Dan Brown - Origin

Almost a bestseller , Langdon thought, but Winston’s point was taken.

“Maximizing viewership was always one of Edmond’s primary goals tonight,” Winston said.

“He’s right,” Ambra said, looking at Langdon. “When Edmond and I brainstormed the live Guggenheim event, he was obsessed with increasing audience engagement and capturing as many eyeballs as possible.”

“As I said,” Winston stressed, “we are reaching our point of media saturation, and there is no better time than the present to unveil his discovery.”

“Understood,” Langdon said. “Just tell us what to do.”

Continuing down the hallway, they arrived at an unexpected obstacle — a ladder awkwardly propped across the corridor as if for a painting job — making it impossible to advance without moving the ladder or passing beneath it.

“This ladder,” Langdon offered. “Shall I take it down?”

“No,” Winston said. “Edmond deliberately put it there a long time ago.”

“Why?” Ambra asked.

“As you may know, Edmond despised superstition in all forms. He made a point of walking under a ladder every day on his way into work — a way of thumbing his nose at the gods. Moreover, if any guest or technician refused to walk under this ladder, Edmond kicked them out of the building.”

Always so reasonable. Langdon smiled, recalling how Edmond had once berated him in public for “knocking on wood” for luck. Robert, unless you’re a closet Druid who still raps on trees to wake them up, please leave that ignorant superstition in the past where it belongs!

Ambra pressed on, ducking down and walking beneath the ladder. With an admittedly irrational twinge of trepidation, Langdon followed suit.

When they reached the other side, Winston guided them around a corner to a large security door that had two cameras and a biometric scan.

A handmade sign hung above the door: ROOM 13.

Langdon eyed the infamously unlucky number. Edmond spurning the gods once again.

“This is the entrance to his lab,” Winston said. “Other than the hired technicians who helped Edmond build it, very few have been permitted access.”

With that, the security door buzzed loudly, and Ambra wasted no time grabbing the handle and heaving it open. She took one step over the threshold, stopped short, and raised her hand to her mouth with a startled gasp. When Langdon looked past her into the church’s sanctuary, he understood her reaction.

The chapel’s voluminous hall was dominated by the largest glass box Langdon had ever seen. The transparent enclosure spanned the entire floor and reached all the way up to the chapel’s two-story ceiling.

The box seemed to be divided into two floors.

On the first floor, Langdon could see hundreds of refrigerator-sized metal cabinets aligned in rows like church pews facing an altar. The cabinets had no doors, and their innards were on full display. Mind-bogglingly intricate matrices of bright red wires dangled from dense grids of contact points, arching down toward the floor, where they were laced together into thick, ropelike harnesses that ran between the machines, creating what looked like a web of veins.

Ordered chaos , Langdon thought.

“On the first floor,” Winston said, “you see the famous MareNostrum supercomputer — forty-eight thousand eight hundred and ninety-six Intel cores communicating over an InfiniBand FDR10 network — one of the fastest machines in the world. MareNostrum was here when Edmond moved in, and rather than removing it, he wanted to incorporate it, so he simply expanded... upward.”

Langdon could now see that all of MareNostrum’s wire harnesses merged at the center of the room, forming a single trunk that climbed vertically like a massive vine into the first floor’s ceiling.

As Langdon’s gaze rose to the second story of the huge glass rectangle, he saw a totally different picture. Here, in the center of the floor, on a raised platform, stood a massive metallic blue-gray cube — ten feet square — with no wires, no blinking lights, and nothing about it to suggest it could possibly be the cutting-edge computer that Winston was currently describing with barely decipherable terminology.

“... qubits replace binary digits... superpositions of states... quantum algorithms... entanglement and tunneling...”

Langdon now knew why he and Edmond talked art rather than computing.

“... resulting in quadrillions of floating-point calculations per second,” Winston concluded. “Making the fusion of these two very different machines the most powerful supercomputer in the world.”

“My God,” Ambra whispered.

“Actually,” Winston corrected, “ Edmond’s God.”

ConspiracyNet.com

BREAKING NEWS

Yes, it’s really happening!

A press release from Edmond Kirsch’s camp has just confirmed that his widely anticipated scientific discovery — withheld in the wake of the futurist’s assassination — will be streamed live to the world at the top of the hour (3 a.m. local time in Barcelona).

Viewer participation is reportedly skyrocketing, and global online engagement statistics are unprecedented.

In related news, Robert Langdon and Ambra Vidal were allegedly just spotted entering the grounds of Chapel Torre Girona — home to the Barcelona Supercomputing Center, where Edmond Kirsch is believed to have been working for the past several years. Whether this is the site from which the presentation will be live-streamed, ConspiracyNet cannot yet confirm.

Stay tuned for Kirsch’s presentation, available here as a live stream on ConspiracyNet.com!

As prince julián passed through the iron doorway into the mountain, he had the uneasy feeling that he might never escape.

The Valley of the Fallen. What am I doing here?

The space beyond the threshold was cold and dark, barely illuminated by two electric torches. The air smelled of damp stone.

A uniformed man stood before them holding a loop of keys that jangled in his trembling hands. Julián was not surprised that this officer of the Patrimonio Nacional seemed anxious; a half-dozen Guardia Real agents were lined up right behind him in the darkness. My father is here. No doubt this poor officer had been summoned in the middle of the night to unlock Franco’s sacred mountain for the king.

One of the Guardia agents quickly stepped forward. “Prince Julián, Bishop Valdespino. We’ve been expecting you. This way, please.”

The Guardia agent led Julián and Valdespino to a massive wrought iron gate on which was carved an ominous Francoist symbol — a fierce double-headed eagle that echoed Nazi iconography.

“His Majesty is at the end of the tunnel,” the agent said, motioning them through the gate, which had been unlocked and stood partially ajar.

Julián and the bishop exchanged uncertain glances and walked through the gate, which was flanked by a pair of menacing metal sculptures — two angels of death, clutching swords shaped like crosses.

More Francoist religio-military imagery , Julián thought as he and the bishop began their long walk into the mountain.

The tunnel that stretched out before them was as elegantly appointed as the ballroom of Madrid’s Royal Palace. With finely polished black marble floors and a soaring coffered ceiling, the sumptuous passageway was lit by a seemingly endless series of wall sconces shaped like torches.

Tonight, however, the source of light in the passageway was far more dramatic. Dozens upon dozens of fire basins — dazzling bowls of fire arranged like runway lights — burned orange all the way down the tunnel. Traditionally, these fires were lit only for major events, but the late-night arrival of the king apparently ranked high enough to set them all aglow.