Where do you see yourself in ten years? (4)
The origins of an infallible plan to fail.
[See here for Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3]
It didn't take long for me to come up with a plan to steal Brady's cryogenic chamber. It's easy when you're motivated by the most powerful creative forces in the universe, hatred and fear. My best research ideas have come to me in exactly the same way.
It also helps to take a long leisurely stroll.
Late that night I took a walk around the outermost trenches. The peaceful night air, mixed with the frisson of potential imminent bombardment, can really stir up the mind. It's a mixed bag, though. Often there is an aerial bombardment, and the noise and flames and mangled bodies can be quite distracting. This evening I came across a bout of intense hand-to-hand fighting, and even after I beat a hasty retreat from the rabid soldiers and stray bullets, I could still hear the screaming for some distance.
I moved to my other favourite thinking spot, the air defences on top of the old student centre. This used to be a miserable place. The standard concession to scholarly egos was to put the university at the top of the hill, behind the town. The hill sloped down gently inland, but was a much steeper drop down into the town and beyond that to the sea. The top of the hill, at the very edge of the campus, sounded like a picturesque place to build the swanky new student centre. And it would have been if the town below were something more than a run-down sprawl of economic decay, and what should have been the coast was not an expanse of dismal grey docks, mostly disused.
Fortunately all of that changed with the dramatic sea level rise, twenty-five years earlier than predicted by our lavishly funded Centre for Climate Change — well done, guys. This set off a spectacular chain reaction of subsidence, and now the student centre sits atop a perilous cliff and boasts gorgeous views of the endlessly fascinating ways that the waves crash around the remains of the old town centre.
It used to be even more impressive, when the medieval church and town hall were still standing, but they succumbed in a matter of months. Now the only clearly identifiable structure is the multi-storey carpark. We've learned to call it magnificent. And to be fair, if you zoom in, you can see the one remaining car on the top floor, and if you zoom in even further, you may be able to glean some symbolic pleasure from identifying it as a Tesla.
People have written poems about it, although not good ones.
It is a source of great institutional pride that the cliff has proved so sturdy. That was the result of the even more lavishly funded Interdisciplinary Centre for Emergency Geology, Engineering, and Science Video Memes. The business case for the Centre argued that within three years it would be financially self-sustainable, due obviously to the video memes. We were all waiting for the Centre's Director and Financial Manager to be strung up for producing such unmitigated horseshit, and it would certainly have happened if there hadn't been an impregnable excuse in the form of an outbreak of war that collapsed the global economy. Credit where it's due, though: between this incredible feat of engineering and the air defence system, the cliff has successfully withstood three years of daily attack.
I thought about all of this while I watched barrage after barrage of missiles being launched from the distant assembled navies. Even huddled in my coat against the wind and the rain, I felt a warm sense of security as I watched each missile reliably shot down. And, as planned: my mind became entirely clear, and a lovely plan formed.
As we all know, and as my little reverie reminded to me just as much as it will have reminded you, it's all about money.
Brady Alexander's cryogenic storage costs money. A lot of money. Originally it was funded from the fees charged to store a selection of the world's richest celebrities, failed-scientists-turned-venture-capital-billionaires, and looney immortalists. Now only a handful remained, most notably the lovingly preserved Michael Stipe, funded entirely by repeat plays of “It's the end of the world as we know it”. (The clever plan was that when the profits fell below a sufficient level it must be safe to try to revive him.) These fees were still just enough to fund Alexander's chamber, but what if the storage system suffered an unfortunate accident? Then the university could simply keep the fees, and the man responsible would be a hero.
The source of Prof. Farmer's power would be gone, and I would have transformed us into one of the richest universities in the UK, which now meant the world.
It was surely impossible to successfully steal the cryogenic storage chamber. But to unsuccessfully steal it — I could do that!
Once I had the big idea, the details came immediately, and the plan fell into place.
A week later we mounted our attack. My troops, I mean grad students, were unaware of the clever twist in my plan. It was touching to watch them train so diligently to steal both the cryogenic chamber, and its associated apparatus, and prepare my own low-temperature lab for its imminent new occupant.
In the days leading up to the mission they made training sorties out to attack other departments, starting with the softies in law, economics and mathematics, working up through the tougher characters in archeology, military history and sociology (you'd be surprised), and finally the bat-shit crazy homicidal maniacs in engineering and medicine. Whoever was left, I psyched up on the day by reminding them of all the competitors who had scooped their results, misquoted their results and, most galling of all, entirely ignored their results. By the early evening they were blazing with a desire to strike and kill.
At 5pm, when every scientist is effectively comatose at their lab bench or computer, we struck.
From the safety of my command centre back in my lab, monitoring communications on my laptop, I really had no idea what was going on. There was a hell of a lot of screaming and gunfire and crashing. Amongst the smoke and bright flashes on my video feed, it looked like Farmer's team, taken entirely by surprise, retreated to the storage rooms to regroup. There was a lull while my people disconnected the cryogenic storage chamber and laid it on a trolley and wheeled it away. In other words, perfect success.
After that they worked on all the pumps and refrigeration equipment and whatnot that needed to come with it. I didn't care about that crap, but we needed to appear to make a serious attempt to take it.
That's when the counter-attack happened, and it wasn't long before I closed my laptop. I didn't need to see the end.
My advance team arrived in my lab with the storage chamber.
“We have to go back and fight for the rest!” they all shouted.
“No,” I told them. “It's too late. The rest have been killed or captured. We need to keep it running with what we have.”
I have to hand it to them, they gave it everything. There was no way you could maintain the temperature level, and keep it uniform and stable, with the equipment we had. But they were furiously plugging and unplugging, screwing and bolting, turning some things on and other things off, for a wild thirty minutes, before someone accidentally opened the chamber.
That's when I swung into action. “Oh shit!” I cried. “Close it up! The last thing we need to see is a defrosting corpse!”
For a few moments everyone was as frozen as Brady, staring at his icy face, with its blue-tinged lips and the frost on his eyebrows and his quivering eyelids.
Quivering eyelids?
“He's alive!” someone shouted.
And so he was. At least for now.
“We have to save him!” someone else shouted.
It wasn't me, but I realised it should have been. A valiant and visible effort was crucial to turn this into a political success. And besides, if he was going to die in a luridly stomach-churning way, I needed something to distract me while it happened.
I threw myself into the effort, and I was soon as committed as everyone else. I couldn't tell whether it was the adrenalin deluding me, or if it was a miracle of human ingenuity and perseverance over Nature, but I began to think that we really could keep him alive.
Was it possible? Could we actually do it?
Stay tuned to find out… maybe even in Part 5.