The vista was a breathtaking display of man’s hubris, succinctly encapsulating the primary flaw of it’s culture. For all its past progress and attempts at feigned unification, this room stood as a testament to humanity remaining an amalgamation of fundamentally distinct entities with incongruous objectives. If measured by resources consumed, this single room represented mankind’s ultimate achievement, dwarfing the ancient wonders and modern infrastructure projects that impacted the world much more visibly. The air in the room hung thick with the irony from people having come together to instantiate this monument whose ultimate intention was the pinnacle of mistrust. A sudden illumination draws your eyes to the clock in the corner of the room where the countdown had begun. The applause from those below the catwalk appeared to shrink away into the distance of his mind as he contemplated how exactly we had arrived at this juncture.
An hour earlier…
He flinched as the sea spray blurred the view of his phone, suddenly becoming aware of the peril involved in holding it in the open so close to the edge of the platform as the helicopter blades still roared. As he sheltered his phone with the arm of his jacket, the futility of his effort was made clear by a disheartening “No Service” in the top right. His vision proved to be as unhelpful as his phone; although the biting cold breeze enabled unheeded visibility, nothing but Antarctic ocean could be seen in all directions from the brief shoreline. Icebergs, snow drifts sailing atop the jagged surface of the rough waves, pebbled the otherwise nondescript horizon.
The short man with the briefcase ungracefully disembarked the helicopter as if to signal that use of the handgrip would be seen as a sign of weakness. A few harsh words were barked in mandarin at the few remaining in the helicopter as the pitch of the rotors whined higher, preparing to climb back into the sky. A cigarette was frenetically pulled from its box and lit with great difficulty as the effects of the rotors could still be felt.
The hurriedness of the man’s actions gave some indication as to the length of the flight. As he tried to piece together how long exactly they had been in the air since they left the airfield in southern Chile, a sobering thought drained the blood from his head. Though they had left in the early morning, he must have fallen asleep on the plane and struggled to recall any details past being offered a cup of coffee. He had been drugged. The organization that had invited him and requested his discretion apparently was unwilling to discover whether he was a man of his word. The short man’s withdrawal abated, now turned and seemed to look through him at something off in the distance behind him. “D”, he told him.
“What?”
“Call me ‘D’” came the clarification in perfect English. “It’s short for Demosthenes which I’m sure someone somewhere thought was clever, though it doesn’t quite roll of the tongue. Welcome. ”
“Where-“
“South Georgia.” Came the response to the unasked question, apparently having derived his intentions from the phone still clutched in his right hand now hanging at his side. “Well, technically an unincorporated area that abuts South Georgia. Even if you had service, you wouldn’t find us on the map. We’ve had it erased from the servers.”
“You erased the label from…”, he began fishing for clues as to the extent of this organization’s influence.
“Not the label. The island.” D said through a cracked smile, letting his pride slip through to his countenance. “Come.”
The jarring dissonance at the foot of the platform steps took him aback. He hadn’t looked down. A beach beckoned them from the foot of the platform’s disembarkation. A rocky, sandy beach completely absent of snow and ice. He removed his gloves – and noticed the temperature to be pleasant. “Why is it warm out? Aren’t we -”, he trailed off as it become obvious that man with the briefcase either couldn’t hear him or had no intention of answering the question. Gripping his briefcase, D fumbled across the beach swearing to himself crossing through the area where the fine sand blended into scattered stones, his flat soled shoes struggling to find footing. He followed D, realizing it to be his only option as he gazed out into the icebergs in the distance.
As they crested the dunes forming the barrier between the beach and rocky interior of the small island their damp suit pants became covered with the fine sand betraying their air of professionalism. Brushing it off only served to transfer the sand to his hands. As he prepared himself to find footing on the jagged rocky hills beyond the dunes, his eyes were drawn to the anomaly in his periphery. A red door built directly into the rocky outcropping clashed violently with the environment – hitherto seemingly unmolested by human activity - around it. The door lacked any sort of handle or access point, though slid down with great speed into the rocks below presenting the two travelers with a small room. D extinguished his cigarette on the rocks on the side of the door and flicked the still smoldering remains into the dry, grassy dunes behind them. As D entered the small room, his expression of impatience beckoning him to follow, he turned and observed the landscape as if concerned that it might be the last time he might behold nature’s beauty. This mysterious organization’s intentions were still unclear, but its methods were made apparent by the events of the day. He walked in and tried not to jump as the door shot back up sealing the two in the small room.
“This part takes some getting used to” D stated distractedly looking at his phone which somehow had a connection. At this point, this was the least surprising event of the day. As if repulsed by the presence of their shoes, the floor raced down from beneath them as their bodies struggled to keep pace. The shock of the initial acceleration yielded to the sickening sensation in their stomach. He focused on a spot in the wall to try to regain control of the imbalance caused by his inner ear’s screams of dizziness..
“Prior to the construction of this facility the record for the deepest hole every drilled by humanity belonged to the Russians’ Kola Superdeep Borehole. They managed to drill to a depth of twelve kilometers. What gets me is that they did it just to see what would happen. You gotta love the fucking Russians.”
“How far-“ he was interrupted by D’s impatience for what he must have considered obvious questions.
“Fifteen kilometers. We actually drilled to a depth of seventeen before we ended up hitting the Earth’s mantle. Magma poured in and killed every poor sap that was down there – set us back almost three weeks.” D’s respect for human life coming through in his lack of empathy. “It wound up being a blessing as that heat is what powers most of our equipment. Drove a wedge right between us and our investors.” The story seemed to become less clear with every piece of new information.
