Judge Rules Border Divining "Unsafe Work"
Raleigh—Raleigh News & Courier
Federal Circuit Court Judge Marilyn Foster ruled against North Carolina-based survey firm God's Acre on Friday, finding that its use of gargoyles and imps to settle North Carolina border disputes constituted "unsafe work" for the creatures, and was in violation of federal OSHA rules.
After two days of lurid testimony, during which several demons described the events following any Unchained's crossing North Carolina's border, Judge Foster refused to lift an injunction against the company and ruled that God's Acre's survey methods, which involved pushing an Unchained towards the presumed border until it was observed to disappear, were "unacceptable in a civilized society."
God's Acre has vowed to appeal, but sources in Raleigh say that the state government will not rehire the firm, regardless of the eventual outcome.
God's Acre based its divining methods on the well-known, but not often applied, fact that the Hellraised are, by the terms of God's mandate, which placed them in the state in the first place, immediately and painfully disincorporated upon crossing the border and returned to Hell without benefit of appeal.
Judge Foster declined to rule on the related issue of God's Acre's claim that the borders it had surveyed prior to the injunction were "ordained by God," and not susceptible to further dispute.
The storm was over when Rhea left the Angus Barn—the young hostess would be disappointed, but Rhea wasn't sorry in the least. Thunder and lightning might be calling cards from Heaven, but they reminded her of too many other things, things she'd seen that were far from Heaven indeed. She patted her briefcase to reassure herself and took a deep breath of the clean-washed air. Ozone-fresh, it was intoxicating, or maybe that was just her mood. She felt like a bobcat in a world of wiener dogs—she was having a hard time choosing which one to tip over first. She threw the briefcase onto the passenger's seat and slid under the wheel. The office first, she decided. Get the contract in the safe, and start lining up things to move on in the morning. All the little things—and some big ones—that had been hanging fire, waiting for cash. Rhea put the top down and let the slipstream tug at her hair, and drove with Adam Ant's "Goody Twoshoes" blasting from the stereo.
When she pulled into the parking lot at Celestial, Rhea saw lights on the second floor. Jack must still be here, she thought. She put the top up and slammed the car door a little harder than necessary. He was going to have to start taking better care of himself. Or maybe she would . . .
Still, she reflected as she shut the lobby door behind her, she was glad to find him here. It gave her someone to share the good news with.
Rhea padded up the stairs to her office, and carefully deposited the contract in her second safe, the hidden one. It was advertised as uncrackable, but it wouldn't keep out anyone who could reach through steel. Unfortunately, she didn't dare expend the Hellawatts to have one of the sort that other Hellraised in North Carolina used. Just the simple act of drawing a document out of a Hellish safe, if she were unshielded, might be enough to tip off Lucifer to her location.
She headed up to the second floor to tell Jack the news. Almost at his office, elated to the point that she wanted to tap-dance down the hall, Rhea rapped against a wall-mounted fire extinguisher with her knuckles. It rang out with a cheerful, brassy sound that echoed up and down the empty hallway. Rhea started to smile, but frowned as the corner of her eye picked up movement. Had something darted into the doorway of Jack's office? It didn't seem likely. Certainly there wasn't any indication that Jack had heard her. She wished she dared expend the Hellawatts to just read the area. But she didn't.
Jack was sitting at his lab bench when she walked in. He was staring fixedly at a circuit board and scowling as if he could glare the electrons into their proper paths.
"Hi, Jack," she said, very softly.
After he had picked up his lab stool, and after she had stopped laughing, Rhea gave him the news. "We did it. I've got our funding locked in; we can finish this thing."
Jack smiled, but it was a wan smile that didn't reach his eyes. He said, "I'm glad to hear that," but he didn't look glad.
Rhea put her hand on his shoulder. "What's wrong?"
Jack sighed. "I just don't think I can do it. I've tried six ways from Sunday to get this board working, and when that didn't do it, I pulled two more ways from Monday, and five from Wednesday." He waved the board in front of her. "I'm at the point where I've either got to say that your design is wrong, and I've seen too much of your oddball stuff work to think that, or that it is just not in Jack Halloran to get that design on silicon and wire. You'd better give it to someone else."
"If I thought there were anyone else better, I would." She took her hand from his shoulder and crossed her arms over her chest. "Look, Jack, I'm far from perfect. I can screw up just as well as the next guy—but I don't think I screwed up when I hired you and I don't think I screwed up when I gave you this task."
"But—"
"But nothing. Let's look over the diagram and figure out where I did screw up. We'll take it component by component, connection by connection, and we'll verify against the board while we go."
Rhea took the printout, got a pencil from her purse and stared making marks. "First connection," she said, "from pin one of the PAL to the pull-down resistor in grid A-twenty-seven?"
"Check!" Jack said.
An hour and a half later, they had gone through every component and trace on the board. Everything checked out, but Rhea wasn't satisfied. "Something's wrong here," she said.
"No kidding, Rhea," Jack replied.
"No," she said, "that's not what I mean. Everything we've checked is right, I know it is, but there's something missing." She held up the diagram. "Something's screwy here. Can you bring up the original on-screen?"
"Sure, if you want." Jack stepped over to his workstation, and brought up the CAD program. It spewed the diagram over the screen like Technicolor roadkill.
