A retirement home under water? Only because of rising ocean sea levels. The superintendant/handyman of the home has to deal with so many problems every single day, and so many cranky tenants. He has to handle so much, until one day…he doesn’t.
He woke up watching the whale shark from his bed. The huge fish swam slowly past the large submerged window of his bedroom, attracted by the cold current that ran along the cliffs. With its open mouth, it was filtering krill and plankton. He was accompanied by a cohort of remora fish. It was a docile animal, even playful despite its impressive size, showing an unusual curiosity about humans.
Dennis could have stared at it for hours in awe. He had to make an effort to activate his mobile device for another day. At that early hour of the morning, he already had three voicemails. The damn old folks never seemed to sleep. He started with the one from Mrs. Griffith.
“Coral forgot to give my husband his blood pressure pills again this morning,” she complained without even saying hello. “We came here so we wouldn’t have to take care of those things,” she looked really angry.
Coral, the resort’s AI had failed again. The problem was recurring and was becoming a headache.
“Hi, Dennis, this is Saul Murray, apartment 34. When are they coming to fix the damp? It’s been there for three weeks now. It’s getting bigger and bigger. It smells bad and mold is coming out. I know you’re doing your best, but I’ll have to talk to management.”
As the ocean water level rose, they had waterproofed two floors that according to the original project should have been above the surface, but the water had continued to rise, and was now threatening the third floor. Soon, they would have as many as six underwater floors. Dennis had spent ten days sealing on the outside all the joints of the concrete on the third floor, but it didn’t seem to be enough. It would be necessary to inject some treatment that would harden the structure and close all the pores waterproofing it, but that was going to be expensive.
“Hi Dennis, Agatha, 103. I woke up at dawn again, dammit. You know I’m a night owl. As soon as daylight came, the window panes dimmed somewhat in the light, but they haven’t gone opaque. I’m wearing sunglasses inside my own apartment. It’s crazy. See if you can fix it.”
The entire building had electrochromic window panes that could not only regulate the level of transparency by applying an electrical voltage, but also control the passage of infrared radiation to optimize energy consumption. Of course, what no one could have foreseen was that one of the residents was almost a vampire. Agatha required complete opacity until noon. They had installed timers specifically for her, but they must have failed.
“She could have stayed in one of the underwater apartments,” Dennis complained aloud to himself as he dressed, “but, of course then, that witch wouldn’t be able to watch her damn sunsets.”
Coffee in hand, he sat down at his holographic table and visualized the day’s work schedule. He cursed under his breath. Clicking on each task, he got a three-dimensional image of each location where he had to make a repair, along with a description of the task.
He had to check the climate control at Depths’ Delicacies, the underwater restaurant just above his small accommodation, where only delicatessen from marine hatcheries was served. Customers kept complaining that it was cold. What else but cold could a bunch of old curmudgeons be feeling? He was convinced it was a purely subjective problem. To solve it, he would have to go outside the energy efficiency margins and that would penalize his service rating, but if he didn’t, he would be penalized by the residents. He didn’t know which was worse.
As a by-product of this problem, filter cleaning of all the indoor units of the heat pumps and overhaul and cleaning of the outdoor units also appeared as a pending task. The overall system efficiency had dropped below an unacceptable 70%.
Next, he had to maintain the infinity pool overhanging the edge of the cliff with its transparent glass bottom. He had to regulate the pH, add chlorine, apply anti-algae, check the pump and filtration system, and run the electric pool cleaner.
Since he was up there, he also had to repair two broken solar panels on the roof of the Cliffs View Restful, the other wonderfully situated restaurant on the cliff top, which played on the words ‘restaurant’ and ‘full board’, to form ‘restful’, and thus reinforce the idea of tranquility and restfulness.
Then, he had to check the machines in the underwater gym located on the same floor as his quarters, the treadmills, exercise bikes and elliptical trainers. One of them was not working.
He also had to replace two spotlights, an LED panel, a volumetric sensor and an outdoor light.
Finally, he also had a pending task for the past week to check the ocean thermal conversion plant which, along with the solar panels at the summit, was the other source of energy for the site. The plant used the temperature difference between the warmer water at the surface and the colder water at the bottom of the ocean to produce electricity.
He now realized that it had been a mistake to spend so much time fruitlessly sealing the third floor. He felt overwhelmed by his to-do list and by having, at the same time, to attend to the demands of Mrs. Griffith, Mr. Murray, and Agatha, the sleepless vampire. He decided to start with her apartment.
As he was in the elevator, the Ainsworths entered. He couldn’t get away. They were going to breakfast at the Cliffs View.
“We didn’t want a submerged apartment,” complained the grumpy old woman in her shrill little voice, “but on the edge of the sea.”
“We’ve already asked three times to be moved to an apartment on a higher floor,” her husband reminded him angrily, “but nobody listens to us. We haven’t been paying all our lives for this.”
“The resort is full. All the apartments are occupied. It is impossible to move you to any other.”
“That’s not my problem. You have to give me what I paid for.”
“When you signed the contract, the second floor was right at sea level. That’s what you contracted for. No one imagined that in a little over a decade it would become an underwater apartment. Be thankful it’s waterproofed. Those on the third floor really have problems. I wouldn’t move if I were you.”
“Well, let them give us an apartment higher up,” the old woman bawled.
