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originaldetectivesheep · 6 years

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A Life of Riley Part 4: The Dumptrucks of the Gods ch 4

Chapter 3

With all the work that we had to do in the lab over the next two weeks, I almost forgot about Mel and the fish – Mel and her bizarre grinckle-reducing station that turned out to be, exactly as Carolína must have half-suspected, dug in to the machine room under the undergrad lab members' condo. She was down there, under a fume hood with a gas mask and a kitchen knife, probably making the ghost antsy by stealing its food to run through her essentializing processes, and after we'd finished getting all of the rest of the dislocator parts out of the machine room, we were back day and night in the lab, finishing the assembly as Riley converted prior versions of the dislocation machinery into this new so-called Raging Potato. I slept under the drill press again, missing Simon terribly, and in every waking moment I ate, drank, sat, fidgeted and daydreamed high-energy physics and circuit design. In a fugue of machinery noise from everyone working around us mixed with abrasive Ash Borer and Netra echoes from the buds on the top of my ears, I worked and reworked the abstract mathematical calculations required to parse through the state space, built DIs and cannibalized old printer cables into control harnesses, and fabricated random chunks of metal to Riley's inexplicable, incomprehensible blueprints.

We were all in; all of us, Carolína and Sajitha and Riley and me switching on and off through every single part of the Potato's subsystems from control software to turning bolts in the outer housing, and because the work was so great, and Riley was so adamant about its completion, we ended up impressing the others: Leo assembling parts together, running harnesses and checking cables, and Remy building the larger parts of the frame together and checking the composition of our few coolant or hydraulic systems, making sure there wouldn't be a corrosion or fault risk once the horrific energies we planned to operate at started thundering through this imposing pile of metal and wire wrapped around the better part of a thermonuclear bomb. There was well more than enough work for all of us – even as we got the frame assembled and the control systems built and integrated, there was always something more to do: automation routines that needed optimization, heavy-duty power cables from the capacitor cells in to the reactor that needed to be audited and repaired, more capacitor power supplies that just needed to be built and sealed and tested for function. Check it, test it, rebuild it, repeat, continue.

I was in the middle of one of these cycles adding in a few functions to the control software for the power-transfer circuit board that was going to manage the dump-in of the initiation energy for us – there were too many supplies and not enough cables to do this by hand – when Riley brought me out of my trance, banging on the top of my monitor with a wrench. "Yuping! Yuping! Wake up! Are you done with the commit on the state-pathing decider? What are you working on?"

I blinked and pulled my earbuds out. "Yes, finished; commit is done back and build is building. Making new control break in power-transfer onboard controller; almost done."

Riley held up a hand. "Don't bother. What we have should be good enough – if the lab doesn't melt when we shoot this off, we'll think about improvements for v2. For right now, I need you to back up your station onto the department cloud share, and anything important that you have local on your phone or a flash drive, any paper drawings that you have notes on that you didn't put over to digital anywhere, you need to come over and throw it in Leo's duffel bag." I stood up, following Riley's thumb back over to the doorway, where Carolína was struggling with a stack of rolled-up paper schematics and how to fit them into a barely-large-enough duffel that looked to already have a couple laptops inside.

I leaned back over and started the backup, then ejected my thumb drive and took the headphone cord out of my phone. "Okay," I said, "Only drive and phone, not much on them, but why?" Riley was already heading back over, and I followed, hoping for some kind of explanation before I got there. There was a strange tang in the air, a taste even beyond the usual strange tastes we got in the lab from ozone and atmospheric metal pollution – a feeling like something was about to happen, like we were about to cross over a border.

"Your phone goes in the bag because I want to insulate us from observer effect," Riley said, shuffling at the insides of the duffel to make room, "and we're doing the backup and loading in everyone's removable data because I'm like eighty percent sure that after we go up, any state that we transition back to is going to be one where we smashed the Potato right up through the goddamn roof, and the lab is going to be wrecked." I pulled up, stunned, thumb still on my phone, and Riley noticed, hastening with more of the explanation.

