Pythagoras- X
“Name and clearance?” the security officer said, eyes glued to his screen.
“Roland Hurst, Math Tech Level 3,” Roland answered, swiping his badge into the scanner.
It beeped pleasantly and the light above the door turned green. Roland went in and descended on a small lift. Around him, tall, steel walls rose a dozen stories straight up.
He was deep in the bowels of the public goods manufacturing house, and the only sounds that penetrated this deep were the machinations of distant robots whirring and clicking and bolting and pinning everything together. Really… everything.
Sprockets, Matchbox cars, thermoses, handy-dandy-notebooks, wide and thin-rimmed glasses, electrical outlets, solar panels, spinning vehicle rims, laser pens, six-shot revolvers, turkey carvers, and more… all from the public goods house. Throughout the day, drones would haul prototypes from one side of the pit to the other, buzzing back and forth like bees in a hive. The noise was tremendous, and techs were expected to wear noise-canceling headphones, but few actually did. They made your ears sweaty, and it was cheaper to get implants to replace your eardrum after it wore out than it was to keep buying expensive headphones.
The lift stopped and Roland got off.
“Roland! How was the weekend?” someone shouted.
Roland was too busy checking his messages and didn’t answer.
“Hey! Roland! Weekend!” they shouted louder.
He looked up. It was Picker.
Technically his name was Silas Pickering, but everyone just called him Picker.
“Fine. Caught a salmon at the river.”
“Oh neat! Real or simu-stock?”
“Simu-stock. The real salmon there are one in a thousand.”
“Right,” Pickering nodded as if he knew what he was talking about. He was really good at that.
Roland hopped into his chair, almost literally, since his chair was a good three and a half feet off the ground. The company believed that it was better for your back if your feet couldn’t touch the ground. It forced you to lean back into the mesh of the seat which could flex and tighten as needed to conform to your exact bone structure.
It wasn’t comfortable, but damn if Roland’s back wasn’t straight as a ramrod.
“Alright what did I miss…” he whispered to himself as he checked the weekend logs.
Fourteen hundred equations solved, thirteen major errors corrected, eleven thousand measurements checked…
As a math tech, his job was straightforward but still required elegance. He received schematics and requests from designers. They might need the circumference of a wheel housing double-checked against the stock wheels in the factory, or perhaps they needed help calculating the angle of ascent of a toy rocket in order to create a drone capable of catching it. Design techs were all the artsy-fartsy type. No sense of order or realism. Half the time the things they came up with couldn’t work on the moon, not that they couldn’t simulate that as well. There were plenty of people living on the moon who needed toys just as much as the rest of humanity.
“Hey, Roland! I saved a doozy for you,” Ricardo said.
Ricardo was the inverse of Picker. Where Picker was talkative and a little stupid, Ricardo was softer spoken but wise. He wasn’t much of a math tech, at least not compared to Roland, but he had generalized wisdom that came in handy sometimes. That’s why Roland kept him around. As the only Level 3 math tech, Roland was in charge of the hiring and firing of the other two positions in this section.
“What’s the equation?”
“Some design tech wants to find the derivative of a circle h where the circumference is equal to the length of a piece of wire between j and k. Problem is, we don’t have any of the variables defined. Want us to just send back a formula and a middle finger?”
“Keep that option on the table. What do they mean by j and k? What does that mean?”
“I think they’re designing some kind of pulley toy? You spin it by pulling on the string, but the string comes in different lengths.”
“Why do they need the derivative of the circle?”
“To send it all up to the physics techs so they can determine the speed and have them check it over with the materials techs.”
Roland rubbed his temples.
“Okay let me see.”
He glanced over the request. It had been smudged before being put in the scanner. Probably some fruity tea or something the design dumbos were drinking.
“Oh look,” he laughed, “under this smudge are their lengths. Fourteen centimeters to twenty centimeters.”
“Hah! Well would you look at that,” Ricardo said.
“But don’t bother plugging it into Calculus Fox,” Roland said, rolling his chair back to his station.
“Why not?”
“They don’t need the derivative. They only need the radius of h for the physics techs to figure it out. The radius will be determined by the circumferences provided. Just use the basic Grapho-Lot program.”
“Ah, thanks, Roland. That’s why they pay you the big bucks.”
He chuckled and shook his head.
What would these boys do without him? He knew every program in and out. Calculus Fox was a nice program, but too beefy for regular design needs. He maybe plugged a dozen equations a year into it. Grapho-Lot, meanwhile, was his favorite. It charted any basic two-dimensional equation with lightning speed and gave the user complete control. Needed anything changed? Grapho-Lot prerendered three alternates to every problem. One could even dictate a problem and it would interpret the inputs of the user. Ricardo was doing that now.