“Then it would no longer be at the edge of the sea and we would be in breach of your contract,” Dennis felt an intimate satisfaction in giving them that malicious answer. Before they could reply, the elevator door opened. “I have to leave you, there is a serious problem in 103.”
And so, it was. The senile vampire had set her timer for 6pm instead of 6am. If only all problems could be solved just as easily.
He decided to get on with pool maintenance at the summit. Early in the morning was the best time, the sun wasn’t burning yet, and the old folks hadn’t finished waking up. Besides, he felt like getting some fresh air.
As he was pouring in the hydrochloric to reduce the pH, he thought of multiplying the dose a hundredfold so that when one of those grumpy mummies got into the water, it would be charred. He found the thought a most gratifying one. Maybe then he would make room for the Ainsworths. He smiled wickedly.
Down in the ocean, an elderly man was bathing alone in the churning salt pool at the foot of the cliff, an enclosure surrounded by nets and grids held in place by floats. He thought that geezer would make a nice snack for his whale shark.
He spent the rest of the morning repairing the two solar panels. One had faulty wiring, the other had a hot spot due to an overload. Then he replaced the faulty light fixtures. He knew that their malfunction would be too visible.
Later, he reprogrammed the Depths’ Delicacies‘ climate control, raising the temperature by one degree. He then began to change the filters on all the heat pumps, starting with the upper apartments, which received the most hours of sunlight.
Late in the afternoon, he arrived at 52, the Griffiths’ apartment.
“Coral is malfunctioning. I ask her for things and she doesn’t respond,” Mrs. Griffith kept complaining while he was changing the filter on the heat pump. “She doesn’t monitor my husband’s treatment, or mine. I’m on my nerves. I’m sick, too. I take eight pills a day, and I have to take care of my husband. He doesn’t know anything anymore…” she wouldn’t shut up.
That gave him an idea.
“Don’t worry. Our software engineers will launch tonight a new Coral version that will fix all the problems. You’ll see how efficient it will be now.”
The old woman was mute for only an instant at the surprising news. Dennis said goodbye and ran out of her apartment. He couldn’t stand her. He knocked on the Ainsworths’ door.
“I hear there’s going to be a vacancy,” he whispered. “I’ll reserve the apartment for you by skipping all the rules. Don’t tell anyone if you don’t want to miss this opportunity.”
The two elders looked at each other in surprise and then smiled.
“I think I’m going to earn a good tip,” he hinted, “don’t you think?” They both nodded dumbly in surprise.
Sitting at his holographic work table, Dennis reprogrammed Coral. He replaced Mr. Griffith’s blood pressure medication with azithromycin, a broad-spectrum antibiotic with elevated cardiovascular risk. He read that it increased the risk of death from heart attack by 2.5 times during the first five days of use. If that wasn’t enough, he replaced the rest of the medication with a dangerous cocktail of nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs that, like the antibiotic, carried a high risk of hypertension, heart attack and stroke.
For Mrs. Griffith, he prepared a brutal overdose of antipsychotics composed of everything he could think of, benzodiazepines, pentobarbital, and fluphenazine.
“Let’s see if this will shut her up for once.”
He enjoyed imagining the robotic pharmacy searching for the drugs and configuring the dosages. Then he programmed the artificial intelligence to serve random doses of drugs to all the residents that night. It had to create confusion. After this, he loaded two viruses to hide his tracks. One was a memory-resident virus that erased files and programs used in reverse order of date of use, while rewriting over free space to make the information unrecoverable. The second was another malicious software that blocked the operation of the computer while the first one did its destructive work. It all appeared to be the result of an external hacker attack. He hoped it would work.
That night, Dennis couldn’t sleep knowing what was brewing. The whale shark came and went, opening and closing its huge mouth, as if it too was nervous. Sleepless, he turned his attention to studying the spots on the animal’s skin, denser on the head and much less concentrated on the tail. He knew that the multitude of moles and horizontal and vertical lines of white or yellowish color formed a unique pattern that unmistakably identified this specimen. He felt that there was an intimate symbiosis between him and the animal, as if he were just another remora fish. He kept drawing it until almost dawn, when sleep overcame him.
The next morning, the resort was crazy. Residents wandered the halls in an uproar. Mrs. Griffith’s body floated limp in the ocean. When they opened her apartment with the master key, Mr. Griffith lay dead in his bed. Everything seemed to indicate that the AI had gone crazy, that Mr. Griffith had suffered a heart attack caused by the error in his medication, and that Mrs. Griffith had committed suicide upon seeing her husband dead.
Dennis had not expected the effects of his lethal prescriptions to be so withering. Nervously, to the expectant gazes of a crowd of residents, he began to don his neoprene wetsuit to retrieve the body. He was worried about what they might find in the autopsy.
Suddenly, the whale shark’s dorsal fin ripped the ocean surface. The huge animal opened its mouth and, like a gigantic vacuum cleaner engulfed Mrs. Griffith. All the old men shrieked in terror. In an instant, there was not the slightest trace of her left.
For a moment, Dennis froze, but then, he couldn’t help but smile inwardly. It was as if the huge fish had read his mind. Those old folks, he thought, hadn’t enjoyed a more entertaining spectacle for at least the last ten years. Thanks to him, the Barnacle Hotel had improved its amenities. They could be more than grateful to him.
That night, all the old folks dined at the Cliffs View. No one went down to the Depths’ Delicacies, let alone ordered fish.
THE END
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