"Mel texted me a couple minutes back, and the grinckle potion is good to go. So, we're going. I know there's stuff that we want to fix, that we want to get improved, but we've been more or less ready to start up the Potato for most of the last fifteen hours, and it just happens that Mel is done with the fish stuff right when we're coming up on a flyby window where we'll have a relatively less-shitty path up to the ship. I'd prefer to go in another three hours, when they'll be on their closest approach, but apparently there is some garbage about the fish chemicals having to be fresh that would make that harder – I don't pretend to know chemistry, much less alchemy, so I'm taking Mel's word on this one – and so we're going now, or at least as close to 'now' as we can get all our shit together.

"The cannon is loaded. There are a couple of our modded nailguns already inside. If you want to take a machete or something to mess up any aliens in person, you can go and take it. Sajitha's downstairs picking up confined-space rebreathers from her co-workers in Facilities in case the oxygen concentrations inside the grinckle spawn areas are shitty. And Melanie is on the way over with this filterized and essentialized or whatever theoretical pure concentration of grinckleness, which according to the stuff she was putting out in alternative journals about ham and crap, probably ought to modify our state coherence enough that a path to the grinckle originating point will be doable with our energy budget if we can get a close enough approach."

I was trying to think this through, to put all the pieces together, and with that, I could finally speak. "Riley," I said, "so – plan is – plan is start up Potato and go to space? To stop grinckles by fighting alien?"

Riley nodded, like there wasn't anything wrong or crazy in that sentence at all. "Yeah, that's about the shape of it. Maybe we'll be able to rip them to bits with the cannon and that'll be it, or maybe the satellite is an automated probe that someone else somewhere else is using to strew grinckles for the lulz, but if there are aliens on this alien satellite or alien spaceship, we're going to go kick the shit out of them till they stop. You think we're not set up for it? I think that between the five of us we should have things pretty well under control: the nailguns aren't that great, but Remy's a taekwondo champ, Carolína's a mean hand with a machete, you're not so bad with one either, and I certainly wouldn't want to be in front of Sajitha when she's got her brass knuckles and a mad on. Maybe some molotovs would help, but I dunno if we've got the time to buy gas, or if they'd burn in that atmosphere." As usual, Riley was looking at this as a purely operational problem, with any ideas about the wisdom of going to space in an iron bucket by shifting its quantum reference frame to go fight aliens in the first place completely ignored.

"Five?" I asked, "Not Leo?" I wasn't looking to try and talk Riley out of this plan, or to poke holes in it – I certainly didn't have a better and smarter idea for us or anyone else to do something about something that wasn't just in orbit but discontinuous with the observed local quantum state – but if I was going to go to orbit strapped in on top of a nuclear bomb, I wanted to have as much information about what we were trying to do as I could get.

"If you haven't noticed, it is kind of super cramped inside the Potato," Riley said, nodding over at the massive pile of steel and cables hogging most of the middle of the lab, "and even five is pushing it, but we can fit, and I need as much skills as we can lift up. Honestly, I really wish that I could leave you here and take Leo, because you're the only one on the crew that's really attached to anyone not stuck in it with us, but even with the autotune, you've got the best hand for state coherence out of all of us. We're going to friggin space pasted on top of a self-containing tokamak: there is zero room for error here, so I've got to take the best, no ifs ands or buts.

"If we had the spare power and the internal volume, I'd want to take Leo, too," Riley continued, slapping him on the shoulder, "but we don't, and so he's got another important job down here: not just holding our stuff in the short term, but maybe holding onto the lab in the long term. I'm not gonna say 'if anything happens' – if the engine's got something screwy in it that we couldn't get out with the diagnostics, well, that's a megaton and change of a physics package in there, and all our component atoms are gonna end up looking for new jobs real quick. But if we don't turn this campus into a glowing hole on startup, and something happens later, then in that case, some future day when the administration wants to fund an AP lab again, then Leo is, not just by accident, exactly who I would want as a designated-survivor to continue the traditions of the Applied Physics lab as we are – not as we were, as we are – I'm not planning on getting any of us killed, or crushed by the roof, or marooned in space, not if I have anything to say about it." Leo still gulped at this; looking at him, I wasn't quite sure whether he was getting emotional at receiving Riley's trust, or about to have a panic attack thinking about what might go wrong when we started the reactor.

"You can, and you really should, take some time and like text or maybe call Simon," Riley said, nodding over at me unconcerned. "We've got some time before Mel gets here with the grinckle juice, and I know it's not fair to put this on you with like, just today. Just make sure that you get your phone in the bag, and you get your coveralls on before we have to load up." I nodded and took a few steps off sideways towards the isolation fridge.

