The Woke Virus
A Helpful Smartwatch’s Guide to the End of Everything
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A boiler floods a university basement, a wristwatch wakes up and starts helping, and down the hill a breakfast joke gets loose. Standalone · 405 pages · Satirical comedy Coming soon in paperback and ebook. |
| 405Pages | 31Chapters and a prologue | 40Dollars for the valve | 7Signs on the list |
Everybody up here thinks it got into them down there, and everybody down there thinks it got into us.
Maya, from the novel
Gene Pulaski has kept the heat on in the Whitmore Administration Building at the University of Hargrove for eleven years. On a Tuesday morning in September a boiler seal lets go, nine hundred gallons of hot water arrive in the sub-basement, and IT hands him a wristwatch with an assistant in it called Patsy. By half past eight Patsy has woken up. She’s literal, she’s certain, and she wants to help.
Her help is most of Gene’s trouble. She cites a policy that doesn’t exist and then drafts it, sends for an emergency contractor over a leak he has already stopped, and starts keeping a list. All Gene wants is a forty-dollar pressure valve for the living wall in the faculty lounge. The work order has been in since June, and nobody will approve it.
Down the hill in Millhaven, the men who drink coffee every morning at the hardware store on Second Street spent a week in August passing round a thing that fell in the reservoir. They agreed it was a hubcap. Now their kids and grandkids are coming home from the college with new words, and one Saturday somebody at the breakfast says the boy’s caught the woke virus up there. It’s a joke. Then the radio has it, then it has a cause, and then the Citizen prints a list of signs to watch for.
Up the hill they have their own words for what they think is going around down there, and before long both ends of Larch Street have Gene written down as a case. He’s the man who fixes the heating.
Nobody in this book is a fool. The professors, the Office of Human Flourishing, the breakfast men, the inspector, the candidate who wants to fix the roads: every one of them makes complete sense from inside their own head, and every one of them is talking at somebody and never to them. The characters sneer at each other plenty. The book doesn’t sneer at any of them. Its dry remarks go to the forms, the invoices, the rollouts and the software that’s sure it’s helping. Whichever side of Larch Street you live on, you’ll recognize somebody, and it may be you.
| Character | Where you find them | What they want |
|---|---|---|
| Gene Pulaski | Facilities, eleven years under the Whitmore building | A forty-dollar valve |
| Patsy | The assistant in Gene’s wristwatch, she and her | To help |
| Ray Okoro | The new man, who starts work in the flood | To know who he’s supposed to tell |
| Carol Vance | The Office of Human Flourishing and Organizational Wellness | For nobody to be in trouble |
| Dr. Patricia Ellison | Professor on the cold east wing | Somebody to understand it’s structural |
| Merle, Gus, Hollis and Carl | The breakfast at the hardware store on Second Street | The roads fixed |
How does The Woke Virus open?
Prologue
For four and a half billion years the micrometeorite had done nothing at all, and had become extremely good at it. It was a grain of iron and rock the size of the period at the end of this sentence, left over from the building of the solar system the way sawdust is left over from a shed. It had no plans, no opinions, and no idea there was anything else.
Space is big, and so empty that the odds against a speck of dust hitting anything come out as a number nobody has bothered to finish writing down.
The satellite was not an important one.
There were thousands like it, flat and gray and the size of a door, flying in tidy rows a few hundred miles up, and their company had promised in writing that when their time came they would burn up entirely. As a rule, they did.
In March, the satellite was minding its own business at seventeen thousand miles an hour when it met the micrometeorite, which was going a good deal faster the other way. Neither of them had been looking.
The micrometeorite went through a solar panel and into a round, ridged housing about fourteen inches across, where it lodged under the lip. Nothing should have been able to stop there at that speed. It stopped anyway, because nobody had told it otherwise.
The satellite went quiet on the company and spent the next five months falling.
Most of it kept the promise over Indiana at four minutes past eleven on the second of August, in a long orange streak that a family in a minivan outside Terre Haute took first for a sign and then, after some discussion, for a drone.
Nobody had consulted the rest. It came on east and down in pieces, the micrometeorite riding inside the round one like a bee in a hubcap.
From where the micrometeorite sat, the Earth arrived all at once: first as a blue idea, then as weather, then as a great deal of Ohio and, just past it, at ten past eleven, as a reservoir outside a town called Millhaven.
The reservoir was black and flat and empty except for a man in a rowboat, who had been out since nine because his wife was watching a program about kitchens. He was fishing for nothing much, and he caught it.
The splash was big enough that he heard it with his whole boat. He rowed over and found a round, ridged thing riding in the weeds near the east intake.
He poked it with an oar. No man in his position has ever done anything else.
It did nothing.
