Jurassic Pouch Part II: The Caves of Yucatan
Previous: Chapter Nineteen; Back on the Ranch
Rad’s previous experience
After a frustrating time, Rad realized the mistake: the scale of the view was all wrong: the default size for the view assumed a far smaller scale than the huge lidar model of the chasm. The software had issued scale mismatch warnings, Rad had dismissed them. It was necessary to learn what they meant.
Rad had always been time-centric, but now appreciated the nuances of representing 3D space in a computer program.
Zoom… out. Dolly… out. Zoom… all the way out. Not that far. Dolly in. Ok.
3DSee had set the ground plane of Rad’s virtual perspective to coincide with at the deepest point measured by the drone, as if the viewer were buried deep beneath the cliff wall ringing the structure.
A casual viewer, that is, able to see through solid rock. Rad was viewing the outer wall of the cenote from a point of view ten meters outside it. The wall appeared as a translucent curtain of green separating Rad from the interior of the Pool of Xblanque.
Rad rolled the view forward to stand just inside the curtain. The view was still too low: the deepest point in the model was deeper than the local floor. Rad scrolled the view straight upwards, 30 meters, so the point of view was no longer within solid rock, and widened the angle of view.
Rad was standing on the steep edge of a beach made of limestone slabs, a scree slope of breakdown blocks descending sharply down to a pool of water of indefinite depth, a surface showing nothing but a reflection of the whitish fog bank above. Across the water, in the distance magnified by the volumetric lighting of the simulation, irregular islands of massive tumble-down slabs stretched into mutual obscurity with the fog.
Rad blanked the screen, and reached for the rucksack beneath the table. There were a pair of 3D gaming goggles in there.
A slurp of cold coffee brought Rad back to…. Coffee shop. Civilians. Old people. Several comparing the clocks on their medical monitors to the time displayed on their device screens. In a bewildered and agitated fashion that Rad knew. What time was it? It was probably not a good idea to ask. How long had Rad been here? It was hard to say.
Rad thought fast. You are not under the Yucatan. You are in (Rad checked the local weather app) Louisville, Kentucky.
At that moment a glorious and life altering thought struck Rad. This changed everything. The VR goggles weren’t in the rucksack. They were on the charger. In the van. The van, away from all these people. Rad was halfway to the van before another thought struck. The coffee. It was cold but still mostly full.
Where was it? Where it must have been.
As Rad burst back through the door, the proprietor of Hofer’s Java looked up from conversation with an elderly coffee patron, and gave Rad a pleasant and welcoming smile as Rad dashed back in for the precious liquid. Odd for it to be welcoming because Rad had sat in there for six hours. The goggles.
Sister Louis was sound asleep and dreaming when the Abbey’s fire alarm sounded. It was a familiar dream, a public lecture by one of Louis’s old college professors. Why was Prof. Wasstoff still lecturing through the increasingly noticeable sound of a fire alarm? You’re dreaming, said Sister Louis’ unconscious mind. Wake up.
Sister Louis fought her way to wakefulness through the heavy blanket of sleep paralysis and fumbled for the light. How long had the fire alarm been blaring? Probably at least a minute. Sister spun her hips to the side of the bed and put on her slippers.
The fire alarm stopped, mid-blast. There was a rustling sound over the intercom system, then a sleepy voice spoke up. It was Sister Sparks, the fire warden. “Fire alarm canceled. Server room only. Fire is out.”
Server room only. The server room was Sister Louis’ domain. Louis put on slippers and gown, and began walking down to the crypt. She met Sister Sparks at the wheelchair lift as it reached its upper landing. Sparks was not wheelchair bound, but had hip trouble.
“Good morning, Sister,” said Louis. “What happened?”
“One of your beloved antique game servers just yielded up a good sized puff of smoke,” said Sister Sparks. “The inert gas suppression system took care of it, if there was anything to take care of. Don’t go in there until the red lights go out. Repeat that last part back to me.”
“I get it. I won’t go in there until it’s breathable. Red lights.”
“Let me know what you find out,” said Sister Sparks. “I’m in Old Nuns Only and Tournament is coming up. If this is sabotage by the opposition, I want to know.”
Sister Louis took Sister Sparks’ place on the narrow lift platform, and patted her shoulder. “Go back to bed, Sister. I’ll carry the wrath from here.”
Sister Sparks grunted and headed up the corridor to her room.
The fire door to the server room was shut. Its small glass window glowed red from the warning lights inside. Sister Louis peered through the window at the racks of servers, all dark. The fire suppression system was still resetting, dumping smoke and inert gases from the room, and pumping fresh air into the room. After a few minutes, the sound of the circulating fans subsided. The warning lights went out, leaving the server room completely dark.
Sister Sparks switched on the lights from the outside and opened the door. A faint acrid scent still hung in the air, the smell of cooked electronics.
Something or someone was introducing peak loads on the server during off hours. Three GPUs in the Cluster had yielded up their magic smoke in the past month, their fragrance lingering in the server room buried deep beneath the Abbey.
Only the older sisters were awake at such hours, taking advantage of the idle processing power to play Taiko 23, but even at maximum resolution and framerate, these simple 3D games scarcely tickled the noise floor of the performance graph.
The offending process was called “initiative” (all lowercase) and ran headless, conducting all its business via network connections.
Network connections. From where? Louis arped and greped. From the Abbey of Gethemane, six miles away.
Sister Louis was babysitter to both the Abbot’s children and their collection of antique game consoles, so it was easiest to just send a text.