Susan's Plague

Chapter 4 - Connections

    Sean strolled into the hospital fifteen minutes early, after another quiet pod ride since his ZipSled was yet to be repaired. The tech at the repair shop informed him parts were on order from New Canton, one of the industrial Cores on the East Coast.  He sat down in his small, shared office and started looking over the work orders for his shift. Chad showed up a bit later and was nice enough to bring an extra coffee, truth be told, the coffee was for a nurse's assistant on Three-West he was keen on, but she was off ill.  Sean thanked him for the coffee.

"Still issues with the MedLine network in paeds?"  Sean waved the tablet at Chad, the device listed all the work orders, sorted by priority.

"Yeah, the nurses are having to send the Pediabot on rounds every fifteen minutes, since the vitals from the nursery aren't reliable.  It's not that critical though, we can push that one off. Now, Nineteen-North is another story, I have had a bunch of calls and emails from the administrators, they want the air purification system fixed now, that's priority tonight. They have had to empty the entire Wing practically and they are running out of room."

"I'm on it.  Have you pulled the logs from the environmental control servers?"

"No, I figured you would."

"My toolbox wasn't in my locker either, have you seen it?"

"Oh yeah, sorry, I had to borrow it.  I think I left it in the maintenance closet on 8-North."

"Geez Chad, at least bring it back when you're done with it." Sean said, doing little to hide his annoyance.

"Sorry chief, I did bring you a coffee.  I gotta run, bunch of reports to fill out. Keep me posted on your progress with 19-North."  Chad excused himself and left, avoiding further discourse on the errant toolbox.

Sean, took a deep breath, turned his attention back to the tablet, and began reading through the notes left by the day shift. He downloaded the server logs and maintenance reports for the top 6 items on the to-do list.  He initiated a diagnostic on the environmental systems for Nineteen-North and fired off an email to the Head Nurse on paeds advising her that he would try to get to that issue this evening.  He then went over to his locker and changed into a clean uniform, which consisted of light-blue overalls and protective footwear.  He clipped an ID badge to his chest pocket, and checked to make sure he had his nearband keycard, grabbing the tablet he headed toward the elevators.  Up on the eighth floor he chatted with a couple interns before retrieving his toolkit and heading up to 19-North.

The environmental control system was a complicated collection of sensors, servers and devices that managed temperature, humidity, oxygen levels, air purification, water purification, waste treatment, and innumerable other things throughout the hospital.  A pair of master servers in the data center provided central control, but each floor had a slave system that managed all the items of that floor, taking orders from the masters and reporting back on current conditions.  All the various sub-systems had sensors that reported data points to the slave, all the environmental variables were sampled several times per second, fed back to the slave which then told the environmental systems to make adjustments accordingly.  When working it was a symphony of modern technology, but when it was broken it was a nightmare to troubleshoot.  Tonight it was not the well-orchestrated system it was supposed to be.  

Some rooms hot, some rooms cool, ventilation running at all different speeds, sometimes not at all, and the dehumidifiers were all running at full capacity leaving the air bone dry on the entire floor. It made for an uncomfortable situation for both staff and patients, at least for those that remained on the floor, many found excuses to work in more favourable conditions. To make things worse, the lighting was also affected, the entire floor was either dimly lit or without any light at all.  Sean donned his headlamp and proceeded to the environmental server closet. The diagnostics had come back inconclusive and then logs told him what he already knew, things on 19-North were bad beyond description. He reset the server, the switch and reinitialized the control application, nothing changed.  He brought up an application on the tablet and paged IT, a man with a dark complexion in his early 40s appeared on the screen.