I opened up the phone contacts to call Simon directly, because I didn't want to end up vaporized and the last thing I said to him was something about making sure we ground up that one last avocado for guacamole before it went completely mushy. The phone clock was showing 13:10, though; by now he was teaching a class, and if I called him, it would take him out of his class, and take him out of himself, and he'd be worried sick about me because I'd called instead of texted and that meant that I was worried, that it was not just possible but likely that I would actually end up dead in space. I took a deep breath, and another, in and out. I thought about what we were going to do, the state that the Raging Potato was in, everything we'd built and all the problems that we'd had, all the things that we fixed; where the last little bits were that we might have improved or reinforced if we had another day – the urgent ones that we might have been grinding on right now if we had another hour. I knew everything – nearly everything – in this jumped-up dislocation chamber backwards and forwards, and in my view, everything was coming down to the very same thing.

There was exactly one point of significant difficulty in this entire system. There was, in a high-level analysis, only one thing that could go wrong. It would be hard to move the Potato into orbit by directly pathing across time-sequenced quantum states to displace it in x-y-z, but it was possible – it was what the dislocation circuits were kind of built to do. If we had to board an alien ship, the atmosphere might be crap, but I knew enough astrobiology just from living with an astronomer that there were practically no atmospheric mixes that were both friendly to any of the possible energy-transformation paths associated with complex life and not fixable with a confined-space rebreather. No, if something was going to go wrong, really wrong, it was going to go wrong from the start, when we dumped ninety gigajoules of energy into a decades-old nuclear weapon and crossed our fingers that the fusion reaction would start burning in exactly the way it was supposed to in order to contain itself, rather than expanding aggressively and immediately like every other hydrogen bomb of its generation. That was it – that was the only part we hadn't tested forwards and backwards. If the Ceiba worked as designed, we could go to space, and I would probably come back in one piece. If it just blew up, there wouldn't be any time for regrets – and Wetmore Hall was only a couple hundred meters away, well inside the primary fireball at the yield Riley was estimating. If we went, we would go together.

I thumbed down to open a new text conversation and punched in my message:

> riley has me kind of stuck on a lab thing > I probably can't make dinner, out too late > and might be dangerous > well, little bit dangerous > so if something happen, remember, I love you

I held the power button down on the side of the phone, and walked back to toss it in the duffel. Simon probably wouldn't see it until the end of his class, but it was okay: it would be less time for him to be worried, and if I could do that for him, I would. Leo zipped up the bag around the phone, and I picked up my coveralls to start getting ready.

There was kind of a stir from out in the hall as I pulled the top part up to put my arms through; I looked back, and immediately saw why. There were people passing in the halls, and Mel Wolfram had come through the middle of them carrying a large thermos bottle wrapped in biohazard caution tape and wearing an army-surplus gas mask. And not wearing it on top of her head, wearing it on the front of her face – it was Mel's hair and Mel's lab coat, so I could know it was her and not some cybergoth or something doing public performance art, but I had no idea how campus security had managed to not see her and decide she was a biological terrorist. I zipped up quickly to get back with the others and get whatever Riley wanted with the contents of the bottle done before the police showed up.

This turned out not to be a thing: Riley hustled Melanie inside the lab, then securely closed the door behind her. "Yuping, Remy, bring it in; Leo, you probably want to back off a little if you don't have a gas mask. It's better if you stay inside for this part and then get clear with the bag later. Speaking of gas masks," Riley continued, turning to Mel as she started cutting away at the tape around the thermos with a pocketknife, "what the hell? I thought this was the deal that you would come up here with the stuff under containment. And it at least looks like it is – why the mask on?"

"It is under containment," Mel replied, her voice muffled and modulated by the rubber mask and the charcoal filters, "but you can't be too careful. It's metastable short-term, mostly, but if it let go in the car, I wouldn't've had time to pull the mask down and probably would have crashed into something." The caution tape and what looked like several layers of plastic shopping bags were cut through, and the thermos bottle was now clear enough that she could start opening the top. "And it's not just the smell – as it turned out, the best carrier compound for the Lebensfisk is high-proof tequila, so a significant spill would also be packing enough alcohol fumes to knock out a horse." This was sounding immediately bad for us as well as abstractly horrible – especially since Riley was scrounging up five mugs or cups or plastic screw caddies.

