The Labyrinth Key

by Howard V. Hendrix

  “A powerhouse inside an artificial cavern, inside a mountain?” Don asked. “Was it built to survive some kind of nuclear attack? Or a terrorist action?”

  “No, no. Nothing like that. The strict security only really started in the latter half of ’01.”

  Don nodded, thinking of the World Trade Center towers, burning like candles on the Antichrist’s birthday cake. Make a wish—and blow out the old order of the world. Many unhappy returns, of terrors and wars. Welcome to the Terrible Twos.

  “Still haven’t gotten the blast-protection doors put in yet, though, even after all these years,” Barakian said. “There’s been some reluctance to do it—and not just because of the expense, either. The power company was so proud of this facility that it used to sponsor tours. No tours now for more than a decade, but every once in a while people from Hollywood get permission to come in and film in certain sections.”

  Two side tunnels peeled off before the Hummer came to a stop again. A pair of immense doors, painted navy blue, stood before them as they exited the all-terrain limo. The blue doors opened, revealing the immense underground space of the man-made cavern. The overwhelming whine of a massive turbine filled Don’s senses.

  The powerhouse and its support structures shone with a yellowish cast, presumably from the halogen work lights that lit the interior. Or maybe the color of the space reflected the yellow-painted 450-ton overhead crane that dominated the view at this level, a tremendous machine mounted on rails atop vertical orange railbeds running along either side of the great room, bolted again and again into the rock of the artificial cave.

  “The crane’s for servicing the generator,” Barakian said over the noise of the turbine, noting Don’s gaze. “The generator itself is housed in the octagonal structure with the pony-motor on top.”

  Don nodded. They clanged down traction-grated steel steps framed in steel handrails—helpful, Don thought, given the steep angle of the stairways. Barakian pointed out ventilation ductwork and emergency oxygen canisters as they made their way onto the catwalk that led out onto the safety-railed octagon. Something about the view as they approached—the geometrical, industrial symmetry of the generator unit and its pony-motor, juxtaposed against the scarred, fracture-patterned backdrop of the living rock from which the cavern had been hewn—struck Don with particular force.

  At the end of the catwalk he stepped onto the sealed octagon and felt the energy of vast machinery shaking the floor beneath his feet.

  “Power use out on the grid fluctuates,” Barakian said, “but the nuclear plant operators don’t like to fluctuate their power output if they can help it—”

  “This is nuclear?” Don asked, somewhat apprehensively.

  “No, no. Hydro. At night, after everyone turns off their lights and computers and goes to bed, the hydro folks here exploit the excess power capacity of the nuclear plants out on the grid. They pull that extra power off the transmission lines to run this generation unit backwards, essentially turning the generator into a giant electric pump motor. They pump water out of the lake below, back up through this power station—named for the engineer who envisioned this whole project—then pump it 1500 vertical feet uphill to what we’ll call ‘B Forebay.’”

  “What’s the pony-motor do?” Don asked, studying his own blue-dyed skull knot in the mirror of the motor’s polished metal.

  “That’s needed because of drawdown: if the plant operator had to start pumpback from a dead stop, the resistance would melt the lines in the power grid. The pony-motor gets things moving, so the excess grid power can be brought on smoothly to convert the generator’s turbine into a pump.”

  “But why do it at all?” Don asked as they moved off the generator octagon onto the catwalk grating again. “Why pump the water back uphill? Sounds like a scheme for a perpetual motion machine.”

  “Not when you can use cheap off-hour power to refill that higher elevation forebay. Then, the next day, you let that same water flow back down the 1500-foot vertical fall, at more than 770-cubic-feet per second, to spin the turbine on this 200-megawatt generator—cranking out power at premium peak load prices.”

  Having made his point, Barakian walked Don down another set of stairs to the octagon’s next level, where he opened an access door that led to the spinning, humming heart of all that energy. A solid cylindical steel shaft—thicker than two men standing back-to-back, and tall as one standing on the other’s shoulders—connected the turbine below to the generator’s coils above. The massive shaft spun at 400 rpms, a building pillar turned whirling dervish. As Don stared at it, Barakian chattered on about how the generator weighed 1.86 million pounds and how the turbine was essentially a massive waterwheel turned on its side. Don barely heard, too busy feeling his face break into a smile of pure wonderment at such superhuman energies, humanly tamed.

  As they left the shaft access room and continued on their way, Don stared up at the work lights, misplaced stars shining in their rigid constellations from the distant roof of the cavern. Everything about the massive plumbing and power system housed inside this immense underground room was constructed on a superhuman scale. To Don it almost seemed more probable that a lost race of gigantic miners had built a place like this, than to believe that ordinary, mortal humans had created it.

  “War or peace,” Barakian continued, oblivious to his companion’s awe. “Doesn’t matter who we’re shooting or who’s shooting us—Hollywood keeps shooting everybody. Parts of several low-budget disaster films were shot here, as well as sections of the last two episodes of the old X-Files series. Among other things.”

  “But why was it built underground like this?” Don asked, following Barakian over a system of bridges and steel-grated flooring, into a room that was much quieter, but still vibrating slightly with the hidden roar of water and the whirling hum of the massive electrical generation unit.

