# Gurgling

Сергей Л Кэнский

Ukr-Eng AI translation. See the end.

1


"Well... the artwork isn't bad. Not bad at all... I owe the guy a bonus," thought the editor-in-chief of The Wondrous World, a popular science-or rather, sci-fi and fantasy-magazine. By "the guy," he naturally meant the illustrator (and since this is an impeccably true story in every respect, we are bound to convey not only every spoken word, but every unspoken thought as well). The preprint of the September issue, or to be precise, its hard-copy version, lay on the desk before him. The general readership, much like the art-gazers, was still waiting for the issue to drop in cyberspace.


The magazine cover featured a bird's-eye view-or perhaps the view from an anti-grav craft, which was also in the picture. Dwindling into the distance all the way to the horizon, a chain of giant wind turbines stood in formation. Farther away, at the foot of deep blue mountains, vast fields of solar panels gleamed with a violet hue. A wondrous world of the future...


The present, however, kept the editor tethered to his seat. There were still a couple of hours left in the workday, but the decision had been made. Nothing would have stopped the editor from signing off on the proofs and heading home to start his long-awaited vacation the very next day, were it not for two circumstances.


The first was Liza, his (and the executive) secretary. She had asked for the afternoon off to pick up or drop off her kid (maybe both) from somewhere or other. This handed the editor an opportunity far too good to waste: the chance to ascend the pedestal of heroic devotion to the common cause-both on a global publishing scale and in terms of this specific business's prosperity... and so on and so forth. It was patently clear that such moral fortitude deserved some compensation, preferably in the form of a ticket to this solo performance for the editor himself. And so, today he would stay from clock-in to clock-out.


Despite being a modest man, easily satisfied with an audience of one, the editor naturally didn't want to waste a good example on his staff. Thus, he had called a video conference that wrapped up about half an hour ago. Granted, it wasn't quite the same as a physical presence, but one has to live in whatever trying times one is given.


No, it was something else that slightly gnawed at the editor's sense of perfection-as always happens when necessity is rebranded as a virtue. The real reason he was stuck at his desk was that the selfsame Liza had reported that their office fridge-about which she had already complained before-had finally given up the ghost. No matter what she did to it ("I wonder what exactly," the editor thought in passing), it was all in vain. So, she had called the service center, and they promised to send a repairman in the afternoon. And since the editor was staying anyway, wouldn't he mind... right? It was hard not to notice that Liza (who fancied herself a clever and resourceful woman) had diplomatically withheld this information until after she secured his permission to leave. He couldn't help but feel a little played, walking straight into a trap.


The publication's headquarters on the seventh floor of an office building consisted of a small reception area and a much larger room. The latter, currently drenched in sunlight, doubled as the editor's office, a meeting room, and a storage space for computer hardware stacked on metal shelves, along with various boxes piled in corners and under desks. The room also housed essentials like a coffee machine, tea supplies, and, of course, the refrigerator. Still, there was plenty of open space, and the view from the windows, unobstructed by high-rises, invited dreamy contemplation. The only departure from prime second-rate office decor was a shotgun hanging on the wall behind the editor's chair, where our protagonist sat at the opening of this tale.


He sighed, pulled a wet wipe from the pack, and wiped his bald head and rather bulging, bloodshot eyes. Neither the wide-open windows nor the large floor fan humming three meters away brought any relief. The editor filled a glass with mineral water, but even as it poured from the bottle, it gurgled lifelessly. "Lukewarm..."


He pulled his laptop closer.


Being an editor-in-chief had its perks. What would rightfully be considered a breach of discipline and a waste of company time for an ordinary office drone-like idling on the internet-took on the respectable colors of "searching for new concepts" or "developing editorial strategy" when done by the boss. Yet the news feed on his screen was hardly fit for any purpose. It was a bleak roll call of freak rains flooding Europe, wildfires tearing through Yakutia, a heat dome suffocating North America, and the planet's dropping albedo due to melting Arctic ice... Just another dreadful summer of another coronavirus year.


"If things keep going this way," the editor thought, "it won't be long before..."


In his mind's eye rose the boundless, bottomless wetlands of Canada and the Siberian bogs, currently locked in permafrost alongside trillions of cubic meters of methane-a greenhouse gas dozens of times more hazardous than the notorious carbon dioxide. It would take only a tiny nudge to reach a critical mass of atmospheric heat, and then some weather fluke would trigger an unstoppable chain reaction. A year would come when winter never arrived. The permafrost would dissolve back into swampland. The rapid melting of Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets would begin, drowning vast continental territories under a seventy-meter deluge of brackish ocean waters, turning all major cities into uninhabitable miasmas.


"And it will all end in forty-two months. But first, a dragon with seven heads will rise from the sea, and on each head a... crown," the editor recalled. "And the dragon will force everyone who survives to be marked on the hand or the forehead, and no one will be allowed to buy or sell without it..."


A knock at the door.


The editor startled and opened his eyes. On the threshold stood an aging man in faded overalls, carrying a hefty toolbox typical of plumbers, electricians, and their ilk.


"Who called the doctor for the ailing fridge?" he asked cheerily.


"Ah, yes, right here," the editor said. "There it is."


The repairman took his time entering, glanced around for some reason, and, stepping up to the fridge, yanked the door open. Muttering a password or an incantation-"Isobutane!"-to whatever was inside, he turned to the editor.


"Did you notice if it was gurgling before it died?"


"Gurgling," the editor echoed mechanically. "I mean, no, I don't remember."


"Let's see..."


The repairman began pulling the fridge away from the wall, then fished an electrical tester out of his kit and half-disappeared into the newly formed crevice. After a few minutes of silence, muttering, and shuffling, there came a brief hiss and an "Aha!" The repairman emerged from behind the appliance.


"Good news and bad news. The compressor windings are intact; we just need to swap out the pill..."


"The pill?"


"Yeah, the PTC thermistor in the starter relay. But there's barely any pressure left in the system, and that's the bad news. Must be a leak somewhere. Give me a hand moving it?"


Together, they hauled the fridge completely away from the wall and spun it around so its backside faced the room.


"So, where is this pill?"


"Right here."


The editor squatted down beside the repairman. Flattered by the attention, the mechanic added:


"And this is the service valve. Refrigerant gets pumped in through this port-see? It's pretty much the same thing as a car tire valve. Usually, the factory seals this tube shut permanently, but it looks like your fridge has been worked on before. Someone brazed this valve in to make topping it up and checking the pressure easier. Handy for us."


"Worked on before?.." The editor grew thoughtful. "I don't even remember where we got this fridge; it was probably left behind when I leased the office. But it looks fairly new, doesn't it?"


"Oh, it's not old at all. But... that's how they build 'em nowadays. Planned obsolescence. Ever heard of it?"


"Of course. The forever lightbulbs. We get articles pitched about that all the time..."


"Lightbulbs or not, nobody sees the year-by-year drop in appliance quality clearer than us repairmen," the mechanic remarked with a touch of bitterness, pulling a small compressor and a brass manifold gauge assembly with multicolored hoses from his box. "Ten or fifteen years ago, things were built to last. Now, it's considered a miracle if they survive their warranty period..."


"What are you going to do now?"


"Pump some pressure into the system and hunt for the leak. It's a good thing the condenser... this cooling grid here... is on the outside."


"Where else would it be?"


"Most modern ones hide it inside the chassis. See any logic in that? Stuffing hot coils inside a refrigerator, heh. They say it looks sleeker and lets you push it flush against the wall. A brilliant achievement, truly. As if anyone ever looks at the back. In the older models, you could back out a few screws and pull the whole unit out. Repairing and dismantling was a breeze. But now... who can actually fix one from scratch anymore? You think this just happened on its own? No, engineers are given these parameters on purpose. Where serviceability used to be the goal, now it's unserviceability-with a heavy emphasis on the 'un'. Quite a mid-air pivot, and they pulled it off without slowing down production, on a massive scale! And nobody seemed to notice. Lightbulbs, honestly... But that's not even the half of it. The classic engineering challenge used to be ensuring equal longevity-making sure all the main parts of a machine had roughly the same lifespan so it would run trouble-free for years, and when it finally gave out, you wouldn't mind scrapping the whole thing. And if repairs or maintenance were needed, the design made them as simple and convenient as possible. Well, today's sabotage-engineers have a completely different agenda, and it's no cakewalk either. Their job now is to maximize unequal longevity, specifically paired with unserviceability, so things look brand new but you still have to throw them away. To do that, they have to figure out exactly which component to rig with a structural time bomb. It has to be impossible to defuse, its failure has to be catastrophic, and the detonation has to happen right on schedule."


The repairman flicked the compressor on for a few seconds, then off, and closed the valve on the brass manifold.


"May I?.." He reached for the bottle of mineral water on the editor's desk.


"Help yourself, but it's warm..."


The repairman took the bottle and splashed a bit of water onto a rag he'd unearthed from his tools alongside a bar of soap. Rubbing up a lather, he began smearing it over suspicious joints in the coils, watching for bubbles. The editor remained standing over him.


"Take the compressor, for instance," the repairman resumed his lecture. "Is that a good place to plant a 'bomb'? No, it's terrible. First off, if a compressor dies, it's obviously just the compressor, and it's easy to diagnose. Second, it's not hard to swap out. Third, it's unpredictable: try to build a defect into a compressor, and it might fail in a week, a year, or a decade, which is unacceptable because the product must last exactly three years of warranty plus one year max. Same goes for the control board: they have to make it reliable because you never know what will fry or when, plus it's incredibly easy to replace... Easy, but not cheap, since that same control module costs about four times less when built into a new fridge than when bought as a spare part. It's the same old heavy-handed carrot-and-stick routine to force the customer to junk a perfectly good appliance and buy a new one. Mind you, if you want a secret, all this digital nonsense is useless anyway. The cold is the same in any fridge, basic or high-end..."


"Where do they put the 'bombs' then?"


"The tubing. They join them with glue. Glue! Look here, you see brazed copper, but tucked away inside, out of sight, it's all glued. What a joke, right? If brazing works out here, why is it suddenly bad in there? Especially with manufacturing standardization and all... But no. Because brazing, you see, produces too unreliable an... ahem, unreliability. Whereas sealant breaks down right on cue. Chemical degradation. And it's not just the joints. The tubes themselves are a weak link. Like a fuse... or the opposite. If one thing doesn't fail, the other will. A guaranteed breakdown, so to speak. Then again, you can't just use cheap tubing across the board. You need a precise failure factor. All my colleagues know exactly where the lines corrode first-ninety-five percent of all such cases. You think the designers don't know? They know, and they could easily protect them. But I can't. Because to get to those spots, I'd have to tear the whole cabinet apart. That's why I said it's a blessing your condenser is this style. You can braze it or replace it, and finding the leak is easy. Mind you, these external grids almost never fail, which is probably why they don't mind putting them on the outside. Creative logic, right? But even this design is rare now. Instead, they don't just glue the lines together anymore; they glue the whole condenser inside the cabinet walls," he patted the side of the fridge, "and then inject polyurethane foam into the space between the outer skin and the liner. Foam insulation. And that's the end of the story. No way in, nothing you can do. Same with the evaporator, except they glue it to the plastic interior wall where the frost builds up. They glue it, and then it delaminates. So the compressor hums, but there's no frost. Funny, isn't it? They invented a new excuse to send a fridge to the landfill. By the way, yours has that kind of evaporator too. So," the repairman groaned, pushing himself up to his feet, "here's what we'll do. I've checked every joint I could reach, no holes in sight. Now we wait at least half an hour. If the pressure on the gauge doesn't drop, I'll swap the filter-drier and recharge the system. If it drops, I'll join the chorus advising you to buy a new one. A piece of... design art like this only makes sense to fix for some grandma out in the country, and even then, self-respecting mechanics don't bother gutting that foam until the chunks fly," the repairman chuckled, clearly recalling something or rather someone, "they just leave the factory nonsense alone and build it from scratch. Or maybe it's better to say the old-fashioned way, the way it should have been done from the start. They drill two holes through the back and mount everything separately, inside and out-condenser, evaporator, the works. And no glue."


The editor went back to his desk. The repairman dragged a vacant chair over to the fridge and sat down to watch the gauge.


"I think you're drawing rather sweeping conclusions from what might just be shoddy workmanship and, I grant you, a flawed design," the editor said. "I see no reason to call it deliberate sabotage. Besides, the world doesn't revolve around refrigerators, even if we're just talking about home appliances. Do you fix washing machines, for instance?"


"On occasion."


"And where are the bombs planted by the saboteur-designers there?"


"They put plastic bearing tubs on the drum."


"Well, I don't know..."


A minute ticked by.


"Why plastic bearing tubs?" the editor suddenly asked.


"Why not? It ticks all the boxes. Catastrophic failure, a highly predictable lifespan, hidden away. Frankly, it's the only spot in a washing machine I'd pick for the job myself. So again, hardly a coincidence. Otherwise, they'd have to hardwire a kill-switch chip or a program that bricks the machine after a set amount of hours or even idle time, just like they did with printers. Big scandal about that a few years back... They're probably more cautious now, so if there's a vital mechanical part, they prefer to use that. People-or rather, consumers-are usually more fatalistic when it comes to raw, material wear and tear. Even if they curse the manufacturers for pinching pennies."


"But isn't that what it is? Aren't they just pinching pennies?"


"On each individual fridge? Sure. But manufacturing five fridges that last four years each instead of one that lasts twenty? That's a hell of a way to save a penny."


Silence fell once more. Then the editor rose from his chair, walked over to the floor fan, and angled it so a portion of the breeze reached the repairman too.


2


'Hell, I've got one of those disposable fridges myself,' the repairman said. 'Lasted four years and that was it. Like clockwork. So, you know what I did?'


'No, I have no idea what you did,' the editor said, a heavy dose of irony in his voice.


'Well... First, I had to figure out whether the leak was on the high side or the low side. Thank God you can still at least diagnose that much. Turns out, it was on the high side...'


Noticing the blank look in the editor's eyes, the mechanic clarified:


'The high-pressure side, I mean. In the condenser. Your standard leak into the foam. So, I grabbed a length of copper tubing and brazed it here and here,' the repairman stood up, gesturing with his hand. 'In other words, I built a brand-new condenser. Then I took a forty-liter plastic barrel-the kind people use to pickle cucumbers-and sat it right on top of the fridge (he made a wide, two-handed gesture). Then I snaked (a smooth, fluid motion) a section of that tubing right inside. And filled it with water. Long story short, now I've got plenty of free hot water in my kitchen.'


'Just like that?'


'Just like that.'


'And it's actually hot?'


'Forty to fifty degrees Celsius on average.'


'Is that a lot?'


'Plenty for washing dishes or your hands. Have you ever actually measured the temperature of the water you normally use? But broadly speaking, the exact temperature isn't even the core of the issue. It all comes down to the refrigerant. Some of them can heat water almost to a boil and still cool the fridge just fine. Out of all the popular refrigerants, isobutane gives you the lowest condenser temperature, and therefore the coolest water. And even then, it's plenty hot. Propane, which is pretty similar and also very common, can give you another ten degrees. And if even that isn't enough-say, for some sanitary regulations-you can easily make up the missing degrees to reach the canonical seventy with a standard resistive heating element built right into the same water tank. It wouldn't make the setup any less cost-effective. Though in reality, nobody needs it that hot, except maybe to disinfect the tank once a year, and even that's just paranoid over-engineering since tap water is already heavily chlorinated. Heck, my bathroom boiler is permanently set to forty or forty-five degrees, and nobody's arresting me for it-the manufacturer built that option right in. But this way, I don't have to fiddle with mixing valves or worry about scalding myself; I just have cold water and hot water, right at the temperature you can get from any fridge without any extra bells and whistles. The bottom line is, I don't turn on the kitchen boiler anymore, and I don't pay a dime for that electricity. If I'd built this rig earlier, I wouldn't have bought a boiler at all. What effect could be more direct and obvious than that? Now imagine: what if every refrigerator in the world was built this way? Voila, global warming solved!'


The repairman finished his wild gesturing and dropped back into his chair with a smug, self-satisfied grin.


The editor smiled.


'In my line of work, I deal with sci-fi stories all the time, but...' he nodded toward the bottle containing the remnants of his mineral water, 'how much heat could there possibly be in that to wash plates and, in passing, halt global warming?'


'A very common misconception,' the repairman said, raising a pedagogical finger. 'Of course, food as such holds very little heat. But even if a fridge is heavily used-meaning you're constantly putting warm stuff in and taking cold stuff out-that only accounts for about five to seven percent of the electricity it consumes. How's that for efficiency?'


'Well, I suppose that's as good as it gets. Or what are you driving at?'


'I'm driving at the fact that if you go to bed at night and walk into the kitchen in the morning... Or better yet, if you go away for a week's vacation and come back home, you'll hear your fridge cycling on and off just like it always does. But everything you put inside it cooled down or froze a week ago, didn't it? Then why is it running? What is it cooling? It's cooling the air around it. And at the same time, it's heating that very same air with these exact coils, right here, in immediate proximity. Can you really call that an intelligent use of electricity? It's like carrying water in a sieve. Now consider that a quarter of all electricity generated worldwide is used specifically for refrigeration, freezing food, and air conditioning. Just imagine what the world would look like if we reclaimed all that heat and stopped wasting clean, useful electricity on warming up water or even the air outside? Because that's exactly what air conditioners do, directly driving global warming. But even that isn't the kicker. The most delicious detail is that for every unit of energy a fridge pulls from the wall, it can pump out three times more heat than a simple resistive element-also known as a heating coil-used in ordinary water heaters. That is where the real payload is hidden.'


'Hmm... Potential is one thing, execution is another,' the editor drawned, sounding bored.


'To bypass the debate on technical feasibility and economics...'


'Forgive the interruption. Have you always repaired refrigerators?'