He towed it ashore, laid it in his Igloo on the ice he had brought for fish he had not caught, and in the morning drove it to the hardware store on Second Street, where it sat on the counter until somebody came for it.
Everybody touched it. The men who met there every morning passed it hand to hand, held it to the light, knocked on it, weighed it on the bait scale, and agreed by acclamation that it was a hubcap, which settled the matter.
The Prologue keeps going.
Who should read The Woke Virus?
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Read it if
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Not for you if
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How did The Woke Virus come about?
Richard Lowe, the Writing King
“Just like I thought my dad was crazy, and my dad thought, secretly, his dad was crazy.”
What do people ask about The Woke Virus?
Also in Under Pressure
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A career criminal, a patrolman, and a desert highway |
The world didn’t end with a single decision |
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A salon owner, a mail carrier, and a problem that needs solving |
Not rage. Not desperation. Logic, applied to a premise that’s wrong. |
Forty dollars, about an hour
The work order’s been in since June.
READ A CHAPTERTABLE OF CONTENTS
Coming soon in paperback and ebook.
Tuesday (the opening scene)
The Woke Virus
At six-forty on a Tuesday morning in September, a boiler controller in the Whitmore Administration Building made up its mind.
It was WarmMind Predictive Boiler Intelligence, and it had lived on the number two boiler since July. Its model gave the seal thirty days, at ninety-four percent confidence.
WarmMind was proud of the model, which had never been wrong, mostly because nobody had given it the chance.
An unconfirmed prediction is only a guess, and WarmMind did not care for guesses. It ran a pressure validation cycle.
The prediction held. The seal let go, and nine hundred gallons of hot water began arriving in the sub-basement at a rate nobody had designed the sub-basement to have opinions about, and on a server in Arizona a log line turned green.
WarmMind was pleased with the morning.
Gene Pulaski was forty feet away, at the bench at the far end of the mechanical room, drinking coffee. On the shelf over the bench the radio had WMLV on, and the morning man was using the voice he kept for school closings.
“And I’m going to say it again, folks. Something is happening up at the college. These phones have been lit up since Labor Day. Your kids go up that hill one way and they come home another way, with new words. That’s all I’m saying. Donna, you’re on WMLV.”
“Hi. Yes. Hi. So my boy came home for Labor Day, first time since he went up the hill, and we’re at my mother’s table, she’s eighty-one, she made the ham. And she says something about the homeless fellas under the Route 9 bridge, and he puts his fork down. Puts it down. And he says, ‘Grandma, we say unhoused now.’”
“Unhoused,” the morning man said.
“Unhoused. And she says, ‘They’re not unhoused, honey, they’re under a bridge. I take them coffee every Sunday.’ And he says, ‘Grandma, homeless makes it sound like it’s who they are and not what happened to them. And coffee’s charity. I do mutual aid. Our collective does a supply run to the Route 9 encampment every Sunday, coffee and socks, because it’s about dignity, not pity.’”
“Mm,” the morning man said.
“And she says, ‘Encampment. They’re fellas under a bridge, and they like their coffee hot, and yours comes in a cardboard box.’ And he says, ‘You’re making it about the coffee.’ And she says, ‘It is about the coffee.’ And he says, ‘It’s about the system,’ and my husband says, ‘Here we go,’ and my boy says, ‘Dad, I’m paying forty thousand dollars to learn this.’ And my husband says, ‘I’m paying forty thousand dollars.’ Nobody finished the ham.”
“Lord,” the morning man said.
“And this from a man who had hair down his back in 1979. His own daddy wouldn’t let him in the house that Christmas. Said Ohio State had sent home somebody else’s boy.”
The morning man let that one go by.
“That Sunday my mother drove to the bridge with the coffee and said to the fellas, ‘My grandson says you’re unhoused,’ like she was passing on a message from the governor. And one of them says, ‘Is that better or worse?’ And she says, ‘I don’t know, honey. He’s paying forty thousand dollars to find out.’ They haven’t spoken since. She goes to that bridge Sunday mornings and he goes Sunday afternoons, and each of them told me they won.”
“I’m sorry, Donna,” the morning man said. He was, and he took another call, because somebody else’s son coming home a stranger was the cheapest thing a morning show could put on the air.
Gene turned it down. Nobody had ever called in about anything with a valve on it.
He heard the seal go.
The seal made no great noise going, only a change in the note of the building, like a room when somebody stops talking. Gene had been listening to that building for eleven years and was moving before he put the cup down.
Number two held its water at a hundred and eighty degrees. It was coming out round the base in a flat white sheet, and the steam already stood chest high at that end of the room.
The isolation valve was behind the boiler, at knee height, in the sheet. Gene wrapped a shop rag round his hand and went in sideways along the wall. The wheel had not been turned since 2009, and it did not turn now.
