Zolitude by Paige Cooper

Author:Paige Cooper
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Biblioasis
Published: 2018-01-03T18:31:33+00:00

Record of Working

His physicists leave their idiot mistakes smeared across their tables, and during the night Arthur marks his corrections. In the morning nonconformity meetings they raise their insulted eyebrows—he has not sourced incompetents, they believe they can police themselves—but there are mossier issues: embedment plaques poxing the housing assembly; blue-sky disruption mitigation schemes from Garching and Palo Alto; lists of additions to the already-biblical ark of conductor metals. His team of design integrators are only four now, and every day at eighteen hundred hours the updates are re-disseminated with deviations flagged in green. At the workstations, bleary engineers take these changes, sometimes, as incidental.

Arthur, the first and only Director General of the project, chides grown men like a grade school math teacher. He stalks around in deep-pocketed camouflage trousers and an old Cambridge rowing blazer. The project is six years old. It is three years and nine months behind schedule. Every day of work costs into the millions: the precise number fluctuates, given the exchange rates on the thirteen different currencies involved, many of which are inflating hideously. Every few months the accountants come from their Domestic Agencies and sit behind their stiff little flags at the horseshoe dais in the glass-walled amphitheatre on Level 6. Up there they can look out over the entire compound: the reactor’s seismic isolation pit populated by four hundred and ninety-three concrete plinths, the trailers, the machines, the debris. At night the military bathes everything in starry silver spotlights. In the centre of the pit, one hundred and sixty degrees of the ring fortress is black, hollow as a promise.

What Arthur has told them: to reach breakeven, plasma must stream—or drift, or sawtooth, or tear—in a four hundred second pulse. And then again, and again. One day it will be self-sustaining. The scale is critical. The Venezuelan Domestic Agency complains of the concrete shortage, but it’s food shortages causing the riots. Of course it’s severe. The forest is virginal. The sea eats the cliffs under colonial ruins. Energy will be delivered in milk bottles every morning. This was Arthur’s vision and everyone understands that his visions come true. For instance, the Elemental Woman waits sleeping in his bed. And the sun achieved ignition, did it not?

Redout coughs and delays, but Arthur, who has never been later than forty-five seconds for anything, is absent. Ten minutes pass. Redout reads emails. Sunlight at this hour tracks across the blue jungle, but doesn’t angle inside the room. The noise of the construction in the pit is muted, but given enough time it accretes in the skull, sludges the blood vessels. Every so often a concussion shivers his collar, and reminds him of other, lesser reactors that have failed: cataclysms even when they were the size of kitchen tables.

Greenhalgh and Boucher drain their coffees and scowl at the green scrawls on their schematics. Van der Meer types on his phone. Six others are wilfully late. Seventeen have cancelled their attendance on a temporary or permanent basis. It’s May.

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