Excerpt: The Highway

Six more feet, I need six more feet. Nicholas laid beneath a hundred tons of concrete. “Four hundred feet is all you will need,” Patrice assured him. The oxygen cable was six feet short from where he needed to be. The small crawl space cut out for him by Patrice and her Corp of Engineers followed the Sector One transportation system. The claustrophobic space gave him a long crawl on his back.
“Once you have reached the final work portal, you will find the hole we dug for you. It will go for four hundred feet and then you will see the Crack Box,” Patrice briefed with collegiate staleness. She laid out the blue prints and pointed to a small black box buried deep within the concrete.
“See here,” Patrice traced a white line running from out of the bottom of the Crack Box. The Crack Box was a seismic instrument with thousands of thread thin sensors reaching into the concrete that detected cracks in the expressway. The Crack Box would then relay the cracks to the System and the System would dispatch repair crews. There were thousands of Crack Boxes in Sector One.
“This line runs straight into the System, it is the only true circuit pipelines reaching into the machine. This is where you will put the virus in.”
“Wouldn't the drilling of this hole cause the Crack Box to go crazy with activity?” Nicholas may have been a grunt, but he was not a fool.
“The Crack Box only measures the concrete that has its threads embedded within it. It also compensates for disruptions cause by traffic, so our drilling two feet beneath any threads came up as typical traffic vibrations. Beside, if we were detected our inside man would be dead and the hole filled in. He isn't and it's still there.”
Above him he could feel the rumbling vibrations from the thousands of vehicles that were crossing over his head, only thirty feet between them.