In the boardroom nearing the top of the Arna & Reynolds headquarters building, a few drowsy faces rubbed at their scalps in concentration.

Each looked over the assortment of folders resting in front of them in various order, but no amount of tilting their head could change the balance.

“None of these.” The now-bearded Henry Pyre says, sipping from a cup of heavily watered instant coffee.

Material Science’s had a field day as the season changed but that did little more than reduce the man’s sleep further as the teams under him scrambled to gather as many new research materials as they could get their hand on.

In the last week alone, they’d discovered a mushroom species which naturally formed a carbon structure similar to the holy grail of Material science, the carbon nanotube. With this alone, a research team splintered into three as they pounced on the problem of replicating the conditions in the lab.

A sense of guilt filled not just him but many of the department leaders as they considered the problem of energy. None were innocent of the use and perhaps even over-use, they all knew that.

It was fortunate the energy use wasn’t better monitored. If any could put a real number on their department’s usage, they’d likely go more than a few days sleepless.

“Yeah, I can’t understand a page of this but it sounds like it could be important.” Woodrow Klien says setting down a project tagged as coming from the Biopharmaceutical department.

As a company that rarely knew the meaning of the word moderation, cutting a single program felt like amputating their own leg, doing it once had been hard enough. There were still proposals coming daily for the continuation of the stealth bomber, and even the space station crew module. Some people had trouble leaving a project half complete and none at the table could blame them.

“It was a good idea.” Jeff says with a shake of his head as he drops his final folder onto the stack. “But all it did was remind everyone what we are trying to keep afloat here. And what we’re on the brink of losing.”

“Talking like that we really might,” Gary mutters without removing his eyes from where it danced across the monitor. Clicking the scroll bar and dragging it down slowly he eventually nods and begins penning down a note and drawing a large ‘X’ beside the words.

“Well, that wasn’t the intention,” Laura says with a weak grimace from sat beside Sophia.

“It’s good to know what we’re fighting for.” Third adds, skipping a few words in an overly complex datasheet. Eventually seeming to give up he drops the folder roughly and shrugs to himself not realizing the pair of eyes on him.

“Excuse me.” A voice interrupts the silent pity party forming in the meeting room. “Mr. Hawkins, there’s someone on line one who won’t stop calling, do you mind getting it? He said his name was Derek Dew…”

“Derek Dueler.” Frank Hawkins fills in for the receptionist. “Got it, sorry about him.”

Turning to the rest of the Department heads he shakes his head in exasperation as he reaches for one of the nearby phones. “Sorry guys, one sec.”

Picking up the phone and barely muttering a breath, a voice begins erupting from the earpiece as a passionate idea is rattled off like memorized lyrics.

“Woah, hold on, hold on.” Frank pauses pulling a notepad towards him and clicking the top of a pen. Scribbling a few words as he clutches the phone between his ear and shoulder he morphs expressions a few times between surprise, hope, doubt, and annoyance. Eventually after penning down nearly a paragraph of notes and even calculating a few equations on the side. He shakes his head at the earpiece and begins hammering his own words back in response. “You understand we are trying to conserve power, not use more of it. Right?”

This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.

Barely awaiting the response that comes Frank again begins pounding his opinion back into the phone. “No, no. We finally got everything swapped over, we aren’t swapping the whole damn thing back just to run a photogrammetry algorithm you all hacked together in a day, that’s a waste.”

By this point no one had any care for the folders in front of them. And, if not for Jeff who grew tired of hearing a one-sided conversation reaching over and pressing the speaker button on the phone, they would have gone without knowing.

“…years. This isn’t some new idea this thing is already trained on similar resolution thermal and photographic data. All we are asking is to let us see what it can do if we feed it the reconnaissance datasets.”

Having noticed the echo a second after his conversation was invaded, Frank sets down the phone and glances around the table.

