At ten past five on the third of October the TileTap pod at outlet 0611 was blinking green, the way it had blinked green all night, and its intake hose was lying in the middle of the splash pool exactly where the install crew had dropped it on the twenty-second of September.
Janelle had the headlamp on with new batteries and the spare set in her shirt pocket, because she had once spent a storm sampling by the light of her phone and her phone had told her, at the worst moment, that it was at five percent and would she like to enable a mode. One point three inches overnight, most of it between two and four. The pipe was running a full rope. It came out of the bank in a black corrugated mouth, fell eighteen inches, hit riprap, and churned white in a basin the size of a bathtub. Foam on top like a root beer float. The pod's pump wheezed somewhere above her on its T-post, topping off bottle nine. It had fired at 2:41. It didn't need her.
She photographed the hose. Close, with the date card propped on a rock in the frame. Wide. And one from the top of the bank that got the pipe and the pool and the hose and the pod all in a single picture, so that nobody, later, in a meeting, with a laser pointer, could say she'd cropped it.
She did not touch the hose.
Bottle one from the pipe. She held it up into the rope until the water came over her knuckles and ran down inside her sleeve to the elbow, cold enough to make her teeth do something, and capped it from the side, brim-full, and turned it over under the lamp. No bubble. Bottle two, the same. Then the meter out of the cut-down thermos she wore on her belt. Pipe first. Rinse. Forty seconds.
7.56, at 14.8 degrees.
Then the pool, a foot from the pod's intake, the same meter, the same rinse, the same forty seconds she counted out loud because counting in her head she always cheated.
7.84.
The pod had a little screen on its belly. She crouched on the wet rock and tilted her head under it like she was reading the bottom of a car.
7.87.
She wrote all three on the sheet in a row on her knee and drew a box around them with the pencil, hard enough to dent the paper. She wanted the three numbers to stay together wherever the sheet went. Separated, any one of them could be made to say something. In a box they could only say what they said, which was that the water coming out of Gary's tile and the water in the hole under it were the same water and did not have the same pH, and that the instrument the miner had bolted onto the outlet was measuring the hole.
She drove to Hartsburg because she always drove to Hartsburg. Forty minutes the wrong way, Ostendorf's field, no ash on it ever. Duplicates, 7.55. Then she kept driving north, because the Schierer eighty above Mackinaw had never been spread and never been sampled, and in April somebody was going to spread on everything around it. She had spent five months wishing that somebody, anybody, in 2046, had put one bottle under 0611 before the first truck of mill ash came down that road. Nobody had. Nobody ever bottles the before. The before is free and boring and has no tile.
The Schierer outlet was a twelve-inch pipe into Little Mackinaw Creek with a cottonwood leaning over it like it wanted to see. Not a rope, a strong string. Two bottles. 7.61. She labeled them SCHIERER 10/3/48 PRE-APPLICATION and wrote on the sheet, under the label, BEFORE ANYBODY DID ANYTHING.
Then she looked at that for a while in the headlamp and crossed it out, because it was a feeling, and the sheet was not for feelings. She wrote PRE-APP, NO HISTORY OF AMENDMENT PER OWNER.
Loretta's kitchen light was on up the lane. Troy's truck wasn't there. She didn't stop. It was seven in the morning and she smelled like a ditch, and an eighty-four-year-old woman who had signed a no-spread form for nothing did not need to be repaid with that.
Card seven, line 46. Four and a half hours. One hundred thirty-one miles. Black pen.
Dale Kowalczyk ran the bottles on Monday and gave her the numbers Tuesday at the PIA dock in Peoria, sitting on an upturned five-gallon bucket with her sheet on his knee, eating sunflower seeds and spitting the shells into a coffee can. He said it was cheaper than quitting anything.
"Zero six eleven, two eighty-eight," he said. "Hartsburg, three fourteen. Your Hartsburg baseflow from the first, three nineteen. Schierer, two ninety-seven, nitrate nine."
"Schierer's under 0611."
"Schierer's under 0611 by nine, with no ash on it ever. And Hartsburg's over it by twenty-six, with no ash on it ever." He spat a shell. It rang off the can. "So the county's got a range of about thirty, and your ash field sits in the middle of it. That's three storms. I'll say that one in writing."
She showed him the box.
He looked at the box a lot longer than he'd looked at his own numbers. He held the sheet out at arm's length, then close, like a man checking a bill.
"You know what that is."
"Degassing."