'In these trying times, many people lose their professions and turn to a trade,' the repairman replied evasively. 'So, rather than argue whether it's possible or profitable, I'll just say that this idea is already hardwired into the millions of heat pumps sold every single year worldwide, specifically to heat water using ambient air. And a refrigerator, like any thermal machine, is the exact same heat pump. The only difference is that in heat pumps called 'heat pumps,' they try to maximize the ambient heat reaching the evaporators, while in heat pumps called 'refrigerators,' they try to prevent it-though as we can see, not very successfully. And one more minor difference: there are millions of heat pumps, but billions of refrigerators. Not to mention the small detail that you still have to buy a heat pump, whereas humanity has already paid for the refrigerators.'


'How do you know there are billions?'


'I crunched the numbers. Generally, statistics don't give you a straight answer to that question, but you can dig up commercial data on how many units were sold in a specific country in a given year. So, if you divide the country's population by that number, multiplied by the expected lifespan of the appliance, and then cross-reference that with the average household size in some of the most populous nations, you can conclude that for every three people on the globe, there is one domestic refrigerator-though in some countries, it might be two. Then again, I could have spared myself the research and calculations and arrived at the exact same figure through sheer intuition. Really, how many people share a single fridge? Exactly. And if, as they say, there are eight billion people on this rock, that means two point seven billion household refrigerators. Now, if we throw in all the home air conditioners, which also number over a billion...'


The repairman raised his eyebrows and swept his hand through the air.


'What are we actually talking about here? How much energy can you get out of a single fridge?'


'Simple math. See this sticker? The energy efficiency rating on your fridge is quite high, A-plus. The manufacturer-and you know manufacturers aren't going to overstate this number-writes right here that it consumes 325 kilowatt-hours of electricity per year. We multiply that figure by at least three, and we see that you can harvest roughly a thousand kilowatt-hours of thermal energy from a single refrigerator every year. Now, we remember that there are 365 days in a year and that three people use one fridge. So, it's completely realistic to say that every single person on the planet could get one kilowatt-hour of free or salvaged electricity every single day. Impressive, right? That's a game-changer, man!'


'But not everyone heats their water with electricity,' the editor countered. 'At my place, for instance, hot water just flows out of the tap. How can I save electricity if I don't use it for that in the first place?'


'But that hot water isn't free, is it? I mean, it doesn't cost the same as cold water, right? So maybe there's still a point in using the heat from the fridge? Ultimately, if you don't open the hot water tap, it's the exact same thing as me not turning on my electric boiler. But it's not just about the money. For you to have hot water in your pipes, gas or coal has to be burned. Usually, municipal boiler plants operate at around 85 percent efficiency, meaning fifteen percent goes up in smoke right at the source. To that, you have to add the fuel used to extract and deliver that energy to the plant or building, then add the heat loss along the way to your apartment-and all of that translates into atmospheric emissions. If you heat your water with your refrigerator, even if it sounds like a joke, no new or additional emissions, pollution, or costs are generated.'


'However, your installation costs something too, doesn't it?'


'Well, let's do the math. With your permission, I won't include the cost of the metal tubing. Because I've already bought it and it's already inside my fridge. So what's left? A plastic barrel, about five meters of plastic pipe, and one or two valves? Personally, I didn't even have to pay for the barrel because I already owned my boiler, and the only thing missing from that boiler was a length of metal pipe running through the water inside it. And inside that pipe, of course, would be the freon from the fridge. But even if you had to buy everything required for a DIY retrofit, at today's electricity rates, it would pay for itself in two or three months max. After that, you'd be saving money for decades. What other so-called sustainable energy tech can boast that kind of economic returns?'


'Even so, that's a very narrow view,' the editor remarked. 'You said yourself that refrigerators are probably the most widely used and sold appliances in the world. So how can you ignore the consumer's perspective? And not just theirs, but the manufacturer's, who wants to satisfy customer demand better than the competition. A fridge is a fridge. It does exactly what I bought it for. If I want to buy one as a gift, for instance, I want it to be a gift, not a headache for someone. Not to mention that I want it to be compact, easy to transport, move around, and place here, there, or wherever, without dragging a water barrel behind it.'


The repairman flared up, his speech turning slightly clipped:


'Then... then why cry crocodile tears over global warming and all the rest of it? If the entire ecological future of the planet, along with all its species, including humans, is nothing compared to the hypothetical convenience of a consumer shuffling a fridge around the kitchen. What is it, a chair? For God's sake!'


'But your plastic pickle barrel on top of the fridge is just ridiculous, can't you see that?' said the editor, who in turn was starting to lose his cool. 'What? Am I supposed to fill it with a bucket and scoop water out with a cup?'


'No need for that. Naturally, I automated everything later, which isn't that big of a deal. For a while, I thought about filling the barrel with cold water using a float valve and overflow pipe, like a toilet tank, and skimming the hot water off the top with a floating hose. But then a better idea struck me. You see, after my experiment yielded brilliant results, it became obvious that I needed a much larger tank, and putting it on top of the fridge wouldn't be the best solution, if it was even possible. So next time, I bought an 80-liter drum and engineered everything into its lid,' the repairman began gesturing again, 'namely, the inlet and outlet for the freon lines-the condenser, that is-as well as the inlet and outlet for the water pipes. And I screwed it tight onto the drum.'


'How on earth did you screw the lid on with all those pipes attached to the fridge and the sink or whatever?' the editor asked slyly.


'You have excellent spatial visualization,' the repairman complimented his client.


'Thanks, but it's not me. You're just explaining it so well with your hands... Well?'


'Actually, I screwed the drum into the lid. While it was empty, obviously,' the repairman laughed.


'Ah, I see. And...'


'And I have an extra line in the lid specifically for drainage.'


'So where did you put the drum if not on the fridge?'


'Set it right on the floor. When I open the hot tap, I'm actually letting cold water in to fill the drum from the bottom, and that cold water displaces the hot water from the top of the drum, forcing it down the line into the sink or shower. The freon in the condenser flows and heats the water in the opposite direction, from top to bottom. That way, the hot water and cold water stay in two distinct layers that don't mix-it's a counter-flow temperature gradient. Only their relative thickness changes. And I left the bottom of the drum uninsulated, just in case. Combined with the exposed section of the condenser after the drum, it completely guarantees the freon won't overheat. So thanks to all these simple tricks, I can place the tank anywhere convenient without needing high ground. The whole thing operates under very low water pressure, no more than one-twentieth of standard plumbing pressure, but perfectly adequate for any shower. The entire system is so low-maintenance it doesn't require heavy tank walls or a perfect seal, and honestly, you could give it a hundred-year warranty. Plus, it's exceptionally safe because even this minor overpressure is only generated when you're actually using the water; the pressure doesn't bottle up in the drum, so you won't flood the neighbor downstairs. I don't know why standard electric water heaters don't use this blueprint. Too simple? Too cheap? And who's going to run out and buy a new boiler because the old one rusted out and leaked, if there's nothing here to rust in the first place?'


The repairman shrugged and glanced at the pressure gauge.


'So, the absolute maximum you can harvest from one fridge is three kilowatt-hours a day?' the editor asked. 'Let me picture that... What's the wattage on this kettle?'


The repairman walked over to the desk where the kettle stood, lifted it, and checked the base.


'Two kilowatts.'


'So, it's about as much heat as a two-kilowatt kettle can produce in an hour and a half...' the editor said, tracing something on the ceiling.


'And it wouldn't be boiling water, but around fifty degrees,' the repairman aided the editor's imagination.


'Yes, not nothing,' the editor said. 'But not a massive amount either. For one person, sure, it's enough, assuming it's a shower, say, not a bath. But for a family of three, if they're sharing one fridge between them like you said-hardly.'


'And there I catch you at your word,' the repairman raised his finger again. 'Because up until now, we've been talking about free hot water. Or rather, free water heating. But usually, a compressor only runs about twenty minutes out of every hour. Nothing stops you, if needed, from forcing it to run for forty minutes, or even the full sixty. In a standard fridge, this depends on the heat influx to the evaporator-meaning the warm groceries we want to cool or freeze, and the insulation quality of the cabinet. So you can regulate this quite easily, for instance, with something like a small shutter that exposes part of the insulation in the wall or door, or by opening some vent, or maybe just by leaving the door slightly ajar. And then, on top of the free water for one family member, there will be two more such portions for the other two. Only this time not for free, but heated with the efficiency of a heat pump-meaning three times cheaper than if it were heated the traditional way. And in a worst-case scenario, if hot water is still short, the extra volume can again be boosted by a heating element, like the one in this kettle, but built into our drum. Even with the thermostat you'd need alongside the element, it would cost next to nothing. And there's no need to fear burning out the compressor: as we established, it's one of the most reliable parts of a fridge, especially modern ones. So the benefit is obvious, and the ecological impact too, even if it's not entirely free. It's entirely possible that on a macro level, it's even better than heating water in municipal plants. Food for thought... At the very least, it's no worse than the efficiency of electricity generation... Listen, this is brilliant stuff. Energy transmission without losses, not through wires, but through the air-exactly like Tesla's big secret discovery. Transmission through the air in the form of the air itself,' the repairman grew cheerful. 'Meaning, at the power plant, we heat the air, and here, we cool it.'


'Wait, I just remembered...' the editor smiled, 'how did you put it? Leaving the fridge open? My wife wouldn't love that. She chews me out when I take too long picking something out of the fridge. Now at least I'd have a comeback. There's definitely something to your idea.'


'Of course. Think of the indirect benefits. Both psychological and economic. Refrigerators themselves could be built cheaper. If there are no losses-if all losses are turned into profit-then the walls of the fridge could be made thinner, or out of cheaper material, or out of any material at all, even brick. And thinner walls mean smaller exterior dimensions for the same storage capacity. Naturally, you could use the most basic compressor. The door doesn't seal tight enough? The rubber gasket is cracked or demagnetized? Who cares. It turns out that in terms of energy consumption, the rating of any fridge, even a shoddy one, would be exactly the same-the absolute highest. And that in itself is a contribution to ecology.'


'By the way, what kind of ecological contribution are we talking about?' the editor asked.


'In short, factoring in the heat from domestic air conditioners-which can just as easily be hooked up to the same water drum-and counting only the direct fuel savings, without even considering the cheaper production of the appliances themselves, which is also a massive deal... by a conservative estimate, it turns out we could stop burning three million tons of fossil fuel every single day. Just visualize that. Three million tons every day. That's nine million tons of carbon dioxide not dumped into our poor atmosphere daily. Or, if you prefer, a tenth of the emissions of all global energy, industry, transport, and everything humanity burns in any form, from backyard barbecues to turbojet engines. And that's just the household fridges and AC units that are already sitting there, running. Isn't that wild? Is it even worth mentioning industrial cooling, commercial refrigeration? I think not. But the picture there is just as pathetic, and nowhere near green. By the way, what I'm talking about is bigger than the impact of all existing solar panels, wind turbines, and nuclear reactors combined, the ones making all the headlines. It's precisely this insane number of refrigerators and air conditioners that allows us to speak of them as a global, untapped energy source. Like the new oil, or something...'


'Well, marvelous,' the editor said. 'You've almost convinced me. But can I still have a refrigerator without a water barrel? I mean, tell me yourself, what would I do with it here? I don't take baths in the office.'


'No problem. In fact, the fridge and the heat exchanger should ideally be separate units, if only because of the vastly different lifespans of each device. Remember what we said about equal longevity?'


The editor smiled:


'And I'd have to call a guy like you every time I need to hook them up or disconnect them? Seems like you're securing yourself a job for years to come, aren't you?'


'But people already do exactly that,' the repairman countered, 'when they connect and disconnect the indoor and outdoor units of air conditioners, don't they? And nobody loses sleep over it. It doesn't present an insurmountable technical hurdle, as you can see. The tech is already standard. By the way, we could get rid of those expensive, bulky, and ugly outdoor units that look like warts on buildings altogether, along with the pricey installation and exterior maintenance. Assuming, of course, you aren't interested in using the AC for heating in the winter. Yes, I know that option exists, but that's no excuse not to harvest the heat when the AC is running in cooling mode, which is why it was bought in the first place. With refrigerators, the whole job would be even simpler because, first of all, both units stay inside the house, and second, you wouldn't even necessarily have to link the freon lines. The heat transfer from the fridge to the boiler could be done via dry contact, just like they cool computer processors. Roughly speaking, you just slap a water canister onto this cooling grid. So in the final analysis, it seems I'm putting myself out of a job, not securing one, especially since fridges would break down less often-compressors have an easier time running with water cooling. The only thing truly needed is for appliance manufacturers to redesign the condensers so they can be integrated with home electric boilers. And boiler manufacturers-often the exact same companies-need to tweak their designs so they can receive heat from those condensers. Both changes would cost next to nothing, or absolutely nothing, and I would make it mandatory by international law. Why not? It's happened before, when they banned freons that harmed the ozone layer, and nobody was worse off for it, even if some manufacturers threw a tantrum at first. And the motive there was ecological too. As for you... your right to buy a fridge without heat reclamation remains sacred. The real question is, who violated your right and mine to buy a fridge with heat reclamation? And worse, they did it in a way that we can't even guess our rights are being infringed upon. You might say there's no consumer demand for such a product, but how can demand ever materialize if nobody ever offers the product in the first place? You think that's an accident?'


'And you think it's a conspiracy?'


The repairman grimaced.


'I think that if there is no supply from the top, demand can be forged from the bottom. Even through DIY modifications like this and showing off the results.'


'Well then, go ahead and do it. If everything is so beautiful and profitable, advocate for these setups among your clients. You're in the perfect position for it. They need a repair, seize the moment. Have you pitched it to them?'


'I have.'


'And?'


'They say, 'Just fix it like it was.''


'See? Nobody wants your barrel.'


'I see nothing of the sort. All I see is that if I were called to fix a fridge that already had a barrel, the client would also ask me to fix it like it was.'


Silence fell. The editor grew thoughtful.


'I'm still certain you've overlooked something,' he said at last. 'I just haven't had enough time to figure out exactly what. However, there's no need to look for complex explanations when simple ones are right there. Occam's razor, you know? Most likely, if appliance manufacturers make unreliable things, it's not because they've conspired to feed the landfills, but because they obey the objective laws of competition, which force them to cut costs, churn out cheaper goods, and cycle through models faster in pursuit of the buyer's dollar.'


'Then how do you explain plastic bearings?'


'The exact same way. If nobody makes water-heating refrigerators, it's because it makes no sense. You've just miscalculated somewhere. I think I even know where. Look: a fridge sits in a room, let's say the kitchen. But it's a closed system. If the fridge doesn't heat the air, then where does the heat for the water come from? And if it heats the air, there's nothing left to heat the water. In other words, you've invented a perpetual motion machine that supposedly pulls excess energy out of nowhere.'


The editor's face beamed with satisfaction.


'Well, if your kitchen is inside a thermos flask, you're absolutely right,' the repairman shot back. 'But in reality, you'll only slightly cool the air, which is constantly escaping through the ventilation or the window-or rather, both. Besides, if you put the fridge in a thermos, don't forget to put the hot shower fed by that fridge into the exact same thermos. In truth, it's not that easy to get rid of that heat, especially in summer, and wastewater accounts for a minuscule fraction of a building's thermal balance. The walls, windows, doors, and roofs have the biggest impact. They are far worse in terms of heat leaking out or in than the walls of a fridge, which keeps chugging along whether you open it or not. So much for your 'closed system.' And so much for 'energy efficiency,' by the way. Because when these clowns advertise and prompt you to pay extra for an incredibly efficient fridge with a smart inverter compressor and electronic drive, they won't tell you-and most likely don't understand themselves-that it's utter nonsense. The entire energy efficiency of a modern fridge in its current design depends exclusively on the thickness of its walls. And the price of that efficiency is the price of the foam insulation. But can you really sell foam insulation for that kind of money? Interesting question: why do no scientific or technological upgrades to such a tech-loaded product matter a damn compared to an extra layer of plastic? Don't you smell something fishy in that? And that's considering you haven't even seen the regulations they use to calculate a fridge's efficiency rating...'


'Hold on a second,' the editor said. 'I'm still not ready to agree with you. Because with your... idea, you're still altering the building's thermal balance. I'll grant you the sewage, but you're removing part of the heat influx in the form of hot water or the electricity used to heat it.'


'All the better,' the repairman replied. 'Aren't we striving to cut energy consumption, especially electricity? You don't protest against LED bulbs replacing good old incandescent ones, do you? But they alter the building's thermal balance too. Ultimately, if you're so worried about the thermal balance, let me point out that the kitchen is the room that least needs heating, but most needs ventilation. Especially in tropical countries, where the bulk of the world's population lives, and therefore the bulk of the fridges and AC units. No, the real question is whether we allow energy to spin in a short, futile circle, or whether we finally wise up and direct it toward something useful. You know, sometimes I wish there were magic glasses through which people could see things the way I see them. I look at this standard fridge of yours and see it as someone's stupid joke, one of those caricatures of pointless contraptions.'


'Don't insult my fridge,' the editor joked.


'I won't anymore. In fact, I don't even understand why we're talking about some closed system in this scorching weather. I've already gathered I won't be selling you my heat exchanger, but I think even you wouldn't mind cooling this room by three or four kilowatt-hours a day. It's strange you don't have an air conditioner in here.'


'Air conditioners dry out the air. It's unhealthy.'


'Ah... Well, it's just as well you don't have one. Everyone's weeping about global warming, yet look at all those buildings plastered with AC units, each pumping heat into an already overheated atmosphere. In every single one of those units, I see evidence of an ecological crime...'


'Through your magic glasses?'


'...and at the same time, they burn coal and other fuels, adding greenhouse gases to the atmosphere just to heat water in the very same buildings from which they are simultaneously throwing that heat away, instead of taking what's handed right to them. Can you make any sense of it? Let's assume that in reality-judging by their deeds-they want to cause global warming, but then why weep about it? Why not just do it quietly?'