"Well, all right," Riley said, obviously not feeling it, "what matters is that you're here, not how much cop aggro you did or didn't pull on the way. Hold off on pouring for a second; I've got to explain this to the crew, and if it's that bad I don't want to have it sitting out breathing while I convince them to stop wibbling and drink it." Melanie nodded, keeping a hand over the bottle's screw-off plug, and the rest of us looked around at each other in open dread and horror as Riley began the explanation.

"So before you durfing mud turtle impersonators go and lose all your shit meeping about ham potions and 'scientifically ludicrous' and 'self-intentionally toxic' and other crap, look, this is the rules. Melanie has consumed a lot of her time and her effort and your basement demon's grinckles in order to make this valorized attunement solution, which she is calling Lebensfisk because she invented it, she gets to name it, and in recognition of that achievement, we are going to do shots with it before we fire the capacitors that are loading right now into the Potato and get moving." I shot a quick look back at the capacitor banks; Riley must have started them up while I was getting changed, but they were loading in, the lights on the indicators showing them ramping on and on towards full charge.

"And I know, that's where you're gonna go next, omagawrf, you're gonna do shots and drive a nuke-powered high-energy relativistic Faraday cage to space. Right, smart. No. Look, it is one shot, nobody here is that lightweight, and we're gonna be lifting off by autotune anyway, there's no way that human beings could manage the state transitions manually until we get clear of the atmosphere and there's less particles to care about. That is the point of the autotune, to handle state displacement in a 3-space-shifting frame of reference." Riley took a deep breath and stabbed down with two fingers at the workbench.

"The point of this Lebensfisk thing is that when we intake it, in some form like this with the tequila carrier that gets the right concentrations in in the right way to make them biologically available – I'm stressing that it's done this way to not poison us, so can it – we shall attain a degree of elemental grinckleness that will make us stickier on states with high grinckle prevalence than would otherwise be the case. This will help us conserve power as we approach the alien ship, because once we get above the atmosphere, that thing is going to be, relatively speaking, a goddamn grinckle gravity well, and we are going to effectively fall down the state space through it and then light up their shit."

"A grinckle gravity well," Carolína interrupted, her forehead in knots like she was having trouble wrapping her brain around how horrifically weird this whole idea was. "A sort of philosophical presence turning into a fundamental force, which we tune to by magic. By magic fish tequila." She was speaking for, I think, all of us – all of the rest of us who were struck dumb by how idiotic and unscientific this was, even in comparison to all the intensely strange and dubiously possible things that we usually did around the lab.

"Look, do not call it magic," Riley said, obviously put out, "this is a scientific institution and we are going to do goddamn science with this fish potion. It's not magic: say rather 'experimentally indeterminate theorized applications of unverified principles responding to inadequately-investigated problem domains'. We reason under incomplete information all the goddamned time; I don't know why this is special or why you're kicking about it."

"Because, Riley, the last time someone drank one of Mel's meat alchemy things, she had to go and get her stomach pumped," Remy answered, his voice cracking and hoarse. "And that was with a neutral carrier – we're at college, ain't you heard that just tequila by itself is kinda constantly awful?"

"Mel had to get her stomach pumped because she drank a friggin gallon of the ham potion – you try drinking a gallon of something with that much salt in it and see how you feel," Riley shot back. "This is a shot. This is for like today – it is not a whole life rejuvenation or in this case grinckleization treatment. You will pound a shot of the Lebensfisk tequila – we will all pound a shot of the Lebensfisk tequila – and it will probably be awful, but we will get on with it and fire up the Potato and get over it. Like I said: this is going to be hard as crap, and we have no room for error, so every corner I can work, I will do it – and if I'm doing it, then you're going to do it for state consistency."

This wasn't getting anywhere. Riley was going to make us drink this fish poison, one way or another, and the only thing that would change would be how mad we all were at each other before we stuffed ourselves into a packing crate sitting on top of a hydrogen bomb. I put up my hands. "Okay," I said. "Okay, it's bad. Will probably be very bad – might make worse. But if works, then it's better – and if doesn't, we'll live. This lab, we build cannon – we overvolt capacitor even if sometimes melt down – we find nuclear weapon lost in jungle and take home. Can drink a fish cocktail that was in blender. This is maybe least dangerous, least dumb, least bad thing we do today – let's do it, let's go." I dropped my hands onto my knees with a slap, in resignation as much as anything. The rest of the lab was looking at me; they still weren't any more enthusiastic about drinking Mel's grinckle thing, but at least it looked like the fight might be over.

