1178. Dynamical entropies, 8
(Armylè)
J - Doctor Morhens!
Morhens looked back. Johann appeared rather concerned. He brought troubling results.
Morhens reviewed them swiftly and furrowed his brows. Something disturbing was there, and not too unlikely.
G - No mistakes possible? You’re sure.
J - We checked yes...
The chitchat was expressions of concerns. Morhens checked the other projects were progressing on schedule, eluding the problem at hand for a moment. Johann asked. Morhens was brushing his beard, thinking.
G - Put the other experiments on hold for a few days. We should focus on that first to find out...
J - Alright.
Johann left, reasonably satisfied with the directive.
Morhens had looked worried during this discussion, but now he had a thin smile as he was also going.
What he had seen between the lines was good news to him, but he preferred to keep it quiet for now.
It was good for him to see he could be counting on the results of T.I. for further purpose. Although as progress was made, he realised he should start timing his strategy, because now others would soon reach the same conclusions as him. Starting with Johann.
Morhens accepted that if he were to succeed, now he should start going faster. Before the discoveries would cascade and challenge or even block his plans.
And for now in the guise of safety, he had tasked Johann and everyone else to look away for a moment.
This distraction should give him a little time to work on that comportment of T.I. he wanted to keep hidden for a little longer.
~
For a few weeks of Autumn this year, the research centre stepped back to repeat experiments and review repeatedly their previous results.
With Johann, they had a focus on the plasma experiment that had gone wrong and promisingly well altogether.
They studied in different conditions the phenomenon that had occurred there.
For some unclear reason, this seemed to annoy the professor. Morhens grew irritable toward Johann and this focus, multiplying the excuses for them to focus elsewhere.
Perhaps because he wanted to keep a schedule for something else. It was still surprising that he showed so little interest toward these topics so fascinating...
Nevertheless, Morhens ordered a new general meeting of his staff to change the directions.
He had a project planned for two months from now, and he made clear how this project was the priority above every other work and research.
He was not willing to discuss it.
The working groups on plasmas could continue working with Johann, but this other project would be under the doctor’s direct lead.
The phenomena of spontaneous accumulation they had witnessed with the plasma was still unexplained but not a concern for the doctor. This new project was closer to the macroscopic tunnelling effect in essence, albeit at higher intensity.
This was an unexpected priority and focus of applied research for the doctor.
His team was surprised such a specific field caught his interest when there was so much left to discover in wider fundamental or applied domains.
Johann was left to lead the most important ones, while still crippling the setup of units’ priorities against him. This was odd. He tried to better understand the plan but Morhens was not in the mood to negotiate.
Others challenged him a little, recalling how previous desires to focus a little too soon on applied concepts had caused backlashes.
Morhens spat with clear anger, repeating that he would not tolerate that his new pet project would get any delay.
The resources first focus was for the next test chamber of the hotel.
The main laboratory building was a complex construction, joining the levels they had acquired gradually and merged together slowly. Now that the main thing was as one large underground building with new living quarters, it was often nicknamed the hotel.
It was the heart of the centre but a short distance away from the biggest industrial warehouses and test chambers.
Morhens was essentially pushing Johann outside and keeping his cards closer to his chest. Even if the most interesting things would occur with the nuclear research reactor, that was still a surprising twist of events for the team of officers.
Johann didn’t complain. His loyalty remained.
As for the hotel, it was then hosting quite a population. The living quarters were indeed lively, all the more since Morhens and Johann rarely bothered with enforcing their authority there. It had become a slightly anarchic agora, and an entry point to the more interesting researches of our times at other layers.
On each level of the underground building, some T.I. apparatus had been set to function all the time.
They were attached to pumps gradually filtering the air around, now also funnelling the extracted T.I. into pipework.
This was for good reasons. For a long time they had always extracted T.I. from the ambient environment without much understanding of its origin.
However as the hotel grew more inhabited, they began noticing that the presence of T.I. grew more vivid in the livelier places. They had therefore begun taking advantage of that, while studying the correlation steadily as well.
They got more T.I. for their experiments and now a foothold in the biological potentials, even though so far nothing obvious had been revealed. Only that the livelier the place, the more T.I. seemed to appear.
There didn’t seem to be any noticeable effect on the people as they gathered, nor as the air grew thinner concentrations of it. They knew it was everywhere like muon streams, passing through most things. And it gave them good causes to organise parties, so everyone was happy.
With the pumps on each level of the facility, and the pipework, they had improved their capacities. They weren’t yet pushing this network further into the city, but later on, that could be considered. If there was no drawback and still no clear origin. If it permeated the world even through the walls of the city, they could just keep using it.
So far, they had not reached the horizon of events for T.I.
Devices to detect or harvest T.I. were occasionally going into the city, without showing anything exceptional so far.
And that was clearly not the doctor’s priority.
Their factory of T.I. was running well with its backbone in the hotel.
Health security had been improved as well. Johann had made sure the clinic of the research centre was well equipped. They had improved their security reviews and measures along the way.
Even if it annoyed Morhens, even he could rarely short circuit them. There was little tolerance to human incidents from the council and they had already been a little too close to annoying consequences.
The proximity of people to experimental machineries and unknown health hazard were therefore scrutinised. The doctors were bored so far.
Now while Johann was working on organising data and theory, Morhens was building new machines in a research floor of the hotel. All the T.I. funnelled away was being concentrated in the nearby factory.
And when everything would be ready, it would return for the next experiment.
One of the advantages of having the test chamber in the middle of the building was that they controlled entirely the flows of T.I. surrounding the experiment, or rather insured their absence. Since everything was extracted and brought somewhere else, they had a cleaner white room for more acute experiments.
Everything was controlled regarding T.I. in this environment.
The drawback was the handling of some heavy equipment so close spatially to offices and living quarters. That was not the preferred urbanism architecture for safety and general efficiency. They benefitted from an exception to efficiency. Safety however remained a concern more narrowly scrutinised.
Johann and Morhens were keenly aware of this. Inspectors were breathing down their neck at each new heavy machine movement or installation.
As for Morhens’s experiment goal, it remained a mystery for a short while.
He had his own plans. What he invented and targeted, he didn’t reveal. One could only hypothesize.
It wasn’t exactly for the benefit of mankind, that much was sure. Geder wasn’t a philanthropist at heart.
And when he thought about that aim driving him, he seemed angrier than anything else.
His fists were clenched, his skin redder, his glare bloodied.
He wasn’t telling everything.
Johann was a little concerned. He couldn’t tell easily what was this experiment’s goal, nor the doctor’s wider ambition. He still would follow him as he had promised himself.
The time nearing that experiment approached rapidly.
The machines they had designed together or separately had been built and gathered. The new test chamber designed by Morhens was being assembled.
The design was odd, and its aim eluded Johann initially.
Morhens was reaching a point of no return he had to keep secret. And he had to reach it before some data was understood by everyone else researching T.I. currently. His window in time was narrowing.
And to throw a political bone to the council, a distraction away from his goad, he had a nasty idea.
This experiment he was building would require someone alive to work.
He was going to ask for the first human experiment.
~
