Нил Стивенсон - Termination Shock

Projecting straight up from the top of the head frame was a neat array of six tubes. Each of these was fattened at its top by a construct that Saskia could not help likening to the flash suppressor on the muzzle of a carbine.

A white-hat drove her and the lord mayor in a small ATV to the head frame’s ground-level entrance, where T.R. awaited them, sporting a huge ornate Flying S belt buckle. Looking up from this perspective it was evident that those six tubes were arranged in a radial pattern, like the barrels on a Gatling gun. They ran straight down into the mine shaft. Because the six barrels, at about one meter, were so much smaller in diameter than the shaft, which was big enough to swallow a small house, there was abundant space in between them for other stuff. The exact allocation of that space had obviously been the topic of much brain work among engineers. Through a kind of verbal osmosis, Saskia had picked up a new bit of technical jargon: “routed systems,” which was engineer-speak for long skinny things like pipes and wires that had to go from one place to another. The results of the lucubrations of the routed systems engineers were summarized in a cross-sectional diagram posted near the door: a big circle with the six smaller circles of the gun barrels evenly spaced around its periphery, and everything else a fractal jigsaw puzzle of advanced industrial cramming and jamming. But the biggest single rectangle in the whole diagram was the elevator shaft. Second biggest was a circle labeled “shell hoist.”

“Y’all do your homework?” T.R. asked, not the least bit seriously, as they got into the elevator. The outward-facing door was solid, but the walls were open steel mesh.

He was referring to a set of YouTube links he’d shared with them last night on the topic of how mine shafts were dug.

“I actually did click through,” Bob admitted. “I’ve a toddler-like weakness for construction equipment.”

Saskia shook her head. “I don’t.”

“Start at the top,” T.R. said. “Place charges. Blow shit up. Scoop out the spoil. Repeat. The whole rig for setting the charges and scooping up the spoil gets lowered into the shaft by this”—he slapped one of the steel members of the head frame—“as you go. That’s the point of this”—slap, slap—“to move stuff up and down. Line the walls with reinforced concrete a few feet at a time on your way down. Pretty simple really. Just got to keep at it.”

He pulled the elevator’s door shut behind them. The three of them fit into it without touching each other. Four would have been a crowd. “Anyone claustrophobic?” T.R. asked. This was merely a formal courtesy, as event planners had already asked Saskia (and presumably Bob) this question three times in the last twenty-four hours. Both she and Bob shook their heads. T.R. hit the “down” button, overhead machinery whined, and they began to descend. “We had a head start on digging this hole,” T.R. continued, “because of an old abandoned coal mine that was already here. But it was only four hundred feet deep, and not wide enough.”

“But you just had to use it anyway, I’ll wager,” Saskia said. “Because of the symbolism.”

T.R. nodded, but didn’t respond other than to get a slightly mischievous look on his face. Their surroundings were clearly observable through the lift’s steel mesh walls. The shaft became more and more crammed, as per the diagrams, during the first few meters’ descent, as various underground pipes, conduits, ducts, and cables sprouted through its walls and turned vertically downward. Past a certain point, though, it didn’t get any more crowded, because it couldn’t. Horizontal stripes and numbers had been painted on things so that you could tell you were moving. A panel on the lift’s wall gave the depth belowground in meters and showed their progress on a cutaway diagram.

“Not the world’s fastest elevator,” T.R. remarked. “Obviously, the device is not manned when it’s running. It is as automated as a zillion bucks’ worth of robotics can make it. So whisking people up and down was not a priority for us.”

“And if I understand the nature of your plan—” the lord mayor began to ask.

“ Our plan, Bob. Our plan.”

“It will be running all the time. Nonstop.”

T.R. nodded. “The design spec is for it to run for two years with ninety percent uptime before it needs an overhaul.”

Bob furrowed his brow. “How do you overhaul something like this?”

“There’s always a way,” T.R. answered. “But the real answer is, you probably don’t. Just fill it up with dirt and build another one. Remember, in two years the world is gonna be a different place. A cooler place, for one thing.” He looked at Saskia. “I had my eye on some of your old coal mines for a while. Down in the southeastern corner of your country. Some nice deep shafts there. Saves some digging. Great symbolism . Decided against it though.”

“I think I know the place you mean,” Saskia said. “Very close to the German border. The neighbors would complain about the noise.”

T.R. nodded. “The Greens would lose their fucking minds.”

“They will anyway,” Bob said.

The lift slowed as it approached 215 meters below ground level. Their view was improving as, it seemed, some of the routed systems got routed elsewhere. It was now possible to see the six steel barrels of the gun arrayed around them. The lift eased to a stop. Through a window in its door they could see into a well-lit chamber beyond. It wasn’t a large space but it was definitely external to the main shaft. “See, down here at the bottom we did a little more blasting and hollowed out some extra volume,” T.R. said. He opened the door and led them into the side shaft. It was not much larger than the bedroom Saskia had slept in last night on the train. The walls were bare limestone, still bearing the marks of the pneumatic tools that had carved them out. The floor was a grate through which they could look straight down into another story below. No wonder she’d been warned not to wear heels. Two men and a woman stood against the back wall wearing air tanks on their backs connected to respirator masks dangling free on their chests. “Safety first!” T.R. said, waving at them. “This area has plumbing for four different gases, three of which can kill you. One, natural gas—basically methane, which we get for free from a well right here on the ranch, about ten miles away. That is the fuel we burn to power the gun. Two, air, which we use to burn the methane and which, incidentally, keeps us alive. Three, hydrogen, which is the light gas we compress to drive the projectiles up the barrels. The air in the peashooter. We obtain it by cracking natural gas in a plant upstairs. Either hydrogen or methane would cause an explosion if it were to mix with air, as the result of a leak or malfunction, and be ignited by a spark. So, four: as a backup system we have stored down here a large quantity of compressed argon, which is an inert gas that does not support combustion. Or life. Now, to be clear, the methane and hydrogen lines have been totally disconnected. We’re not stupid. There’s no way such a leak could happen right now. If one were to occur, it would be detected by these here doohickeys.” He indicated a white box mounted to the stone ceiling that looked like a smoke detector as designed by the Pentagon. Saskia now noticed more of them all over the place, merrily blinking. “If that were to happen, an alarm would sound and argon gas would flood this whole volume and drive out the air and render the atmosphere non-combustible.”

“And then we would all suffocate,” Saskia said.

“Good news, bad news!” T.R. confirmed. “That’s why we have portable air supplies. Each of these fine people is wearing one and has a second one handy. If the alarm sounds, they’ll do what it always says to do in those goddamned pre-flight announcements.”