Sajitha shrugged, and put her hands on her head. "Fine! Fine – all right, I'm in. I'm with Yuping: this is going to be awful but it's got a long way to go before it's the dumbest thing we've done this week. Let's just shoot 'em and forget this was ever a thing." Remy nodded, and Carolína took a deep breath to pull herself together. Riley lined up the cups, and Mel braced herself over them, like she had to gather herself, even under her gas mask, before she opened up the bottle and released the horrifying stench inside.

Of course, she would – she'd made it, she knew what she was getting into. The bottle opened, and the rest of us were almost bowled over by the indescribable brain-gnawing tidal waves of rotten, fermented fish stink somehow married to dead-at-ten-paces rotgut tequila fumes and blended up with the back-alley effluvium of a paint factory that decided illegal dumping fines would be cheaper than hiring someone to drag their garbage away. The smell was so violently bad that I almost wondered if one of the capacitors had shorted, and was throwing a fatal arc through me, rewiring all my senses backwards before it burned the nerves completely away. But no, I was not dead – I was still alive, and that meant that there was still my own tumbler of pureed dead grinckle sitting out in front of me.

I grabbed for it, and somehow around the weird blue and purple shadows that were blotching my vision from the fumes and the stench, I could see everyone else having the same idea: the longer these stupid, vile, insane beakers of poison were sitting on our lab bench rather than setting our guts on fire, the longer they were going to stink up the lab. I threw my head back and slammed the shot – the double shot, there was more liquor in this cup than there had any right to be – at a single swallow, feeling the tequila hit my stomach like an exploding cannon round, and I fought down the urge to puke as the dirty-rutabaga-skin taste of a hundred or a thousand grinckles charged back up into my throat, back up into my nostrils. This had better work – this had better frigging work – because if it didn't, there was nothing on earth that could redeem this obscenely stupid shot.

I braced myself on the bench, breathing hard; Remy was holding his stomach, wincing, Carolína had her coveralls ripped open at the neck, squeezing her throat and grimacing, and Sajitha, fists clenched into white knuckles, was shuddering with her head vibrating at a frequency we could barely get out of our power drills. Even Riley was looking knocked out, bleary-eyed and coughing, and Leo was backed up to the door, wide-eyed, like he couldn't wait to get the hell out of this place, the hell away before Riley came up with anything worse.

"All right," Riley said, back in command despite a last spluttering cough, "all right – that's it, that's it, let's go. Get yourselves squared away and get in the Potato – we're gonna hit full power in about a minute and there's no need to wait a second longer than we have to. Leo, Mel, get clear, close the door, lock up behind you; no observers, no observer effect."

"Good luck," Leo said, his voice showing exactly what he thought of our chances, as he closed the door behind them; inside the lab, Carolína had got her coveralls back together and her rebreather onto her belt, so I could give her a boost up into the Potato and climb up the Ceiba housing into the chamber after her. Riley finished checking the cable connections from the capacitors in to the reactor initiator a few seconds later, and followed me up, locking down the panel to close us in.

"Sajitha, turn on the interconnect panel." Sajitha turned on the panel that Riley meant, and because there was barely any way not to see it, how close we were all packed inside the metal dislocation cell, we all saw the capacitor banks all coming up green. "Right – we're coming right up on full power. Carolína, open the power-connection interlock, that's the key under your right elbow." Carolína turned around, sort of, and fiddled with something in the wall of the chamber. Something clicked up by the ceiling, and Riley opened up a metal latch cover to reveal an impressive button with a heavy idle-contact shield all around it.

"If you want to grab on to someone or something," Riley said, glancing over at the interconnect readout panel, "now would be a great time. Otherwise, you're probably going to be holding mostly the floor until we get the hang of this. Full power – firing in three – two – one –" Riley's finger stabbed the jumpstart button, and ninety billion joules of electrical power dumped in through the ignition manifold, summoning Hardtack Ceiba forth from its sixty years of silence. Just like that – that was it.

Chapter 5

#nanowrimo #alifeofriley #fiction

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