  “Has to do with elevations. Potential and kinetic energies. It’s part of a power project which, for security reasons, I’m not at liberty to identify by name. I will tell you that it’s a system of a dozen dams and tunnels and high-volume pipes. Six man-made lakes and additional forebays. Nine powerhouses. Twenty-three generating units. Associated penstocks and tailraces. It’s a gravity-powered fluid-medium energy machine extending from ‘Lake E’ and ‘Lake F’ in the high Sierra to ‘Lake R’ down in the foothills. When the builders began it, this hydropower project was just about the biggest construction job ever attempted. Right up there with the Panama Canal. This power station here came later—the last on the project, completed in the 1980s.”

  Don nodded, trying to figure out if he’d ever heard of it.

  “The power companies have always claimed this project makes the upper end of this particular river the ‘hardest working water in the world,’” Barakian continued. The two men now walked through a large control room where old-fashioned valves and dials predominated.

  “Then how come nobody’s working here?” Don asked. “This place is empty as a ghost town. Shouldn’t there be people watching over all this?”

  “There are,” Barakian said. “Just not here. The whole system is monitored and controlled by a central operator at a computer screen, some miles from here. The operator watches a digital, virtual representation of the whole system of lakes and dams, tunnels and powerhouses.”

  “Supervisory control and data acquisition, then?”

  “Precisely. A SCADA system, with the usual division into remote terminal units and master terminal units. The RTUs doing data gathering and control throughout the big plumbing, the MTUs coordinating the overall system. Some smaller distributed control systems embedded in the overall routing, but mostly long distance connections in open-loop configurations.”

  “This analog stuff here is all backup, then?”

  “Safety redundancy. In normal operation, this is a mechanized and automated haunted powerhouse, Donald. Maintenance crews usually don’t come through more than every few weeks at most. There’s a machine shop f
or repairs on-premises, but other than routine maintenance, this place pretty much runs itself.”

  “What about the guards we saw when we came in?”

  “The gate security is usually remote, too,” Barakian said. “Read from motion sensors and surveillance microcameras aboveground and around the tunnel entrance. I suspect we met human guards at least partly because they knew we were coming. It’s all remote controlled and remotely monitored. Even the power generated here is remotely utilized.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Most of the electricity this system generates doesn’t stay in the area. It’s always gone to Los Angeles, since the first turbines came on-line by the river, a century ago.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “Supply and demand,” Barakian said with a sly smile. “To find out for certain you’d have to ask Henry Huntington—or the famous but unnameable engineer who came up with the whole idea. But they’re both long dead. The engineer envisioned the project, but it was Huntington’s money that got things rolling. Ever hear of Huntington?”

  “Is he the same one the Huntington Library and Gardens are named after? The ones in Pasadena?”

  “They’re in San Marino, actually. Same fellow, all right. Southern California electric and railway tycoon.”

  Passing the weirdly empty kitchen and break room, Barakian led Don on a brief detour into the main transformer room. There, the power from the big generator passed into a squat, bulky, battleship gray unit shaped like a metal head with three tall insulator-sheathed horns sticking out of its forehead. The tip of each of the horns was connected by a solid, curving metal bar to another Frankenstein’s lab device, a bus bar in a conduit filled with argon gas.

  The three conduits, their electricity made safe for the power grid and the outside world, led back to the elevator and stairway shaft. There, Barakian explained, the conduits followed that shaft a thousand feet straight up, to the top of the mountain.

  “Watch,” he said, turning off the transformer-room lights. After a moment, when his eyes had adjusted to the dark, Don saw a faint blue glow playing about the triple horns of the transformer. “See it?”

  “The blue glow? Yeah, I do.”

  Satisfied, Barakian switched the lights back on and they returned to the main floor.

  “I figured you might know Huntington’s library from your research,” Barakian continued. “He was a big-time collector of medieval and Renaissance texts. Paintings, too, among other things. Not even he knew everything his collections housed. We’ve had some of the more obscure items brought up here for you and your work.”

  “Here? Why?”

  “When we said you were going underground, we weren’t speaking metaphorically,” Barakian said, opening what was apparently another support-room door—Limited Access Area Authorized Personnel Only—and taking off his hat as he entered. Following him inside, Don felt as if he had stepped inside the crack in the mountain that led to Faerie, and wondered if he should be hearing the thunder of ninepins played by odd little men.

  In contrast to the valves and dials on the other side of the door, on this side he was met with an auditorium-sized wonderland of all the latest high tech. Computer monitors and projection screens covered the perimeter, hanging in front of the not-so-smooth-blasted and shotcreted walls. Several of the cave’s computer screens prominently displayed the Dossi painting Don had seen in Philadelphia. Here and there around the room Don saw stacks of documents and books, some of them apparently quite old.

  Two techs—remoting from some undisclosed location—appeared to be scanning and digitizing pages from old books, at least from what Don could discern on some of the smaller screens.

