“But it would have been cooler if you had to carry me out strapped to a back board. I know,” Tristan said ruefully. “Vladimir? Got anything for me?”
The Vladimir with red hair was strolling carefully into the space, kicking fire extinguishers and empty Red Bull cans out of his way while studying an iPad. “Preliminary diagnostics suggest a large number of wedged processes. Probably a bug we can fix overnight.”
“What does that mean?”
“The ODEC was running at maybe one percent efficiency.”
“Sounds like you have a long night ahead of you, then,” Tristan said.
Diachronicle
DAY 291
In which we become decoherent
WHEN I ARRIVED THE NEXT morning, Frank Oda was already there, and with him—arms crossed, slightly pacing—Rebecca. Two of the Vladimirs were lying on the server room floor asleep. Longbeard was in our little kitchen, supporting himself on his elbows and gazing fixedly into a cup of coffee.
On Tristan’s cue we all resumed the places we had occupied for the previous day’s failed experiment. The vessels had remained filled with liquid nitrogen overnight, so there was no need to repeat the chill-down process. Tristan donned his snowmobile suit—it would be just about freezing in the chamber itself—and gave us all a grin and a thumbs-up signal, before walking into the ODEC and closing the door behind himself.
Oda-sensei seated himself at the console and ran through the checks, then flipped the switch. Someone had zip-tied a blanket over the Klaxon to dampen the volume. The surge of electricity sent shivers down my spine. Something was about to happen now. I’d no idea what, but I knew that it was history in the making, and I was present for it and not grading papers, and that was extremely satisfying.
For fifteen seconds, Oda watched, frozen, and we all watched him. Then he shut it down. In the silence that followed we could hear the Vladimirs celebrating.
Tristan exited the ODEC clutching the sides of his head and staggering drunkenly in his snowsuit. On instinct I moved toward him to steady him, but he veered away from me and collapsed, kneeling, to the floor, looking dazed.
“Yeah, we’re, um, we’re getting, eh, closer,” he said in a distracted voice, peeling off the balaclava, and then yawned. He looked up at Oda-sensei. “Did I fall asleep? How long was I there for?”
“Fifteen seconds,” said the professor, surprised.
Tristan shook his head and slapped his cheek a few times. “Well, we’re onto something, then—whatever happened to me the first time, lots more of it happened this time.” He grimaced and tried to shake it off.
Journal Entry of
Rebecca East-Oda
MAY 15
Temperature 66F, bright sun. Barometer falling.
Peppers and chard germinated. Lilies of the valley in full bloom. Lilacs at peak. Swapped out storm windows for screens (finally).
Work on the new ODEC continues, and has become the sole topic of discourse in the house. Frank is just as obsessed as he was the first time. I read over my diary from back then, and must remind myself that this time at least he is working with a willing and supportive cohort (besides me, I mean). Jury still out for me re: Tristan. Prefer Melisande but she’s not in charge. (Not clear if their relationship is personal or just professional. Not sure they’re clear either.)
The schedule has been extended by two days to accommodate upgrades to the software, and improvements to the building’s electrical service. Whomever Tristan works for takes him seriously; Frank faced endless red tape whenever he requisitioned extension cords, for heaven’s sake.
Two concerns regarding this project, besides the obvious reservations.
First: Tristan insists on being inside the ODEC while it is in operation. He can’t understand how that makes him the observed, not the observer. Uncle Victor’s Labrador retriever is in charge.
Second: Frank—satisfied to be working on the physics—turns a blind eye to the supposed application. Magic. There are Powers That Be who take the Magic premise seriously enough to buy Tristan a building and send him tanker trucks of liquid helium without any paperwork. Hard to reconcile this with common sense. Frank heedless.
Also, Mel is concerned about a woman who contacted her claiming she can do magic. T&M’s rendezvous with this woman has been delayed several times, and the woman is becoming verbally abusive. This does not stop them from intending to meet her, which will possibly happen tomorrow after the next ODEC go-round.
Diachronicle
DAY 294
In which we become even more decoherent
TWO DAYS LATER, WHEN THE liquid helium showed up in the unmarked stainless steel tanker truck, Tristan velcroed and zipped himself into a snowmobile suit, gave us the thumbs-up, and stepped up into the ODEC, where, just for safety’s sake, he pulled on an oxygen mask. Apparently liquid helium was adept at finding and seeping through the tiniest leaks, so the cavity might fill up with helium and asphyxiate him before he knew it was happening. Once again, Oda walked around the building going through his checklist, and took his place before the console. By now, our expectancy was tempered by experience.
Liquid helium, as I now knew, was fifty times as expensive as the liquid nitrogen we had been using, and a lot colder. Nitrogen became a liquid at 77 degrees above absolute zero (the point at which atoms would stop moving, if such a state could be reached), but to do the same trick with helium you had to chill it all the way down to a mere 4 degrees. By the standards of the normal human world, it was a distinction without a difference—both were very, very cold. But to scientists like Oda, there was a world of difference between 4 degrees and 77. The liquid helium jacketing the ODEC would have radically different properties from LN2—properties explainable in terms of Bose-Einstein statistics, an advanced concept in quantum mechanics that Tristan barely understood and I couldn’t make sense of at all. The gist of it seemed to be that the liquid helium would cloak the inner cavity of the ODEC inside a seamless jacket of matter, all of which was in the same quantum state. This was supposed to have some effect of isolating the cavity from the rest of the universe quantum-mechanically, and greatly intensifying its effects.
Cold as they were, the plumbing and the vessels were still boiling hot by liquid helium standards, and so after the LN2 had been pumped out we had to go through another cycle of “atmospheric exchange augmentation” out the “exterior vent ports” before the system settled down. The digital thermometers began to read dramatically lower temperatures.
Once the system had stabilized at 4 degrees above absolute zero—negative 269 degrees Celsius—Oda flipped the switch. This time he let the system run for only five seconds before turning it back off.