? Those artificial scents getting pumped out are nice, don't get me wrong, but they're intense. Very intense."
Jo nodded. Part of her considered turning the cabin sixteen scent intensity, scentensity as CVC labelled it, down a little bit to accommodate the man’s concerns. However, that would have been a breach of the company policy on minimum acceptable scentensity levels. Whether they knew it or not, the passengers needed the fake aromas to be that strong, so that they wouldn’t pine for home or try to use their own air fresheners.
"Tunnel ahead." Declared a sign which was rapidly charging towards Jo. It was worth another punt to get the man to leave her alone.
"Sir, we're about to go into a tunnel. It would really be for the best if you head back inside; headroom will be limited, it'll be dark and it'll be very noisy. I don't think you'll like it very much."
"Limited headroom? All that means is that there's something between me and the sky." He replied.
"There might well be something between your shoulders and your nose if it's a low one."
The man laughed jovially.
"That's just my neck and my mouth. No need to fret about those. I'd say they've never done me any harm but it'd be quite the fib." He chuckled.
Jo sighed and lamented the good nature of idiots as the promised tunnel rushed to greet them, like a toddler barrelling towards a parent. With a howling "thwoom" of non-consensually displaced air, Heart Rush rattled into the hillside in the only way that didn't warrant a national news report. Hungrily, the hillside’s gaping maw engulfed them. Darkness consumed everything that their vision had been merrily observing, and the throat of the hill roared with echoing track noise and the blaring of engines. If the passenger had been making any conversation at Jo, benign, malign or otherwise aligned, it was lost in the rushing and crashing noises of the tunnel. All that the engineer heard in her head was the practiced countdown until she could see her work again, but she turned instead to face the roving passenger. With any luck he would have been pushed below deck and she could stop worrying about a salary penalty for damage to CVC guests. The moment of blindness becoming vision and the return of relative quiet, or at least the calming of a cacophony, would arrive in five, four, three, two, one...
The man was still there, and now there was a woman standing with him.
"You're right! It really is windy!" She laughed.
"What?!"
"It was dark inside so I thought I'd pop out for some fresh light." She beamed. “And it was dark out here too, to begin with… but now it’s light! And windy!”
“Very windy. Old hands at being on the roof like me and this engineer here know that all too well.” Explained the man, much to the continued delight of his new friend. “Apparently these boxes all control important things that we don’t need to worry about. I’m Basil, by the way.”
“Moira. Lovely to make your acquaintance.”
“Basil is quite right, they’re important and they’re all delicate so please be careful and take yourselves back indoors.”
“We won’t touch anything we’re not supposed to. Will we?” Moira asked Basil. It sounded less like a request for agreement and more like a genuine question than Jo really liked. The firm grip that Moira currently had on cabin fourteen’s curtain regulator did nothing to help matters.
“We won’t.” Basil confirmed. The regulator was released.
Jo looked wearily at them both, then shook her head and returned to her circuitry. Nothing could be done without risking a complaint, and Jo had no intention of donating the regulation pint of blood as penance for poor customer service. A small amount of easy soldering, rendered tricky by a moving vehicle, restored the functionality that she herself had removed by detonation of a component, and she resumed her troubleshooting.
“What did you say the nice lady was up to, Basil? It looks interesting.”
“It does, doesn’t it? I’ve been assured that while it’s nothing of which I need the details, it is nevertheless something of the utmost importance.” He relayed, with a tone that was just ambiguous enough that Jo couldn’t chastise him for sarcasm.
"Important enough that we should have a panic, do you think?" She asked earnestly but calmly. "I'm always ready to have a panic should the need arise, of course, but I wouldn’t like to do so unnecessarily. Feels like an awful waste of time and effort when I could instead be having a lovely relaxing ride on the train."
"Or its roof." Added Basil.
"Or its roof." She agreed with a smile. "So, miss? Do you think we need to have a bit of a panic about what you're up to?"
"No!” Jo cried, turning around with incredulity carved on her face. Or it might just have been the effect of strong winds on a weak face for sustained periods. “No of course not. When would panic ever be helpful?"
"For attracting attention, for getting the heart rate up, for simply feeling alive... the list goes on. A lot of people talk panic down but I'm a real champion for it under the right circumstances. If I hadn't panicked about that beetle I saw across the road the other day then I'd never have made that nearby bus conductor stoop to pick it up, and then he'd never have put his back out." She explained, gravely. "Can you imagine going to work with your back almost out? The notion doesn't even bear consideration, and my panic saved him from that."
