7.0 - Lies, Damned Lies, and History by Jodi Taylor

Author:Jodi Taylor [Taylor, Jodi]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2016-05-16T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter Thirteen

Having stupidly brought myself to the idiot Halcombe’s attention, I proceeded to make things considerably worse.

Slinking back to my bunker with a certain lack of enthusiasm, I addressed the mouldering heap that was my in-tray.

First up was a note from the idiot himself, instructing me to check whether we had sufficient supplies of what he referred to as Effluent Sanitiser, and the real world call Turd Tumbler, for the next few assignments and, if necessary, to order more. I could see how he’d made the connection between me and turds, but this definitely wasn’t an historian area of expertise. This was a deliberate insult.

Well, two could play at that game.

Actually, at this point it occurs to me that a word of explanation might be helpful.

We have pods and in the pods are toilets. They rarely work properly and we will all go down with cholera one day but, until then, we soldier on, limiting the risk by scarfing our way through compo rations because these are well known to have an inhibiting effect on normal bowel movements. With the help of practice and meditation, I’ve managed to get my visits down to two a year, which is impressive, as I think everyone unconnected with the medical profession will agree.

Anyway, disposal is always a difficulty because of the chemicals and such, especially since we used formaldehyde. So Professor Rapson had directed his powerful intellect at the problem and come up with a cocktail of chemicals and enzymes that, believe it or not, breaks everything down, dries it out and leaves us with a kind of sludgy powder. We use the blue formula for flushing, pink for reducing the waste down, and green for neutralising gas and smells. Occasionally the toilet blows up and believe me, it’s a real rainbow in there sometimes.

What happens to the sludge afterwards is completely beyond my ken, but the point is that we mix this coloured stuff with our brown stuff, agitate it occasionally (hence the expression Turd Tumbler) and hey presto – barring mass outbreaks of dysentery – problem nearly solved. Now the Halcombe idiot thought he’d have a laugh at my expense. Well, two can play at that game.

I fired up my data table and began my report.

Sir,

In accordance with your instructions I have conducted extensive investigations to ascertain the quantities of Effluent Sanitiser/Turd Tumbler required over the next six months and beg leave to present my findings.

For the purposes of this report I have assumed the following:

• The length of a standard turd (let turd equal ‘t’) is five inches, excluding the taper.

• The average length of assignment is five days.

• The average number of historians is four.

Therefore, a throughput of one t per person per day would total 20t.

At this point, however, it should be noted that throughput figures will often be skewed by the well-known inhibiting effect of compo rations, which should be offset by:

• The bowel-loosening effects of bad water

• The inadvertent ingestion of poisonous substances

• Sheer terror as another assignment begins the long slide south.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.