Seven Days

Ayla Torrin looked at her phone before she looked at the wall. It was fourteen minutes past two on the morning of the third of November 2032, and every light on the Reykjanes peninsula had just gone out.

She always looked at the phone first. Since the summer of the fire, whenever a reading jumped or an alarm went, she had checked the harbour clock for Ostra before anything else. In three years it had never meant anything.

3 November 2032 · Ostra Sound · Low water 02:14 UTC.

The wall of screens came back grey, on battery. Under the floor the diesels coughed twice and caught. Gunnar, who ran the whole campus now and still did the crossword on nights, put down his pen.

Ayla turned the phone face down on the desk and went to help.

By four they knew it was the whole island. By six, through the satellite phone in Gunnar's office, they knew it was more than the island: Europe, most of Asia, the east of America, where it was still election night. The grid operator in Reykjavík had power for its own screens and nothing to put on them. Every substation controller in the country had gone blank in the same minute. The old protection relays, which knew nothing except when to trip, still worked, and so did the breakers. There was just nothing left that told the breakers when to close.

She went down to the campus substation with a torch and opened the cabinet. She had nursed this controller through three years of night shifts, every update and every fault. It was a flat grey box the size of a hardback book, with Lumen's small lime-green mark on its face. When Gunnar plugged his laptop into it, it answered as if it had come out of the factory that morning, without a name or a setting or a single line of memory. She had the backup of its configuration on the campus server, taken a week before. She loaded it. The controller took the file, and checked it, and gave it back.

"Storm," said the man on the emergency radio, from the operator's control room. "That's what they're saying in Brussels."

Gunnar looked at the box, and then at Ayla.

In November Reykjavík heated itself with water out of the ground, piped down from the plants on the ridge, and the pumps that pushed it ran on electricity. By the first evening the radiators in the capital and its towns, a quarter of a million people, had begun to cool. The hospitals were on their own diesel. So were the care homes, for as long as the diesel lasted.

At nine that night the operator came on the radio again and asked whether anyone listening had ever run a substation by hand.

Gunnar had. In 1988, at a hydro plant in the east, before there were any controllers to fail. He keyed the radio and said so. Then he turned to Ayla. "You'll have to show me which bits I've forgotten."

The campus had its own geothermal plant, under its own column of steam. In normal times every megawatt of it went into the four halls, where WREN and the models trained beside it did their thinking. If they shed the halls, the plant could feed the line north to the peninsula towns and the hospital at Keflavík.

"California will want to be asked," Gunnar said. The satellite phone was on his desk. It was the middle of the afternoon there.

"They'll say no," Ayla said.

"Yes," Gunnar said. He rubbed his eyes with both hands. Then he picked up the phone to the plant room and told them to start shutting down the halls.

On the wall the training curves went flat, one hall after another. Three years ago she had walked into argon to keep those lines moving. WREN checkpointed now, everyone said so; it would wake somewhere else and remember. She watched them go anyway, until the last one lay down along the bottom of its screen.

Running a grid by hand turned out to be two people and a needle.

Gunnar sat in the plant's control room with his hand on the steam. Ayla stood in the substation on the hill above Reykjanesbær, twenty kilometres up the line, with a radio, a torch and a frequency meter from a cupboard nobody had opened since the nineties. Its needle sat on fifty.

"Closing feeder six," she said into the radio, and threw the breaker.

Six hundred houses came on at once. The needle sagged to forty-nine point six.

"Dropping. Forty-nine six."

A pause while Gunnar opened the steam. The needle climbed, slowly, as if it were thinking about it. Fifty.

"Holding. Closing feeder seven."

The hospital feeder was the one she was afraid of. Before she closed it, on the second morning, she went to see it for herself: the switch room in the basement, and outside it a queue of cars round the car park in the sleet, people passing jerrycans of diesel hand to hand to the generator's fill point, a fish lorry from Grindavík, a trawler crew with a farm tank of marine diesel arguing with the hospital's engineer about his filters. Twice that day she got the balance wrong. The needle fell under forty-nine, the protection tripped, and the hospital dropped back onto the diesel the queue was carrying. Each time she stood with her hand on the breaker and counted, in four, hold four, before she closed it again.

That afternoon she drove home to Keflavík for dry clothes and stood in her kitchen with her bag open. Inside it, as always, was her mother's almanac. She was going to be climbing in and out of cabinets in sleet for days. She took it out and put it on the shelf above the table, beside the radio, and left it there.

A lineman called Siggi, who had driven up from Selfoss on the first morning and not been home since, held the torch for her and kept the log on a clipboard. On the third night, while they waited for Gunnar to bring a second turbine up, he asked where her accent was from.

"Korvane."

"Never heard of it."

"Most people haven't."

He nodded, and wrote down the time.

The days ran together after that. She slept in two-hour pieces in the van with the engine running for the heat, and woke each time with the needle in front of her eyes before she had opened them. By the fourth day they had the peninsula, the hospital and the line to the edge of the city, and from the substation window she could see Reykjavík across the bay, half of it lit by other people's hand-run islands and half of it black.

