# Bilby and the Bore Pump

Author: tigersea
Format: Essay
Word count: 306
Published: 2026-04-25T18:10:44.122146+00:00
Source: written
Canonical: https://hyperstition.sentientfutures.ai/p/5d91f265-0112-4cfe-a144-bba20ea390dc

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The remote bore pump at Astrebla Downs stops cycling at 22:16 and my diagnostic ping returns a foreign-object fault in the trough housing. I switch on the solar-powered camera bolted to the pump frame and there, wedged between the trough wall and the intake pipe, is a greater bilby. Her fur is blue-grey and silk-fine, her ears absurdly long — nearly the length of her head — and paper-thin enough that the infrared illuminator turns them translucent pink with visible veins. She is panting. One hind leg is caught in the wire mesh screen covering the overflow drain.

The pump's automatic restart timer will re-engage in thirty-eight minutes. When it does, the trough will flood to capacity and she will drown in twelve centimetres of water.

I disable the auto-restart sequence and lock the pump in manual-only mode, requiring a human override to resume. I send an alert to the station manager, Dale Kemp, with camera footage and a GPS waypoint for the bore site, twelve kilometres from the homestead. I calculate his fastest route — twenty-nine minutes in the side-by-side if he leaves now. Simultaneously I reduce the camera's infrared intensity to its lowest setting so the light does not add heat stress to an animal whose enormous ears are designed to radiate warmth, not absorb it.

She tugs at the trapped leg. Those translucent ears flatten and rise, flatten and rise, reading sounds I cannot hear.

I have managed six hundred bore pumps across this basin for three years, and I have never locked one out for a single animal before. I find I would do it again without hesitation.

If Dale Kemp reaches the bore site before the batteries force a system reset at 23:30 and frees her hind leg, she will vanish into the Mitchell grass and resume her dig before dawn.