“Find all radii of circle h where the circumference is between fourteen and twenty centimeters. Calculate and render.”
The program spit out a result almost instantly and Ricardo sent it back to the design techs.
Then, everything went dark.
“What? What’s happening!” Picker shouted and fell out of his chair. At least, everyone heard him fall out of his chair. It was pitch-black in the pit of the public goods house.
“Where are the lights? Where’s the power?” Even Ricardo’s cool head was sweating.
In the enormous black pit, tiny red dots of light swirled and ascended as the drones received some silent emergency signal. They floated up and up and up… then there was a scream. It started far away, then grew louder. Someone had tried to jump off their platform and grab hold of a drone to escape. He plummeted down to their level, smashed into an ascending drone, and went silent. Then they heard his body slump off and fall until it was gone. They didn’t hear it hit the bottom. The noise of the drones was too loud.
“Shut up! Don’t move. If you fall over the railing you have another ten stories to go. Don’t move,” Roland said, calming the other two techs down.
“Right, right,” Pickering said, breathing quickly. “The power can’t be out, right? Power never goes out. That’s just insane. It can’t go out…”
“Shut up, Picker, and let the boss think.”
Roland was thinking — trying to.
How were they going to get out of here? Power was never supposed to go out.
There hadn’t been an unplanned power outage anywhere on Earth for fifty years. Even sunspots couldn’t knock out power grids anymore, they were too well shielded. Portable power packs, solar panels, microreactors… you name it. The whole planet was gridded from street lamps to jumbotron. There was simply no way the power could go down in an entire factory. It was unheard of. There must have been a planned shutdown that got timed wrong, but who knows how long it will last? Maybe no one in management knew they were down here. It could be hours. They didn’t have that long. With the air circulators down, it wouldn’t take long for the air to grow stale, then toxic, with the heavy breath of thousands of stranded, panicked people.
With the lights out and the lift dead, they were completely stuck on their work platform. In the tunnel above him, he could hear people shouting to each other across the open work pit. Their voices echoed like demons in a well, and no one could make out what the other was saying.
“Everyone’s stuck! We’re gonna die,” Picker squeaked.
Ricardo put his common sense to good use and pulled his phone out. It lit up his section of the platform.
“Okay, at least these work,” Roland said, mimicking him. “No signal though… just perfect.”
Across the tunnel, he saw several more lights pop on. The whole pit was glowing with tiny, white pinpricks of moving lights as everyone figured out the same thing. Their phone screens could light up their little area.
“I know if there’s an emergency we’re supposed to evacuate, but what if the emergency is we can’t evacuate?” Picker said, laughing nervously.
“They couldn’t have planned for this. It’s unthinkable,” Roland said, pointing his phone at the lift which was a good few meters above them.
“We need to get up to the door.”
“How? We don’t have a ladder or anything,” Picker asked.
“We have the tool heads from the CNC machine, a blow torch, and the printer,” Ricardo pointed out.
“Yeah, but what to use…” he leaned against the railing, and felt a screw under his fingers.
“Boys, I got an idea, but you’re not going to like it…”
It took them twenty minutes and a lot of nervous sweating, but eventually, they got the railing taken apart using the tooling heads from the CNC and their torch. Laid out in front of them they had eight stretches of pipe, each of which was two meters long. Then, sixteen stretches of one-meter-long piping.
“Alright, now what?” Picker asked.
“We need to make a ladder out of this, and prop it up to reach the lift.”
“Okay, but how long do we make it?” Ricardo asked.
“We just use the whole thing!” Picker said.
“No, we can’t,” Roland explained, “if we use all the piping, we won’t have any to get us from the lift to the door, and if we don’t use enough then we won’t be able to reach the lift. We need to use the minimum amount of pipe to get us to the lift so we have enough to build to the door.”
“How about we just lift the piping up once we’re on the lift, then take it apart to make a ladder for the door?” Ricardo suggested.
Roland hadn’t thought of that. He searched for a reason for that to be wrong, but he couldn’t think of one.
“Sounds good,” he said reluctantly.
“I don’t think so!” Picker said, “I worked as a safety tech for two years before transferring. Those lifts aren’t that sturdy. They have a maximum safe weight limit of around six hundred pounds when they’re powered down. We can’t all get on it and have the ladder too.”
“So we need to bypass the lift entirely,” Ricardo said, finishing Picker’s thoughts.
“Damn. So we need to prop the ladder up at such an angle that it reaches the door, but doesn’t rest on the lift,” Roland scratched his head.
