0.4 A Meeting of Minds - Part 2

“Stay hydrated!” he told himself, as he sipped his water supply. Few descended into the ‘Pits of hell’, as the staff had come to call it. The protective suit made the heat bearable, but it was not going to be easy. While an elevator brought him down the long shaft, the lengthy corridor down which he was trudging was so hot, he could swear he could see the heat radiating from the walls. Before him, was a massive door. The schematics indicated this was the location of the geothermal plant’s main reservoir, but he still couldn’t figure out why it was flashing on his schematics.

His tablet did not give him access to the giant doors so he began to look around. To his left, saw a series of panels down one of the side corridors which he had earlier ignored. Over there, a panel gave him maintenance access. He first started by syncing his tablet, then began looking over what was wrong. It seems the heat in the area was well over specs and that was causing a series of problems in the relays. Some of the failsafes were in the red and it generally looked like everything was on the verge of failure. He made a note of everything he’d need.

He stood again in front of the massive doors. Why would the main reservoir be closed like this. He suddenly noticed a warning light flashing. His oxygen was running low. On his way up the long shaft, he tried piecing it together. Dr Diablo was running the plant at full capacity and it was still not enough. Even the auxiliary generator, which was supposed to be run only for minimum amounts of time, was being run continuously at full capacity. And finally, The temperature was much higher than it should have been. He could only conclude that to ‘increase power output’ someone thought it would be a good idea to dig deeper to access more heat? Whatever the Doctor was up to, he was exceeding the specifications of his lab. Suddenly, the simple math problem had complications and came with a deadline.

By the time he had freshened up and rested, it was late at night. Not that it meant anything in the interiors of the lab complex. He figured he could get a walk around and check out what the rest of those flashing red lights on the main level looked like in person. His armed escort had vanished once his credentials checked out. Most of the warning lights turned out to be related to personnel, and when he began to add them up, it seemed like it would barely make a difference. He finally identified three labs that seemed to be drawing the most power. Presently, he stood outside Lab no. 4. He thought to himself, “There’s no way they gave me access to these labs!” but to humour himself, he waved his tablet in front of the scanner and then did the biometric scan. To his surprise, the door hummed open. “Seems like they really want me to fix this problem,” he mumbled to himself.

He was out 10 minutes later. The room housed the lair’s main computing systems. It was churning away at some complex genetic permutations and combinations, most of which went right over his head. He figured taking that offline would be as good as asking the Doctor to shut down his research facility. He did however note down in his recommendations to check if the data processing could be moved offsite.

Next was Lab 5. When he entered, the whole facility was dark. When he tapped ‘update’ on his tablet, it indicated it had been taken offline a couple of hours ago. He was a bit happy about that, when he noticed Lab 6 was now churning away at full power and there was little to no let up in the lair’s energy consumption. As he overlaid the timeline, he realised that Lab 5 ran during the day, while Lab 6 ran at night. “I must be sleepy to make such a stupid mistake,” he thought to himself. Lab 6 was just adjacent, so he figured he’d inspect it before calling it a day.