"Wow." Rhea winced. "It does get flashy, doesn't it? I see why you prefer the printout." She sat down in front of the screen, put the printout in her lap and started tracing circuits onscreen with the mouse, comparing them to the hard-copy diagram. It took her about ten minutes to hit a discrepancy. "I don't believe it." She looked up at Jack, who had been leaning over her shoulder, and said, "You've got to see this."
"What?"
"Look! This circuit. There's a lead from here to here," she pointed, "and it's not on the printout." She felt Jack press close as he looked over her shoulder.
"No," he said finally, "it's not. Print that puppy, would you?"
Rhea clicked on Print, and Jack's laser printer started to hum. He grabbed the warm paper as it came out and compared it to the screen. "Same thing," he said excitedly. "It's missing again! And look, the line that should be there is perfectly horizontal, and looks like it would be about one pixel high. Print something else. Some text file."
Rhea pulled up the workstation help menu and printed the first screen from the introduction. Jack grabbed the paper and held it up beside the other sheet.
"It's perfect." He pointed to a spot on the page. "This line of text is exactly level with the blank spot on the diagram printout, and there are no dropouts in it at all."
Rhea absently tapped her foot against the side of the desk. This was bizarre. "Let me try printing something else in graphics mode," she said finally. Jack nodded, and she brought up the CNN feed, freezing it on a frame of the president speaking to a group of senators.
"He looks like he's in pain," Jack said.
"Republicans give him gas," Rhea said, and hit print. Jack grabbed the printout. "It's back," he announced. Rhea looked. "Right through his nose," she agreed.
"So it's not a print engine problem, or it would get the text too," Jack said. "It's got to be a firmware bug in the bitmap code. What are the odds here?" He waved the paper and the president flexed, still avoiding the issues. "Out of over three thousand rows of pixels, the one line that can screw us irretrievably is the one that goes out. What's next? Michael Bolton makes a good song? Maxwell's demons let ice boil?"
Rhea stared at him. "You know . . . it just could be." She stilled herself inside, being careful not to think about what she intended to do. "Give me your coffee cup."
The mug was clear, thick glass with a flattened world logo traced on it in white, and about half full of cold coffee. Jack handed it to her carefully; he obviously wanted to ask what she was doing, but she shook her head slowly, and he held his peace.
Rhea turned to the printer and hit the cover release.
The top popped open, and she darted a hand inside with inhuman speed. She closed her fingers over something that shouldn't have been there. Something that squirmed.
"What the hell—" Jack said.
Rhea popped her find into the coffee mug, keeping her palm over the top. "Precisely," she said. Inside the mug a small figure floated, treading coffee.
It was humanoid, about two inches high, almost as clear as the crystal itself . . . and very unhappy. As they watched, it shimmered and changed to a bile green, then a brick red before going back to clear. During the whole sequence, it was beating its fists against the walls of the mug. Its imprecations and the small, glassy pings were almost as annoying as a Chihuahua in full yap mode. "Stop that!" Rhea said, and shook the cup. It lost its balance and floundered, kicking up an oily froth of brown bubbles as it sank beneath the surface.
"What is it?" Jack asked finally.
"Gremlin," Rhea said.
Jack was silent for a moment. "That figures," he sighed. He tapped at the glass and the gremlin got its head above java level long enough to scream something obscene back at him. "Guess it doesn't like instant."
"Or much of anything else at the moment."
"So now what?"
"Well, before it goes under for the third time, it's probably going to remember that it can port out of there if it feels like it, and then it's going to be history."
As if taking a cue, the imp stopped struggling and raised an arm far enough above the surface to flip them the bird. It sank slowly and forlornly, and when the last extended finger disappeared into the murky brew, there was a muffled pop and the gremlin vanished in a coffee whirlpool.
It reappeared, dripping, in the open top drawer of the file cabinet near the door. It tripped over Headsets and fell into Heatsinks. It clambered back out again and shook its fist. "Shitsmudge! Snotswallow! I tell! She gonna get," it shouted in a voice like a swarm of mosquitoes descending, and then it vanished again.
"Shitsmudge? Snotswallow? Never heard those before."
"That was probably its name." Rhea took her palm from the mug. The air pressure equalized with a gentle whoosh, and she put the cup down. "That was different."
Jack leaned over her shoulder and pressed print again.
This time the diagram came out perfectly. He rolled it into a tight cylinder and whacked it against his palm. "So I've been tearing my hair out and losing us money because a gremlin decided to live in my printer and kill one lousy row of pixels."
"They're not very smart," Rhea said, taking the paper and unrolling it, "but they have an innate knack for knowing how to do the most damage. I doubt it will be back; once you get the gremlins out of a system, they move on to something else."
"But what did it mean 'I tell'? And 'she gonna get'? I don't like the sound of that. And what's this she business, anyway? She who? It can't mean my gargoyle, can it? I mean, what are the odds of my having two Unchained on my case? Specifically."
"I'd guess low. Exceedingly low. And I can't imagine what the little monster meant." Rhea knew a bit more about the subject than she cared to say. She'd put together plaguing teams in her time—it would take at least a demon to ride herd over a team comprised of a gargoyle and a gremlin. And in any case, for Jack to have three Hellraised working on him, he would have to have a special significance to Hell over and above his value as fodder. She knew what Hell looked for in recruitment cases, and she just didn't see it.
"Anyway, you're missing the moment, Jack." She waved the diagram. "We've got what we needed. The money. The fix for the MULE drive. We're in business."
Then she smiled. "Well," she qualified, "maybe."