Dark Thoughts

Charles was quickly loosing his cool, both physically and emotionally. A sweat had formed on his forehead and upper lip, and his blue cotton shirt had sweat stains under the arms. Having Jensen reporting every procedure to him, like a child of eight wasn't helping his anxious state. His absence to the control centre at least stopped the background noise and allowed Charles to concentrate on locating the drawings.

Suddenly Charles exclaimed "Allright! I found one". Some small measure of relief as he'd uncovered one of the two drawings, though what the schematic of the buss amplification system was doing in the middle of a pile of Mechanical Drawings for the trussing structure for the incoming feed was a bit of a mystery. "Hopefully it's not an indication of the filing system he'll find on the electronic version of the drawings" he thought to himself.

Shifting the drawings from in front of the schematic to the front set of plan cabinet hooks, Charles proceeded to activated the release mechanism that allowed the interlocking jaws to come apart far enough to remove the drawing. He carefully extracted his treasure and laid it on the light table that was acting as a temporary emergency centre for the drawings.

Charles turned back to the cabinet in search of the other drawing, that showed the physical location of the data trunk in relation to the streets in the surrounding suburbs. Either the magnified version showing just Trunk A or the overview showing all of the trunks would suffice.

This one should be the easier of the two to find, as all of the overlaying streets are printed in green and go to the edge of the pages, making them easy to distinguish from the other drawings. Armed with this information, Charles no longer had to examine the drawing identifier in the right corner and paged his way through the cabinet's like a veteran bank teller, counting notes.

Charles' felt as though some of the weight had been lifted from his shoulders as he continued his search at more than triple his previous speed. Finishing plan cabinet four (labeled Control Centre Mechanicals, despite containing the Mechanical Drawings that hid his schematic, and a set of feed bus electrical schematics) Charles closed the cabinet with a muffled clang, and eased the lock open on plan cabinet five.

The top door wouldn't open easily as it should, and a quick examination soon found that one of the hinges had been damaged in the move. Crouching slightly, Charles put his shoulder under the lip of the top lid, and pushed up with his legs. The hinge screamed in protest as Charles forced the lid open. With this pushed up at an obtuse angle, Charles released the catch to allow the front portion of the cabinet fall open to the browsing notch, with the claws still locked together.

Only five or six drawings in, the green lines that Charles was eagerly awaiting began to appear at the edge. There seemed to be a large number of similar drawings grouped together, more than he recalled being present, but never mind, the drawing with the bold red line emblazoned across it's diagonal was now glaring at him from the intestines of the plan cabinet.

Opening the claws, Charles released the cabinet's prey, and laid it on top of the schematic. The red line of the trunk's path from the building in which Charles now stood contrasting startlingly like a deep cut on pale flesh. Quickly tracing the artery of the buss from the building, Charles was somewhat relieved to see that it followed the roadwork of the city for the most part, only passing under the railway station and a shopping mall on it's 28km journey to the splitting station.

"Jensen" called out Charles absently while his focus was still on the page.
"Jensen?" he repeated as he looked up.
Charles recalled Jensen muttering something about doing some checks a while back, and focused his energies on recalling the location. Something about breakers…

"He must be in the Control Centre," he thought.

Reaching for the beige internal phone he dialed 311, the control centre extension.