“Who cares! We’ll just build it, then set it up and see where it lands!” Picker was panicking again.
“The platform is too small to build a ladder that long!” Roland shouted. His voice echoed and they had to wait a moment for the voice to vanish before they spoke again.
In the tunnel, someone else had gotten panicky and fallen off. They heard the scream fall past and fade away like a car flying by on a dark road.
“So what you’re saying is, we need to build a ladder that is long enough to reach the door, set at a far enough angle to not touch the lift, and isn’t too long for us to handle without pushing ourselves off the platform, is that right?” Ricardo summarized.
“Yeah,” Roland paced up and down the metal trying to work out what he needed to work out.
“Who cares! Why don’t we just start building?” Picker asked.
“We can’t reattach the pipes using the original screws. We need to use the torch. That means any welds we make are permanent. If we mess up even one of these pipes, it might mean we lack the material to build it. We have one shot at this,” Roland said, trying to calm Picker.
The three men eyeballed the distance, measured their pipes again, and went about sketching out plans on their phones. Picker’s initial design had too many rungs and was overengineered, Ricardos looked okay but lacked a sturdy base, and Roland’s was too thin for Ricardo’s larger mass to make it up safely.
“This is impossible unless we know the starting point! We need to pick the spot on the floor to weld the pipes to, then we won’t have to use any of the material for a base,” Roland said.
“Okay, but how far away from the wall do we need the base?”
Something in how Ricardo asked it made Roland realize what the problem was.
“Pythagoras-X! We need the program Pythagoras-X!” he said, going to his console.
Oh, right, the power was out.
“Yeah! This is just a math tech problem. We would work this out for any old ladder. Why are we making a big deal of it? Haha…” Picker said, consoling himself. He went to the lift and searched the warning label for any useful information.
“Aha! It’s ten meters up, and we have eight two-meter pipes and the one-meter sections to act as rungs, we have enough! We have sixteen meters of pipe! If we connect them with the rungs that should be sturdy enough and not too large to work with. It can fit on the platform.”
“Good, but how far away from the wall do we connect them…” Roland was thinking, thinking, thinking.
Dammit! If only the console was up, he could plug the length of the wall and the length of the ladder into Pythagoras-X and the program would automatically tell him the angles of the triangle and the lengths of the sides needed to determine the final point of the triangle. It would be a right angle on the wall… what did that mean?
“How many angles does a triangle have?” he said.
“Three, duh,” Picker laughed.
“No! I mean degrees. How many, like three hundred sixty?”
“No, that’s a circle,” Ricardo said, “I’m sure of it.”
“How the hell can we not know how many degrees are in a triangle?” Roland shouted.
“The programs know it,” Picker shrugged. His phone was getting darker. He had to conserve battery power. It was as if his voice was growing quieter along with the light of his screen. He knew that his life was tied directly to its tiny glowing surface.
“Okay, okay, okay, let’s think… the wall and the floor make a right angle. And the wall is ten meters and the ladder is sixteen meters… How far from the wall do we need to put the base of the ladder? If we knew the angle of the wall we would know the other two angles because we could subtract them from the difference of the wall and the total. Wait, would they split evenly? That only makes sense if the wall is the same length as the distance on the floor… shit! How many degrees is it!”
The other two stared blankly back at him.
“A man wants to build a sixteen-meter ladder up to a ten-meter barn door!” He said, “how far away from the barn does he need to place the ladder?”
No answer.
“Come on! How far! It’s not that hard! We have so many variables! This is basic stuff! A level one tech would know how to solve this!” he was screaming now, and his voice echoed back. Other people in the pit were screaming back, but he didn’t know what they were saying. It was likely that many of them were even worse off. Maybe their phones were dead. Maybe they hadn’t had lunch yet and were hungry and cold. Maybe they were in the base of the pit and the heat sinks weren’t active anymore, so they were frying in forty degrees C. Maybe the carbon recyclers weren’t working, and oxygen was becoming scarce. Maybe the dark would swallow them up forever.
Picker’s phone died, and he sat down slowly in the black. If he moved, there was no railing to stop him from tipping over the precipice.
The lights turned on.
All around the pit, voices of joy echoed off the walls and the drones descended once again, content to go about their business as usual in their mechanical way.
Above the three men, the lift jumped and groaned as it slowly came down the wall. At the top, the security guard popped his head through the door and looked down. He saw the wreckage of the railing and the sad state of the platform. It was hacked and burnt where their tool marks had damaged the steel plating. Ricardo, Picker, and Roland were hunched, sadly together around the last of their glowing phones. The guard whistled, then laughed.
“Haha! Whewie! Good thing the power came back on or you boys would have died down there!”
