‘Okay, fire her up.’ Emerson stood, hands on hips, looking up at a fan with blades the size of trees. It’s casing hummed as the bearings began to rotate and the air around her cracked and hissed it was pulled from the cavernous space and into the giant mechanism.
Looking over at the console, she watched the speed tick up past 200 RPM, and sighed. Well, at least we’ve reached that bar, however low it may be. They needed a constant 1,200 RPM to achieve a workable equilibrium but this was progress. The old fan had capped out at 1,000 which, these days, wasn’t enough.
There was a monumental groan. Emerson felt the solid bedrock beneath her shudder, which is disconcerting to say the least. The blades of the fan began to stall, falling out of their regular rotations and the console readings jumped erratically.
‘Alright, alright,’ said Emerson, ‘Power down again. Jacob, get me the diagnostics, will you? I really think this is a software thing and not a power thing.’
Software things she could probably fix pretty quickly. Power was less forthcoming.
‘Boss?’
Emerson turned. It was Hendricks, looking nervously down the great hall of the carved temple.
‘It’s been seventy-two hours now,’ said Hendricks, checking his watch, ‘do you think we have much time left to get this fixed?’
Emerson followed his gaze down the vast hall that their fan faced. In that colossal space, their great machine appeared diminutive. ‘Truth be told, Hendricks, I don’t know. He’s not awake yet, is he?’
The titan lay on its back, where cooling waves of air should be passing over it. Instead, motes of thick dust hung limply above its motionless body. Already there were cracks in its stone muscles. A dull orange glowed from its veins. If you approached anywhere near the great hall, you could feel the heat pulsating from it in waves that matched the beating of a titanic heart.
‘Maybe we should consider flooding the hall,’ said Emerson, only half-joking.
Paddy Dobson
6th November 2020