'Maybe they're lying about global warming?' the editor suggested.


'Meaning it doesn't exist? I don't think so... Too much evidence. And isn't it obvious? If we heat the atmosphere, it gets warmer. But even if global warming is total bunk, that still doesn't explain the utter stupidity of this kind of economy.'


'What is stupidity to one man is rigorous logic to another,' the editor murmured mockingly.


3


'Looks like the pressure is holding. Let's get to fixing it.'


To the existing pile of equipment, the repairman added a torch, a cylinder of freon, and a few brazing rods. Things began to hum, burn, and stink... Meanwhile, the editor amused himself by reading. About twenty minutes later, the repairman stood up.


'Now I'll pressure-test it one more time, then pull a vacuum and charge it. Almost done.'


'Thank you for your work. And for the conversation. As a media representative, I found it quite instructive. Though if you ask me, there's no real future in what you're saying. Humanity strives to consume energy, not conserve it.'


'It's not that humanity doesn't want to save energy,' the repairman grunted. 'It's that the people who sell energy to humanity don't want it saved.'


'Not entirely. Humanity as a mass isn't just standing on the sidelines either. Everyone wants to live in a bigger house, drive a bigger car, travel more often and farther, and not be confined to local goods or seasonal produce. Ultimately, people want to eat meat, not grain. You can't change that. You could force people to consume less energy, but what's the point of that kind of fanaticism? Without freedom, nothing makes sense. We need to produce more energy, plain and simple. And the paradigm of our technological development is the concentration of energy, not the reclamation of low-grade heat.'


'Well, maybe... And where did that get us? To this?' The repairman gestured toward the window.


'No need to panic. Alternative energy is growing at an unprecedented rate. Soon, we'll stop burning fossil fuels altogether...'


The repairman returned to the pressure-testing and soaping routine, but this time only on the joints he had just worked on. Bored, the editor wandered over again.


'Alternative energy...' the repairman muttered. 'You mean those windmills Don Quixote was fighting? Yeah, a real alternative. Incredible progress, truly... And in the end, aren't they harvesting that exact same low-grade energy?'


'Huh? I suppose they are. You caught me there.'


'Besides, in what way is that any better than my setup? After all, by their own admission, what is the biggest flaw in those famous renewable sources? It's their intermittency. Sometimes the wind blows, sometimes it doesn't. And the sun shines-or doesn't shine-on photovoltaic panels, which are just another low-grade energy scavenger. Then you need batteries, which cost even more than the hardware itself. Meanwhile, refrigerators run twenty-four-seven. They don't need real estate on a roof or in a field; you don't have to build a damn thing... absolutely zero hassle. They are already here, and they will always be needed... just reach out your hand and take the energy. Clean energy. And then use it right next to where it's generated. A uniquely elegant synergy. Granted, my fridge doesn't produce energy, but it saves it. So what's the difference?..'


By now, the repairman's grandiose ramblings had exhausted the editor-much like they probably have the reader of this story, assuming he or she hasn't already closed it to go wander elsewhere on the internet. But the editor, of course, enjoyed no such luxury. So he simply pointed a finger and asked:


'Is that a vacuum pump?'


'Spot on.'


'And that?'


'That's a gauge manifold. Or just a manifold. Built to count the money, I guess. The red gauge is for high pressure, and the red hose matches. The blue is for low pressure. Even though the hoses are identical structurally, it's best not to mix them up. Right now, we have the pump hooked up to the red side. The blue hose will go to the fridge. And here, to the yellow one, I'll screw on an adapter with a valve, and then the freon cylinder. Once the air is evacuated, I'll close the red valve on the manifold and crack the valve on the cylinder. Then I'll fire up the fridge compressor and watch the blue gauge. As soon as the pressure hits zero-point-four atmospheres, the charge is done.'


The vacuum pump began to whine, and the repairman walked over to the window. Peering out, he began counting under his breath:


'One, two, three... Just from here, I can spot nine roofs with solar panels. Do you have any idea how long they have to operate before they offset the energy it took to manufacture them? To say nothing of the ecology of that manufacturing and their eventual disposal. Wind power isn't any better off, by the way. You won't find a full cost breakdown for a standard windmill anywhere. Commercial secret, most likely. They're even embarrassed to state how much energy such a rig will generate in a year, preferring to tell rubes-who can't tell the difference between kilowatts and kilowatt-hours-about 'installed capacity' and how many 'homes' it could or couldn't power. So the estimates for when a windmill actually becomes energy-positive range from a few years to never, and its carbon footprint is a total black box. But if we're going down that road, let me ask you: why this way? Why the Don Quixote blueprint? At altitudes above three hundred meters-roughly the height of the Eiffel Tower-and specifically in the mid-latitudes where the bulk of consumers live, steady winds blow with maximum energy density, several times higher than the wind near the ground. Why not exploit that?'


'But projects like that do exist,' the editor said. 'Unfortunately, they haven't been successful.'


'I know exactly which projects you mean. Because I saw them too, even on TV-which is a miracle in itself. One was a giant helium balloon shaped like a doughnut with a wind turbine inside the hole. They'd launch the whole thing into the sky and beam the juice down to earth via cable. Good Lord! The other was a literal tethered airplane. It could even take off like a plane, but its props were meant to act as wind turbines and its engines as generators. Are those the projects you had in mind?'


The editor nodded.


'Brilliant. But why do you say they weren't successful? They secured funding; they got on TV. If that's not success, what is? Sure, no steam engine could generate electricity more expensive or dirtier than these eco-friendly alternatives, but who cares?'


'Do you have a better idea?'


'Not just ideas. I built the damn thing. One day I was flying a kite with my kids, and I asked myself how I could harness that massive pull. At first, I thought about utilizing horizontal motion. Mechanically, it's probably the simplest design. The bottom end of the tether is tied to a long lever. As the kite dives sideways, it pulls the lever (here the repairman started helping himself with his hands again). Then it loops in the sky and pulls the lever back. Back and forth, back and forth. The rest is just engineering. But it has two flaws. First, it would be impossible, or incredibly difficult, to synchronize those movements for multiple kites. The tethers would tangle in no time. So grouping several such generators next to one another to create a utility-scale power plant would be out of the question. Furthermore, I would have had to design and stitch a massive kite with complex aerodynamics, and I wasn't about to sink a ton of time and money into that. Plus, it would violate the core premise: low-cost energy. So I decided to go with vertical lift and standard children's kites. I bought six of them. They're simple, cheap, stable in flight, and ready to go. I just had to rig an extra loop on each, like a buttonhole. As for the ground unit, I salvaged an old bicycle, stripping the front wheel off and the tire off the back. Flipped it upside down, obviously, and instead of a saddle, I mounted it onto a pipe driven into the dirt so the whole rig could pivot with the wind. The rear rim doubled as a pulley, and on the front fork, I rigged up some basic mechanical automation...'


The editor choked back a yawn and pulled another napkin from the pack. The repairman took the hint and quickened his pace.


'In a nutshell, my idea was to create a kite cluster where the individual units were somewhat independent of one another but fed into a single power train on the ground. Launching them all is just as easy as launching one, and definitely a hell of a lot easier than launching a massive kite. Besides, if the line on one big kite snaps, you have to start the whole circus from scratch. My design, on the other hand, lets you launch the cluster exactly once. If one of those little kites tears or breaks away, it's no big deal. So one rag flies off somewhere-the others stay in the sky. At that altitude, by the way, they stay up permanently, even if the pull isn't strong enough to generate much juice. Of course, my design allows you to reel things down to replace a lost kite, or to inspect, repair, add, or remove them one by one. The whole thing scales beautifully, and overall it's a solid setup, truly... You can find others online to suit your taste. Mine uses shorter strokes-cycles, that is-than most similar concepts. But the common thread among them all is that you don't haul blades, generators, and heavy cables into the sky with balloons or planes. Everything sits neatly, conveniently, and accessibly on the deck, where every pound works to your advantage instead of driving up the cost. There's no need for a foundation either, since there are no blades, no tower, and no forces trying to topple that tower. You just set it on a heavy concrete block, or anchor it to a boulder or a driven pile. Plus, you don't need to clear massive safety buffer zones like you do with those enormous rotating blades. And since there are no blades, nothing threatens birds, makes noise, or ruins the landscape... Most importantly, every single component is dirt cheap. But that's the catch. Cheap energy is bad energy.'


The repairman sat down on the chair closest to the window. He continued:


'Hell, even the wind at low altitudes could be utilized so much better. After all, we already have blades and towers that don't need building. You know what they are? Trees. Trees! Sounds funny? Not at all. Have you ever pondered how much energy is locked in tall trees swaying in the wind? Climb to the top of a tree in a gale and feel it for yourself. We chop a tree down for firewood, but over its lifespan, we could extract many times more energy from it than from its lumber, by the simple virtue of it swaying in the wind. And how cheaply that energy can be harvested! That's another piece of my know-how. You don't even have to climb the tree to anchor a rope. These days, that's a perfect job for drones. All these lines from neighboring trees run to a yo-yo type device with a generator, which is then hoisted up high between the trees out of everyone's way, and boom! Each individual tree has its own swaying frequency, and that generates torque for the generator. Want me to sketch it out?'


'No,' the editor said.


'And again, in terms of payback periods, no windmills or panels come close. For summer cottages and the like, it's the holy grail. No eyesore, no damage, no danger-even your neighbor won't complain about a disturbance. No one will even notice. Though, obviously, you need large trees nearby. Even a single tree will do if you anchor the other end to something stationary, like a wall or a pole. In my experience, the maximum practical number of trees per generator is five. But that's if they're just growing wild. Not that it matters, because the generator block is so small, simple, and cheap-ripe for mass production. And who knows, maybe someday people would start intentionally planting trees in formations to harvest wind energy from them. Then again, trees vary. Pines would probably be best: tall, clean trunks... Maybe palms... Hell, they try to harness ocean wave energy, and doesn't a forest billow like waves in the wind?..'


Something dreamy flickered in the repairman's eyes.


The editor, however, brought him back down to earth:


'Even so, if what you're talking about actually worked...'


'It does work,' the repairman shrugged. 'What's there to fail? The whole thing is as simple as a sledgehammer. High school science is plenty.'


'If all of this were as efficient as you claim,' the editor continued with soft persistence, 'someone would have started manufacturing these systems long ago. It's a strange phenomenon: I often hear about various projects, but the inventors themselves somehow never make it to practical execution. Why, for instance, if it's all so simple and cheap, haven't you started production yourself? You'd make a fortune.'


'I'd make a mountain of trouble.'


'From whom? Who's going to stop you? The oil mafia? Reptilians from planet Nibiru?'


'There are no reptilians. There isn't even an oil mafia. There is only ever the same old power mafia, because all power is a mafia that divides people and triggers their dog instincts by cooking up funny boogeymen and slurs-like 'conspiracy theory,' 'perpetual motion,' 'unrecognized genius,' 'reptilians,' 'Masons,' and so on. But those are nothing more than words and a conditioned reflex, like a dog executing commands. If you rebrand those exact same contemptible terms as 'politics,' everyone suddenly starts showing respect.'


'But politics is something else entirely, isn't it?'


'No, politics is conspiracy as such. I won't even go into the intelligence agencies of any state, which are quite officially paid to engage in conspiracies, both their own and others. Or those Bilderberg clubs that openly gather for secret meetings and invite, by the way, the energy ministers of certain countries. But what does it mean when the media reports on presidents meeting 'without the press'? What is that if not a conspiracy, legalized and taken for granted by society? What secrets can presidents possibly have from their own people? It's barbarism and the inoculation of canine reflexes: one morality for the masters, another for the dogs. If one of their tail-wagging brethren points out that this is abnormal, the barking starts: 'reptilians,' 'conspiracy theory'... A theory, right!'


'Nevertheless, I see I'm going to have to endure some flavor of a conspiracy theory anyway,' the editor said with a wink. 'Could you at least spice it up with a few aliens and flying saucers?'


'Hey! Who's talking here?' the repairman laughed. 'The very same man who urged me not to multiply entities unnecessarily?.. I must say, Occam's razor is a blade that cuts both ways. When you're slicing someone up, be careful not to nick yourself. After all, don't the anti-conspiracists slash right and left with Occam's razor like a samurai with a katana?-in the sense that they hunt for the simplest explanations. And what else do you expect from these narrow-minded, incompetent people? When they spot two old women selling tomatoes at the market for the exact same price, they conclude the old gals just had a meeting without the press. Naive conspiracy theorists, what could they possibly know about the weight of economic factors? Factors that, no matter how complex and varied they are for those old women with their tomatoes, ultimately boil down to the exact same price tag.'


'Maybe the old women don't grow the tomatoes themselves, but simply work for the same owner?'


'Good point. But where do you categorize that? Under natural causes or conspiracy theories? And how do you explain that several grandmas at the market have tomatoes, but nobody has cucumbers? You see, what you call Occam's razor isn't it at all. It's just your desperate urge to find objective explanations at all costs. A respectable thing, the scientific approach. But is it always intelligent? Maybe here it's you who started multiplying entities? And don't forget that the devil's primary trick is convincing us he doesn't exist. You don't have to picture him as some clever, sophisticated entity. Lord of the Flies-that's about him and his methods, tedious and relentless, like a buzz. It's thanks to this obsessive stupidity, which truly has something inhuman about it, that his minions have made us believe they are smart. Because it's easier to believe in some other intelligence than in that level of stupidity. We simply capitulated to that stubbornness and indeed devolved into dog reflexes and the safe admission that conspiracies can only exist as a theory. Do they exist in reality?-no, no, that's a 'conspiracy theory.' At the same time, biased objectivity aside, I agree that we must look for common causes, especially when there are common traits... Have you noticed what this alternative energy-the one being shoved down our throats, of course-has in common? It's the high cost.'


'You're wrong there. The price of renewables has actually dropped quite drastically in recent years.'


'An excellent addition! We rejoice like children over this fact, but do we ever stop to ponder why on earth that is? What exactly could have gotten so much cheaper in wind turbines and solar panels?'


'Technology, perhaps?'


'What technology? And what is its actual share in the price tag? What did those technologies add, two percent over twenty years? Or do you mean manufacturing technology? Nothing earth-shattering happened there either. Solar panels have to withstand brutal weather conditions-that's the baseline requirement. Okay, fine, so now they saw silicon one-and-a-half times thinner. But the price dropped tenfold? That, you see, has neither a technical nor an economic explanation. Imagine if computers added that same two percent of performance-would you notice a change in the cost of computing or the computers themselves? Or wind turbines? Nothing changed there at all. It's the same old steel, glass, plastic, and concrete, to say nothing of the electricity required to manufacture all of it, the price of which isn't dropping; it's rising because of those very same renewables. So how did it happen that nowhere else and in nothing else did any of this get cheaper, but in windmills and panels it plummeted, and by multiples at that? Want to know what that is? The first dose from a drug dealer is always free, that's what it is. Who said you can't turn the entire human race into addicts? I wonder what the payback is. Though even that is known. As always, draining the life out of you. In general, cost and price are, as we know, different things, but when they start diverging that wildly-look for the counterfeit.'


'Well, it's no secret that all of this became possible largely due to government subsidies,' the editor remarked.


'Ah, so no conspiracy could possibly exist, right?' The repairman grimaced. 'Because it's politics?'


'At least there's no secrecy.'


'At least the public focus is completely blurred right now. And the fact that by extracting money from our pockets, they lower the price on something irreparably expensive, while the door is slammed shut on alternatives that are cheap by their very nature-is there no secrecy there either? Fine, it's easy to laugh at unrecognized geniuses with their petty kite generators and fridge heat exchangers, but what about the thermonuclear fusion energy program? Haven't these recognized geniuses, official physicists, and top-tier politicians made clowns of themselves?'


'What's wrong with the fusion program?'


'There's nothing wrong with the program itself. Except that since the middle of the last century, we've been brainwashed into believing that fusion is the Holy Grail of cheap, infinite, and clean energy for all mankind. But when it finally became feasible and they actually started building the first full-scale fusion power plant, they suddenly changed their minds. Isn't that hilarious? And now, saving humanity from a global eco-catastrophe hinges on Don Quixote's windmills. A farce.'


'ITER is being built,' the editor said, showing off his awareness.


'Of course it is. If they officially stopped building it, the question 'why' might pop up. In fact, they can't even do that, just to avoid the awkward question of how they managed to bury twenty-or by today's count, thirty, forty?-billion of the public's money instead of the initial two. Yes, two! The project has existed for nearly forty years, over twenty of which have been actual construction, and here, you see, unlike the windmills, nothing got cheaper over those same twenty years. By the way, it just so happened that by the time of the great, unnoticed revolution I told you about-meaning about fifteen years ago, when they started producing junk instead of household appliances-up until then, windmills were honestly getting more expensive, right along with materials. And then something happened. Well, with ITER, the opposite happened, and if the question 'where's the money' hasn't been posed yet, why not keep building that ITER for another two or three decades, until it has zero practical significance whatsoever. And there will be so many more compelling reasons to drag things out even after it's finally commissioned, God willing we live to see it... Humanity seems in no rush to drink from the Holy Grail, does it? On the other hand, isn't it already a true Holy Grail for everyone involved? Despite this, I recently caught a podcast interview with a physicist who's been on the project since the nineties. He goes: 'How is it that back then I was young, and now I'm old, and still nothing. A five-year delay, a ten-year delay...''


'International bureaucracy is notorious for delays and the misappropriation of public funds,' the editor said.


'Perhaps. But there was another similar project-started, completed, glorified, and even largely forgotten-all within that same timeframe. And neither international cooperation nor public funding prevented its successful execution. Despite the fact that this project was five times larger than a fusion power plant. Have you guessed what I'm talking about?'


'I'm not sure...'


'The Large Hadron Collider.'


'And it's five times larger? How did you calculate that?'


