Chapter 3 - subtitle
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The Apathetic City
On the coast, around the enormous obelisks which seemed to have been uprooted by a capricious giant, a small human was walking, curiously illuminated in the night. She stood up. They should not explore here. They should not be disturbed.
“Claire, I miss Four Events Before Greatness.” A small person, looking exactly like Phoebe, in the same white and blue dress Phoebe was still in yesterday, was tugging at Claire’s dress, who took a chair and put the petite person on the table, at eye level.
“Already ? And you said you found her antics annoying just yesterday, Seven Omen” Claire said with a warm smile. “In a lot of way she will be a different person when she will be back. She’s on a trip to find herself, and I hope I’ll find a way to send each of you toward that at some point.”
“Is she happy at least ?” The petite lady seemed worried but also a bit vexed to be left behind.
“Right now, she’s mostly overwhelmed. But I am sure she will think of you this night, when things will have calmed down. I do think you have a bond that will endure throught your transformations. And she may need your help at some point.”
The petite lady perked up, visibly interested. “My help ?”
Églantine and Phoebe were running toward the train ; the poor Phoebe had a very hard time keeping up, her short legs could only go so fast.
“Sorry … to have .. slept up” apologized Églantine.
“If you have the breath to talk, maybe you could carry me ?” acidly said Phoebe. She was running as fast as her small legs could get her.
Eglantine then she noticed the board and stopped running. “you … can … stop, the train… have a delay”
“Oh. Let me help you with that bag if we aren’t in a hurry.” Phoebe took one of the bag, whose bulk was awkward for her, but she did not seem to mind its weight. Églantine was grateful for the help albeit was amazed the little ladette was not even out of breath after running at full speed for a full five minutes.
“So, what did you find on that mysterious and hermetic spare part maker ?” asked Phoebe. The train was almost empty so they had commandeered the entire table to prepare their reportage. Églantine had her computer open for notes, and had put on her tablets a map of the area.
“Not a tons. But it’s curious. Zeppelin Manufacturing use CNC machines and 3D printers to do subcontracting work, and had a long reputation of low price, weak quality control, and bad service. Since around two year ago apparently they got much better in term of quality, but also there start to be rumors of industrial piracy. Curiously they seem to not have even bothered from removing the logos of TSMC or Valeo from the final product.”
“That’s pretty odd indeed. Maybe their deal with Tony is that he shield them from legal consequences, or something like that ?”
“There’s that, but also, you can’t make chips with CNC machines and 3D printers. That’s an entirely different industry, and a hard one to set up. And then there’s these reactors parts, which seem to need a furnace and metallurgic equipments they also don’t seem to have.”
“How big are their factories ? Maybe they use an essence replicator. But these things are gigantic and absolutely guzzle energy, so looking at their infrastructure could tell us”
Églantine looked alarmed. “Essence replicator ?”
“Yeah, these things that use a tunnel effect to force a quantuum duplication, then stabilize it with liberal amount of energy to deal with the conservation of mass. They are pretty harshly constrained in term of maximum size, but given the biggest piece you showed is the size of my thumb that seem possible” said Phoebe.
Phoebe continued, ignoring the visible skepticism of Églantine. “Look at these giant building on the map. There’s a big substation just near, that could be that”
“That’s not in their factories. It’s one of these abandoned projects of giant data center.” Églantine checked something on Internet. “This one was slightly more finished than average and did get a power link, but it’s still just empty halls now, the servers were never installed.”
“Empty ? I bet you a Moretti it isn’t. We should have a couple of hours to sightsee these “empty datacenters” after our arrival. Your interview is tomorrow, right ?”
“Yeah, the interview is not on a sunday.” Églantine was curious, but annoyed at Phoebe pulling some sci-fi nonsense as if it were real.
Églantine parked the rental car in front of an abandoned store. That neigborhood seem to have had better days. The low hum of gas turbins was audible in the background.
“Empty buildings usually don’t hum.” said Phoebe, approaching the barbed wire barrier. “There’s cameras, too.”
“So what’s your plan ? Getting arrested by the cops ?”
“That row of camera is not powered.” she pointed at a dilapited cord in the grass that was supplying the camera. “And that gate is climbable, with just a bit of barbed wire on top. Once on the other side I should be able to open it to you.”
Églantine was not trilled about breaking and entering, but she was curious and suspicious. The site have almost twenty gigawatts of power accessible from the substation, why would they need gas turbines on top of that ?
While she was lost in her thoughts, Phoebe quickly climbed the gate, grabbed the barbed wire at the top and did an acrobatic flip over the top, landing elegantly on the grass of the other side. She then unlocked the gate.