"It feels like an assumption or two has been made there regarding the likelihood of a bus conductor injuring their back at work." Jo assessed.
"A very good assumption." Praised Basil, labouring under the belief that he was agreeing with both Jo and Moira.
"Thank you."
"No, that's... you know what? Sure, why not."
"Why not panic?" Moira asked, lifting her arms out to the side and squatting a little in preparation to have a great flap.
"No, why not… nevermind what I’m why notting. The point is that there's no reason to panic."
"You're sure? It's no trouble to me." Moira assured. She had the look of someone with all too much practice at forging mountains from the endeavours of moles.
"I'm very sure."
"Well, you know best. It's your train after all. But if the circumstances happen to change then you will let me know, won't you?"
"You'll be the first to know." Jo lied.
"Great, thank you. We'd best let you get back to what you're doing, I suppose" She laughed. A flash of hope burst like a firework in Jo’s chest at the notion of the two passengers getting back into the safety of the train’s interior, but then, much like the same colourful explosions, it turned into nothing but a rain of embers. Far from leaving the roof, Moira had instead taken her phone out and was idly tapping away at something or other. Visions ran through Jo’s mind of the light, fragile electrical device being torn from her hands by the rushing air, spinning discus-like down the length of the train, and either disappearing off the side, or embedding itself into something very expensive.
“Please don’t drop your phone!” She pleaded. “There’s no way you’ll be able to get it back, and it might damage something.”
“I have no intention of dropping my phone, fear not. It isn’t even in my hands!” Replied Basil.
“I was talking to Moira.”
“I don’t plan to drop my phone either.” She confirmed.
“Of course, but it’s easy to lose your grip on things up here.”
“If you were addressing Moira then does that mean that I, in fact, can drop my phone?” Basil asked, apparently unwilling for any conversation to occur without his direct insertion into the middle of it. “It’s still not terribly appealing to me, but it’s nice to know what options one has available.”
“No phones are to be dropped. Not mine, not yours, not Moira’s, not anyone else’s.”
“Gotcha. Nobody’s phone is to be thrown along the roof of a moving train. Feels like that should be in the FAQ about the trip, to be honest.” Basil summarised, helpfully.
“What’s your position on phones that aren’t owned by anyone?” Moira enquired.
“Just as bad.”
“Noted. Thank you for clarifying, but we really will let you get back to work now. Wouldn’t want the brakes failing because we distracted you.”
“Sounds like you could get a really good panic out of that one though.” Basil chuckled, elbowing Moira jovially.
“Ha! You’re right there. What a lovely silver lining you’ve found!”
Despairing at the futility of it all, Jo returned to her work. With the partially detonated circuit board now repaired, she was able to unscrew it from the metallic casing and move it out of the way to continue her investigations. She rested it against the wall of the control box’s enclosure, and the wind wasted no time in snatching the board away, flying it kite-like using the long, suspiciously thin wires that connected it to the train’s main electrical ecosystem. Although frowned upon by the electrical engineering purists, who feared that old, weak solder joints were not designed to hold the load of a hundred mile per hour wind pulling against them, Jo quite liked how cheerful the makeshift kites made her workplace. The tell-tale sound of a shutter’s clicking behind her revealed that Moira felt the same way. It also gave evidence to her aggressive disregard for Jo’s warning about dropping her phone.
With more of the internals of the control unit exposed, Jo began to suspect that she’d identified the source of the original malfunction. The remnants of several dozen cable-ties spilled out onto the roof of the train, immediately being swept up by the wind and barraging Basil and Moira in a hail of tiny plastic debris, leaving behind an impenetrably dense morass of multi-coloured wiring. Woven and tangled like the roots of an electrically insulated mangrove, the cables and wires had formed more of a nest than a circuit. It was a fundamental truth of the universe that, within a matter of moments, any cables, when left unattended and unsecured, would be knotted together in the way that no human hands could ever replicate. A chasm of bubbling dread opened within Jo, and all of her hopes of a quick job poured into the fissure of awful reality and dreadful familiarity.