'Not by the money, obviously,' the repairman smiled ironically. 'My indirect method is much more direct. The fact is, the collider and the reactor are essentially the same machine: a superconducting magnet built with the exact same technology. Technical details are usually deemed uninteresting to the general public-or under that guise, they are concealed, like so much else-and it never occurs to anyone to compare the projects for some reason. But if you do manage to dig up specific data for both, it can clarify a lot. Feels like intelligence work at that point, doesn't it? So if you, for instance, compare the mass of liquid helium used to cool the magnets in both projects, you'll get a pretty accurate comparison of the ventures as a whole. Well, the collider uses 130 tons, while the reactor is designed to use only 25 tons. That, by the way, aligns well with the initial, honest cost of the ITER project, because they built the collider in earnest, to actually build it. You might ask why the fates of these two projects are so different? Why is the collider a success story and the reactor a failure? The answer is simple: because the collider is useless. It was never intended to give people cheap energy, so why not build it. You see how meticulously they adhere to that exact same principle, all the way from billion-dollar enterprises down to projects that cost a couple thousand or even a few hundred bucks? They are all naturally bound by energy itself as a universal currency. Energy from any source is the exact same energy, much like the principle that money has no smell. And energy is money, just as money in our civilization is energy, and both are power. Therefore, the rule is clear: whatever happens, energy must not be cheap. Look, the richest man in the world buys a lousy social network for forty-four billion dollars, even though for that same money he could have bought practically free and clean energy for everyone, forever. You think he doesn't know that? He knows damn well, which is why he won't come within a mile of projects that even hint at cheap energy-smart man. Because if energy loses its price... hm, it's like in the Bible: if salt loses its savor, wherewith shall it be salted? So, if energy loses its price, he loses his money, and along with it his projects, and nobody flies to Mars, and he really wants to. But that one is at least more or less honest, even if he loves a tall tale. Whereas the other one, the Microsoft guy, goes out of his way to fund and advertise blatantly idiotic projects just to compromise and muddy the waters around cheap energy altogether. Whenever you see him among the sponsors, it's a guaranteed joke...'


Talking like this, the repairman walked over to the fridge and closed the red valve on the manifold. Then he plugged the fridge's electrical cord into the outlet and cracked the adapter valve on the refrigerant cylinder for a few seconds. The cylinder hissed and instantly frosted over. Then the repairman reversed his actions.


'Not everyone does this, but it's useful to let in a small purge of freon so it flushes out the last molecules of air and moisture along with it,' he explained, returning to his spot by the window.


'So, you believe energy should be free?' the editor asked him.


'I believe it already is free. But that is the biggest secret in the world. And the biggest conspiracy.'


'Well, I'll be!'


'Energy costs nothing, but to those who own the world, it costs everything. It costs them their power-at least for now and perhaps for the next decade. But as such, as a material thing, it means as little to them as money does. To us, it's a real thing; to them, it's merely a function. But what would they do without that function? If the function loses its functionality, wherewith shall you make it functional, heh-heh. Throughout our lives, we've had every opportunity to see that energy and energy resources are routinely and constantly used as a proxy for money-or rather, a smoke screen for under-the-table dealings when they buy and sell... what? Power, of course. Only power is the true value and the true commodity in their world. This artificial nature of energy, by the way, was pretty naively exposed by the people cutting those deals. I remember the days when they tried to at least offer some natural explanations like 'world oil reserves are finite,' and in those days, even the starship Nostromo was hauling nothing but crude back to Earth across the entire galaxy-along with alien predators, naturally. The funny side of that explanation is that they tried to apply it to a universally produced and utilized commodity, even in cases of double and triple price hikes within a single year. Would you raise the price of a commodity-and so synchronously at that-by a factor of two this year, even if you suddenly learned of a potential shortage fifty years down the line? To say nothing of the fact that such explanations were promptly forgotten when the price dropped. Or who, by the way, remembers the recent boom in biodiesel or shale oil, which accounted for a mere couple percent of global production but made such visible waves on the surface at the time? Sadly, that naive period of making any concessions to public intellect seems to have ended. Nowadays, they mostly just say 'political price,' and that's it. Conditioned. It's not a conspiracy; it's politics, right? So, energy is used as a currency, but let's consider: what makes a currency good? First, ubiquity. The wider its circulation, the better. How does energy in the narrow sense-meaning electricity and petroleum products-look in this regard? This currency is the same everywhere, and the entire global population accepts it. How miserable a person's life would be if they didn't have this currency or access to it in the modern world! I'm not sure even the Mennonites would agree to live like that, or at least with that kind of world outside their community. The second requirement: the currency must be secure. This means ironclad control over energy technologies and global oil and gas resources. We see that clearly enough, don't we? Again, we see it at every echelon, from the level of states with their armed forces right down to the level of every private citizen into whose life state regulators poke their noses. If you want to live off the grid, you're forced to use only approved means of electricity generation, which means paying even more for it, directly and indirectly, via taxes. Everything else is deemed theft, or rather, counterfeiting money. You aren't even permitted to generate a little heat to warm your own flesh in any unapproved, unmonitored fashion. You won't even have an inkling about certain possibilities, especially if those possibilities are practically accessible by nature-like, returning to our muttons, heating water with fridges and AC units. Furthermore, we are forbidden not just from generating our own energy-because that kind of independence could trigger the devaluation of the global currency and, consequently, diminish the power of those who rule the world. We aren't even allowed any noticeable energy conservation outside their control, because that would lead to the exact same effect. Notice that compared to past eras, humanity is literally swimming in energy, yet it has never experienced inflation. Ehrlich and Simon bet on the wrong thing. You just said that humanity wants to consume more and more energy, but the price of materials used to build more powerful machines always lags behind the price of the energy required for it and which they consume. And finally, we come to the third criterion of a good currency and the most fascinating reason why energy was chosen as such and why it remained the sole global currency-because it had its own history. To best serve its purpose, to eliminate any barter, money itself must possess no material value, but merely be tokens of material value. Only simpletons-or numismatists-see the value of a coin in the coin itself. On the other hand, it's an ancient and indestructible psychological phenomenon-the fact that we perceive value in the representations of value. If only because we strive to keep our coins safe, like our own children. How do you escape the displacement between the rational and the irrational here? So why did it happen that energy fell into the same category as printed slips of paper, or virtual bitcoins, or-perhaps the most telling example-gold, a metal that is useful for next to nothing and hardly worth mining, at least in such quantities? Which is why, by the way, it sits as dead weight in vaults, yet even that doesn't open the public's eyes or make the ordinary citizen reflect on true values,' the repairman ironized. 'A big, big secret. A secret from us, but not from them. And the aforementioned psychology only helps them dupe us.'


'And yet, it works,' the editor said. 'It works and ensures the sustainable development of civilization and living conditions. Precisely because money still holds its value, and because everything is anchored in human psychology.'


'I wouldn't lean too heavily on human psychology,' the repairman shot back. 'Besides, sustainable development is just an illusion. That fact is concealed for now, but the transition is inevitable, precisely because of technology and psychology.'


'A transition to what? A New World Order?' the editor asked skeptically.


'Not particularly new, and it's not like such a transition is anything new in itself. After all, these shifts have always happened. Slavery, feudalism, capitalism... Now, it seems, we're heading back to slavery. Why not? After all, the slave-owning system lasted the longest in history. Seems like a very sturdy architecture. And there's no need to panic. It's just a form of power, but the essence of power remains identical in every century. Energy is already our bondage and their power. But new technologies enable an even more total, direct control. It's too tempting not to exploit. On the other hand, energy as an instrument of coercion is bound to expire, and quite soon at that, and the rulers are preparing to step over it. The only question is how it will actually play out, or how it's already unfolding, because there are nuances and circumstances... But overall, all the answers become available the moment we dare to pose the questions. For instance: what would you do in their shoes? Or: what is the current form of power? Or what is power as such? Even when we talk about power, we almost never ponder what it actually means. It's as if we subconsciously understand what it is, but it's too vague or complex. Or we desperately don't want to admit that power in any form means a will directed at the flesh and blood of human beings. People like you or me might not comprehend what's so pleasant or vital about it, but perhaps that's exactly why we don't hold any power. Likewise, we don't always grasp that capitalism isn't just about money. The power of money-even apart from the power of wealth and property-has existed since its, money's, invention, under all forms of power. Some form of money will always exist, because it will always be necessary to redistribute power. But now, under capitalism, money has been capitalized-in other words, invested in material things and the raw materials from which those things are made and continue to be made, in the energy to manufacture them, and in the technology of their production, in order to make money again and buy power. You cannot extract a single item from that list without collapsing the entire structure. But that is exactly what happened. Capitalism collapsed the very day energy detached from matter.'


'What?!'


'No, this isn't about a perpetual motion machine yet, don't look so alarmed. But think about how deeply the bond between energy and matter serves the very nature of power. Back in the day, a medieval lord held and exercised power simply to ban vassals from gathering firewood in his forest. Better let it rot, or you buy it, or you freeze. Here, energy was bound to a material carrier-'wood.' And power over that bond meant life or death for the vassals. Has much changed in the modern world? Even now, you can't just walk into any forest and gather branches. No, no one is ever letting go of those reins.'


'What reins?'


'Well, those exact same energy reins. And they drive a team of horses named Hunger and Cold. Or Heat, for that matter. And our rulers will cart humanity wherever they damn well please in that wagon. They might drop those reins, sure, but only to grab another pair, even tighter. But here's the rub: the old reins are so worn out they're ready for the trash, but the new ones aren't quite ready yet. That is the unique quirk of our current historical moment. And that's why we-or those of us who see anything at all-so often find ourselves at a loss as to how to apply Occam's razor. One might ask, for instance, what the deal is with this fusion energy story. If they're dragging their feet so blatantly and have essentially, shamelessly shut down the project, why did they ever start it in the first place?'


'And why is that?'


'Well, there's an historical aspect to that as well. Don't forget that the ITER project was launched back during the Cold War-whatever that war actually was. In the fusion race, there was a long sprint, and both sides were convinced the other might reach the finish line alone. But overall, it looked safe enough in the sense that while it was supposed to yield plenty of cheap, clean energy, the technology itself was perfectly controlled by capital-meaning big money and political power. Just like it was, and still is, with nuclear fission. From a historical and technological standpoint, the advent of fusion energy was well-planned and proceeding precisely according to expectations. By now, we would have long forgotten about traditional nuclear power plants, replacing their reactors with fusion ones. The Fukushima tragedy might never have happened. And, of course, we would have completely forgotten about burning coal at power stations. Phasing out coal and uranium mining wouldn't have caused too massive a disruption. This prospect was logical and clear to anyone close to the matter. That physicist from the podcast, who said he had a lifetime dream job on the ITER project, complained, by the way, not just about the constant delays, but also wondered why this was the only project of its kind. 'It makes no sense,' he said. But can something that big truly make no sense? Can such monumental things be accidental? Big enough and strange enough for a scientist to notice them, even if he doesn't actually grasp their significance. If this long-developed and well-prepared fusion strategy took such a sharp U-turn that even a household appliance repairman can spot it, it means the decision was made by the big bosses. Nuclear energy isn't an industry that can be influenced by anyone other than the big bosses. It's just like space programs, isn't it?


Isn't it fascinating that all of us-not just that physicist from the podcast-are always ready to decide that something 'makes no sense,' yet for some reason, we find it too difficult to ask ourselves what the actual sense is, why this 'something' happens or exists anyway. It's as if there is some universally accepted presumption of absurdity, and no one believes that 'whatever exists is rational.' Or is it just easier to live that way, projecting your own inner absurdity onto the outside world? Or is it simply the difference between not thinking and thinking, and thinking hurts? The very same devil who pretends he doesn't exist slipped us that popular phrase: that one shouldn't look for malice-read, build a conspiracy theory-where everything can be explained by stupidity. But that is the theory of fools, or for fools.


However, just asking the right 'why' isn't enough either. If that physicist truly wanted to regain his sense of meaning, he should have also asked 'when.' Yes, the historical aspect again. As Sherlock Holmes said, 'My dear Watson, if we know what happened, then to understand why it happened, we must analyze when it happened.' Well, or he could have said something like that. So: whatever happened between the signing of the ITER construction agreement-which in itself was a step toward controlling the situation, much like nuclear disarmament treaties-and the start of the foot-dragging, meaning somewhere around thirty to forty years ago, something so powerful must have occurred that it flipped the normal development of human civilization on its head and canceled the existing plans for it. Logical?'


'And what was it?'


'Let's rather ask what it had to be. Because here, I want us to keep a firm grip on the razor of logic. From this perspective, it seems such an effect could only be achieved through the discovery of some revolutionary technology with the potential for a colossal impact on the capitalization of energy. Short of inventing a miracle machine capable of producing everything out of nothing, the only thing I can imagine here is a machine that produces energy out of nothing-meaning a perpetual motion machine, which I don't even believe in myself. Or something along those lines. Because if you have unlimited energy, you can make whatever you want, like gold from lead or an orchard out of a desert. Furthermore, we have a direct link between this hypothetical invention or discovery and the fusion program, because even if they were hiding a new discovery-why interrupt the program? On the contrary, continuing it would be the best cover for the existence of some new energy, as if nothing happened. Why draw attention? And they did everything not to draw it, yet they couldn't continue either. Curious, isn't it? The only possible outcome was what actually happened-endless, shameless stalling. But such a massive delay should, in itself, stand out like a sore thumb, if people weren't almost entirely idiots. And this has been dragging on for twenty or thirty years now. It's a phenomenon of immense trust in idiots to invent idiotic explanations and believe them. It's amazing they haven't slapped a 'political' label on this project yet to shield it from questions. Not a single parliamentary commission, no hearings in any participating state regarding the misappropriation of taxpayers' funds. Who could be so powerful, above everyone else, to allow or disallow even speaking or asking questions? But all of that would be for the common folk, who don't really ask much anyway. Another thing is that this shutdown of ITER was done secretly and inexplicably for the mass of the very people who worked on the project. Why? Because they, the scientists, were the primary ones who couldn't be told, since they are exactly the ones who would understand what kind of consequences were at stake.


From all of this, we can draw two more conclusions. First, the new technology was just as safe and clean as thermonuclear fusion; otherwise, the bosses would have had grounds to openly ban it, even if they had to stretch the owl of propaganda over that globe, which they've always been good at. Second, it differed from nuclear energy in the sense that it was poorly controlled by big money. In other words, implementing this technology was cheap. Here lies a paradox. To have a massive impact on our entire civilization, such a discovery had to become widely known, because the organization or organizations running the world have their own hierarchy and inertia. They wouldn't be galvanized into action by a discovery known only to the inventor's friends. Even assuming tight control over all accidental inventions-which was hardly practically possible in the pre-internet world-it would have been much easier to nip it in the bud and live on as if nothing had happened, with the fusion plans and everything else intact. What is there to say about our time, mind you, when every small fish with any new idea rushes to the internet first thing to hype it up in hopes of securing funding? Well, the internet is also a 'net'-a very useful grid if you know what kind of fish might appear in the sea. Remember you asked why I don't set up production for small-scale alternative generators? I wouldn't be the first. In the best-case scenario, my predecessors, instead of funding, were bought out for very little money, losing all further rights, including the right to speak. But I digress. So, if back then that invention became widely known... and if we take into account its essential quality, namely its dirt-cheap nature and, consequently, its ubiquity, then it means the invention was gaining its own speed and momentum. Was it possible then to make a smooth U-turn rather than a sharp one? It seems not. Which is exactly what we witnessed-or what someone who can see witnessed.


Nonetheless, I think the bosses would have gotten away with even this maneuver, if not for the ecological problem. It is more than real, and it's more than a problem. For hundreds of millions of people, it potentially means plain death, but the bosses aren't thrilled about it either. They don't want to risk violent riots-because people won't take their lethal pills as submissively as they showed in the movie Silent Night-unless, of course, they manage to give people that pill in advance under the guise of, say, a vaccine for a new disease. And the means of evacuation for the chosen ones somewhere into orbit or to another planet-which would also come in handy in case of some asteroid or other planetary disaster-are also not technically ready yet, though they are being actively prepared. Besides, the bosses simply don't want to lose their capitalized power-to put it bluntly, they don't want their Manhattan to go underwater, though it's highly likely this matters to them only for the time being and for a certain period. All they care about is a smooth and painless transition for them-strictly according to Occam-from capitalism to... I don't know what name will be adopted for the next form. To replace the worn-out energy reins with new computer-biological ones, all they need is time, but time is exactly what they lack, due to that very same global warming. I am certain they won't make it in time, even if they decide to revive the fusion program, and there are signs of that. It's too late for that, and their fear back then, thirty years ago, was far too potent-things like that aren't forgotten. But they aren't ready for the final transition either. Hence this frantic bustling with windmills and photo-panels, and on the flip side, the exact same frantic bustling at the other technological extreme-that promotion of AI and 5G. I don't know what next plague, war, or famine they will conjure up along this path, but if they and all of us get lucky, we will escape the eco-catastrophe by the skin of our teeth. All at the expense of the people, of course, not theirs, just as it has always been. See what they are aiming for? Instead of using that revolutionary technology-truly revolutionary, the one that detached energy from matter and because of that struck so much fear into them, but at the same time a technology that can grant us freedom from energy and economic slavery at this level of technological civilization-they decided to pull off what is probably the most massive and audacious Orwellian coup in human history. Through intimidation, bribery, and plunder, they want to herd us back into the prison of capitalism, which has long lost its right to exist. But they won't let us have what should have naturally emerged instead of capitalism thirty years ago either, because it wouldn't be on their terms. So they devised a scheme where, instead of the obsolete energy technologies we've already paid for many times over, we buy technologies that are just as obsolete but slightly cleaner in the long run. In other words, humanity must buy from them its very own right to live and not rebel, slavishly shackling itself to the same iron, plastic, concrete, machinery, and expensive energy in which the bosses have already capitalized their power. Preferably forever, or at least until the new leashes are ready. Simultaneously, they will steal, or are already stealing, the green agenda. They will say: 'Look, we have wind turbines, solar panels, everything is already eco-friendly, the planet is saved, and most importantly, money has already been invested in all of this, and besides, it means lots of jobs since all of this needs to be constantly manufactured, utilized, maintained, replaced... Do you want unemployment? Do you want a revolution? Why do you need this fusion energy?' That is what they dream of.'


