Parnes escorted Kronos, Hiccock, Parks, and Tyler into the chamber. With a flourish, he waved his hand in a grand gesture usually only seen in hokey magician acts. “It’s my pleasure to introduce you to … ALISON.” He pointed to the sign as he de-tangled the acronym. “Amassed Looped Intelligent Spherical Operating Nexus.”
“Madonn’. Look at this sucker!” Kronos said, his jaw dropping.
“They were this big when I left the Navy,” Admiral Parks observed.
In the entrance corridor, the young Marines and MPs placed the charges as directed by the older UDT men.
In the security office, a communications man monitored a radar CRT that presented twenty incoming blips, inching closer to the center with each sweep. “Sir, I have something … incoming.”
His superior officer glanced at the green fuzzy splatter, recalling what a formation of attack helicopters looked like during the Iraq War.
“Welcome to the chamber. Carved out of solid rock. One mile of lead ore deposits between us and all those nasty little alpha and gamma rays.” Parnes’s showmanship was now in full evidence.
“Like a giant X-ray shield,” Hiccock said.
“Necessary because we are dealing with electrical impulses as faint as ten to the minus twenty-four coulombs, or about the output of the faintest star.”
“What’s with the freaking tank, dolphin shows?” Kronos asked with a snort.
Parnes turned to Hiccock. “Where did you get this individual?”
“He’s my resident techno-sapien.”
“Who you not calling a homo?”
Parnes addressed Kronos, “Ever hear of absolute proximity?”
“Yeah, sure, who hasn’t?”
Parnes rolled his eyes. Hiccock gestured to him apologetically.
“Me,” Tyler said. “I’ve never heard of it.”
“Well, the biggest limitation to the speed and power of computers today is the distance electrons have to travel inside the processors.”
“Wasn’t that the reason behind large-scale integration?” Hiccock asked.
“Yes, but LSI reached its limit when we discovered absolute proximity.”
“Right, we can’t manufacture a chip with components any closer than seven atoms.”
“Intellichip thought they had finally broken through the seven-atom barrier,” Parnes footnoted, “but then they blew up.”
The glass lenses of the MP’s binoculars reflected twenty attack and support helicopters on the horizon. He called out, “Sir, we got a visual, Sir. Two minutes!”
“Come on, guys. Move it!” the major barked.
“Keep your stallions in the barn, Major,” Mack said with no more tension in his voice than if he were attaching a lure to a line. “Don’t want the charges to blow with us here on the outside, do ya?”
“Forty-two-second ride to the bottom, Sir. Eight seconds to clear that. Leaves us with just about a minute to get the hell out of here.”
“They should only need twenty more seconds. You got lots of time, son.”
“But obviously you are telling us about all these challenges because you’ve overcome them.”
“Yes and no. Look here.” Parnes grabbed a model of the sphere. He held it up. “The object wasn’t to make a faster chip, really. It was to make a faster processor. To that end, we ganged up ten million super processors and ingeniously configured their parallel arrays into this ball network. A super-superprocessor, if you will.”
“So the shortest distance between any two is through the inside.”
“Originally we called it ‘dense-pack spherical proximity.’ It effectively made our processors, all ten million of them, run as fast as if they were.07 atoms apart.”
“So you increased the speed one hundred times,” Kronos said.
“That’s 100 times a million times 360 times faster than the fastest single chip known. Which are the ten million we have in the core right now.”
“That’s 360 million times faster throughput?”
“You forgot the two zeroes from the 100 factor.”
“Christ! You got 36 billion times faster throughput!”
“Yes. Yes. I know. Incredible, isn’t it?” Parnes shook his head, giggling like a new father.
“But all that power in a ball heats up. Air-conditioning was our biggest challenge with ENIAC,” Admiral Parks, the veteran of big computers, said.
“You were part of the ENIAC team?”
“Sorry, with all the shooting and bloodshed I forgot my manners,” Hiccock said. “Robert Parnes, Admiral Henrietta Parks, USN retired.”
The major was in full run. “Got to go now, Sir.”
“We’re ready,” Mack said joining him in the hustle to the elevator. As he passed his pal Harry, holed up in a perch atop the main entrance area, he called out, “Gonna blow big, Harry. Got your ears stuffed?”
Harry cupped his ear, faking deafness with a smile, “Whadja say, Mackie boy?” The copters were flaring for a landing.
The major was positioned at the elevator. “Now or never, Sir!”
Mack gave Harry the frogman’s thumbs up and sprinted to the elevator just as the doors were closing, smashing his wounded shoulder. He grimaced. The doors shut.
“I am honored to have you here. Admiral, I trust you like our little setup.”
“I wouldn’t say I’m impressed. Actually, I got booted from the service for warning against contraptions like this.”
“Really? Well,” Parnes produced a smirking sigh, as if he had a bad taste in his mouth, “that makes it a horse race of sorts now, doesn’t it? However, as to your heat dissipation point, exactly. Forced air and conventional convection were not options.”
“Static charges from rushing air?” Hiccock said.
“This is turning into a master class!”
“So enter the sauce here,” Kronos added as he went to touch the goop. A technician grabbed his hand. The tech took a rubber glove out of his pocket and dropped it in. It immediately crystallized. He picked the glove up with a pen and dropped it to the floor. It shattered like glass. “It’s like freaking Mr. Wizard!”
“Yes. We originally thought of cryogenics but that was too costly and unstable. Then we found a compound, a super antifreeze if you will, that stayed liquid and stable at one hundred degrees below zero.”
“Let me take a guess: manufactured by Mason Chemical.”
“Yes. Before they had that nasty accident.”
As the elevator car was descending past an explosive charge embedded into the rock, the major, Mack, and a few men riding inside were looking up toward the top of the cavern. The major checked his watch. “Thirty seconds,” he reported, and then looked back up as if they could see through the top of the elevator.
“You keep saying ‘originally.’ What has happened since?”
“Well, and here’s the really exciting part …”
“Can we speed this up, what with the imminent explosion and all?”
“Okay, so we submerged the core into this compound and it started interacting with the clear electrolytic liquid.”