Upon her appointment to Heart Rush, Jo had inherited jurisdiction of the roof from an engineer known among the crew as ‘Negligent Alan’, for reasons which became obvious upon even casual and apathetic inspection of his work. While many others held beliefs such as ‘if a job is worth doing then it’s worth doing well’ or ‘if a job is worth doing then it’s worth doing badly’, Alan’s philosophy was more along the lines of ‘no job is worth doing, and even if it was worth doing, why should I bother?’. It was widely speculated, and generally accepted, that Negligent Alan had only remained an employee of CVC for so long because he held devastating blackmail materials against one of the directors. This assumption was only proved to be false when it came to light that Alan had never been employed by CVC in the first place, and therefore firing him was impossible. He was just a confused passenger who’d got his metaphorical wires as crossed as his literal ones, and now effectively worked for room and board alone. Although his work was poor enough to require two more employees to fix it, he was a convenient insurance scam because any harm he did could be classified as vandalism.
Under Negligent Alan’s reign of utter disinterest, the various control units and electrical junction boxes of Heart Rush had been amalgamated into Gordian monstrosities, formed from interlocking strands that were easier to replace entirely than try to tease apart. Of course, upon Jo’s appointment to roof duty, CVC had insisted that she pick them apart anyway, because they weren’t paying for replacement parts and her suffering was ‘a cornerstone of the Heart Rush experience’. Spending so many long days and nights on the roof, wrist deep in the warren of high current power lines, had given Jo an almost instinctual ability to trace wires and pull them apart, as well as several severe electrical burns. Seeing that she’d somehow been able to miss this control unit during her early days on Heart Rush had brought the memories of every spark and shock back to her. In a word, it was not a welcome development.
“Just rip it all out, I reckon.” Said a young lady behind her, making Jo jump enough to hit her own sternum with a spanner. “That looked painful. Wouldn’t do it again if I were you.”
“Who are you?” Asked Jo, rubbing at the newly forming bruise.
“I’m Tracy, a friend of Moira’s. She invited me up here on account of how windy it is.”
Jo frowned, finally working out what Moira had been doing with her phone.
“What a selling point.” She said flatly, rubbing at the impact mark.
“Yeah. Pretty great to feel fresh air.” Tracy agreed, looking around herself with her tongue jammed into her bottom lip, thoughtfully. “What’s this whole mess about then? Looks like someone hasn’t been managing their routings. It’ll make your life a whole lot easier if you do, you know?”
“I’m aware. This isn’t my handiwork.”
“It doesn’t matter who’s it is if you have to work with it.” Tracy advised. “Sometimes we all need to take a bit of ownership and just fix the problems in front of us.”
“Yeah, I get it. I’m going to fix it.” Jo snapped.
“Probably want to tear the whole lot out and start from scratch. My television remote was a lot like this inside until I opened it up. Improved the whole thing in a matter of minutes with nothing but a soldering iron. That’s what you get when you have sixth sense for these things like I do. I just get electricals, you know?”
The only thing that Jo was sure of knowing, in that moment, was that she’d love to ram Tracy’s soldering iron somewhere that would need a lot of improvements shortly afterwards.
“That’s very impressive, but I can’t rip this all out. I’m under instruction to detangle and re-tidy, besides which this is a very complex control system.” Jo replied, as diplomatically as she could. It was true, at least, that everything in the control box was unnecessarily complicated thanks to years of reckless optimisation. If mistakes were made or parts were damaged then the automatic scoreboard in the squash court might fail or, worse still, the brass-polish dispensers might turn onto emergency manual mode, reducing their throughput by a devastating 8%. Jo would not let herself be responsible for inflicting such terrible fates on the passengers below.
“Ah, so you’re really under the thumb of the suits up above then? It’s awful to see people stripped of their initiative and any independent thought like that. I’d hate it, myself, but I’ve always been a very influential and disruptive person. Been pushed out of many institutions for my radical ideas and refusal to kiss the ring of corporate overlords.”
Jo crossed her jaw and looked at Tracy. She couldn’t have been any older than twenty. The only institution she could have been kicked out of was school. Or maybe her local discount electrical goods store.
“Right.”
“Canape, madam?”
They both looked up to see a waiter holding a tray of tiny vegetable samosas. He was leaning steeply into the wind in order to keep his precious cargo steady, with the wind flapping furiously at his black suit jacket and previously neat hair.