'But we won't let them do it,' the editor said.


'We must break their plans,' the repairman chimed in.


4


He had already begun charging the refrigerant and was now watching the blue needle of the pressure gauge, closing and reopening the valve at intervals. The editor came over to watch.


'You can also do this using a scale,' the repairman said. 'You place the cylinder on it and watch. When the cylinder gets lighter by the exact number of grams specified as the freon mass by the fridge manufacturer, you stop the charging. But I use a pressure gauge. You need the manifold gauge set either way, so why bother bringing a scale...'


'What should the pressure be?'


'Zero point four. That is, at the compressor inlet and in the evaporator, the pressure is minus zero point four atmospheres.'


'Below atmospheric?'


'But the outlet is still roughly plus four atmospheres anyway. Generally, the pressure depends on the type of refrigerant, and there are dozens of them. Theoretically, it could be any liquid or gas. As for this refrigerant, isobutane-it's almost the same thing as the liquefied gas for stoves or lighters, which is well known to rogue technicians who economize at the customer's expense, even though isobutane is already one of the cheapest. Though it's also explosive, which is why it's banned in some countries. But this gas usually boils at minus ten degrees Celsius, which nowadays is considered insufficient for freezers. So you have to maintain the pressure in the evaporator below atmospheric; then it will evaporate at minus twenty or even lower. The downside to this is that if a leak occurs somewhere on the evaporator side, outside air gets sucked in. And there is moisture in the air, which condenses in that same evaporator and mixes with the gas. This happens while the compressor is running. But when it shuts off, the pressure throughout the system rises, and this mixture escapes outward through the defect. Then a new cycle begins, air is sucked in again, the mixture is diluted with water even further, and it ruins the compressor. As a result, after a certain period, nothing but water might be left in the system. And water gurgles. That's why I asked. If it gurgles, there's a hole in the evaporator.'


'Is it really explosive?'


'I swear. Imagine a leak right inside the refrigerator... Plus, keep in mind that this gas is odorless, and you won't be able to detect it. So after you haven't opened the fridge for at least a whole night, an explosive mixture forms there by morning. Then you walk up to it with a lit cigarette to grab a bottle of milk, open the door... Ka-boom!'


'I don't smoke.'


'Well, a spark could also occur in the light bulb circuit, which switches on precisely when the door is opened. Meaning, don't worry, nothing will explode without you right there.'


'Why did you tell me that? Now I'll be afraid to open refrigerators.'


'Well, that could actually help a lot of people. Almost every second person.'


'Are there that many accidents?'


'No, there are that many fat people.'


The editor crouched down and began to scrutinize the refrigerant canister.


'Why doesn't it say 'flammable' here?' he asked suspiciously.


'Hmm, there's a lot of things they don't write...'


A minute passed. Then the editor said:


'This revolutionary technology...'


'Yes?'


'Did you mean your heated refrigerator again, or was that about some other perpetual motion machine?'


'No, about a real fact.'


'But in some parallel universe?' the fantasy magazine editor inquired.


The repairman laughed:


'Looks like it. There, in that parallel universe, a fascinating magazine called Science and Life was published among others. With a circulation, mind you, of three and a half million-all on paper, of course, because back then there was no other way. And there, in the fifth issue of 1985-which, by pure coincidence, happens to be the year the agreement to build ITER was signed-there was a fairly large article about what was then a non-existent thing: high-temperature superconductivity. From that article, it was clear, first of all, that at the time absolutely nobody knew which direction to look for this superconductivity. Secondly, it was also clear that nobody really expected to find it. Thirdly, it was obvious that, nevertheless, those parallel people desperately wanted to find it because the prospects were clear and ready, since conventional low-temperature superconductivity had been discovered long ago and they knew how to use it. The whole issue was-pay attention!-about the price, the money. Because cooling superconductors with liquid helium is a big, big hassle, and there was no cheaper option at the time. And there was this phrase in the article... something along the lines of: 'Oh, if only we were lucky enough to discover such superconductors that could be cooled with liquid nitrogen! That would create a true revolution in all of human civilization!' So what do you think? Not even a year had passed when-bam!-the discovery of precisely those superconductors was announced. By pure coincidence and outside any existing theory of superconductivity. In that parallel world, and maybe in ours too, it was a global sensation that was talked about and shown on every television set.'


'An interesting story,' the editor said.


'Undoubtedly,' the repairman replied. 'Or an interesting story could be made out of it. Here's how I reckon it happened: some benevolent aliens read that article, consulted each other, and decided to help humanity. Of course, galactic laws frown upon interfering with the natural course of development of other civilizations in general, and on this planet of apes as well. But on the other hand, the aliens thought, these primates have truly polluted the planet as much as they could, and in the future, it will obviously only get worse. Besides, if they dream of such clean energy, it means they are morally ready for it, so let's give these fools, who haven't even discovered such an elementary thing, this very discovery. And so it was decided. And... I don't know exactly how they did it, I'm not very well-versed in sci-fi stories. Whether they crawled inside the heads of the right scientists and inspired them with the right idea, or perhaps they snuck into their laboratory and planted samples to be tested for superconductivity... In any case, it worked. The sensation was deafening, everything was confirmed in thousands of laboratories worldwide, and the Nobel Prize was awarded instantly-which, by the way, never happens for discoveries made in the very same year...


Well, a year passed, then two, maybe three, and the aliens, who kept browsing those same magazines, began to notice something incomprehensible to their reptilian minds. Either humanity had lost interest in the discovery, or it had simply forgotten what it had so recently craved... In short, a complete lull. 'How dense these earthlings are,' the aliens said, scratching their gills in bewilderment, and then they tossed us cold fusion as well. In for a penny, in for a pound! What's done is done, and after all, it's still the same clean and infinite energy, so why not?


But our bosses knew why not. This time they were ready and fully armed. The danger was clearly understood; the strategy for handling the civilian population and the necessary narratives had all been developed and tested already, and the scientific community had already been vetted and trained. Scientists, you know, are quite easy to drill-no harder than any other refrigerator users. In some cases, it was done the hard way, of course, but what was there to do? Circumstances demanded it. Speed and containment were the decisive factors, just like putting out a fire or catching cockroaches. As a result, by the end of the third year, they actually managed to suppress the discovery of high-temperature superconductivity. But it was a real battle that left indelible scars of war. And, of course, after it, the victorious army was at the peak of its strength and vigilance. Therefore, when a new discovery of similar nature and consequences emerged-meaning cold fusion-they simply wrung its neck like a chicken's.'


'Terrible things you are saying.'


'Oh, the terror of our rulers was even worse. It was as if they had been rudely awakened to find themselves naked with a noose around their necks, the stool beneath their feet already wobbling. A total catastrophe, a deprivation of power and the very meaning of their existence. Somehow they turned out to be completely unprepared for this. Because the scenario of the appearance of a source of free or very cheap energy, uncontrolled by the authorities, had existed before, but it was purely speculative. Nobody took it seriously. Like some sci-fi pulp fiction. And then science fiction became reality. Consider it the first singularity in our memory. If only the discovery had been allowed to develop naturally, it would have very quickly turned out that global electricity production exceeded consumption several times over. And not just electricity. It was obvious that we were extracting just as much excess oil and ore, smelting metals... The scrap metal from redundant industrial machines and equipment alone would have been enough to stop polluting the planet for the next half century. In short, everything predicted in that '85 article regarding a technological and social revolution was becoming a reality. Just imagine their panic!..'


While the repairman was rambling on like this, the editor was clicking away on his laptop.


'So what's the big secret then?' he said. 'Here, high-temperature superconductivity. Roughly six million hits.'


'Only?' the repairman wondered. 'Of course, I knew they would scrub it, but I didn't expect them to go this far. A worldwide sensation ended up lower in mentions than... I don't know, recipes for fried flying fish? Six million? But there should be billions of links, citations... A parallel world indeed.'


'Flying fish, twenty-two million hits,' the editor informed him, having checked that on the internet too.


'See? On the other hand,' the repairman said, 'thirty years have passed already... That war left traces, as I said, but how many traces of real wars are left after thirty years?'


The repairman thought for a few seconds and said:


'You know, this analogy is richer than it seems at first glance, in all aspects. It's a pity the very fact of this war had to be hidden. There's no room here for all sorts of historians, propagandists, patriots; nobody will shoot a movie or write a book... Seems like I'm the only one left.'


And he laughed.


'Imagine the rulers' situation when this thing rammed into their domain without any warning. Intelligence utterly failed, not a single defense plan, and most importantly-invulnerability to the conventional and most formidable weapon, money. Because the discovery was cheap in every aspect. Not only was the cooling cheap, but the superconductor materials and the technology of their manufacture were cheap too. I remember, not even two months had passed since the announcement of the discovery when in some countries they started distributing kits for making high-temperature superconductors in school labs and demonstrating the effect in classrooms. Besides cheapness and simplicity, this shows the level of infatuation with the news. So they couldn't, as usual, ridicule the scientists who made their discovery outside the official theory and say that the results were not confirmed, as they did in the case of cold fusion. Regarding the latter, they still say this to this day, despite the fact that cold fusion experiments were conducted independently, though in most cases semi-officially, in hundreds of laboratories, and an unexplained excess of heat with a commercially viable ratio similar to what is expected from the ITER fusion reaction was discovered and confirmed by dozens of prominent scientists who were not afraid to risk their careers and reputations. And when it's no longer possible to mix idiocy into facts, to slander, harass, and mock, they say with seemingly objective intonations that 'this has found no independent confirmation,' though what they mean is dependent confirmation. Whenever I encounter such a phrase regarding cold fusion and many other things, I always want to ask: who, exactly, is supposed to confirm it for it to be established as a fact? It's like chasing a ghost. It seems no amount of scientists will suffice to confirm a fact if someone-I wonder who exactly-doesn't want it recognized as a fact. Did you know that out of fear of being ridiculed and ostracized, and to have at least some freedom, this entire field of research and its effects were even renamed from cold fusion to Low-Energy Nuclear Reactions? How do you like that inquisition?


But that's not how it was with high-temperature superconductivity. For that, it was already too late. Add to the picture a fifth column, or rather, a horde of useful idiots with academic degrees who kept writing that-I quote-this discovery not only revolutionized modern physics but also has the potential to revolutionarily change all social aspects of humanity. I've compiled a private collection of such articles. Those fools in rose-colored glasses didn't even think that the social structure of humanity isn't a thing that exists on its own independently of human will, and that the ruling classes would be far from thrilled by the prospect of a social revolution, but would rather stage a counter-revolution. But here the bosses themselves fell into the pit they had dug for simple-minded humanity. Later, they adjusted this policy too. Less naivety, more intimidation.'


'So how did they manage to suppress it?' the editor asked.


'Well... mostly with money again. The discovery was invincible to money, but people were not. At any rate, it was a fun time. In those few years after the discovery, laboratories and large companies managed to create fully functional, and in some cases still operating to this day, superconducting motors, transformers, generators, power lines... Most of this was experimental, of course; it couldn't be otherwise when everything was changing and improving so fast. I remember there was such a boom that they took standard electric motors-standard, imagine!' the repairman burst into laughter, '-and swapped their rotors for superconducting ones, and even then, they obtained several times more power for the same mass and volume.'


'What's so funny about standard motors?'


'But the whole point is that with such electrical currents, you can completely dispense with the ferromagnetic steel altogether, both in the rotor and the stator; more precisely, you have to get rid of it because it saturates very quickly and is of no use anymore, so what do standard motors have to do with it? They were just in a hurry, wanting to try everything right now without developing new designs specifically for superconductivity. And out of all that, only six million links remain in the entire internet? The boys are doing a fine job...' the repairman shook his head.


'Motors without steel?'


'Not just motors. Transformers too. I mean power transformers. You probably know that power plants generate energy at the same voltage we use in our homes. But to be able to transmit it over long distances in an economically acceptable manner, the voltage needs to be stepped up-usually in two, rarely three stages-say, to three hundred thousand volts, and sometimes even to a million, and then stepped down again. Many people have no idea what a horrific voltage is on those pylons and how much this entire story costs. Once I calculated that power transformers alone account for 25 kilograms of steel plus a kilogram of copper or aluminum for every single person.'


'Is that a lot?'


'Depends. If 25 kilograms is a pair of fairly large dumbbells quietly rusting under your bed, it doesn't look like much. But if a 75-kilogram cabinet stood in the apartment of every family of three, like another refrigerator or a fifties-model TV-but a cabinet that does nothing for us, only hums, consumes electricity, stinks of hot oil, demands to be bought, and then repaired, replaced, and maintained-getting rid of it would be a blessing for the family. But it isn't in their apartment anyway. It's humming, stinking, and demanding our money somewhere far away. Out of sight, out of mind. Just like the grid behind a refrigerator and the heat it produces. However, using superconductivity, these transformers aren't needed at all because there's no need to step up the voltage. Likewise, those gigantic power line pylons wouldn't be needed either. And no one would ever die from high-voltage electric current again, if anyone even cares about that. Can you imagine the pile of scrap iron that would be formed waiting for a better use? And how much land would be freed up? And there's not even a need to change everything at once. We could continue to use the current grid, simply replacing old transformers with new ones, which will also require no iron and will be several times more compact and incomparably cleaner ecologically. Nitrogen for such machines is liquefied from the air right on the spot, and in case of a leak, it goes right back into the atmosphere. Though in reality, in most cases, nothing but supercooled air is needed.'


'And what about the price?'


'The price? I remember it vividly: liquid helium was eleven rubles a liter, liquid nitrogen-five kopecks. The same at modern prices: twenty dollars for helium and ten cents for nitrogen. Two hundred times cheaper. Feel the difference? Well, they felt it too. For a power built on the price of energy and materials, this is simply a collapse. How did Marx put it-there is no crime a capitalist won't commit for the sake of profit. But what about losses like that, huh?


And that's just the coolant. Add the factor that liquid helium is super-volatile and requires constant replenishment, whereas nitrogen doesn't. Besides, you have to understand that liquid helium is only four degrees above absolute zero, while liquid nitrogen is seventy-seven degrees, which means a completely, totally different class of cryogenic equipment, thermal insulation, and the machines that will use liquid nitrogen. All in all, the difference might turn out to be a thousand-fold. Naturally, the ITER project should have been halted too and redesigned for the new superconductors, because from an engineering standpoint, nuclear fusion technology is nothing other than the technology of superconducting magnets, which with the new superconductors would be several times stronger and cheaper, and this was known immediately. Remember I said that a new discovery in the energy sector, by the logic of events, had to have a direct bearing on ITER? Well, this is it. But such a redesign of the project would be nothing short of a frantic advertisement for the new superconductors, and then goodbye control, goodbye the power of money and politics. And this is precisely the most incriminating moment-the fact that there was time for such a redesign, because they hadn't physically started building ITER back then. And from that moment on, ITER is an absolute fake. It became a fake back at the blueprint stage, see? That was the most audacious part. Meaning, from the very beginning, a decision was made to flush all that money down the drain to build a fake. Not even because they wanted to, but because the risk of letting the new technology run wild didn't allow them to even cancel the project before construction began. Well, if it was a deliberate fake, why be surprised by the foot-dragging, and why there was only one such project, and everything else that physicist in the podcast didn't understand-unless he was just pretending.


On the whole, if we return to the question of price, it's worth noting that millions of tons of natural gas are liquefied every year at a temperature not much higher than nitrogen for the sole purpose of shipping it across the ocean and burning it there in kitchen stoves, and this is considered economically justified. This alone should remove all questions regarding the capabilities and price of the new-or no longer so new, but long-shelved-technology.'


'All questions?'


'Honestly, yes. But obviously, the rulers simply couldn't let go of the argument or tool of price, no matter how ridiculous and obsolete it looked here. For them, it's a centuries-old instinct. Just like a caveman won't let go of his club, even if offered a better weapon. So alongside the sole and exceedingly expensive-meaning deliberately made exceedingly expensive-never-ending construction of ITER, as an anti-advertisement for fusion (because that was another goal of theirs), in the exact same manner and with the same purpose, they maintain a few companies in the world that produce exceedingly expensive high-temperature superconducting wire. Suffice it to say, they use precious metals as a stabilizer for the superconducting coating. Absolute nonsense.'


'Why don't they just shut down this superconductivity completely?'


'That would be too noticeable. Just as noticeable as a complete shutdown of the ITER project would have been, which we just talked about. And it would actually mean a loss or at least a complication of control. Control over people, of course, who have or might have something to do with these technologies-like that physicist with the non-dream job of his whole life, full of entertainment for a decent salary. Better to pay him that salary but keep him in plain sight. Not that they didn't have to kill a few too noisy and defiant ones on the way to the current stability, but that's just how it goes... Besides, although the discovery did happen, it remained at the level of a shot in the dark. There is always a possibility-or danger, if looked at from the perspective of the masters of the world-of the appearance of unexpected substances with superconductivity, which does happen from time to time. So after the rulers' panic subsided a bit and everything began to go in their favor, they decided to leave everything in a state of semi-frozen ambiguities. And this entire, so to speak, limited edition works as a safety switch. If someone gets seriously interested in this topic, the first thing he will stumble upon will be information about excessively expensive superconducting wire, or, say, he will land on the completely optimistic official website of the ITER project, and this should reassure him-after all, people are working, building. He would simply expose himself as a person with suspicious interests.'


'You should have warned me sooner,' the editor smiled.