“It’s not made for this.” Frank explains mostly to the table but partially to the engineer on the other side of the phone. “It’s either going to be packed with false positives or its going to burn a week’s worth of energy to compile and then spit an error the moment it’s launched.”

“How are we looking for oil currently?” Third can’t help but ask a bit hesitantly. It felt like something he should know considering he gave the order to do it.

“Our reconnaissance UAV’s have an array of sensors, radar, high-frequency pulse sonar, infrared. We’ve been compiling that data into large heatmaps, and we are handing those off to a team of geologists.” Woodrow explains pulling up a program on a nearby laptop and turning the screen so Third could see the small dots swirling back and forth on the map. “The dots are UAV’s on preestablished scanning routes. Each green square you see has been completely scanned and each red square has been cleared by the geologists.”

“…” Third begins to speak but cuts himself off as he notices the understanding nod from the Resource Management head.

“Yeah progress is slow but we have to be thorough. And my team can only work so quickly.”

“Then why not let the computers help? Atleast if they can mark potential spots of interest or something, then the geologists aren’t wasting time checking at random.”

“They aren’t just checking at random.” Woodrow rebukes a tad insulted by the insinuation against his team. But calming himself he begins again with his explanation. “When the UAV captures any data out of line with the standard the operator marks it so we have a starting point to work with.”

“Operators?” Third asks, assuming the ‘U’ in ‘UAV‘ had meant ‘Unmanned’ and not something else.

“Each fleet of six drones has a human operator as required by state and federal law.”

“Which state and country was that again?” Third asks with a tired laugh. “I don’t know. Maybe I’m still not fully getting it, but I can’t see a reason not to try.”

“Booting up ‘floor six’ is costly.” Gary explains simply, turning his glance to Frank to fill in further.

Nodding to himself with a hand to his chin Frank does so. “Floor six was designed to run neural networks with datasets larger than an exabyte. It required written permission from the state as well as from our electricity supplier to even turn it on, and when we did, it was for periods of no more than a couple hours deep in the night when demand was low.”

“Compiling all of the UAV sensor data would be done on Pico-Brain. So all floor six needs to do is ingest the file and run the algorithm. It could be done in a few hours.” Derek who’d been patiently listening on the other side of the phone explains as the conversation nears a catching point.

“What’s Pico-Brain?” Third asks feeling a bit left out as the others around him nod when they heard the option.

“It’s a cluster of mobile SOC’s.You can think of it like a ton of smartphones wired together into a low-power supercomputer.” Frank explains holding out his own smartphone as a visual. “Most of our light computing is being handled by Pico-Brain or her little brother Femto-Brain. Emails, text messages, phone-calls, file-sharing, they all get routed through the clusters to save power. Only the larger stuff like floating-point calculations and simulations are handled by the racks.”

“So it’s possible?” Third asks, ignoring much of the explanation to cut to the root of his question.

“Yeah, Pico-brain could certainly do the brunt work of assembling the dataset.” Frank confirms with little need to even consider. Handling video data was hard-wired onto the chip, apart from a dedicated bank of GPU’s there were few better tools for the job. “It might take a day to prepare though, and all the work Pico had been handling will have to get offloaded. That means spooling up more VM’s. And more power consumption.”

“Can’t make an omelet without cracking a few eggs.” Third shrugs after considering the dilemma of using more fuel to find fuel. “Let’s do it.”

“Hold on, we need to think this over carefully.” Jeff begins to remind them, but his words fell on deaf ears.

“Sounds good. We’ll get started now.” No sooner than his words came through the phone, the line unceremoniously went dead without even a dial tone.

“Oy!” Woodrow shouts as the constantly updating map on his laptop goes blank as its network connection is lost.

“This is why we think carefully,” Jeff grumbles wrenching himself from his seat and pulling the walkie-talkie to his face to bark orders at the security personnel under him.

“Wow, they work quickly.” Third guiltily laughs as connections across the complex shut down in preparation for the migration to a newly prepared computer system.