It was a Thursday. I'm not sure I know why I remember that, it's not the kind of thing I pay much attention to, I don't even remember my supervisor's name. The dude was memorable, but I don't remember his name. He was the building's head custodian and gave all us student-employees our marching orders even though he wasn't actually our boss. Technically, Steve was my boss. The custodian was a character. Looking back I’m pretty sure he was usually a bit drunk, but I can’t say I noticed it at the time.
Anyways, the building was an old brownstone and surprisingly tall for such an old place. A broad rectangle, six stories tall, with three basement levels. If you moved it off campus into a city street it would look like an old apartment building. Random windows had been bricked up: the third and fourth floor had several rooms that had been combined vertically into extra-large space, and the second floor had been mostly removed to both raise the first floor ceilings and to reinforce the floor on the third. Which was still the third floor, despite now being the second floor. The inside was a maze of large labs, tiny offices, and narrow hallways that led to nowhere. There was a huge service elevator on the west side of the building, large enough to park a panel van or to move a first-generation IBM.
I came in through the garage entrance by the elevator, taking the stairs down towards the furnace room. The furnace was new. Well, newer than the original coal monster that came with the building. The extra space had been converted into a large locker room and storage area. I swiped my badge through a scanner by the door to clock myself in and went to my locker to pull on the protective overalls we all wore. The big guy heard the beep, and without looking up growled to me, “You're late! You're supposed to be here at six.”
“I can't be late, Sarah.” So yeah, I don’t remember the super’s name, so let’s go with Sarah. We were required to work 4 hours a night, any time after five PM and we had to be finished before five AM. The handbook specified that we could come in whenever it was convenient for our schedules. The handbook also specifically said that our oddly-shaped supervisor was only there to assign tasks. The dude wasn't even allowed to evaluate us on whether those tasks were finished adequately. I guess there had been problems in the past.
Sarah stood up, his bulk sorta leaning past his desk. “Dr. Hansen wants help up in his lab. Apparently, there's been problems today. He expected you there an hour ago.”
“Why did you tell him I'd be there an hour ago? You know we don't have schedules, it just makes you look dumb.” Sarah – I didn't actually call him Sarah, but I don't remember his name and he needs one for the sake of the biography, and I’m pretty sure I never saw him again after this semester – reddened down to his neck. He reddened easily – he was pretty pale and blond, so it was always super visible. The man was shaped like a football, too. Not an egg, a regulation American football. Or maybe a rugby ball? No, the stretched buttons on his shirt looked like the stitches on a football. Very tall, but a small head with shoulders that somehow sloped into a barrel chest and beer gut that in turn shrunk away past his waist into smaller thighs, narrow calves, and feet that looked tiny in orthopedic trainers. What really struck me was that he had skinny arms too. Some guys get teased for skipping leg day, Sarah skipped arm day too.
He didn't say anything more to me – all of us student custodians had these arguments every damn time we clocked in. It wasn’t the first time he’d been called dumb by a student-employee, and probably wasn’t even the only time it happened that night. Fortunately, as much as Steve rubbed me wrong, she and the other counselors really did have the students' backs when we worked for the school. They did a pretty good job keeping tin-pot megalomaniacs like Sarah from actually hurting our jobs or prospects. Remember kids, remember to find out if your prospective college actually likes having students. That can be more important than any ranking.
I finished throwing on the heavy coveralls and grabbed up my cart. It was a pretty normal janitor cart – mop bucket on the front, a disorganized array of cleansers, rags, sponges, and other random bits of gear on the trays in back. Filthy handle to push the thing. You've seen dozens just like it, I'm sure. Just because we were in a building full of literal space-age cutting-edge tech didn't mean the support staff did anything different. There might have been some sort of GPS low jack on it somewhere, but if there was I’ll bet no one knew the login for it anymore anyways.
Hansen's lab was up on the fifth floor, and I was worryingly surprised when I found it pristine. I had gotten used to getting called in to find burnt motor oil splattered over floor, walls, and ceilings, or scorch marks that needed to be painted over, or metal shavings so thick you used a shovel to clear them out. Even blood and vomit in the lab rooms wasn't terribly uncommon with all the harried grad students around here. Hansen's place didn't even have a real smell to it, beyond what any old building had. Ok, maybe there was some burnt popcorn in there from recent history, but not the kind of stuff I normally spend my evenings mopping up. His lab in particular was usually relatively easy to deal with – just dust and ash and the occasional scorch mark I couldn’t do anything with. He had one of the better ventilation setups too, otherwise I’d bet his room would be even more full of smoke than all the other engineers’ spaces.
I didn't see the doctor at first – I pushed my way in and looked around for whatever it was I was supposed to do. A large motor set on a low platform had pride of place in the room – the framework stood about four feet wide, four feet tall, and fifteen feet long. Strung along inside the steel frame were pipes, wires, open circuitboards, what I think was a large battery, and other unidentifiable bits of electronics and machinery, all built along a long narrow design that tapered to a pronged pipe thing at the end. I remember it struck me as kinda odd when I first saw it, most of the Angat motors the professors tinkered with were more of a big ring shape. Hansen was sitting at a desk in the corner of the room, working on a computer.
The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.
I cleared my throat and he turned, smiling broadly. “Oh, great! I'm glad to see you, I desperately need another pair of hands. Come over here.”
