The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O.. Nicole Galland

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СКАЧАТЬ if on cue, the persistent, infuriating beep-beep-beep of a truck’s backup alarm sounded from the street; we could hear it through the roll-up door at the loading dock.

      “Woo hoo hoo!” Tristan shouted. “LN2! Up and at ’em, folks!” He strode down the tank right-of-way to the loading dock and hit the button that opened the dock door. A semi-trailer rig consisting largely of a large white sausage-shaped tank was backing down the ramp from the street, scattering nests of rats and pissing off seagulls. Suddenly there were weary-looking Maxes and Vladimirs all over the place. In block letters that could be seen from space, the truck was labeled LIQUID NITROGEN. Ah, of course: liquid nitrogen, aka LN2. After Tristan’s brief, disgustingly cheerful exchange with the driver, hoses were connected between his truck and some storage tanks that, in my absence, had been crudely bolted into the concrete walls of the building. Impressive whining noises came from a thing that, I was informed, was a cryogenic pump. When the LN2 first hit the warm innards of the storage tanks, there was an amount of hissing that defied description, unless you have ever heard all of the bacon in Iowa being dropped onto a red-hot griddle the size of Delaware. With that was a concomitant amount of milky, chilly fog. Tristan grabbed me by the arm and dragged me out of the building. “Non-toxic,” he assured me, “but—”

      “But I need oxygen.”

      “Yeah. I knew I liked you, Stokes.”

      “Is this why the ODEC contains life support equipment?”

      He shrugged modestly. “There are certain failure modes,” he said, “such as freezing to death and asphyxiating, that come naturally to mind when we are getting ready to lock human subjects in a sealed chamber completely surrounded by cryogenic fluids chilled to within four degrees of absolute zero.”

      That initial spasm of hissing and fog production was because the walls of the tank were at room temperature. Once they had been chilled down, the pumping of the LN2 continued with no more drama than if it had been tap water. The fog dissipated and Tristan made a decision, which I assumed was science-based, that it was safe to go back inside. I followed him through the loading dock doors, past the tanks, and all the way to the door of the ODEC, which now stood ajar. I took a small step up to stand on its threshold, and had a look around.

      Every square inch of the cavity’s interior surfaces, including its floor and ceiling, had now been tiled with circuit boards: plates of green plastic covered with fine traceries of orange-red copper and studded with electronic components. Most of these were the tiny black rectangles of integrated circuits, but there were also LEDs blinking in a range of colors. Dangling from the ceiling by their hoses was a pair of oxygen masks—part of the life support equipment, clearly: should helium leak into the cavity and displace the breathable air, its occupants could pull these down and strap them over their faces. (I was never a hard-science chick, but my high school chemistry teacher near enough resembled Orlando Bloom that I had diligently aced the class.)

      Still balanced on the raised threshold, I turned around to look out the ODEC door into the space surrounding the chamber. Where the head of the conference table had formerly stood was a control console, attached to the ODEC by a large plastic pipe, channeling gouts of cables. Above it, a cable ladder from the server room disgorged a waterfall of Ethernet cables and fiber-optic lines. Seated at the console, running through some kind of checklist on an iPad, was the probably-Korean Max. Oda-sensei and his wife, Rebecca, were watching over his shoulder.

      “Wow,” I said from the threshold.

      “Right?” chirped Tristan happily. Somewhat unnecessarily, he extended a hand to assist me back down to the floor. “The professor is giddy. Tell him he should throw the switch.”

      “It is your project,” Oda-sensei said peaceably, sipping coffee from a blue thermos. “The honor should be yours.”

      “It was your project first! We’ve been arguing about this all week,” said Tristan to me with a grin. “You call it, Stokes.”

      I called it in favor of Oda, and Tristan saluted him with a flourish more Renaissance than military. Tristan then closed the ODEC door and engaged several massive mechanical latches.

      With a childish, nervous smile, Oda-sensei handed off the thermos to Rebecca, then responded to Tristan with a gesture something between a nod and a bow. Console Max stood up, stepped back from the console, and made a similar gesture, inviting him to sit down. Oda, with a little don’t mind if I do smile, took the Seat of Authority behind the console and pulled on a communications headset.

      There was one moment of potent, expectant stillness. What a thrill this must be for him, I remember thinking. I was desperately curious. The enormousness of it far exceeded my urgency to discuss Erszebet Karpathy.

      “Exterior vent ports open,” Oda intoned.

      I had no idea what he was talking about until I heard the familiar rumble and groan of the loading dock door being hauled up. “Check,” shouted a Max. He was echoed by another Max who had just opened the door that fronted the street.

      “Atmospheric exchange augmentation systems to full power,” Oda said.

      Tristan darted over 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 СКАЧАТЬ