A mechanical chime sounded as an instant message sprang up. “I waited the ENTIRE DAY. Where were you?” She had changed her profile picture again, this time to an artsy-looking purple blur.
I went to the couch and nudged Tristan. Deep asleep, he almost instantly awoke and leapt to his feet, shoving me sideways without registering my identity, glancing around for an assailant.
“It’s just me,” I said with irritation. “Calm down.”
“You startled me,” he said, as if I should have known better.
I gestured to my phone. “Take a look at this.”
Even as I showed him her comments, our exchange, and her blank “About” page, several more prompts popped up on the bottom of the screen with mechanical chimes, as Miss Karpathy informed me she could see I was online and why was I not answering?
Tristan considered the screen a moment. “The Vladimirs have been all over this. Intriguing-slash-disturbing-in-the-extreme. Tell her you’ll speak to her tomorrow. Today’s got to be about the dry run.”
I tapped in, “Sorry. Will be with you tomorrow evening.”
Immediately the response: “Why the delay?”
“Technical difficulties,” I typed.
“With the ODEC?” she typed back instantly.
I looked at Tristan. “Jesus,” he said under his breath. “Who is she?” He moved closer to the screen and nudged my shoulder with his. “Tell her you can’t discuss it online,” he whispered, as if worried of being overheard by somebody. I typed this in, and a response came back:
“Will you come with your Mr. Tristan Lyons?” she typed back. “I wish to meet him.”
I looked up over my shoulder at my Mr. Tristan Lyons. He nodded, staring at the screen.
“We could go now,” I suggested.
He shook his head. “We don’t know what we’re getting into. Tell her yes, I’ll come with you. But tomorrow.”
“With Mr. Tristan Lyons,” I typed. “Tomorrow evening.”
“Come before 6 p.m. or it will be harder to leave because of the Night Guard.”
We both continued to stare at the screen for a moment in silence. Then Tristan reached out and gently took the phone from my hand, tossed it on to the couch.
“Can’t wait to hear the explanation,” he said, sounding weary. Then, with a tired grin down at me: “Funny how she called me your Mr. Tristan Lyons.”
I felt my face flush. “Maybe she’s dealt with another Tristan Lyons,” I said. “Surely the multiverse contains more than one. The coffee’s ready.”
“Good,” he said, “because so is the ODEC.”
During my sojourn to Salem, the crew had mounted all of the circuit boards to the walls of the inner cavity and also bolted in the electromagnets; these were mounted to a sturdy framework of steel angle irons that had been welded together around the external tank. Black melted areas on the floor suggested that welding sparks had set the occasional odd fire to the carpet; larger burns were surrounded by penumbras of powder that had apparently been shot out of the various fire extinguishers, which now lay scattered around the floor like empty beer bottles after a frat party. As Tristan led me in, he absentmindedly nudged these out of the way with his foot, cautioning me to watch my step.
“Did your friends come through with the liquid helium?” I asked. Certainly the first time in my life I had uttered that sentence.
“They will.”
“That’s a no?”
“We’re testing it with liquid nitrogen. Much cheaper.”
As 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.