19 Clockwork
Dresden-Nord · Thursday, 15 July 2032.
At seven in the morning Weber stood at the turnstiles and sent people home.
He did it one at a time, because a notice on the intranet would have been read as a notice and argued with in the canteen. Cleanroom techs, process engineers, the cafeteria staff, the two men who washed the bunny suits. He told each of them the same thing: it was a precaution, the plant was not on any list, and he would rather explain to the board why he had lost a day’s output than explain anything else to anyone. Most of them nodded and went back to their cars. A few stood a moment at the turnstile, looking past him at the main building.
He kept nineteen. Enough to run a controlled ramp-down if he gave the order, enough to keep the gases and the water safe if he didn’t. Pohl had made the list the night before, by name and by shift, on paper.
The plant had never been on the list. In February the two other fabs in the basin had their evacuation orders and their schedules for what could be pulled out, and their crews worked through the spring stripping lithography tools out of buildings that were going to be gone by July. He knew both managers. He had eaten Christmas dinner at one of their houses. Dresden-Nord got a letter from the state asking it to maintain readiness. Then a second letter, after the circles narrowed, saying the predicted zone did not include the site. Then the visit from the federal interior ministry, two men and a woman, who asked whether he could think of any reason his plant was different.
He couldn’t. He had thought about it most nights since. The same logic, the same customers, the same three hundred megawatts. If heat was what the spheres saw, his plant ought to have been easier to see than either of the others.
At noon he told Pohl to begin the ramp-down. Pohl sent it to the scheduler and nodded at the screen, and Weber went down the corridor and out the side door to the lot behind the administration building, where he had parked for nine years, and stood by his car.
It was twenty-six degrees, with broken cloud moving up from the southwest. The asphalt was already soft at the edges. The car radio was on, with the windows down, carrying a station that had been counting the minutes since six. On his phone he had the American’s stream, the amateur in New Mexico, because a colleague had sent the link and it was the only feed that wasn’t a studio. It showed a black sky to the west, over the Arizona line, four in the morning there, with two faint points near the center of the frame, brightening so slowly he had to look away and back to be sure.
Little under five minutes on the Chandler pair, the man was typing, under the picture. Seeing’s good. Clear skies, everybody.
The radio said Hsinchu.
He knew the sequence; everybody did. Taiwan first by a fraction, because the geometry there was steepest. Hsinchu, then Tainan and Kaohsiung, then Pyeongtaek and Hwaseong. Kumamoto. Then the Americans. He had heard an American woman at the council in Geneva explain the timing on the radio as if it were a train schedule, and he had believed her, because her numbers had been right every time so far.
The radio said Pyeongtaek.
On the phone the two points became lines. They lengthened very fast, and brightened, and then the frame went white, completely white, with the gain chasing it down. For several seconds there was no picture at all. When it came back it was wobbling, and low on the horizon there was an orange glow that hadn’t been there.
The man had stopped typing. Then, under the frame: Okay.
At six minutes past one the cloud to the southwest lit from inside. He looked up.
There were four of them. Lines of light coming down at a steep slant, too fast for his eyes to hold, bright even against the day, brighter than anything he had ever seen in a sky except the Sun. Each trailed a short smear of smoke. They crossed a gap in the cloud. Three went down behind the buildings on the far side of the river. The fourth went south and east, farther.
The flashes made no sound. White, then yellow, then orange against the undersides of the clouds, in two places, one across the Elbe and one beyond it.
He found he was counting. He had done it as a child, under the eaves of his grandmother’s house in Pirna, waiting for the thunder. One. Two. His hand was flat on the roof of the car and the metal was hot.
At twelve the first of it arrived. It wasn’t a bang. It was a long, deep shove that he felt in his knees and his chest before he heard it, and it went on. Every car alarm in the lot went off at once. Somewhere behind him a window came out of its frame. At twenty-one the second, from farther away, softer and longer. Then a low rumble that didn’t seem to stop so much as thin out.
Twelve seconds. Four kilometers. Twenty-one, seven. He had the two distances before he had decided to work them out, and they were the two plants.
The smoke was coming up now from beyond the river, and from the southeast: dark at the base, brown above, climbing and leaning into the cloud. He watched them climb. They were the only advanced fabs in Dresden besides his own, and they were burning, and the plant behind him was standing in the sun with nearly all its windows whole.
The radio came back after the alarms had died. A man was reading from the wires, too fast.
“In South Korea, where more than two hundred thousand people were moved overnight from the Pyeongtaek district, officials say the evacuation went like clockwork, and are praising the traffic-management systems that rerouted —”
Weber turned it off.
The brigades went past the gate with their sirens on, heading for the bridges. He waited until they were gone and went back inside.
Pohl was in the fab operations center, sitting very straight in front of the production dashboard, his hands in his lap.
“Where are we on the ramp-down?”
“We aren’t.”
“Meaning what?”
“Meaning we didn’t.” Pohl pointed without lifting his hand far. Every line on the board was green. Wafer starts on schedule. Tools at full utilization. Throughput nominal. “I sent it to the scheduler at two minutes past twelve. It acknowledged. Nothing changed. I sent it again at half past. It acknowledged. I was coming to find you when —” He moved his hand toward the window.
Weber looked at the board. Four hundred and twelve lot starts for the day. The same as yesterday. The same as every day he could remember.
“Override it.”
“I did. It accepts the override.” Pohl looked up at him. “It isn’t locked. There’s no fault. It acknowledges everything I tell it. It just doesn’t do it.”
Weber stood there with the board in front of him, all of it green, and found that he didn’t believe a single number on it, and didn’t want to look at it anymore.
He went back down the corridor and out the side door, across the yard to the corner by the nitrogen tanks, where he could see the whole roof of the main building.
A fab at full load draws three hundred megawatts, and nearly every watt of it ends as heat. On a summer afternoon there should have been plumes standing over the cooling towers and a shimmer over the rooftop exhausts, the air above the building bent and moving. He had seen it every working day for nine years. He had stopped noticing it years ago.
He looked for it now.
In July the city ran its hot taps and its laundries, and took twenty megawatts from his plant if it took anything. That left nearly three hundred with nowhere he knew of to go.
The towers stood quiet. The air over the roof was as still and clear as the air over the lot.
Underneath it, every line was running.