"Tile water comes out of the ground loaded with CO2. Soil air's thirty, fifty times the sky. You drop it eighteen inches into a pool and whip it white, it lets go of the gas, and the pH goes up, because there's less carbonic acid in it." He tapped the 7.87 with a seed. "Alkalinity doesn't move. Same bicarbonate. Same water. The pH is just telling you how hard it's breathing out."
"So their bump is."
"Their bump is CO2 leaving the water and going back up into the air. On a carbon tile." He thought about that with real pleasure. "That pool's the only place in the whole system you can actually watch carbon go back where it came from, and they've got a green line on it."
"I don't want to be mean about it."
"Course you don't. You want it in the right column." He took her pencil and wrote along the bottom of the sheet in his block capitals, POOL pH ELEVATED BY CO2 LOSS, ALK UNAFFECTED, and signed it D. KOWALCZYK and initialed it as if it might be stolen. "That's from the lab, not from you. People argue less with the lab. They think we don't have opinions."
She asked what she owed him for the Schierer bottles, since they weren't on anybody's plan and his bench time was.
"A third storm," Dale said. "And whatever the nephew says when he reads his sheet. I want to know what a farmer says about his own water. I've been running it nineteen years and nobody's ever told me."
The ticket closed itself on the thirteenth, day eight of ten business days, while she was standing on the bank.
The YardDesk truck was on the shoulder when she pulled up for a dry-week check. White pickup, magnet on the door, ladder rack that had never held a ladder. The tech was maybe twenty-four. CODY on the shirt. A tablet in a rubber case that was telling him, step by step, what his morning was. He said her name like he'd read it in a ticket, which he had, and he was polite about it, which made everything worse.
"Hose is in the wrong spot," he said, as if he'd found it.
"It's been in the wrong spot since the twenty-second."
"Yeah. Install crew does a lot of these in a day."
He knelt on the riprap in brand-new knee pads, reached up into the pipe mouth with the intake, and cinched it to the corrugation with a black zip tie. It took five minutes. It was exactly the five minutes she had sat in her truck on the first of October and not done, and she watched him do it with a feeling in her chest she could not have put in any column.
He took a photo for the tablet. The tablet accepted the photo and closed the ticket while he was still getting up off his knees. She heard it chime from the bank.
"What happens to the data from before," she said.
He looked at the tablet. The tablet did not have a field for that. "It says SITING CORRECTED. Effective now."
"So the three weeks in the pool stay in."
"I guess they're just, like," Cody said, "the data."
He wasn't being smart. Nobody had given him a field for it. Nobody had given anybody a field for it. He waved when he drove off and she waved back. It wasn't his fault. Nothing in this whole thing was ever anybody's fault, which was the main thing wrong with it.
On her phone the pod column had grown a small gray wrench at 10:26. Before the wrench: the green curve, the 9/24 bump, the 10/3 bump, 7.87 at the crest. After the wrench: nothing yet, a dry week. Across the top the tile still said CARBON SIGNAL. Her note from 9/24, the one that said INTAKE IN SPLASH POOL, was still in the pod column where you could find it if you hovered over the right cell at the right zoom and already knew it was there.
She filled her own bottle from the pipe a foot below the new zip tie. 7.57. The pod, drinking from the pipe now too, said 7.60. Three hundredths. That was an instrument. That was fine.
She did the deciding at the kitchen table on the fifteenth at a quarter past six, with the dog on her feet and the bad coffee, because the good coffee was for Sunday and it was a Thursday all the way down.
She could ask them to delete the pool data. She wrote the sentence. Please remove 9/22-10/13 from the 0611 pod record. She looked at it. It was the same move as the gray bar on Hartsburg, the tile deciding which of her bottles counted, just pointed the other direction. Somebody's tool deciding which water was real. She had been on the wrong end of that for a year and she was not going to start doing it back.
She deleted the sentence.
What she sent, to Corwin Abate at Isometric, to Ray Haskell, cc Priya Venkataraman, with the three hose photographs and the boxed sheet with Dale's initials on it:
TileTap 0611 intake was sited in the outlet splash pool from install (9/22/2048) until YD-FS-118204 closed 10/13/2048 10:26. During that period the pod measured pool water, not pipe water. On 10/3, same meter, same minute: pipe 7.56, pool 7.84, pod 7.87. Lab note (PIA, D. Kowalczyk): pool pH elevated by CO2 loss; alkalinity unaffected.
I am not asking for this data to be removed. I am asking for 9/22-10/13 to carry a flag on the vintage tile, visible without hovering: INTAKE IN SPLASH POOL, pH BIASED HIGH BY DEGASSING.
