Free Nicola Griffith by Slow River Page A

right to deny basic safety precautions and procedures to her shift.
    But Magyar had not written the rules, she merely had to follow them to meet the almost impossible productivity standards Hepple had set. And I doubted she knew any other way. She was smart, yes, and seemed to have good instincts, but she was untrained and unsupported. Hepple had no business appointing her to a supervisory position without even going through the motions of teaching her what she needed to know. No doubt he thought she would make him look good by comparison.
    Even the orientation procedures were disorganized and sloppy. Magyar had surprised me on my second day by digging up a copy of the orientation disk. “Watch it in the breakroom,” she said. “It runs forty minutes. I want you back on station in forty-five.”
    The carpets and walls of the breakroom were done in white and teal, and there were about twenty uncomfortable chairs and two screens, one tuned to the net—usually the news—the other to a video loop of swimming fish. There was a PIDA reader under each screen, but I didn’t have to V-hand it to run the disk.
    The video was terrible. It wasn’t just the production values that were bad; there were several major errors in the procedures described, errors that would continue to echo down the line, like Magyar’s insistence that the bugs could not tolerate even the slightest deviation in temperature. The information was simplistic at best: “In the primary section, specially tailored bacteria break down some of the more toxic compounds. Think of them eating ammonia and excreting other, less toxic chemicals, like nitrite. . .” Worse, there were half a dozen blatant edits where worker safety information had been taken out, probably by Hepple. No details about warning signs of the deadly chlorine gases that could build up, or methane explosions like the one that had killed four hundred workers in Raleigh, North Carolina, six or seven years ago, even though I had seen the red methane-release handles at the emergency station. The simple evacuation drill was clear—use this exit, not that; turn this off, not that—but unexplained. More worryingly, there was no mention of the stakes, the regional impact of polluted water if someone really screwed up their job: nothing about spontaneous abortion and convulsions, or violent dehydrating dysentery, spinal meningitis or central-nervous-system collapse.
    “I hope you got something out of it,” Magyar had said when I gave it back. “You need to look out for yourself in a place like this. Pay attention to the machines. They can be dangerous.”
    I had not known what to say. The machines in and of themselves were not dangerous—if you followed safety procedures. But you could not follow safety procedures that you were not told about. I wondered how much Magyar herself knew, how much she pretended not to know in order to keep her job. I had contented myself with a nod and a thank-you.
    I circled the rake, which was still madly trying to dig its way to Australia. The month before I started this job, another worker had his left leg torn up by a mobile rake that had got stuck. Statutory regulations stated that a machine should never be approached while in operation; that it should be deactivated by remote, then towed out of the water and examined by a qualified technician. At Hedon Road, there was never time: turning the machine off and then on again in less than thirty minutes damaged it. The rakes were temperamental enough without adding to their unreliability, and we were so shorthanded that the unwritten rule was: Shove it out of the hole and keep it going. Once in the clear, whatever was clogging its tines usually got whirled off. If you couldn’t find and retrieve what it was that fouled the blades in the first place, you just hoped that the next time the machine encountered it, it wasn’t your shift.
    It looked as though the right front tines were jammed. I stepped carefully in front