Cruise Crisis

By Troim Kryzl

Episode six of the series takes place on the 1kYears cruise liner. One day in the lives of Blessing Oduro and Tola Akinbola, two professionals making a living in very different, but equally high tech dependent careers. Personality downloads into a virtual resort isn't the only innovation gracing the 1kYears world, brands like EthaMar and MovNail are here to stay.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Troim Kryzl
• Release date: Sep 30, 2018
• ISBN: 9780463491317

Troim Kryzl

Not providing a photograph and writing under a pen name for professional reasons. Please refer to my website and LinkedIn profile for as many details as can be made available under my current career circumstances.Mastodon: @[e-mail]

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Cruise Crisis

Published by Troim Kryzl at Smashwords

Copyright 2018 Troim Kryzl

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

Thank you for downloading this ebook. This book remains the copyrighted property of the author, and may not be redistributed to others for commercial or non-commercial purposes. If you enjoyed this book, please encourage your friends to download their own copy from their favorite authorized retailer. Thank you for your support.

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...Dilute the resultant Pelagobacteristatic concentrate 100:1 in purified water. Stir for 5 minutes to achieve a homogenous solution... Blessing reads the instructions aloud, for better focus.

Back in her student days, she wouldn’t have thought twice about performing such a simple procedure. If anything goes wrong in a university lab, you empty the test tube and start afresh. Simple, neat, no stress. Totally different from what she’s doing today.

Blessing had been all in favor, of retrofitting the 1kYears Cruise liner with an ethanol generating hulk. The EthaMar sales guy didn’t need to work her hard.

Making your own fuel while you travel, an irresistible idea, for any maritime engineer. Also the perfect chance to put her bionics degree to good use. Blessing fought the captain, and won. At 1kYears, if the toy of your dreams counts towards the sustainability score, you get it.

Blessing is now in charge of the first full industrial size EthaMar installation.

Most of her ship’s hulk is as white as a conventional cruise liner. Additionally, either side of the vessel features two gleaming green areas the size of basketball fields. They make the 1kYears ship look like a giant Ginerian flag sailing the high seas. Close up, the green areas turn out to be partly organic. Gazillions of algae colonize a translucent ceramo-metallic structure. It feeds them just the right amount of sea water to optimize their ethanol production.

Your pump at your side! Never no more idling around in a harbor to wait for the refill while breathing toxic fumes, this sales pitch convinced Blessing.

What the bloody leech of a vendor failed to mention were details on her new role as her ships filling station attendant. And girl, what a complex mess she got herself into!

Running an EthaMar installation of this size compares to Blessing’s previous lab experience like cooking for a horde of gourmets to boiling one single egg for your own dinner.

Still waiting for the electric stirrer to complete its mission, Blessing recalls the awe that struck her when she accessed the maintenance manual for the first time. 12,321 pages of instructions, and that’s just for the management of a foreseeable variety of conditions.

The EthaMar algae, specifically designed for their job, are a capricious and demanding bunch. Their feed needs to be continuously adjusted to the amount of sunlight, its angle of impact, the ambient temperature and a basket full of seawater parameters.

In principle, the analyzing and adjusting is performed by the EthaMar software. But Stupid Mario, as Blessing calls the permagrin interface in allusion to her favorite childhood game, is forever asking for her guidance. And she can’t even blame the virtual white coat.

The data Stupid Mario was fed were generated by much smaller EthaMar units on a couple of private yachts and one river ferry. A square meter of algae, that’s nothing, compared to a basketball field worth of the beasts. And Blessing has to handle four of those.

Traffic in a town with a single main road, that’s easy to manage. Try the same approach in a mega city like MMA, their home port, and you get a gigantic bust-up. The Mehut Metropolitan Area never really unclogs, the go slow only comes in different flavors. Same with Blessing’s ethanol generating hulk sections. They’re never well well. The engineer and her charges stumble from bloom to bust and back, in an endless loop of indigestions. And Stupid Mario grins.

Like this morning. When Blessing checked before breakfast, Stupid Mario proudly announced all systems, and all their precious algae, all green. By the time her coffee had cooled enough no longer to boil off the tip of her tongue, the gadget on her wrist went flashing red.

From green directly to red, and beeping for emergency help, that was a first.

Normally, there’s a couple of hours of an orange alert phase. It provides Blessing with some time to liaise with Stupid Mario, and to call the 24/7 EthaMar support hotline next.

No such grace period today. Red means immediate action, unless you want to lose a full unit worth of algae. And you forfeit any warranty if you don’t act according to instructions in a matter of twenty minutes. At all times of the day. Even before coffee.

Don’t worry, the guys in customer support don’t mean it. That twenty minute rule is never implemented to the letter. As long as you pretend to be doing something about an issue, in roughly the first hour after the alert, you’ll be all fine.

Sounded nice and feasible, when the sales rep put it like that. What he failed to mention, patently, was the size of the manual, the complexity of the instructions therein, and the time required to act on them. If you have to wait for stuff to be mixed, stirred, chilled, heated or filtrated, a mere hour, that’s nothing.

An alarm announces the completion of the stirring process. No more time for Blessing to contemplate whether she would prefer that sales rep caned, whipped or tarred.

The solution is ready for administration. A life or death matter, for gazillions of hard working algae, and one very tense maritime engineer. Twenty pints of life saving medicine. Or would she have prepared a toxic sludge that will kill off what little life is left in the front starboard unit?

Blessing will find out soon enough. Heaving the metal container from the