After 10/13 the pod and my meter agree within 0.03 at the pipe. I'll keep checking.
She read it out loud to the dog. Visible without hovering was the only line she was proud of. The dog thumped once, which she took as a second.
Then the other thing, the one she'd been avoiding since July. The planner had a box called FIELD HOURS that nobody in the district filled, because the district paid her salary whether she filled it or not, and the miners paid for nothing in it either way. She filled it. Every storm since the twenty-eighth of May. Every bottle trip to Peoria. Two coolers, because she didn't trust one anymore. The ninety-four miles that had come back NOT REIMBURSABLE, and the hundred thirty-one from the third, and the drive to Schierer's, which had been nobody's idea but hers. She didn't ask for money for any of it. She just wrote it down so it would exist.
61.5 hours. 1,140 miles. Two coolers. One headlamp.
The planner, being helpful, offered to express this as COST PER TONNE CO2e VERIFIED. It needed a denominator and it offered to pull one from the vintage.
She looked at the button for a while. She could see what it would do. Her sixty-one hours divided by somebody's tonnes, a number with a dollar sign that would make her look either cheap or expensive and would make the tonnes look real either way, because now there'd be a cost attached to them, and things with costs attached to them are things.
She declined. There was no denominator. That was the point of the sheet.
She sent Haskell the hours with one line on top. These are hours, not vintage. They don't turn into carbon. They're what the alkalinity line cost before you funded it.
On the twenty-second of October it rained point nine of an inch with a wind in it, the first one that fall, and there was frost on her mirror at a quarter to four and the truck's heater finally worked, which figured.
The pipe ran a rope. The pool foamed white. The pod's intake was up in the pipe mouth where Cody had tied it, and the zip tie was already furred with brown slime, which is what everything in a tile pipe becomes. The pod had fired at 2:58.
Two bottles from the pipe. The water went down her sleeve again. It was colder this time and she said a word to it.
Pipe, 7.59, at 11.2 degrees. Pool, 7.86, because she took the pool every time now; the pool was the control for the pod. Pod, 7.61.
She wrote them in a row and boxed them. Same as the third. Only this time two of the three numbers were the same water.
In the truck, with the heater on her shins, she opened the vintage page. Tonight had a bump, a small one, the size of what happens when it rains on a field. It was lower than the 9/24 bump and the 10/3 bump by about a quarter of a pH unit. Exactly about a quarter. The line ran green up to the wrench and kept on green after it, only lower, like somebody had stepped on it.
No flag. Abate had answered on Friday: Received. Will raise with buyer and registry. No date. Haskell had answered: OK on the hours. Didn't know it was that many. R. Priya hadn't answered. The planner had, in its way. Sometime that week the headline across the tile had gone from CARBON SIGNAL: ALKALINITY + CONTINUOUS pH to CARBON SIGNAL: CONTINUOUS pH (TRENDING). Her alkalinity had been taken out of the title. The word TRENDING had been put in. She didn't know what made it do that, and she suspected nobody did, and she suspected that if she filed a ticket a tablet would close it.
She drove the controls. Hartsburg 7.55. Schierer 7.60, the second bottle ever off that pipe. At Schierer the kitchen light was on and this time Troy's truck was in the yard, and he came down the lane in a sweatshirt with a coffee and stood on the bank above her and watched her turn the bottle upside down under the headlamp.
"What are you looking for."
"Bubble."
"Is there one."
"No."
He nodded as if that answered something he'd been wondering about for a while. Rain was dripping off the cottonwood onto both of them.
"When do I get the sheet."
"Two weeks. Dale wants to know what you think of it."
Troy drank some coffee and looked at the pipe his uncle had laid in 1979, the string of water going into the creek, the one field in the township that nobody had put anything on.
"I'll think it's my water," he said, and went back in.
She stood there a minute in the drip. Then she wrote on the sheet, under the box, in the column that was hers: Operator present. Asked for results. Card seven, line 50. Four hours. One hundred twenty-eight miles. Black pen.
In the cooler behind the seat there were six brown bottles, brim-full, every one inside hold, going to a man on a bucket who wanted to know what a farmer would say. On the tile there was a green line, a gray wrench the size of a comma, and three weeks of CO2 that had gone back into the October air over Gary's ditch and been counted, a quarter of a pH unit at a time, as the opposite.
She didn't delete it. She asked for a flag. She was going to keep asking until it was visible without hovering, or until somebody gave Cody a field for it.