“I’m afraid they might be a little cool from the breeze up here. I’ll speak to the maître d and see if anything can be done about it.”
“Great, thank you.” Tracy said, taking a samosa from the tray.
“And what are you doing up here?!” Jo demanded.
“Serving canapes. There are guests.” The waiter clarified, indicating towards Tracy, Moira, Basil, and a small crowd of other people who had formed around them. “The drinks are following closely behind me.”
“All of you go back inside!” Jo bellowed at them. “This area is off limits to all guests and staff members other than me!”
“Moira said you were letting her stand up here.”
“And Basil.”
“I’m not ‘letting’ them do anything. They just ignored me when I told them to go downstairs again. I’ve done my due diligence.”
“They’re all sheep, you won’t get through to them. Flocking to the roof like lambs to the slaughter.” Tracy tutted. Jo restrained herself from pushing her off the train, and considered that response to be sufficiently gracious that vocalising anything was unnecessary.
“I can’t get down while there are guests here. What if they become hungry or thirsty?” Lamented the waiter and, to be fair to him, he had the best excuse of anyone.
“Look, it’s dangerous up here. I’ve told you all, now. I advise you to go back inside while I finish this up.” Jo said, with enough finality to signal that she was going back to work but not enough to make anyone else obey her. It was the eternal struggle.
Over the course of the next hour Jo squatted, knelt, crouched, sat and stooped in front of the control unit, pulling the tangles apart one by one and poking various metal things with a multi-meter. There were a few near misses as the train lurched this way and that, with Jo almost trying to steady her falls by pulling on the pathetically thin wires. Years of practice had thankfully taught her to overcome those instincts, and instead slam her body hard onto the metal roof of the train. A pair of waiting staff were on hand each time to pick her back up, and one of them even snuck her a glass of aubergine juice. Since it was a rather unpopular choice among the guests, no-one really noticed that it was missing. The gesture, however, turned out to be far nicer than the experience.
By the time she was done with her cable tying and general tidying, the inside of the control box had been transformed. No longer did it resemble the kind of undergrowth of which an ancient jungle would be proud, but it was a neat, spacious paradise. This was starkly contrasted by the utter state of Heart Rush’s roof, which now acted as a kind of elevated, fenceless pen for the majority of the passengers aboard the vehicle. Adding to the existing perils of moving around the roof, namely the gale force air resistance, obstructions and falling debris, it was now nearly impossible find space to move. Accessing the hatch would require pressing herself through the dense crowd of people, who were huddling like absent-minded penguins.
“Oh my goodness me.” Jo muttered to herself, but she’d given up on trying to make anyone listen. If the serving staff and the tennis coaches were going to insist on staying up here, then there was very little she could do. Reluctantly, she was forced to admit to herself that it was quite impressive for anyone to serve a tennis ball hard enough to out-speed the train, and doubly so for no balls to have been lost so far. The courts inside were constantly surrounded by lost balls, but apparently the risk of real loss out here gave them the incentive they needed to take care.
With a shake of the head Jo tried to make herself focus on the task at hand. Although she’d made tidiness where only mess had lurked before, and despite the successes of replacing something she herself had broken, nothing she’d done would mend the automatic armrest smell dispenser in cabin sixteen. After so long working on it, it would be terribly embarrassing to admit to Theresa that no real progress had been made. Besides, she’d also be punished for wasting CVC time. Allowing paranoia to take over where rational thought had drawn nothing but blanks, Jo once again took out her tablet to check the work instruction. Perhaps she’d misread which cabin number needed attention, or maybe the whole thing had been a convincing and banal hallucination. The times in her life that Jo had wished to have serious sensory problems were scarce, but this one was a real giant of the genre.
In time with Heart Rush bouncing on the tracks, Jo’s heart skipped a beat when she saw two notifications awaiting her, both marked urgent. She swallowed, and got a faint reminder of the taste of aubergine juice when she did so.
The first message was a follow-up from Theresa, presumably containing no modest quantity of fury regarding the aromatic calamity still ongoing within the carriage. This gave it a very low score on Jo’s informal ranking system for the order in which to read her messages; those which would likely involve awkward work, a severe dressing-down, or a request to attend a social gathering all gained very few points, and those which could be answered with ease or completely ignored scored very highly indeed. Sufficiently low was the score of Theresa’s message that Jo scrolled down to the next one, and saw that it was from Commodore Rush himself, the highest ranking member of CVC aboard the train.