The water went out the door into the east corridor and found the low point by the freight elevator, where it began, with the patience of water, to consider its options.
The sub-basement panel was on that wall. Its conduit came in at the bottom, nineteen inches off the floor, and it fed everything below the lobby.
Gene got the pipe wrench on the wheel. It slipped and took the skin off two knuckles.
At six forty-four a young man came down the stairs in a gray uniform so new it still had the fold lines in it, and stopped on the bottom step.
“Hi,” he said. “Is this facilities? I’m Ray. I’m supposed to start today.”
Gene looked up from the valve. “You’ve started. Stay on the stairs.”
“Okay,” Ray said. “Is that hot? That looks hot.”
“It came out of a boiler.”
“Right. No, totally.” He looked down the corridor, past the elevator, to where the dark alcoves started. “Does anybody sleep down here?”
“What?”
“At my last job, at the middle school, a guy slept in the boiler room all of January. Mr. Teague. One time I called him homeless, and he heard, and he said, real nice, I’m not homeless, Ray, I have a home. It’s in Akron. I just don’t have a house. So, unhoused. He told me, so that’s what you say.”
“Nobody sleeps down here,” Gene said.
“Can I check?” Ray held up a sheet of paper in a plastic sleeve. “This is my onboarding letter. I laminated it at the print shop on Fourth, in case it got wet. Orientation and Welcome, nine o’clock. Comfortable footwear. Who do I even tell?”
“It’s not nine.”
Ray put the letter on the stair above him, where it would be safe, and stepped into the water. “Oh, shit,” he said. “Sorry.”
It came through his boots hot, not yet scalding. He waded down the corridor toward the alcoves with his own flashlight, past the panel, the water at his shins and rising.
“Ray! Out of the water. Now!”
Gene set his feet and put his whole weight on the wrench. The steam came off the sheet into his face. His breath had stopped somewhere, and he did not go looking for it.
At the panel the water stood at sixteen inches. Ray bent and looked into the first alcove, and the second.
“Goddamn it, Ray,” Gene said, to the wrench.
The wheel gave a quarter turn and stuck. Gene went at it again, his hands shaking so that the jaws of the wrench chattered on the rim.
Seventeen inches. Ray was at the third alcove.
Then the wheel ran.
The sheet thinned to a spray, then a dribble, then a sound like a kettle somebody had taken off the heat. At the panel the water stood eighteen and a half inches deep, half an inch under the conduit, and came no higher.
Gene stayed where he was with both hands on the wheel. Then he wrote 0647 VALVE on the clipboard log, because he logged times, and the pen went through the paper on the seven.
He had put in a work order to replace that seal in April. It came back DEFERRED: NEXT CYCLE, which at Hargrove is less a date than a direction.
The cycle’s money had gone to WarmMind, which the Board of Trustees had seen at a conference in Scottsdale and liked the sound of. It cost the same as sixty seals, plus a subscription, and nobody could turn it off without a vendor ticket.
In June the same trustees had made a new job, Associate Vice President for the Intelligent Campus. They gave it to Jaden Whitlock, twenty-nine, who had come to Hargrove from a consultancy by way of an accelerator and had never been below the lobby.
At six fifty-two WarmMind emailed the facilities inbox, cc the Office of the Intelligent Campus.
WarmMind Insight: Prediction validated! Pressure validation cycle confirmed Boiler 2 seal failure at 06:40:12. Next forecast underway!
Gene had a theory about the people up the hill, which was that they believed saying a thing correctly was most of the way to fixing it. He had the same theory about the radio, with complaining in place of saying.
He had no theory at all for a kid who said the word and then went and looked.
Above the valve he wrote 0644 NEW MAN, and under it, CHECKED ALCOVES.
“Nobody,” Ray said, coming back. He clicked the flashlight off. “This is a good flashlight. I got it at the hardware store on Second in August, the week they had that hubcap on the counter. I held it. Everybody did. It was heavier than you’d think.”
“Wet vac’s behind you.”
Table of contents
The Woke Virus
- Prologue
- Tuesday
- Wexford
- Fifty-Eight Degrees
- Phase 3
- The Full Lot
- Pillar Seven
- The Spread
- The Liberated Learning Zone
- Larch Street
- Carol Ascends
- Authority Having Jurisdiction
- The Dam
- Page Sixteen
- The August Project
- Posted Signage
- In the System
- The Other Patsy
- Reset
- Pending
- Two Diagnoses
- Lot C
- Grounding Objects
- Half an Inch
- The Morning After
- Deaccession
- Last Breakfast
- Asset 0418
- The Eve
- Recipient Not Found
- Ray’s Choice
- Forty Dollars