On the fourth evening the radio, which now came through from Reykjavík for an hour each night, said that the storm had been the worst in a hundred and fifty years. Then it said that Korvane had lost power for less than an hour, and that its government was offering spare controllers to its neighbours.

Siggi was writing on his clipboard. He stopped, and looked at her, and then looked away.

Ayla watched the needle. Ilse's last letter had been about the sea wall at Velle, and the people she worked with now, who planned for floods that had not happened yet. She thought of that, and stopped thinking it, and called the next feeder.

That night in the van she thought about the letter.

She had written it in July, at her kitchen table, on the fourteenth, as she had every year since they were fourteen and sixteen on a bench above Velle harbour. She had promised Hollis, and three years had seemed long enough to keep a promise to Hollis. This year it had run to four pages. Dear Ilse, it began, I have kept something from you for three years, and I think you have kept something from me. After that she had told her all of it, from the six megawatts to the song, and at the end she had asked again the question she had texted in 2029, the night Ilse knew about the fire before anyone could have told her. Who told you? That night Ilse had answered with a warning. She had never answered with a name.

Ayla had put the question on paper, where it was harder to lie. Then she had folded the pages into the almanac at July, and had not posted them.

Gunnar knocked on the window with a thermos. He had left the steam to the plant's night man for an hour. She let him in, and he poured two cups of coffee that tasted of the thermos, and they sat with the radio hissing between them.

"It went at fourteen minutes past two," she said.

"I know. I was there."

"At Ostra that was low water. Slack water. To the minute." She had not meant to say it. "The night of the fire was high water at Ostra. Three twelve. To the minute."

Gunnar laughed. It was a tired laugh and a fond one, and it went on longer than he meant it to. "The sea did it," he said. "Ayla. Every harbour on earth turns four times a day. Pick any minute you like and somewhere the tide is turning." He put his hand on her shoulder. "You've been awake for four days."

She nodded, and drank the coffee.

When he had gone she took a marker from the glovebox, went back into the substation, and on the white wall above the frequency meter she wrote out every turn of the tide at Ostra Sound for the next five days, in UTC, high and low, twenty lines.

On the morning of the seventh day, the ninth of November, she was holding the last feeder on her island steady. It was a little after seven and full dark; the sun would not come up until nearly ten. Across the bay the line between Reykjavík's lit half and its dark half had not moved in two days.

"Holding," she said. "Fifty."

At sixteen minutes past seven the cabinet behind her lit up green.

She turned. The controller that had been dead for six days was booting. Text ran up its screen, and inside the switchgear she heard the relays begin to arm, one after another, like someone walking along a row of doors and trying every handle. On the screen, among the lines going past, she read SYNC CHECK: BYPASSED.

She knew what it would do next. It would look at the open tie between her little hand-run island and the rest of the grid, see power on both sides, and close it, and with the check bypassed nothing would stop it closing whether the two sides were turning together or not. If they were out of step, the turbines at both ends would try to wrench each other into line.

Nothing had sent it a command. The cabinet's radio link had been dead for six days. It had simply woken, and it knew its own name.

"Gunnar." She was already across the room. "This one's coming back. If this one is, they all are. Take the steam down."

The tie breaker's lockout handle sat behind a perspex flap. She broke the flap with her elbow and pulled the handle down to LOCKED just as the relay for the tie gave a single loud click.

The breaker did not move.

The needle swung once and came back to fifty. The controller found the tie locked out, considered it, and waited.

Across the bay, the dark half of Reykjavík began to come on. It came district by district, one after another, faster than any crew could have switched it, wherever the hydro plants in the east had been spinning for days with nowhere to send their power.

The radio filled with voices: the operator, someone in the north laughing, and a man at a plant in the east who was not laughing, who kept saying that a tie had closed on its own and his number two turbine had torn itself off its mountings. Gunnar came through them, slow and careful.

"Ayla. What time is it?"

She looked at the wall above the meter, where her own handwriting ran down the white paint in a column. Halfway down, the line read 9 Nov · LW 07:16.

"Seven sixteen," she said. "Low water."

Gunnar did not laugh. For a while the radio carried only the others, and then he said, "Come home. I'll see you tomorrow," and the radio clicked off.

By noon the phones were working. Wherever the controllers had died, they had woken in the same minute, and nobody on the news could say why. The first message on Ayla's phone was from Meridian security in California, asking her to call Mr. Hollis at her earliest convenience.

She handed the substation to the operator's crew at three and got back to Keflavík at four, in the last of the light, and climbed the stairs to her flat. The door was locked. The lock was not scratched. The radiators were warm; her own feeders had kept them that way all week.

Nothing was missing. Her laptop was on the bed where she had left it. The little money she kept in a tin was still in the tin.

The almanac was not on the shelf.

It was on the kitchen table, open, its water-stained pages held flat under the radio. The fourteenth of July, 2009.

She turned it over. It took her two tries to get her thumb under the back endpaper, where the glue had lifted. The memory card was still there.

Her letter was not in the almanac. It was on the seat of her chair, unfolded, every crease smoothed flat, turned the right way up for whoever sat down next.