'Perhaps I should have,' the repairman smiled back, 'but I didn't want to look like a conspiracy theorist. In any case, I can spare you further risk, because no matter how much you search the internet, you won't find the answer to the single question that interests an average person: why this is practically not used. At most, you might encounter a brief, incoherent mumbling consisting of two points: these superconductors are too brittle to make wires out of them, and, secondly, they cannot withstand dense magnetic fields without losing their superconductivity.'


'And is that true?'


'No, it's a delusion. Granted, you won't make a flexible wire out of a block of ceramic model 1986. But this argument is a typical distraction toward a false target. Why wires exactly, what are they needed for? You can make a motor or a transformer without using a single millimeter of wire. Traditional electrical machines are made exactly the way they are made because copper or aluminum are flexible metals, and therefore winding them was and remains simply cheaper and more convenient. But nothing prevents us from manufacturing coils entirely, without winding. Pressing them into molds or depositing them onto cylindrical insulators. Or there is also the structuring and sintering of that ceramic in copper tubes with rolling or drawing. That's where the technology needs to be developed. But we know that nothing starts happening until big money is invested in it, and who is going to invest money to get rid of money? So why not let them, the scientists, tinker under supervision for a long, long time until all the windmills and panels in the world are built? Besides, if, despite meager funding and recruitment of new personnel, some more superconductors are discovered, it will be in those exact laboratories, not in some John's garage. Meaning it's also a matter of security, because they don't want to be caught off guard a second time-they are literally trembling at the thought. So it turns out that a balance is needed after all, though at what level is another question. And indeed, already in this century, superconductors made of magnesium diboride, as well as iron-based ones, were discovered. From these, you can already make a round wire and twist it like a regular one.


In addition, there are also fairly flexible tapes made of that very same first ceramic deposited on a structured substrate. It's a wonderful thing; it works anywhere, and if you're going to change the wire in ITER's magnets, it should be changed precisely to this tape-though in this particular case it won't be nitrogen but, for example, liquid hydrogen, which they don't mind burning in rockets. That means the coolant itself will be about ten times cheaper compared to helium, and the entire cryosystem about ten times cheaper-a hundred total. And the magnets, as I said, will turn out several times stronger at this temperature, meaning everything can be made more compact. That's why new reactors are designed specifically for this tape. But if for the thirty years that it has been produced, the price for such a tape four millimeters wide and with a superconducting layer thickness of just one to two microns stays at three hundred dollars per meter, then we understand where it will be applied and where it won't. This is the price argument-entirely artificial in my conviction, which is to say, the exact same club in a savage's hands. For the same money, by the way-meaning for three hundred dollars-you could buy about three or even five kilograms of the actual superconductor material. And why? Because there is nothing to make a huge markup on there, and no way to establish a monopoly.


Regarding the brittleness argument, I can say that porcelain cups, washbasins, or even bricks are also ceramics, but that doesn't mean we can't use them because they aren't strong enough. Furthermore, even before the discovery, let alone now, ceramics was a highly developed technology, ready for application to this particular superconducting variety as well. I remember, for instance, there were prototypes of entirely ceramic car engines that required no cooling and were therefore highly efficient. Moreover, computers can also be defined as a ceramic technology. What are microchips, essentially? This alone should raise big questions: why have these technologies in computers made such colossal progress and become so cheap over the past 30 years, yet seem so helpless when applied to superconductivity? Actually, the entire task here comes down to aligning the superconductor crystals in one direction. And what, is that a mission impossible at a reasonable price?


As for the critical magnetic fields, that, just like the brittleness, is just words. They won't show you numbers. Isn't it funny? By the same logic, one could say that every rope has its tension limit, and that would be true, but it's no argument for not using ropes at all. See, if you lie descriptively, it works for most people and at the same time carries no accountability. All public policy is based on this. But lying factually, in numbers-that's a different matter. So all serious articles on high-temperature superconductivity consist of the history of the discovery, various theories in full scope, diagrams, formulas, molecular structures, and so forth-in contrast to the fact that these articles are the first thing an inquisitive layman's eyes will see on the first page of his search engine. Food for the man on the street, which shoves itself in your face on any topic, is somehow completely absent here, and what is there is exactly what is needed to scare him away and simultaneously leave him fully confident that research is ongoing, that everything is transparent and fine. Only one in a hundred-presumably a die-hard conspiracy theorist-would continue his hours-long search to find those two simple numbers, which are the only ones of practical significance and correspond to the magnitudes of the magnetic field and electrical current. To find them and ask what the hell it all means, because these parameters-combined with completely accessible materials-shut down all possible, or at any rate any mass practical implementations.


See what they are doing? They are sifting people through an increasingly fine grid. But first they built-or rather, keep building all the time-a wall separating two completely different pools of information. The first kind is information that can justly be called misinformation. It comes to you on its own, forced upon you. Everyone, waking up in the morning, immediately falls into this swamp of information noise to flounder there until exhaustion. The second kind of information you must search for, exerting your own effort.


Strangely enough, for most people, the idea of such a barrier is just as insurmountable as the barrier itself. It works like a one-way trapdoor. You cannot forget what you know. And you can only notice something, not the absence of something-except in the case where that something actually was there, and recently too, so you haven't had time to forget. And forgetting is very easy if you don't see it constantly and if it doesn't affect you in your daily life. That's exactly what happened with high-temperature superconductivity. That's why even hints of it in open sources are scarce, like that brief, incoherent mumbling about the flaws of warm superconductors. And this, from the perspective of the rulers building these information barriers before us, is the second best thing after complete silence.


The same applies to the past. You cannot remember that you didn't know something. You cannot remember an empty space that wasn't even an empty space for you, because you knew nothing around it. Therefore, years or a lifetime of ignorance seem completely insignificant compared to a minute of knowledge. But it's a trap. Your ignorance is just as important as your knowledge, especially to those who manipulate you, so it must be just as significant to you if you don't want to be manipulated. But no, you can always count on running into someone who has never heard in his life of something that could have been highly influential for him, but if you point it out to him, then to him you are a fool and a conspiracy theorist on the basis of his one-minute knowledge obtained thanks to a Google search initiated by none other than yourself. This sense of the barrier separating the information that comes to you and the information that you come to-that is probably one of the hardest mental efforts. And helping people overcome this barrier is probably one of the most thankless jobs in the world.'


The repairman caught his breath and continued:


'Not that you can be sure of anything even with this second kind of information, meaning the one you look for yourself. There, too, you are more than likely to stumble upon misinformation, but here there's already a barrier because it doesn't shove itself in your face. Generally, it has always been this way, since the beginning of any political power, across the full Machiavellian spectrum of propaganda, deception, secrecy, and suppression-in particular, 'what isn't on TV doesn't exist at all'-but it's interesting that even with the advent of the internet, which shapes your information input more or less according to your interests and thus makes propaganda more digestible, even now you won't find the discussed topics in your recommendations, no matter how much you google it or search for it on YouTube. Why indeed indulge such dangerous interests of even isolated individuals? No one will notice it anyway. As for that very limited number of articles on high-temperature superconductivity that still appear, any mention of practical use has been expunged from them. To me, all of this amounts to an admission of guilt.'


'So it's not used anywhere now?' the editor asked.


'In industrial series, it seems, only in MRI scanners. Probably why this type of diagnostics has taken off so much. And before you say 'see?!', I'll note that the opportunity to say so is one of the reasons it was allowed. And why exactly in MRI scanners? First, it has nothing to do with the energy sector of the economy, and therefore, with cheap electricity for the people. Second, it didn't involve anything too noticeable, because superconductivity had always been used in this equipment. They merely changed low-temperature superconductivity to high-temperature. Third, this equipment has limited application. You don't run into it every day, it won't catch your eye, and surely, the people around it and especially inside it have more urgent problems. Then consider that the medical equipment industry is, to put it mildly, a very closed international corporation, and the prices there are just as incomprehensible as those of weapons manufacturers. To sum up, MRI scanners can play the same role of a safety switch as ITER and the manufacturers of golden wire. But, of course, here too, the condition of no advertising must be met. Or someone might ask what is so special about MRI magnets that high-temperature superconductivity can be used only there, and not in electrical power equipment with much less stringent requirements. And after that question, god forbid, start looking for such implementations and find them. Because, as I've already said, in those few years after the discovery, quite a few generators, magnetic energy storage units, motors, and transformers-with and without winding-and even a few high-temperature superconducting power lines were manufactured 'After all, something had to remain even on printed paper, whether thirty years have passed since that 'holy war' or not. At worst, even those remnants can be used as sedative pills, though it's better for them to avoid that altogether. Otherwise, foolish thoughts might arise as to why all of this was left in the past, and how on earth it was possible back then-with neither brittleness getting in the way, nor magnetic fields proving too strong-yet somehow, after thirty years of scientific and technological progress, we have managed to forget this wisdom of the ancestors.'


'People often say the same thing about the Moon landings,' the editor remarked. 'As in, how could we do it back then, but can't do it now. But what, in your opinion, would be the most interesting applications of superconductivity?'


'I think motors.'


'The ones without steel?'


'With steel used only for structural elements. But even that isn't particularly interesting. Steel is too thermally and electrically conductive. And heavy, especially if you consider motors in vehicles. This is where superconductivity leaps bounds ahead in terms of efficiency, because if you have to haul the motor around with you-accelerating it, braking it-then every single kilogram matters. That's why the new motors will be-and in fact, they had already begun making them this way back in those ancient times-made of composites, of plastic.'


'Like bearings in washing machines?'


'The bearings will be superconducting too. It's a perfect diamagnet.'


'Sounds a bit too perfect.'


'And where else would perfect, lightweight, and powerful motors go? To aviation, to the skies! Although, in the parallel universe from which we were so rudely excluded, they don't fly in airplanes, but rather... do you know in what?'


'Flying saucers?'


The repairman smiled and made a gesture that said bullseye:


'You asked for flying saucers, so there you go.'


'And... you know how they work?'


'In general terms, yes.'


'Listen, why don't we have some tea?' the editor said.


5


'Tea?'


'I can't offer you cold drinks just yet,' the editor smiled, 'but tea is our everything. After all, it's already five o'clock. And there are cookies. Are you finished with the refrigerator?'


The two-kilowatt kettle was switched on, and the cookies were pulled from a drawer. After the first cup, the repairman glanced at the shotgun hanging above the editor's desk:


'Nice gun you have there. Is it real?'


'Yes, but it's not in working order. Tell me more about these flying saucers. Our authors need fresh inspiration; perhaps you could help them.'


'All right. Why do you think a classic flying saucer is shaped exactly the way it is-why does it look like a disc? Because that is the shape of the magnetic field of a superconducting energy storage unit, whether it's a solenoid type or our good old ITER-style torus. I'll say right off the bat that for grid-like storage units, the shape can be anything-cubic, rectangular, you name it. So those fantasies of ufologists make sense too. One way or another, energy is stored in the form of a magnetic field created by a current in a superconducting coil. Electrical current is also drawn from this same coil whenever needed.


This machine has been known for a hundred years and could be the ideal accumulator-storing energy without losses, with instantaneous charging and practically limitless power-were it not for the cost of helium cooling and the limits on magnetic field strength. Or, better to say, if not for the structural strength limits, since the so-called Lorentz force tries to rip it to shreds. So this device can be compared to a high-pressure scuba tank. We don't use air tanks for energy storage simply because we cannot make them strong enough without making them absurdly heavy and expensive. This very same problem would limit the use of superconducting magnetic storage systems even in a cheap, high-temperature variant. The best attempt in this sense, as far as I know, was made once upon a time-back in those same days-on an electric locomotive for the purpose of acceleration and regenerative braking energy recovery, but generally, they are too large for conventional transport. In the early years after the discovery, there were projects for such large underground storage facilities to balance daily peak demands for entire countries, but they, understandably, remained just projects. It's a bit funny to recall this now, when everyone is clamoring about storing energy from wind turbines and solar panels, but such an accumulator is strictly forbidden, of course. On a much smaller scale, this device was used somewhere for power grid protection, but all of that is stationary, naturally. There isn't enough room for it on the roads.


But there is room for it in the air, and even more room... where? In space, of course! In the alternative, frankly stolen-from-us present, people no longer fly on the inventions of the Wright brothers or Sikorsky. What do they fly on instead? To picture it, you have to understand that although by physical principles the storage unit is similar to the ITER plasma chamber, we don't need plasma here-nothing hot like that. On the contrary, that must be avoided. In a tokamak, we intentionally create very dense magnetic fields to trigger and sustain a fusion reaction, which means we have to deal with enormous forces. In a storage unit, however, provided there is enough space, a different concept applies. No one will waste that space beyond what's necessary, but imagine a massive, open-work structure made of roughly the same cable that was already used decades ago for superconducting power lines. That is, a flexible pipe through which liquid nitrogen or its vapor circulates and cools the superconductor inside. Thanks to that very same Lorentz force, the structure maintains its shape on its own, and due to the enormous volume, the field density can be quite moderate. Because of this concept of scale-meaning the larger the volume, the better its ratio to the surface area-over there in the parallel universe, people even joke that it's a reincarnation of airships. But I wouldn't say it's just about size. As with many other ways of life, the discovery of high-temperature superconductivity made aviation much simpler and more accessible.


Yet even that is child's play. Imagine a space-faring version of this thing. Everything is assembled right out there, in zero gravity. No pipes needed, no coolant... Oh, by the way! You can write in your magazine that the mystery of the Tunguska meteorite has been solved.'


'By you?'


'Of course, I don't know the details of the whole story, but the gist is this. The magnetic storage unit of an alien starship transitioned from a superconducting state to a normal one. Most likely simply because, due to some error or accident, it entered Earth's atmosphere, which it wasn't designed for. You see, real spacecraft don't need cooling for their superconductors, nor do they need to maintain a vacuum in their plasma chambers, because space is already a vacuum, and a thin, shiny conductor is actually an ideal thing for cooling via infrared radiation in the chill of deep space, even within star systems, let alone interstellar space. On the other hand, they cannot fly in planetary atmospheres, for which purpose more traditional flying saucers are used. So when this accident happened, a massive explosion occurred that literally vaporized the entire spacecraft... Let's hope the crew managed to eject somehow before it happened. Interestingly, three years after this catastrophe, namely in 1911, the discovery of superconductivity was made-the cold kind back then. But cold or warm is relative, especially when it concerns extraterrestrial civilizations. And that's the second time such a link appears between superconductivity and aliens. Curious, isn't it? What was it after the Tunguska catastrophe-a technology leak, or a forced transfer of technology with the aim of building a means to escape Earth? Unknown. But what happened next? Did the aliens succeed, or did something go wrong again, or did plans change for some reason and they chose or were forced to stay? Let your authors write the rest of that.'


'Could you at least tip them off regarding the energy source? Because a storage unit is all well and good, but it needs to be charged from something, right?'


'It's a starship,' the repairman laughed. 'It flew up to a star, charged up, and flew to the next star. And generally, there are more options here. Because if you think about it, it would be useful on Earth too, as an airplane or, say, a space ferry. It wouldn't need to circle in orbit. It could descend to an altitude of ten to twenty kilometers above the surface, drop cables, and recharge. Well, or via radio waves... But probably a cable. Because it still needs to take on cargo and passengers, so it would need some kind of elevator...'


The repairman fell into thought.


'Tell me, does your hypothesis about the Tunguska meteorite somehow... well, fit the facts?' the editor brought him back to the topic.


'At least it doesn't contradict them. Back in the fifties, when atomic energy was in vogue, and aliens were also coming into fashion... Hold on a moment,' the repairman stopped, 'the Roswell UFO-wasn't it from that same starship? There's another idea for your writers.


Anyway, in the fifties, a similar hypothesis existed that the 'Tunguska' was an alien ship with a nuclear engine, so they searched the site for remnants of radioactive fallout of uranium and similar heavy elements, but of course, they found nothing of the sort. If there was a nuclear energy source on board, it was fusion, not fission, and there was absolutely zero chance of finding pieces of the superconductor because it must have vaporized throughout its entire volume simultaneously-not to mention that it didn't necessarily have to consist of any exotic elements or be very bulky. On the other hand, this accident, if it really was a magnetic storage unit, must have hellishly ionized the atmosphere, which finally explains the mystery of the multiple northern lights reported by European newspapers as far away as Europe immediately after the incident. So those expeditions should look for traces of an electromagnetic pulse, if they can still be found or distinguished from other destructive factors.'


'Why look for them if you already know everything anyway?' the editor smiled.


'Oh, listen,' the repairman mused. 'Was it really an accident? Perhaps something did happen on board the starship-like an Alien or a Predator hatching from an egg, though you won't sell that story to your readers a second time. One way or another, something happened, and there was no choice but for the crew to eject in saucers and burn the starship. Planet Earth happened to be at hand, but they chose a very inconspicuous crash site, and indeed, nobody saw that 'meteorite' in quotation marks. Here, the very character of the locality suggests that it might not have been an accident. Even in the oceans, there might have been more observers than in Siberia. It was 1908, after all. And if you cause an explosion over a pole-even the South Pole, not the North Pole-those are not only uninhabited parts of the Earth's surface, but simultaneously the magnetic poles of the Earth. What could such interference lead to?'


'Don't exaggerate,' the editor objected. 'Well, there was an explosion of a few megatons, so what?'


'Depends on what those megatons consisted of. If it's a hydrogen bomb, that's one thing. But what if the entire explosive force was a magnetic field? One would need to do the math here...'


'By the way, have you actually done the math?' the editor asked. 'Or are you exaggerating the energy of the storage units, and more importantly, its concentration? Because smeared-out energy, even if there's a lot of it, doesn't make a Tunguska explosion.'


'I don't know alien technologies,' the repairman said, offended. 'But surely they are better than ours, since they came to us and not we to them. So who knows what kind of concentration they have. But what we earthlings have at this time is the ability to store the equivalent of roughly fifty tons of rocket fuel in every thousand cubic meters.'