Jo swallowed again, and the taste of aubergine was no better this time. It seemed clear to her that the ranking system needed to include strongly negative scores for personal messages from corporate members of CVC staff, because she was now actively looking forward to Theresa’s telling off.
“Jo.” It started. “I don’t know what you’ve been up to on the roof all this time, but I have had another check in cabin sixteen, sniffing hard from the moment I walked in the door.” Jo raised one hand to her head and tried to push her fingers through her hair. The hood from her overall made it rather difficult.
“Is everything alright?” Basil asked her. His mingling through the crowd had led him back to the engineer, and given her state of apparent distress he felt it necessary to check in. “Are you sad because you’ve finished the rewiring? I’m sure there’ll be some more around here for you.” He speculated blindly.
“If anything I’m all too happy to have finished the wiring Basil. Sorry, but I need to read the rest of this.”
“No problem at all, I’ll be here when you’re ready.” He said, folding his hands in front of himself and smiling earnestly.
Jo sighed, and continued reading while Basil waited politely for her.
“At first, suffice to say, I was mortified that the scheduled aroma of molten wicker did not rush to greet me. What did I in fact smell, you may ask? It was helmet sparkle. Helmet sparkle! Can you imagine?” Jo could imagine, and it was horrifying. “To receive helmet sparkle, the smell of how a freshly polished helmet looks, but not the smell of helmet polish itself, at that time of day, was a shock. But it made me wonder if the problem was more localised. So I checked in the dispensing nozzle and would you believe it? Would you? I found a pencil jammed in there, blocking some of the scent ports and putting everything out of line. There was never a problem with the control unit, so you can come back inside for now.
With no apologies,
Theresa.”
An old mattress bounced off the side of the train, dropped from a bridge overhead.
“Huh.” Jo said.
“Was it about your shoes?” Asked Basil, gravely.
“No? What’s wrong with my shoes?” Jos asked, looking down at her CVC issue roof-walking boots. They were a little scuffed but that was to be expected with a job like hers.
“Nothing at all, I just wondered if someone else might have feelings about them.”
“Are we talking about Jo’s shoes? Because I have opinions!” Said the waiter who had given her aubergine juice, rushing over. “I think they’d be much better with laces going all the way under the sole, in case you need to take them off sole first.”
“Great, thanks for the input.” She said flatly. “But the message was nothing to do with shoes, least of all mine. It was about the repair I was sent up here to make not actually being required in the first place. But I’ve got another important one, hang on.”
“But I have thoughts to share as well.” Moira cried from beyond a group of milling retirees.
“Me too.”
“Does anyone else’s opinion focus on the heel? I feel like we could have a heel focus group before we give our feedback.”
Ignoring everyone else as best she could, which was normally a lot easier during roof duty, Jo opened the message from Commodore Rush.
“Engineer. I hear that you are responsible for luring the majority of our guests onto the roof. I scarcely need to tell you that if a low-flying group of geese pass over the tracks at the wrong moment, then we could stand to lose several of these people in one terrible, feathery tragedy, but I am not writing to lecture you on safety.” The commodore’s message opened, meandering its way around the point without ever having to make contact with it. “Nor am I writing to point out how dragging our serving staff outside the train could lead to losses of CVC assets including glasses, trays, miniature baguettes, or even lowly staff. I’m not even writing to tell you that performing repairs in front of the plebs could give away certain industrial secrets surrounding how we make the pottery carriage so calming.”
Jo looked up for a bit and stared at the sky. He’d done a great job of explaining in great detail the things he wasn’t writing to explain in any detail at all. It was a wonder anything got done under his command.
“I am, in fact, writing to congratulate you. Your efforts in tricking these people to pay for a carriage, and then having them stand on the roof instead, have given me the great idea for a new class of ticket, one which will revolutionise Heart Rush and push revenues ever higher. You, Jo, are the inspiration of our new Chaff Class! Get used to having company up there when you work, because our Chaff clientele will not be permitted indoors under any circumstances! I’m sure that a visionary like yourself will find a way of coping with the change.
Humbly,
Commodore Rush.
P.S. I assume you’ve been told already, but sort your shoes out.”