Églantine was surprised both by Phoebe’s speed and how she grabbed barbed wire in her hand, and they don’t even seem bruised.
“easy peasy. I am not sure it even count as trying to keep people out of here.” She seemed extremely proud of herself. Églantine sighted and followed her inside.
The surrounding area was starting to get reclaimed by grass and small trees, but the doors and building seemed clean and kept in order. She opened the door of the massive building easily, and the generators howl escaped through. There were rows of mobile turbines in container, she could see at least twenty of them just on this floor. Their noise and vibrations permeated everything to an uncomfortable degree. Phoebe started to cover her ears, visibly distressed by the amount
“They sure seem to use an alarming amount of power here” said Églantine, while taking a picture the closest one, a reconditioned airbus engine. The outline of the logo of KLM, the airline who used it was still visible. She thought about how horribly inefficient these turbines are ; how can it be cost effective ?
The team examined a couple of them, visibly reconditioned engine from various airline. Then Églantine noticed something
“Do you see the faded logo on that one ?”
“Yeah, it’s KLM. You can still see the bottom of the L.”
“Look at that picture.” Églantine showed the picture of the first engine. “They are faded in the exact same way.” Phoebe nodded. “Could it be they used, how you called it, an essence whatchamanig to duplicate whole turbines ?”
“No, no. The biggest practical size is like one centimeter. The essence chamber would need to be gigantic, and the consumption scale with the cube of the size.”
“they are using several gigawatts of power.”
“Uhm, you underestimate cube law. They would need around 25% of the world energy output to be in the ballpark of what it would be needed for something as big as that. Outside of the fact that scaling the chamber itself would be impossibly hard. A centimeter scale one, cooled to -273° kelvin, typically only last three to four hours.”
That sentence still seemed entirely out of a comic book to Églantine. She litterally did reports for an industry newspaper and never heard of that, and her physic classes are screaming that this is nonsense.
“So do you have a better explanation ?”
“Not really. I wonder if they are doing paratech here” said Phoebe.
“Paratech ?” Églantine said, quizzically
“You don’t know what paratech is ?”
Églantine nodded.
“My caretaker explained me a bit about. Technology is, essentially, the application of Truth to Reality for our benefit. There’s four kind of it ; the first one is tech, which is when we apply Truth in ways we fully understand. That lead to reliable, reasonably intuitive things like agriculture, steam power, television, and the like.” Four Events Before Greatness suddenly had an extremely academic tone.
“super tech is when we try to wrangle Truths we don’t quite understand yet, but where we are fundamentally correct, just unclear on the detail. That discrepancy lead to it being unstable, temperamental, hard to reproduce ; but with time and better understanding, it became tech over time. Things like nuclear powers, silicon chips, or cosmology were or are currently super tech. These are dangerous, but still predictable enough to be used, and of course there’s degree, nuclear technology in 1945 was much less stable than today. Essence duplication is also supertech, and at its earliest stage to boot”
That’s an odd framing, but for now it make reasonable sense thought Églantine. this seem to describe the tech used by Tony S. pretty well, given he seem unwilling or unable to reproduce and sell it
“then there’s paratech. Paratech rely on ambiguity and gaps between reality and Truth. On surface it look like super tech, but it fundamentally cannot be stabilized, and it tend to have corrosive effect on the mind of people who try to. It’s pretty rare because it tend to destroy both itself and anyone who study it. Some of Tesla or Cantor’s work delved into it, and we know how well it turned out for them.”
“Lastly, there’s untech. Untech is lies applied upon Reality, under a veneer of regular technology to hide it. These lies are malicious, destructive, but self-sustaining ; they are an extrem danger the rare few time it happen. The good thing is that the mind of pretty much any living being have developped over aeons defenses to refuse to it and shut down thoughts that would lead to it. The rare time it happen it’s linked to paratech researchers whose mind get damaged in a way where the barriers get destroyed, but the higher thoughts aren’t. My caretaker was very opposed to any discussions of it, but did point as an example the portal researchers in California. They tried to stabilize a paratech pocket dimension they wanted to use as a way to get cheap storage. Their efforts led to the Loma Prieta earthquake, and that pocket dimensions degenerating into ravenous lies that kidnapped people around the area, grew uncontrollably, and were threatening the entirety of California before being shut down. She did not elaborate on that shutting down but that was unlikely to be a pretty process.”
“That both make too much and too little sense. But more to the point, if they do what you call paratech, what do we do ? Do we call the authorities ?”