'Fuel has a higher concentration,' the editor noted.


'Higher,' the repairman agreed. 'But fifty tons is fifty tons. And how much does a magnetic field weigh? Nothing at all. Haul it back and forth as you please. And what is concentration if you don't have that concentration in time-meaning, if you can't use the energy as quickly as you need to? Rocket designers solve precisely this problem: how to burn all the fuel as quickly as possible without ripping the rocket apart. Hence all those pillars of flame and dozens of rocket engines on a single rocket. We've been conditioned to admire this, but it's actually the feebleness of the technology. After all, those engines aren't pushing the rocket up; they are pushing the fuel for themselves. Isn't that funny? The entire Starship system, along with the ship, the booster, and all the engines, weighs only three hundred tons. But the fuel in it weighs five thousand tons. So essentially, it's not a rocket, not a spacecraft; it's a tank with attachments. It's the same as if a subcompact car had to tow a fuel tanker behind it and also have an engine like a massive truck just to pull that tanker. And still, the fuel-meaning the concentration of energy per unit of mass-in that tanker isn't enough, which is why, for example, they have to resort to dangerous fiery atmospheric braking, which has already killed so many people, instead of landing or taking off calmly. And this, too, is sold to us as a great achievement of modern technology. How the hell is it modern? Modern-truly modern, not some future stuff-allows storing and freely managing as much energy in one cubic kilometer of emptiness as in more than ten thousand Starships with boosters. Can you imagine a simultaneous liftoff? Now that would be a sight! And as for concentration: if you were to stack those rockets almost on top of one another in that same cubic kilometer, there would be about twenty meters from rocket to rocket, and the diameter of each is actually nine meters, and the height is over a hundred and twenty. If you looked at that cube from the side, it would look very dense. And all of that would weigh 53 million tons that need to be pushed. Even the dry rockets would weigh more than three million tons. Whereas a dry storage unit of the same energy, even with modern technology, would weigh only a hundred or a hundred and fifty thousand tons. And it is always dry, even when 'fueled,' so to speak. So let's divide 53 million by 150 thousand. It comes out to about three hundred and fifty times. That's as if someone had rocket fuel 350 times more powerful than what we have now. Not a bad concentration, huh? With that, you could take off from or land on any planet very comfortably, without noise and dust. And this, in turn, eases, simplifies, and cheapens the entire design.


Or, if you prefer another comparison, a one-kilometer storage unit like that can hold 180 terawatt-hours. In other words, all the power plants on the planet would have to run for two and a half days just to recharge our storage unit. Or it's 150 megatons. Meaning the Tunguska explosion could have occurred on the leftovers of the gas, so to speak. A cubic kilometer is a lot, but even in Earth's orbit, it's a grain of sand. Moreover, I repeat, the energy itself will weigh nothing, have no inertia. So where is its concentration truly greater, if you calculate it in relation to the payload mass and engine power?'


'Speaking of which, what engine?' the editor asked. 'You've described the energy storage, but how do flying saucers actually fly? Don't tell me you haven't invented anything better than the good old photon rocket.'


'Why a photon rocket? Have you seen how bulky they are? There are ion engines, or even better, plasma ones. A wide choice of thrust, specific impulse up to a hundred times better than hydrogen-oxygen; forty days and you're already on Mars. You'll have to bring quite a bit of water along as a working fluid, of course, but you don't have to economize: the entire sewage system will go into the plasma. Plus, it's gorgeous-a swimming pool on a starship. Those are the kinds of starships that should be built instead of that pyrotechnics with pretensions and eternal fuel transfer in orbit. The main thing is that all the technology for this is ready. Unless you insist on the photon engine, which would still need some refinement.


But in reality, it looks like even the plasma engine will only be auxiliary. It's a bit paradoxical for conventional logic, but an energy storage unit and an engine are not such different things. The fact is that after 1986 there was another discovery, or rather a continuation of the same one. The untold story goes that it all started in one of the peripheral European countries, back in that period of great hype when scientists got their hands on cheap superconductors and greedily experimented with them in every possible way. Just as, in fact, an ordinary Candidate of Sciences-or as they call it now, a PhD-was doing in the laboratory of a not-very-prominent university. Discipline in such labs is never too strict, so it happened that the PhD's colleague, who was helping out during the experiment or had just dropped in for a little chat at exactly the right time, was smoking at the workstation. I no longer remember what the PhD was intending to measure then or what assumption he wanted to confirm, but I bet he forgot about it himself right then and there. Because he or his friend-history again is silent on who was first, and I think we can share the priority between them-noticed that the smoke from his cigarette-or perhaps it's worth calling it a pipe to make the story more picturesque-was behaving strangely. Upon entering the space above the experimental setup, which, naturally, was very cold, the smoke went not down, as it should have if anyone were thinking about it at all, but up, like in a chimney. Meaning, one truly had to have a sharp mind and keen observation to notice that the usual behavior of smoke was unusual under the given circumstances. That is how trivially gravitomagnetic fields-or, simply put, anti-gravity-were discovered. However, this cannot be called an absolutely pure fluke, as was the case with high-temperature superconductivity, because a theory of such fields had already accidentally existed for several years up to that point. Nobody just paid attention to it. But the existence of a theory could not, of course, save such a discovery, even in times when official scientists fail to see facts if they don't agree with theory, because they also fail to see any theory that doesn't align with the official theory.


This way of doing business could lead to no other result than that while in the parallel world people have already forgotten about terrible chemical engines, in this world anti-gravity 'could neither be confirmed nor refuted' for the next eight years following its discovery, and then I lost its track completely. Can you understand this Jesuitical formula when applied to natural science? It's a carbon copy of the fraudulent 'what isn't on TV doesn't exist at all,' but here it's 'what isn't in the official theory.' So it turns out that with them, no matter what you catch hold of, there is nothing: no cold fusion, no EmDrive, and probably not even the Mpemba effect. How does that Orwell quote go? 'The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears.''


'You still haven't said what that experiment of this PhD was,' the editor said.


'Oh, he was simply rotating a superconductor disc in a magnetic field. Thanks for the cookies.'


The repairman began to get up from his chair, but the editor's question stopped him:


'But what about the scientists? Why don't they protest? Don't they understand?'


'Science is too big for everyone to understand everything or pay attention to everything. The specialists must understand, I think. Though, to be fair to at least some of them, a hush-hush operation on a global scale like the one they pulled with warm superconductivity was something truly unprecedented. Everyone knows that there is nothing hidden that will not be revealed, but to make the revealed hidden? That is a bit beyond the bounds of experience and even imagination. On the other hand, only a fool could think that such technologies, or indeed almost any technologies, could ever be left without the strictest control. And control means prohibition and nothing else. Even if not a total ban, at least a freeze. To think otherwise would be like dropping a hundred-dollar bill on the sidewalk and hoping to find it there the next day. Here, even the objective bias that should be inherent in scientists doesn't look like a sufficient excuse.


We talk about intellect, but from a vulgarly psychological standpoint, everything is even clearer. Salary, grants, careers, authority, families, respect... For scientists, just as for those rulers, the meaning of life is always on the line too. And there is always so much temptation to suspect when everything is absolutely clear. No need to imagine scientists as fighters for truth at any cost. That's like idealizing athletes, doctors, priests, or any other profession. Or do you think everyone was delighted when superconductivity turned out to have no theory-for which, by the way, some had already received titles and prizes and written textbooks, while others had been teaching it in universities for decades? By the way, a general theory explaining high-temperature superconductivity still doesn't exist today, though they prefer to keep quiet about it. But it was already too late, and this is probably a unique case at present when an objective fact is recognized as such without a theory. Nowadays, science knows everything-we've lived to see it. And if there is something that causes any debate, it's theories about theories. Even then, even among theoretical theories, canonical and heretical ones have already appeared.


So who, in the end, was thrilled by the new possibilities back then? Only those who didn't have the old possibilities. The scientific world itself is entirely capable of swallowing any discovery along with the discoverer, perhaps with a little external help, or at least simply without objections. And this isn't just talk or conspiracy theories. There is a completely real and everyday-I'd say fleshy-aspect to it. One now-deceased academician, virtually the greatest in his country and in this field, one of the fathers of the theory of superconductivity-the very one that failed to predict the appearance of the new superconductors, and for which he once received a prize from the hands of Stalin himself-that same academician, half a century later, and already when the discovery of high-temperature superconductors was effectively buried, receives the Nobel Prize in Physics for that exact same work. What's more, the formulation of the nomination was 'for pioneering contributions to the theory of superconductors.' Is the message clear enough? 'Forget that anything else ever happened here.' I remember how that academician was interviewed back then, where he was slyly asked if he was too old to enjoy the Nobel Prize. He replied: 'No, why should I be? It was good to recall that pleasant feeling of being awarded. It's just that the sum isn't all that large. I can't buy anything of value with this money that I don't already have.' Do you understand that? I don't.


And he also used to write popular articles telling how wonderful it would be to have nitrogen-cooled superconductors, but shortly after they were discovered without him, so to speak, he changed his approach and began to condemn the 'psychosis' over the matter, insisting that only room-temperature superconductivity would be truly useful superconductivity. See the distraction toward a false target again? Don't do the possible in hopes of the impossible.


In conclusion, this is the very same academician who founded a scientific inquisition in his country called the Commission on Pseudoscience, into which pseudoscience cold fusion was promptly included. Not because it was actually impossible to either confirm or refute, but because its existence contradicted the canonical-meaning allowed-faith. And this just a few years after such an unexpected discovery of the new superconductivity. That smells a bit too much.


As for the scientists who weren't bosses, those of them who were in the loop from the very beginning were allowed to continue theoretical research for a while longer, and they were satisfied with that. The same story as with ITER. Naturally, all those scientists have retired over this time and have mostly died out by now. The young ones were effectively locked out of the field since their university days by the simple method of not allocating funds for such research and not including the subject in curricula. Simply don't approve it; that's enough. In truth, it's a highly centralized system. The concealment of truth is aided by the fact that this is not a mass profession or specialty, with zero chance of becoming mass against the backdrop of a generation of 40-year-old bearded men who have never even heard of this worldwide sensation. You see, all of this is planned very consistently, persistently, and long-term, which is why it looks like 'soft power.' But it's the exact same scorched-earth policy that was applied with such force in the first years after the discovery. Scorched out of reality and out of memory. Actually, all natural sciences are considered dangerous to their power by the rulers, and quite rightly so. For this reason, in ordinary people, all healthy interest in science is drowned in the muddy water of artificially created and sponsored idiotic theories and riddles on one side, and mockery of them on the other. That is, their chips are placed on black, on red, and on zero. That's what control looks like regarding the average man, but for the scientific community, everything works almost the same way. If you live day to day, the changes are too slow, gradual, hard to notice, but I have an archive of several scientific periodicals, and if you track their mutations even selectively... Believe me, it's a depressing picture.'


'Can you name a few?' the editor asked.


'Well, just yesterday I read a new issue of a still-living journal called Advanced Technologies. Not exactly a journal, since they call it an 'information bulletin,' and it looks the part. Initially bi-weekly, now monthly, it was founded in the early nineties precisely to handle the wave of news about high-temperature superconductivity, but it also contained news about nanostructures and other buzzwords. Specializing precisely in solid-state physics, to which warm superconductors belong, this publication of the Academy of Sciences was even black-and-white for many years. What is priceless is that even now it's available for free on the internet, archives included. There you can clearly see the whole evolution-or rather, devolution-of the subject, and the general state of this branch of science. The whole history is right before your eyes, especially if you know how to read between the lines, starting with issues almost every one of which for a few years contained what they called breakthrough news about superconductivity, accompanied by expressions so strange from the lips of scientists, such as 'by the will of providence.' I swear, that's exactly how they printed it. What a time that was! Later, bewilderment appeared, along with attempts to find rational explanations as to why industry didn't want to implement such lucrative and ready-to-use technological solutions, and joy when it did happen in isolated cases. Then one could read irritation over the closure of one promising line of research or another related to superconductivity, and insufficient funding. Then the practical aspect wasn't even mentioned anymore. There was plenty of nothing but theory and descriptions of experimental effects. Then the information on superconductivity was moved from the first section of the bulletin to the very end. Then-quite shockingly-issues began to appear with no information about superconductivity at all. Now it's a color newspaper that has a column quite aptly named 'For the Unoccupied Mind,' where they look at insect wings and the mysteries of the Egyptian pyramids from a scientific perspective. But you will hardly find even a word about superconductivity there, unless it's in the subtitle, which for some reason they kept from times past-perhaps as a challenge, or perhaps as another clear message. I won't be surprised if in six months or a year the mention of superconductivity disappears even from the subtitle. And maybe the bulletin itself will disappear, because there is actually no point in it anymore. That's it, the discovery is finished. Case closed.'


'But one can't deny the progress made in all the years since what you call the discovery,' the editor said.


'Well, something important was indeed secretly transferred from that parallel world to this one at the moment of bifurcation.'


'What exactly?'


'Guess. Use the historical aspect again. The year of the discovery plus a few more to prepare the material base. What do we get? Something starting from the first half of the nineties. What new thing appeared back then?'


'The internet?'


'Mobile internet,' the repairman laughed. He stood up, plugged the refrigerator into the outlet, and began gathering his tools. The editor remained seated at the tea table.


'I've always wondered why people never ask questions,' the repairman said. 'It's like a family curse of all humanity. Something disappears, something appears, but we are ready to accept everything without question, any conditions, as is characteristic of animals or children. Actually, compared to us, even the ram from the proverb looking at a new gate looks like a genius. He at least noticed. Perhaps we as a race truly are at such a stage of development? That is a sad thought. And I think there is something more to it: not just feeblemindedness or faintheartedness, but some kind of flaw. Sometimes, however, it looks like a simple lack of curiosity. The appearance of mobile phones effectively solved the communication problem for all of humanity in just a few years, and no one asked how that happened, why not sooner. Was there really nothing to wonder at? Did people back then really forget the physics they had just learned in school about the propagation of radio waves and why all those radio and TV towers have to be built? That the shorter the radio waves, the smaller the distance over which a signal can be transmitted, and only under the condition of a direct line of sight to the receiver?'


'Cell towers aren't that far apart.'


'Not far enough for thousands of subscribers from houses, from steel cars with closed doors, to make calls and download various TikToks simultaneously through them? From behind buildings, hills, and trees? And not make a mess out of all these signals?'


'Digital format,' the editor pointed out.


'Morse code is a digital format too. Besides, why are microwaves used with the greatest success precisely in microwaves-meaning in ovens-and not in radio transmission? Precisely because they are wonderfully absorbed by any organic substances and bounce off any metallic, and not only metallic, surfaces. So could that really be the best band for communication? Of course, even before World War II there were long and not very successful attempts to create some sort of cellular networks and use precisely this band for them, because only there did unused frequencies remain, but that is exactly what should have raised the question 'what happened' when it finally did happen. It's enough to have an idea of what these networks looked like before the nineties, even literally in the eighties, and how many mobile phones of that time-no matter how they looked-could be connected to them at all, and how densely towers had to stick out along roads just so people could make calls from cars with antennas on the outside, by the way. But something like giving a mobile phone to everyone, and with video calls to boot? That was beyond the imagination of even sci-fi writers right up to the moment it appeared in reality. It's even strange, by the way, how sci-fi writers can't and never could predict anything. It makes their futuristic descriptions laughably outdated even within their lifetimes. In their works, not only do starships haul oil, but the computers in those starships run on punch cards. Not a single new technical idea have I encountered in their novels.'


'They are writers, not inventors,' the editor stood up for them.


'Yes, but the genre they chose obliges them to keep their noses to the wind and see a bit further than their readers, who, however, also weren't surprised when such fantastic things appeared in their hands, no matter how much they changed their daily lives. What's more, writers not only fail to predict things in the future, but on the contrary, are more rigid than life itself. Look at the scripts of modern thrillers, detective stories, and even melodramas. Half of them would fall apart if the characters had mobile phones-meaning the ability to call or film. But they do have them, for twenty or even thirty years now! They have to pretend not to notice, otherwise the screenwriter's plot won't hold together. Well, with the most conscientious screenwriters, the heroes still hold their phones up high and say: 'No signal!'. And why the hell is there no signal for them...


By the way! My home router fails to catch the signal from my mobile even in the third room. Yet the base station catches my video call somehow, even though I don't even see where it is. And in an open area, the distance to the router might be, well, thirty meters. But to the stations, say, about three kilometers. And the format is supposedly digital in both places, and the waveband, and the signal power-because it's the exact same phone in my hand, after all. Why is that, isn't it interesting? Notice that the station is a hundred times further than the router, but that doesn't mean the station receives my signal a hundred times weaker. The signal is ten thousand times weaker! What is happening, man? What is in those stations that we don't see? What, finally, unlocked the door to this entire mess in the early nineties? Isn't it interesting? No questions from the 'unoccupied mind.' And it's not just that we don't see the stations! We don't even see our own refrigerator as it really is! So much for 'progress'!'


'But this is progress nonetheless!' the editor countered. 'You said yourself that the communication problem for humanity has been solved.'


'Those are just crumbs that fell from the table. But even those crumbs are poisoned, otherwise we wouldn't even have them.'


'You mean 5G, of course,' the editor smiled.


'And 5G, of course. Let's put it back in its place.'


Together with the editor, they began to turn the refrigerator and push it against the wall. When the job was almost complete, the repairman said, 'Oh,' and gripped the refrigerator. Then he said, 'Excuse me, I need to sit down for a minute.' He crept to the nearest chair and sat down cautiously.


'Lumbago?' the editor asked sympathetically. 'Take your time. Have some more tea.'


'No, thanks,' the repairman replied and explained: 'It's very important to drop everything at the very first attack and give yourself a moment to rest, otherwise everything will get much worse and take longer. Unfortunately, our job is full of awkward postures harmful to the spine.'