He waited for D to continue, not bothering to be interrupted again, correctly judging that D got some pleasure drip feeding the story to instill such confusion. “Those clowns at Squandering Resources, Inc. are how this whole thing got legs. When we first were looking for seed capital nobody took us seriously. I don’t blame them as half our business plan was effectively redacted and covered in black. I was there for the original pitch to their board – a bunch of suits wearing blank stares until we got to the slide on our energy requirements. The load was completely unprecedented and was usually when we got laughed out of the board room but for some reason this got them excited. They funded everything we needed to get started on the condition that they could be the sole energy partner. While we started digging out this facility, they drew up plans for the generators.”
He looked around for some sort of indication for how far they had travelled. The walls were all smooth steel with no readouts or buttons, and they had been travelling downward for an unsettling amount of time. At least the acceleration had subsided.
“Coal. Fucking coal. That was their plan. They wanted to dig a second hole and dump what would amount to roughly half the remaining coal on the planet down like a garbage chute. The world’s biggest tire fire burning fifteen kilometers underground. The heat signature would have been recognizable from Mars so it was completely untenable. It was around that time that we realized that they had no interest in what we were fucking doing. I always suspected that they just thought it would be fun to burn all that coal and somehow get paid for it. When we told them we had found a solution that would reduce cost and allow us to leverage renewable energy it drove them up the fucking wall.”
The elevator showed signs of deceleration. “One of our engineers did some math that showed that we’d be pulling so much heat from the planet that we’d actually be robbing it of some of its angular momentum and potentially be siphoning off the magnetic field keeping out the sun’s radiation. When we shared this fact with them, it somehow put them at ease and we haven’t heard from them since. The money never stopped flowing. Those guys are fucking weird, man.”
His heart rate began to rise in anticipation of the door screaming back open as the elevator came to a stop. He wasn’t sure if he was more worried about the unknown that lay behind it or the jarring speed in which the door would recede into the floor. He bashfully flinched again as his fears were recognized and saw that D definitely took stock of his action. The two looked out at what must have been an airlock door that stood open as if to greet the passengers of the elevator. They stepped in as the foot-thick metal door swung began to close with all the patience the previous door had lacked, the creak of metal on metal filling the small room. The release of pistons and unseen locks sliding into place signaled the completion of it’s duty.
“Compression?” he asked.
“Unless you’d prefer the bends.” D showed signs of boredom as he watched the pressure indicator click on and begin to tick upwards, checking his phone seeming to have forgotten he had done so not five seconds earlier. D sighed and decided the best way to pass the time was to continue to make conversation. “So tell me what you know about blockchain.”
He was caught off guard at the sudden shift to an interrogative tone. “It’s a a cryptographic, distributed ledger which –“.
“I’m not asking you to parrot back the bullshit that industry has used to pollute the global conversation. I’m asking what you know about it. Let’s try this differently – how is it different from what was possible before?”
He collected his thoughts. “It enables trust-less, secure transfer of resources.”
“Now we’re getting somewhere. I can do what you’ve just said with a central, SQL database. How is it different from the shit they cooked up in the 70s?”
“Proof of work?”
D snapped his fingers and pointed at him. “Proof of fucking work. That was the insight in our lord Satoshi’s paper.” He tried not to let his face betray his surprise as he watched D perform a quick series of hand gestures following his use of the name Satoshi, realizing that D must have been a member of the nascent Church of the Chain who quite literally idolized blockchain’s inventor. “A currency backed by kinetic energy. The US dollar used to be backed by gold but that went out the window for good in the 70s. Now it’s backed by the ‘full faith and credit of the government’, and we all know how much faith people have in that today. By backing it with actual, tangible kinetic energy – work done – it secures the network.
Eager to show prove his worth, he finished D’s thought. “If you wanted to hack the network, overwrite a previous block to eliminate or double-spend a previous transaction, you’d have to expend the energy of not just the current block, but all previous blocks back to the target block in the same 10 minutes everyone is looking for the current block.”
Alarm klaxons echoed through the closed chamber triggering the locks on the opposite door – a mirror of the first – to begin it’s dramatic swing open as warning lights swung round. The compression process had completed. D hopped to his feet and began tapping his foot as if it would make the door open faster. He used this opportunity to finish his earlier thought. “Because that’s impossible, the network is the first truly secured system of wealth transfer.”
D presented him with an actual smile for the first time since their meeting. “Impossible. Right.” D walked through the door leaving him with no choice but to follow. He stepped out onto what appeared to be a catwalk and was immediately greeted by the return of the nausea from earlier, but from a different source. The room in front of him could only be described as humbling.
D leaned precariously against the railing, enjoying the look of shock on his face as he took in the room in front of them for the first time. The catwalk they stood on seemed to be roughly the middle of the twenty or so other catwalks, each spaced two stories apart. The back of the room almost couldn’t be seen clearly. Florescent lights striped the ceilings seeming to converge to a point providing the evidence that the room must be miles long. Workers with clipboards and tool-belts traversed every level of the catwalk, all of them hurried. Everything was eerily symmetric with the exception of what appeared to be an LED readout off center in the top right corner of the far back wall, large enough to as to be visible from their vantage point, hanging between the eighteenth and nineteenth catwalks. The clock slumbered, awaiting its eventual purpose.
At first the shelves that covered the center in the room in hash symbols, interlaced by the catwalks appeared to be bookshelves.