“We’ll think about that later.” It was clear that Phoebe had no ideas of what would be the correct course of action. “Also, do you have ear plugs or something ? This is unbearable.”
They followed the power cords linking the turbines outside. The night have fallen and Églantine took a picture of the sky. They entered the second building, just as full of turbines as the first. The cords then led to a metallic gate in the wall, big enough to let a truck through, and a construction container nearby seemed to hold the controls of the site. Inside, there were a computer with monitoring graphs and a stack of document. The sound of the turbines was almost unbearable, and the whole container vibrated so much it felt wobbly.
“They generate a cool 4.5 gigawatt with these turbines.” She looked at the screen and notes. “Everything is in german, sadly.”
“Oh, I do happen to speak german” said Phoebe. She jumped on the table and started reading. “It’s… not very clear.” Phoebe visibly struggled with her german. “I think it’s exploitation logs. The foreman complaint about how fast they go throught turbines. They also talk about problem with the … glazier processus ? Or maybe the Glaserin processus ? Not clear if it’s a proper noun or not. Anyways it seem to be linked with the turbines. There’s also worries about the health of the staff, with hallucinations, vomiting, and sleep troubles recorded.”
Phoebe was lost in thought. She had recognized the name Glaserin from the identity papers that Claire gave her. Coincidence ? Phoebe don’t really believe in them, and doubly not when Claire is involved.
“I can see how people working in that noise could be ill”. As if on cue, Églantine sight failed and everything faded to black for a moment while she was getting dizzy.
“Églantine !” Phoebe pushed Églantine outside. “Are you well ?”
“Better now. Dunno what happened, but that whole building vibrating like a violin is making a number on me.”
Their steps were brisk while they were exiting the building. Phoebe re-locked the door before climbing it again, and noticed Églantine anxiously looking at the east.
“Something have spooked you, Églantine.”
“The sun.” Églantine said, pointing to the sun in the east, low but quite above the horizon. “How come it was night when we got to the second building ?”
Églantine nodded. “Let’s go to the hotel.”
After putting their baggage in their room, Églantine and Phoebe searched for a restaurant and went to a clean but soulless fried chicken shop nearby. They took a box of fried chicken and a large frie, and installed themselves at a table in the empty restaurant. Églantine was still reeling from her earlier experience, and being reminded of it by the faint hum of the turbine definitely didn’t help. She could not say if she was still feeling the vibrations from these, or if it was her memory toying with her.
Visibly, Phoebe did not feel much better. She was much less upbeat than usual and was shivering, almost shaking. Églantine looked at her methodically removing all bits of meat from the chicken bone, then eating the cartilage. She was almost surprise she didn’t eat the whole bone.
“Since they talk about hallucinations in their notes, maybe the night sky between the buildings was one ? That permanent noise was really something” said Églantine.
Phoebe dropped her chicken bone, jumped on the table, and said clinically “I remember you taking a picture of these stars.”
Églantine took out her phone, put it on the table near Phoebe, and showed the image gallery of her phones. She clicked on the one of a night sky, and her vision blackened a little. “That is definitely an old picture.” said Églantine while shaking and moving her finger to the delete button.
Phoebe reacted quickly by swiping the screen to select another picture before deletion, and shouted “No. KEEP. THAT. PICTURE.” She did not really look angry, but she did look extremely determinated.
Églantine backed down in surprise, colliding with the white tiles of the wall. “Why ? I often take random night sky pictures, and I am almost out of space !” Despite her tone, Églantine looked shaken. The shop attendant noticed the voice, but looked with indifference to the scene.
Phoebe moved to take Églantine’s hand ; her warm, very firm flesh, was both alien and comforting. “Églantine. Get a hold of yourself. You clearly took this picture on purpose. To prove we didn’t daydream”
Églantine slumped on the table, almost overturning it and Phoebe with it ; she took a step back, then silently moved to hug the head of Églantine.
“I apologize for insisting on checking this building. It’s a bad place, made by unscrupulous people. We’re in it together, and there’s no shame in having that place get to you.” Her voice betrayed a bit of distress over the situation.
Églantine regained a bit of composure and stood up, Phoebe cradled in her arms. “You’re actually right. We need to find what are they doing, and we need to put a stop to it.”
When the pair of them exited the building, the attendant remarked “Since they installed that factory a lot of people sleep badly and are stressed. You’re not the first one who have a meltdown because of the whole …” The attendant gestured toward the industrial zone “… atmosphere. Peoples are leaving. Some are angry but by now it’s the biggest employer of the city, so what can we do ?”
Églantine was resolute. “Quite a lot, actually. I have helped community force corporations to respect them in the past, I can do it again.”