The editor decided that his spine deserved a rest too, and returned to his desk, to his comfortable chair.


'So what about 5G?' he reminded him.


'5G, yes... I wonder what there is more of in this cellular story overall: meeting existing needs or creating new ones-meaning, a new slavery? Not to mention that this is the creation of truly new tools for citizen surveillance, of course.'


'Big Brother is watching us?'


'Is that funny too? Then let's laugh at the governments of nations currently waging an international war over messengers, cell phones, and social networks, openly admitting it's all for the sake of surveillance and mind manipulation. Do you not believe the authorities, or do you think being a conspiracy theorist is their exclusive privilege? Just like conducting surveillance? This is like some sequel to Orwell about distrusting your own eyes. A new level of loyalty, or whatever you want to call it. The Party ordered you not to believe the Party? Total submission. By the way, the story with the so-called pandemic is exactly about that. Did you know, for instance, that the World Health Organization declared a pandemic, yet no such term as 'pandemic' actually exists in the official dictionary of that very same WHO? It was my own personal idea to check, while everyone else just swallowed it. But if the term doesn't even exist, what exactly did they declare-and so brazenly, defiantly, drumming it into everyone's heads? Why, in fact, were the anti-covid measures so blatantly absurd? Because how else do you test people's readiness to accept slavery? To accept it in its very essence, giving someone direct power over your own flesh and blood. To let yourself be branded.'


'Or chipped?'


'Or chipped. New times, new brands. Especially since the principle of such a chip, which remotely controls human physiological functions, has already been patented. Guess the number of the patent application.'


'Six hundred and sixty-six?'


'Zero six zero six zero six. I wonder, is it easy to pull off a stunt like that, ordering a specific registration number? Or do you think it just happened on its own?'


'Maybe it's just trolling?'


'At least the patent is real. You see, if they saw off your leg for the sake of a hilarious joke, you're still left without a leg. Ready to join in the laughter? Because this is a test for true slavery, not for freedom within slavery, which is how they muddle our heads. This factual power over flesh and blood on a new digital level, which they have prepared for us, is the foundation, but they also need total power over our minds. Meaning, conscious acceptance. And that, too, was an important goal of that covid story. Not just to test, but to habituate, to make people aware. What is slavery, after all, if the slave doesn't know he's a slave? It wouldn't even give the slave owner full satisfaction, not to mention how shaky and unreliable it would be. Knowledge of the truth is needed for legitimation, and slavery, perhaps, depends on it most of all, so it could be called the most legitimate form of power, if you appreciate gallows humor. On the other hand, if we are indeed ruled by some alien-even if local-intelligence, perhaps conscious acceptance of slavery is a requirement of some incomprehensible moral code. Who knows? Or maybe it's a necessary part of a ritual sacrifice? One thing is certain: it's an IQ test for humanity. The ultimate one. And I'd say we are failing it. A third of a century has already been wasted, which is more than enough. I said that perhaps the energy discoveries were gifted to us by aliens, but there is only a grain of a joke in every joke. What if this is our last chance? What if my mission is to open the eyes of the most foolish? And if it turns out that even placing a copper pipe into a barrel of water is too complicated to understand and execute to save the planet... Maybe we truly deserve to be subjugated by a higher intelligence.'


'So, I guessed right that you are a prophet of the aliens?'


The repairman spread his hands: 'Who knows. The ways of aliens are inscrutable. But don't be alarmed. At least, they aren't speaking to me just yet.'


'Are you sure? That really is reassuring,' the editor joked. 'But still, what does 5G have to do with all this?'


'Well, obviously. They'll need to harvest this entire mass of data from the chips. But that's for the future. At the current stage of their development, chips have only one advantage over smartphones, namely: you can't leave them at home. On the other hand, you won't talk to a chip as if it were your close friend, which is exactly what you do now when you talk to both of them. Undoubtedly, the ultimate chip will be hooked up to the human nervous system, like a Neuralink, and will be able to induce pain, unconsciousness, or even death. Meanwhile, by inventing another 'pandemic'-meaning any threat to humanity, be it from robots or those same aliens-they can force people to carry smartphones or some other analogues of an external chip in the form of a document, or simply a barcode on a piece of paper that can be read by a commercial device connected to a database. And what difference does it make if they aren't implanted into your body, if it's so easy to restrict your vital functions without them? Besides, the history of documents or even numbers on the body didn't begin yesterday.


But it's one thing to scan a barcode meant specifically for identification, and quite another to scan someone's face, gait, voice, and distinguish them from millions of others scanned simultaneously, especially if the person doesn't want it. Here, resolution will never be superfluous, nor will the number of surveillance points, because they need to track a person continuously. That is what 5G is for, though I'm sure it's for something else too, which I don't know about. But there's a bonus: since people are already used to video surveillance, this won't require a new traumatic experience; instead, it's so easy to explain away with common safety concerns. Doesn't every sheep seeking safety in numbers believe that its law-abiding nature makes its private life 'uninteresting' to the authorities, until it's its turn to be turned into shish kebab? How do they love to say it-'who needs me', or rather, 'who needs you'. Didn't they show with covid exactly how everyone becomes needed, either in their readiness to sacrifice their dignity and human rights or, worse still, to aid this fascism? Nothing new, nothing new... Nothing but technology, of course, but what technology and how applied? Rulers are ready to use any invention to create new needs for people and never lift the essential burden from them. Hence this one-sided progress, this absurdity of the IT boom against the backdrop of artificial braking and even regression in the energy sector. And this will continue until the ultimate goal is reached-total and instantaneous control over the life and death of every single human being.'


'And 5G will do that? Are you serious?'


'I'm not a spy or an insider. I see only what everyone else can see,' the repairman replied. 'One thing can be said for sure: no one would start building this new network if they didn't have a plan for its application. But have you noticed that they don't even try to explain anything to the public?'


'Why should they? What is there to explain? Honestly, I don't understand all this fuss about 5G.'


'Honestly, neither do I. Even with the existing means of surveillance and control, with everyone carrying a nearly perfect tracking device on themselves and using cashless money, the authorities can eliminate anyone the old way even now. Meaning, there's no rush. However, the fact remains. The new network is being built without any plausible reason.'


'Telecom companies are upgrading their equipment. Isn't that reason enough? Isn't it their internal business?'


'Not exactly. If only because it concerns the external, public space. Therefore, I believe explanations are required. But there are none. Either they don't want to provide them, testing people once again for voluntary slavery, or perhaps they simply can't invent such explanations. This fuss, as you put it, is because people are afraid, because they sense something new and incomprehensible. Someone is paying billions, but who and why? Where else have you seen such 'modernization', when and in what other industry? Telecom companies are spending billions to replace something that already works perfectly in an oversaturated market, and they aren't telling their users anything like 'we are going to provide new services and make more money on this.' People are used to that kind of logic under blessed capitalism, but it's obvious that this won't pay off that way. My information needs are fully satisfied because they are limited by the parameters of my physical essence. Man is the measure of all things, isn't he? I will have the same eyes, the same fingers, the same ears, the same speed of speech, the same bodily reaction, the same speed of thought, and I won't have others even if they make their grid faster. So their 5G is not for people. Who is it for then? Who are these real users who are ready to pay billions and don't expect a return on investment? Didn't I tell you that capitalism is over? That is what causes anxiety in ordinary people. And 'Don't Look Up,' right? But perhaps that is the definition of ordinary people-to forever be stuck in the past, and when the future is shoved right in their faces, to quickly and without question get used to it, not looking up, but looking into their mobile phones. Once in history, they were given a chance to cheat the system, and what did they do with it? They allowed the system to snatch it right from under their noses, right before their unseeing eyes. For ordinary people, capitalism is still real; they still have permission to enjoy its tragedies at the level of cracks in the floor, unable to see the horizon of the near future, but for the rulers of this world, all of that is already in the past. Old money is already worthless to them, and they can throw it all away just so that we, using this money, make shackles for ourselves. This is not a matter of decades or the next generation. We will all see it.'


'Tell me this,' the editor asked. 'If you had the opportunity to tell everyone the same thing you told me... Not just tell it, but be heard and understood. Would you do it?'


The repairman lowered his gaze and fell silent. His lips twisted unpleasantly.


'You know, that's a strange question you've asked,' he finally said. 'I've thought about it. Wouldn't that be aiding their plans? It must be included in their plan, you know... Perhaps it's already too late for the truth. Perhaps it always was. This I don't know either. Perhaps back then, thirty years ago, our only chance lay in our unawareness. In our innocence, so to speak.'


'Like for Adam and Eve?'


'Something like that. But in both cases, it didn't work, as we know. In any case, I wouldn't want to play the role of the Serpent.'


'Which role would you prefer to play? Prophet or Messiah?'


'Christ said, 'You will know the truth, and the truth will set you free,'' the repairman said after a pause. 'But those scientists presumably knew the truth. Did it set them free? Did it set me free? Now it's everyone's turn to know the truth. But I won't be the one to tell them. And I don't want to hear that slavery is freedom, no matter what Christianity or Orwell have to say on the matter. I'm sick of this propaganda.'


'What is truth?' the editor joined in the quoting. 'You just said that only unawareness or innocence could give us a chance. But isn't that the same as a lie?'


'But I also said that it didn't work. In any case, who will I make happy with my revelations? Who will practically benefit from those discoveries or from a refrigerator with a heat exchanger? Only the poor souls for whom a thousand kilowatt-hours a year is a significant saving. Never mind that they constitute the majority of the world's population. Because against this stands all the money in the world. Not just the money of those who hold nine-tenths of the world's wealth, but truly all the money combined with everything it means and represents, with all the not-so-bad, at least not unnatural things, such as purposefulness, upbringing, self-respect, traditions, even glamour... Can you imagine what a force that is? Was there ever any chance at all? Not all poor people, to put it mildly, dream of equality. Which, of course, doesn't stop them from being the food supply. So, maybe let's not take away people's dreams, huh? Even if it were possible to rediscover this discovery. No, count me out. I just don't want to see any of it.'


Finishing his speech, the repairman filled out the invoice, then stood up and handed it to the editor.


'Filter and posistor replacement, plus a refill, total is one hundred and ten. If there are no complaints, please sign below where it says 'Customer Signature'.'


The editor signed the invoice and handed it back to the repairman, then paid the money.


The repairman gave one copy of the invoice to the editor, and put the other, along with the sheet of carbon paper and the money, into the breast pocket of his overalls. Then he picked up his suitcase.


'Wait... So what actually happened to the refrigerator?' the editor asked.


'Nobody will ever find out now. Perhaps a micro-leak that couldn't be traced. But the refill will last for a few years. And no, don't worry about an explosion. Maybe the valve stem got loose. Or maybe some vengeful saboteur intentionally unscrewed it. It's a matter of seconds. Do dissatisfied authors visit you often?' the repairman joked. 'In any case, the company gives a six-month warranty. If anything goes wrong again, give us a call.'


He took a business card from his pocket and placed it on the desk in front of the editor, next to the fresh issue of Amazing World magazine, on the cover of which a long row of elegant wind turbines stretched toward fields of solar panels. The repairman looked away.


The editor took the card. It read: 'S. L. Kenski, Refrigerators and Air Conditioners,' followed by a phone number starting with 555, and a website address: http://budclub.ru/k/kskij_s_l/


'Is this your company's website?'


But the repairman was busy checking his smartphone.


'Excuse me, I have another call. Goodbye.'


'All the best.'


By the door, the repairman turned around: 'Where is the restroom around here?'


'Fourth door down the hall.'


The repairman nodded and left.


Epilogue


The editor followed the repairman with his eyes, then shifted his gaze back to the preprint of his magazine. 'A nice illustration,' he thought again and signed the issue for print.


Then he leaned back in his chair and stared at the opposite wall for a full minute.


Eventually, he shrugged, took the repairman's business card from the desk, and, holding it against his laptop screen, typed in the website address. After a few mouse clicks, a long smile appeared on the editor's face.


Then he stood up and walked over to the open window. A still, hot haze obscured the panorama of the city. The gray film on the faded sky, familiar from past years, was a sure sign that the peat bogs nearby were burning. The sun was still high and hot, but of a dull, sunset-like hue.


A movement below caught the editor's attention. It was the repairman leaving the building. After a few steps, he stopped and looked around. From beside the wall, where the editor couldn't see her before, his secretary Liza approached the repairman. She was easy to recognize by the same dress she wore to work today. Shifting his tool suitcase to his other hand, the repairman took Liza by the elbow, and the pair quickly vanished around the corner.


'So that's the child you had to pick up from somewhere... or take somewhere,' the editor thought textually, and closing his eyes, leaned his head against the window frame. Somewhere in the depths of his consciousness, he heard the soothing, muffled gurgling of his native swamps. His facial features, bulging eyes, and bald head resembled something reptilian at that moment. 'Swindlers... All of them are swindlers. What a planet...'


The end.


Заметка переводчика:


Заголовок: Украинское 'Булькотiння' переведено как 'Bubbling'. Это точное соответствие, которое на английском звучит одновременно обыденно (вода, хладагент) и немного зловеще (как закипающая бездна мерзлоты).


'Антигравiльот': Переведено как 'anti-grav craft' (или anti-grav ship). В англоязычной фантастике это звучит более естественно, чем буквальное antigravitator.


'Дракон... корона': Очень тонкая авторская игра слов (коронавирус / Апокалипсис). В английском я сохранил эту библейскую торжественность ("a dragon with seven heads will rise... and on each head a... crown").


Технический монолог: Монолог мастера адаптирован под сленг американских/британских ремонтников. Например, 'позистор у пусковому реле' - это 'PTC thermistor in the starter relay', а 'пiгулка' в данном контексте отлично переводится как 'pill' (они действительно так называют этот круглый элемент). 'Заплановане застарiвання' - это классический экономический термин 'Planned obsolescence'.


'counter-flow temperature gradient' - так переведен фрагмент про слои воды, которые нагреваются в противоположном направлении и не смешиваются. В английском это устоявшийся инженерный термин для эффективного теплообмена.


'dry contact' - 'сухой контакт' (передача тепла без прямого смешивания сред/фреона, как в кулерах процессоров).


'thermos flask' - термос. В английском просто thermos часто ассоциируется с брендом, а thermos flask подчеркивает физическую суть закрытой системы.


'Just fix it like it was' - 'Робiть як було'. Звучит очень по-житейски, отражая консерватизм обывателей.


В переводе технической части мы сохраняем точный профессиональный сленг холодильщиков (brazing rod, gauge manifold, evacuation/vacuuming, backing off the valve), а в философской - чеканный, слегка циничный, но интеллектуальный слог.


'returning to our muttons' - идиоматический перевод выражения 'повертаючись до наших баранiв' (французский корень revenons à nos moutons). Звучит очень литературно и иронично.


'rubes' - простаки, деревенщины. Хорошо передает пренебрежительное отношение мастера к тем, кто путает киловатты и киловатт-часы.


'Well, I'll be!' - 'Оце ма╓ш!' (классическое выражение удивления).


'thermonuclear fusion energy' - управляемый термоядерный синтез. В тексте мастер разделяет колайдер и ИТЕР, подчеркивая их технологическое родство (сверхпроводящие магниты) через объём жидкого гелия (liquid helium).


'detach energy from matter' - отличный перевод фразы 'вiд'╓дналася вiд матерi╖', подчеркивающий физическую и философскую концепцию.


'to stretch the owl of propaganda over that globe' - адаптация устойчивого выражения 'натягувати сову на глобус'. В английском языке нет прямого аналога этой фразы, но в контексте речи мастера этот колоритный образ звучит великолепно и передает его саркастичный характер.


'by the skin of our teeth' - идиома, идеально передающая 'майже на межi' (едва-едва, чудом спастись).


'the green agenda' - 'екологiчний порядок денний' в современном политическом и медийном лексиконе.


'by now, we would have long forgotten...' - здесь используется сослагательное наклонение (Conditional III / Mixed), так как речь идет об упущенном прошлом ('дотепер ми б давно вже забули').


'holy war' - 'священна вiйна'. Кавычки подчеркивают сарказм мастера по отношению к этому тайному историческому противостоянию.


'leaps bounds ahead' - отличная идиома для 'рiзко вискаку╓ вперед' (делать колоссальный скачок вперед).


'bullseye' - точная адаптация жеста 'ну так!' / 'в яблочко!'. Также можно использовать описательный вариант: The repairman smiled and nodded as if to say, "Exactly!" - но короткое bullseye делает текст более живым.


'In general terms, yes' - устоявшееся выражение для 'на загал так' (в общих чертах).


'rogue technicians' - точный эквивалент для 'майстрiв-шахра╖в'.


'to wring its neck like a chicken's' - 'скрутити шию як курчатi'. Очень живой, кинематографичный образ в речи ремонтника.


'hits / mentions' - поисковые 'ссылки' в контексте интернета (вместо буквального links, что означало бы просто гиперссылки).


'Low-Energy Nuclear Reactions (LENR)' - официальный научный термин, под которым сейчас в мире действительно исследуют холодный синтез (вместо Cold Fusion), чтобы избежать стигматизации.


'MRI scanners' - медицинские томографы (Магнитно-резонансная томография). В английском языке в быту и медицине используют аббревиатуру MRI.


Заметка автора:


Данный текст - опыт художественного перевода с украинского на английский при помощи AI версии Gemini 3.1 Pro. Поскольку главный интерес, по мнению автора, заключается здесь в оценке способностей AI для решения подобных задач на данном этапе его развития, в тексте перевода не было сделано никаких изменений, кроме названия (AI конечно же согласился с этим) и исправления одной смысловой ошибки на стыке частей текста, подлежащих переводу, именно по этой причине замеченной автором и, вероятно, допущенной переводчиком. Кроме того, в конце текста добавлен список замечаний по переводу, которые счел нужным сделать сам переводчик. Оригинал для сравнения помещен в разделе автора под названием 'Булькотiння'.