He was... unremarkable, really. Middle aged, darker skin that could have been an old tan or something more ethnic, bald with the remaining brown fringe cut very short, and a bit of stubble that spoke of a long day's work since his morning shower. Even his blue eyes were more a washed out grey than anything you could describe as piercing. His voice was sharp, “Come here, it won't bite, I need to show you what I'm doing.”
Most of the physicists around here were insanely protective of their devices. We usually weren't supposed to even sweep out from under them, so I was hesitant when Hansen pulled me over to a long box bolted near the narrow end of the pipe. The box was open along the top, and I looked in to see a line of little thumb-sized gadgets placed against a very heavy cable or tube. The box itself was actually wood, and when I got closer I realized he had just bolted a window planter box to the side of his machine. The tube connected more machinery on the far end to the narrow pipe. Each device in the box had a flashing blue indicator light. Hansen handed me a shoebox filled with identical little gadgets.
He reached in and pulled off one of the devices – it detached easily and the blue indicator promptly changed to yellow and started flashing. “Do you see the lights? The moment one turns green, pull it out –just drop it on the floor or toss it behind you or whatever, I want you to be fast. Take one with a yellow light out of the box and plug it back in. Same deal if a light just turns off.”
At this point I noticed that the little guys in my box all had blinking yellow lights too. I was still kind of confused, “Um... Sarah said... I'm usually just here to clean up?”
Hansen growled. Literally, growled. “Grrr.” Like that cereal mascot. “You're here to help me with my work. Any questions about what I actually asked you to do? Or are you going to just complain?”
This was more interesting than mopping. For the moment anyways.
I asked, “Ok, Green or off, I replace it. Fast, don't worry about what I do with the green ones. Anything else I should know?”
“No,” he said. “Just make sure that the ones you plug in still are showing yellow. Otherwise drop them. Try it a few times now.”
The little thumb drive thingies pulled out smoothly and plugged in easily. I had to have them lined up straight, but they weren't terribly finicky or tight. The connectors were like those old fashioned double plugs you see for headphones on old airplanes.
“Great, lets get going. Let me know when you run out, I'll be doing the same on the other side.” Hansen went back to his computer, entered a bit, and flicked a big switch on the large end of his machine. It began to hum and whine quietly. The whine was kinda painful, to be honest. It wasn't loud, but somehow it made me need to pee and floss at the same time. “Oh, if you see one of them turn red, duck fast.”
And then it started. The prongs on the pipe started strobing bright white light, rattling the whole frame with each flash. Before I could even register the noise or shaking, the device closest to the flashing light turned green. I pulled it, plugged in another. By the time I had done that two more had turned green and a third had turned off. I felt like Lucy sorting chocolate, but before I had time to get truly behind I had emptied out my box and all the plugged-in boxes were green or off. The rattling and the strobing stopped immediately, and Hansen darted back to flip the switch and shut off the whine.
“Excellent! You did way better than most of my usual grad students. We managed a full forty seconds! Beautiful.” He rambled for a bit about watts and volts and Brinells. He was super excited for something that looked a lot like a firework, and appeared less useful. Sure, that was a lot of power, I guess, but who wants energy that requires the kind of maintenance this thing did for less than a minute of juice?
All these drives and motors and generators that people were playing with did the same thing. Produced way more energy than they should, and then broke within seconds. It seemed like Hansen was trying to rig it so that it was easy to fix with replaceable parts, but it was still the same problem. The only thing he seemed to have done better than the rest of the yahoos was to identify which part was going to break first – the devices plugged closest to the output pipe pretty much always broke first, which was the only reason I had been able to even begin to keep up.
I must have looked skeptical because the professor quickly went into professor mode while I gathered up all the gizmos we had scattered around. “Angat's dark bosun generators produce a huge amount of force – we've got a car battery plugged in to kick-start the process, and frankly we could have done about as well with double-As. The car battery just recharges easier and lasts a bit longer.” Hansen had the trick of typing one thing into his computer while talking about something different. Or maybe he was just talking gibberish. I wouldn’t know. I’m not even confident I’m remembering things right. If you want a real explanation of the science, go find a textbook.
“The energy produces EM fields that mess with even very-well shielded electronics and motors. Not really an EM pulse, but somehow it fills anything connected to the actual generation device. I think there’s some sort of bosun moving through the circuits or some other strange matter. But because the generation requires very specifically modulated energy pulse to maintain the reaction ... the chips and switches that control the EM fields break almost as soon as the reaction itself starts.”
“So that's what I'm doing.” He looked up from his computer and saw that I clearly hadn't reached his conclusion. He was very perceptive, actually. I hadn't reached any conclusion – his lecture made about as much sense to me as Chewie's speeches about hyperdrive repair do. Which is why I'm paraphrasing a bit – this is really just what has been laboriously explained and dumbed down for my sake over the years.
“I'm not trying to perfect a generator, not directly. I'm trying to figure out why the damn thing breaks. This isn’t about producing power – this is about producing a whole bunch of breaks so I can spend the day analyzing to see where, when, and why it broke. We can identify patterns, hopefully improve the engineering and shielding, and see if we can't make it last longer.”
“Worst case, I think I can make a circuit breaker type system, so the power runs through a bank that can switch itself back on automatically, instead of just burning out.”
“By the way, I just sent an email to Sarah and to the student employment office. You're working for me now. I expect you to come back again tomorrow night. We'll start at sixish. You’ll need to hit your councilor’s office sometime tomorrow to sign the forms.”
I didn't have much to say. I guess it was better than the blood, sweat and tears I cleaned up in the rest of the building.