  Off to one side, three-dimensional geometric schematics of something that looked like a large, multisided hall or theater hovered over another bent-air holographic projection table. A trio of white-coated techs—real-time holographic remotes, again—were testing and adjusting the haptics on a full-sensorium feedback virtuality unit in the center of the room.

  “Wow.”

  “Indeed. I thought you’d appreciate what we’ve amassed here,” Barakian said, smiling broadly. “The original power project here was a privately funded construction project for the public good—the largest ever. The Kitchener Foundation has privately funded the work going on in this room, too. We’re very proud of it. Short of what the NSA and some other large governmental and international organizations possess, this is as cutting edge as information processing and telecommunications get on this planet.”

  “Fantastic,” Don said, looking over the marvels on display in the underground space. He seemed almost to float as he followed Barakian down a ramp toward the floor of the facility. “But again, why here?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “How can the Foundation operate openly here, in a sensitive facility, without interference from the authorities?”

  They came to a stop not far from the virtuality unit. Barakian placed his hat on a corner of the unit and turned off its pickup microphones and cameras. Their conversation, from here on, would presumably be very private.

  “Oh, yes—that,” Barakian said with an awkward gesture of dismissal. “We don’t exactly operate ‘openly,’ as you put it. It so happens that a number of Kitchener Foundation people also serve on the board of directors of the utility that operates this powerhouse. That gives us a ‘pass,’ which turns out to be very convenient.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “The people responsible for ‘managing’ society,” Barakian said, staring about the room, “like to have a certain level of control over most high-tech activities of any significant scale. Activities they don’t control they insist on monitoring, at least covertly. One way they accomplish that monitoring is by looking for the drain high-tech activities cause on the power grid, or for the electromagnetic signature such large-scale activities leave behind. The fact that all this equipment just happens to be situated right next to a power station—one seldom visited by human beings and housed deep inside a mountain—makes anything you do here that much harder to detect from outside. Especially during the next few weeks, when this facility will technically be closed down, while the long-delayed blast doors are installed in the entry tunnel and the elevator and stairway shafts.”

  “This is all so overwhelming,” Don said, turning around slowly as his gaze took in the room. “Something James Bondish about it—in an Ernst Blofeld’s underground lair sort of way.”

  Barakian frowned.

  “That’s not the comparison I would want to make, although I know Doctor Vang, my opposite number within Tetragrammaton, tends toward those sorts of spy-versus-spy analogies.”

  Based on his infosphere research, Don recognized Vang’s name, and thought that his fondness for such analogies made sense—given the man’s imposing history. Born to a Southeast Asian peasant family, in a village with a shaman and a neolithic-level culture, Vang would one day go on to head Tetragrammaton. He had, in his early teens, been recruited to service in a CIA-sponsored guerrilla army, then had escaped from Cambodian killing fields after the collapse of the American-backed governments in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. Had emigrated to California, to culture shock and eventual retraining via a CIA-sponsored scholarship, to become an all-American success story in the information sciences.

  As creator and CEO of Paralogics, Vang had at one time run the largest specialty supercomputer firm in the world—a company whose biggest clients were the NSA and the CIA, conveniently enough.

  “You’re on speaking terms with Vang?” Don asked, more than a little surprised.

  “Of course. If Tetragrammaton exists essentially to break down the boundaries between humans and machines, then the Kitchener Foundation exists to maintain what is essential in those boundaries.”

  “What?”

  “Ah, I can tell by your expression that you see opposition in that relationship, but I see it as a complementarity—as I’m sure your friend Jaron Kwok would have, jud
ging from what we’ve been able to learn of his notes.”

  Don didn’t know about the “your friend” part, but he let it pass.

  “Complementarity? How so?”

  “What do you know about Felix Forrest and his pseudonymous science fiction stories?” Barakian asked, cocking an eyebrow.

  The question, in answer to his own question, caught Don by surprise.

  “I know one of them was probably about the CIA’s MK Ultra project. Why do you ask?”

  “In a whole cycle of stories, Forrest conjures up his ‘lords and ladies of the Instrumentality.’ Into the far future, these ladies and lords strive to help the human species survive, and to return mankind to its humanity, to keep man as man.”

  “And?” Don asked, after a pause. He wondered whether old Barakian had lost his train of thought.

  “Long-term antagonistic relationships often coevolve toward codependency. The Soviet Union and the United States during the Cold War. Poisonous milkweed plants and the monarch caterpillars that feed on them. Ants and swollen-thorn acacias. Both nature and culture offer many examples.”

  “What’s that got to do with this Instrumentality thing?”

  “There are lords and ladies of the Instrumentality on both the Kitchener and Tetragrammaton sides of the issue, Don. The problem, I think, lies in that we disagree about exactly just what it means to be human. Both sides are working toward what each considers to be in the best interests of humanity, or at least in the long-term survival interests of the human species—only in very different ways.”

  “To say the least,” Don said, looking up distractedly at the way the Dossi painting was divided up among the screens.

  “There’s more overlap than you might guess,” Barakian continued. “In our own ways, both the Kitchener Foundation and Tetragrammaton are currently working against PCAM’s Operation E 5-24, for instance.”