to a white plastic window fan—one of a pallet load of such that we had acquired from Home Depot—and turned it on full blast. I saw now that several more were scattered around the room. Feeling a desire to be part of this momentous occasion, I turned on all that were in reach.
“Check!” Tristan called, when all of them were spinning. I could hear a much larger, industrial-sized fan humming out by the loading dock, and another “Check!” from that quarter.
“Burst disks and pressure relief valves are all green,” said Oda, glancing at his display. “Initiating cryogenic chill-down sequence in three . . . two . . . one . . .”
Cryogenic pumps began to hum, and a few seconds later we heard the sizzle and hiss of liquid nitrogen coming into contact with room-temperature plumbing. The idea was simple enough, now that I understood what was happening: we needed to pump the LN2 from the big storage tanks by the loading dock, through piping that the Maxes had installed, to the gap between the ODEC’s inner and outer vessels. But since the plumbing and the vessels alike were currently warmer than the boiling point of LN2, the liquid was going to boil off at first, until everything got chilled down. As before, clouds of milky, chilly fog spilled out of valves all over the facility. But the “atmospheric exchange augmentation systems” did a good job of pushing it out the “exterior vent ports.” Outside of these—as we could all tell by checking surveillance monitors that had been racked up on the half-shattered remnant of a nearby wall—several Lukes were standing guard to make sure that random people didn’t just wander in off the street. The Lukes had begun showing up a couple of days ago; they were big, beefy, taciturn, and dressed in rent-a-cop uniforms devoid of insignia. They seemed to think Tristan was cool.
The cryogenic drama lessened as (one inferred) the plumbing and vessels became super-cold, and then we could hear the fluid level rising between the ODEC’s inner and outer walls. Oda had purchased a large number of cheap digital thermometers from Home Depot and duct-taped them all over the place, and it was fun, for a while, to see their readings plummet into triple-digit negative numbers.
“How much farther?” I asked Tristan, during a lull.
“To what?” he inquired.
“To absolute zero.”
He shook his head. “Not going there today.”
“I thought that was the whole point.”
“Don’t pout. This is a dry run. With LN2. Which costs less than milk. If it works we’ll source the liquid helium and do it for real.”
“Vessel is full. Hatch is full. Both holding steady,” Oda announced. “Confirming criticality in lower magnet ring.”
“Criticality? Sounds very MLA,” I said.
“MLA?”
“Modern Language Association.”
Tristan sighed. “He just means that the magnets in the bottom-most ring have now been cold enough, long enough, that they have dropped through their TC—their critical temperature—and become superconducting.” He seemed mildly offended by my quip.
“Ah, so that’s the purpose of the dry run,” I said.
“Yeah. Until all of the magnet rings go superconducting, we can’t even turn the ODEC on in any meaningful sense of the word.”
This at least gave me something to watch. The vessels, of course, had filled from the bottom up, and so the magnets on the bottom had spent a longer time exposed to cryogenic temperatures. From bottom to top, there were thirty-two distinct rings of little magnets, each of which completely encircled the cavity—the ODEC’s inner vessel. The rings were stacked one above the next, spanning the full height of the cavity. The Maxes had mounted an LED on each ring. It was red when the magnets were warm, but turned blue when they had gone superconducting. Over the course of a couple of minutes we enjoyed the simple but weirdly exciting spectacle of watching that column of LEDs turn from red to blue, from the bottom to the top.
“We have full criticality,” Oda announced when the uppermost one turned blue.
I had found myself standing next to Rebecca. On an impulse, I turned toward her and raised my hand, palm facing out. Startled by the movement, she swiveled her head to place me under her blue-eyed gaze. It was like staring into a couple of those LEDs.
It occurred to me that she might not recognize the gesture. “High five?” I said weakly. She looked away as if hoping that the whole regrettable incident could be forgotten.
Meanwhile her husband was busy. “Internal sensor calibration matrix has been computed and flashed to embedded firmware. Ready to boot the renormalization feedback loop, Vladimirs?”
“Check!” shouted a Vladimir from the server room.
“Booting it,” Oda said, and reached out toward one of the very few mechanical switches on the console. It was military hardware, eBayed (Tristan boasted) from some collector of Cold War electrical components. It had a protective cover that had to be flipped up out of the way to provide access to the switch itself, imbuing it with more ceremony.
I nearly suffered a heart attack after Oda snapped the switch to “on”: an alarm Klaxon began to sound and it happened to be mounted directly above my head. I jammed my hands over my ears and pivoted away from it; Rebecca was doing the same, in mirror image. At the same time the room lights dimmed, flickered, and went out, prompting battery-powered red emergency lights to switch on. I tripped over a discarded fire extinguisher and staggered a couple of paces, finally breaking my fall by colliding with a rolling coatrack that had been set up to one side of the console. This had been stocked, for some reason, with a row of snowmobile suits in various sizes and colors. They were soft, and cushioned my fall as I knocked the whole thing over and went down onto the floor. It must have made a loud noise. No one noticed because of the Klaxon.
Tristan was either a perfect gentleman or no gentleman at all. At the moment he was too fascinated by goings-on surrounding the ODEC to know that I had taken a pratfall. Probably just as well. I clambered to my feet and reached into my pocket, where I’d got in the habit of stowing a pair of foam earplugs. Recently I had been using them when operating power saws, but they were just what I needed now.
Tristan signaled Oda to switch the power off. The Klaxon went silent. The room lights flickered back—this took a few moments, since one of the Vladimirs had to run to the electrical panel and flip a number of circuit breakers back on. The collective excitement of the room palpably dissipated. So much drama, so many sound and visual effects, for—what?
“Anything?” Tristan inquired.
“The data loggers inside the cavity all went dead. Completely zorched, as far as I can tell,” Oda said. The words sounded like bad news but his tone of voice implied fascination.
“So we don’t even know if anything happened in there.”
“Something friggin’ happened,” insisted the most long-bearded of the Vladimirs, who had just stormed in from the server room. “While that thing was on, we ran a ridiculous amount of data through our servers.”
“How much?” I asked.
He looked exasperated. “Enough that I could make up some kind of strained analogy involving the contents of the Library of Congress and the number of pixels in all of the Lord of the Rings movies put together and how many phone calls the NSA intercepts in a single day and you would be like, ‘Holy shit, that’s a lot.’”
“Holy shit, that’s a lot!” I exclaimed dutifully.
“And as to the amount of computational processing performed on that data, using Professor Oda’s algorithms—well—same basic story.”
“Fantastic,” I purred.
“I believe you,” Tristan said, “it’s just that we don’t appear to have any data on what actually happened in there.”
“Confirmed,” Oda said. “The renormalization loop appears to interfere with normal functioning