Robots vs. Fairies(3)
“Bring it back fast. Boss man’s coming for a surprise inspection.”
Clover swallowed a groan. It stuck in her throat, a great knot of exasperation and dismay. “How do we know he’s coming if it’s a surprise?”
“He always forgets that the deer in the Enchanted Forest have cameras in their eyes. He was checking their teeth.”
“What, again?” Clover returned her attention to the pixie. “Cover for me.”
“Clover—he’s got a stranger with him.”
Clover said a couple of words that weren’t supposed to be allowed in Pixie Glen, much less in the all-sheltering embrace of the Mother Tree. She concluded with, “I’m on my way,” and began her descent, still clutching the broken pixie in one hand.
She was almost to the bottom when the damn thing’s head burst into flame.
*
The nearest maintenance door was more than twenty yards from Pixie Glen, concealed in the rocks making up the back of Mermaid Grotto. The park’s original plans had an access door on the back of the Mother Tree, but Mr. Franklin had put the kibosh on that.
“Children will want to circle the tree, to gaze in awe upon its denizens!” he’d said, in his booming, all-for-the-children tone. “Make it a full-spectrum experience, accessible from all sides, with no chance of an unsightly seam to spoil the illusion!”
“Okay, that’s a great idea, we love it, but you do understand that a structure involving over two hundred miniaturized animatronic figures, some of which are attached to independent micro-drones, is going to require a lot of upkeep, right?” Adam had been the voice of reason on the engineering team back in those days, when the Fairy Dreamland expansion had still been mostly blueprints and arguments about whether or not they could have a unicorn petting zoo. “If we don’t have a maintenance door in the Tree itself, every time there’s a mechanical error, we’re going to have to shut down the whole Glen. There’s not going to be any functional way around it.”
“Then find a way to keep them from breaking,” Mr. Franklin had said, and that had been that: no maintenance door in the Glen.
Every time Clover had to walk those twenty yards with a burning pixie in her hand, she hated the man who owned her home and place of work just a little bit more.
At least the Park was closed for the night, offering respite from the usual need to scuttle along with a smile on her face, a spring in her step, and a deep loathing of humanity brewing in her heart. Clover made her way to the door, swiped her ID card, and stepped through into the dim, humid hall. She relaxed, taking a breath of good, earthy air. Humans and their weird fetish for open spaces. Air that hadn’t been boxed up for a while had no character.
Mr. Franklin didn’t like how dark the maintenance tunnels were. At least he’d accepted it after he was told, over and over, that too much light would attract the attention of park guests, killing the illusion of effortless perfection. He still hadn’t been happy about it. Clover suspected the old man would have gotten rid of maintenance entirely if he’d been able to, living ever after in his kingdom of obedient, never-breaking robots. She smirked as she walked. Wouldn’t he be surprised if he knew how impossible, yet achievable, his goal really was? It was a paradox. She loved those. They broke people in the most entertaining ways.
Her smirk died as she stepped around a curve in the hall and into the brighter lights of the maintenance lounge. What looked like two-thirds of the night crew was there, some with fantastical beasts or magical creatures spread out across their workbenches, others wiping grease off their hands and trying to look like they enjoyed the lights being up.
Clover walked briskly to her own workbench and dropped the headless pixie into a jar. It would stay there until its battery wore down and its wings stopped flapping. It wasn’t efficient, but those wings were like razor blades, and the off switch was—naturally—right between them.
“Hell of a design flaw,” she muttered sourly, and capped the jar. Letting the pixie run itself down might preserve her fingers. Clover liked her fingers. Disfigurement for the sake of her art was not something she considered particularly interesting, or particularly desirable.
Some of the older engineers thought differently, thought a missing finger or a truncated thumb was a mark of commitment to the work. They were relics of a different time, and while it might take a while for them to settle into comfortable retirement, she was willing to wait. The second the last of the old guard hung up their tool belt, the safety regulations around here were going to change.
“What’s the emergency?” she asked, turning to the nearest engineer.
Violet—the youngest bar one of the Park’s current engineering team, still bright-eyed and full of endless faith in the future—looked at her with wide, worried eyes and said, “Mr. Franklin is coming.”
“Yeah, I know that. That’s why I was called out of the Glen.”
“The man he’s bringing with him has a clipboard.”
That was more unnerving. Men with clipboards came in three flavors: lawyers, accountants, and efficiency experts. Lawyers could be convinced to back off with magic words like “safety regulations” and “adherence to legal requirements.” They didn’t understand what went on in the tunnels crisscrossing the body of the Park like veins, pumping the life and vitality that was just as essential to the survival of the whole as blood was to a living thing. Accountants were harder, requiring access to supply sheets and maintenance logs that weren’t necessarily as accurate as they should have been. Thus far, the faked-up versions created for the Park shareholders had always been good enough to keep an audit at bay. But an efficiency expert . . .