Chapter 44: Vacuum Tube

The cable car followed the aerial ropeway deep into the tunnel. The dim overhead lights cast curved arcs along both sides of the vaulted ceiling, making one feel as though they were traveling inside the body of a giant serpent, with the arcs of light forming its ribs.

Station 151 was a massive underground ant nest. Even among the internal staff of the base, very few had ever walked through every single tunnel in the entire complex. Viewed from above, its main structure resembled a gigantic letter H. The different sections of this H-shaped tunnel belonged to various departments of the base. The 104 Sanctuary was located in the left main tunnel, responsible for the maintenance of the Crimson Lotus, while the 105 main tunnel was on the right, burdened with other missions. Personnel from the two main tunnels did not interact during working hours.

Station 151 was precisely that kind of place; without a map on hand, you had no idea where the deep tunnels in your field of vision led.

They might lead you to an unexpected destination, especially late at night when no one was around. Blundering blindly through Station 151 could easily result in wandering for hours without finding a way out, until you bumped into your colleagues arriving for work the next morning. Therefore, the workers and cadres within the base only ever walked paths they were familiar with.

Old Man Ji, leading a group of cadres from the Equipment Department and Logistics Department, sat inside the cable car. They disembarked at the platform in the 105 main tunnel and hurried purposefully toward Workshop 112.

There were three giant mecha maintenance workshops in total within the base. Workshop 110 was the exclusive workshop for the Crimson Lotus and the most important one; Workshop 111 served as the backup workshop and was currently empty; while Workshop 112 was the coolest one.

Because here stood the coolest giant mecha in the entire world.

Code-named: Zhaofeng.

The world's only all-vacuum-tube computing core, steam-powered technological validation prototype.

This was a project personally spearheaded and tackled by Old Man Ji and his technical team. No one would ever guess that this grumpy old codger, who always wore a scowl on his face, secretly possessed the soul of a Warhammer 40K fan, capable of dreaming up such a delightfully punk creation. The original design concept of Zhaofeng stemmed from people's anxiety over super electromagnetic pulses. When Angel No. 001, Seraphim, erupted, it not only almost flipped the North American continent upside down but also triggered the most powerful and longest-lasting electromagnetic pulse humanity had ever witnessed. It wiped out half the world's electronic products and all satellites, leaving the upper atmosphere choked with high-energy charged particles that lingered for years and even began to interfere with the Earth's magnetic field.

That madman of an angel rendered humanity's entire arsenal obsolete overnight.

EMPs were the mortal enemy of any precision electronic instrument, especially giant mechas. Their combat operations relied on the immense processing power of computing cores capable of performing tens of quintillions of floating-point operations per second. However, the more sophisticated the integrated circuit, the more terrified it was of electromagnetic pulses. Unless you encased the entire giant mecha in a massive Faraday cage, sealing it completely off from the world, the surge currents induced by an EMP could fry a giant mecha into a useless scrap of iron within seconds.

Imagine this scenario: a second angel capable of triggering a super electromagnetic pulse descended (an event Old Man Ji believed was inevitable). In an instant, it would plunge humanity's communication systems, command systems, and decision-making apparatus into a prolonged paralysis. Modern civilization, built entirely upon Maxwell's equations, was utterly helpless against such an attack targeting its soft underbelly. From eight hundred kilometers away, it could cause the giant mechas to go offline right where they stood.

Old Man Ji's memories of the disasters during the Great Collapse remained vivid.

Thus, he spearheaded a project that was bizarre to the point of absurdity—though given Old Man Ji's formidable seniority and lofty status, such a nonsensical project managed to pass the approval process. While everyone else was rushing to upgrade systems, making computing cores increasingly sophisticated and processing speeds ever faster, he chose to buck the trend, swimming against the current and forging an unconventional path by unearthing a long-decayed antique from human history.

This antique was as old as Old Man Ji's father.

--The vacuum-tube computer.

Talk about an archaeological masterpiece; this grave-robbing effort was so professional that even legendary tomb raiders would raise their thumbs in praise.

If one had to use four words to describe a vacuum-tube computer, they would be: clumsy, massive, dark, and crude.

A machine weighing dozens of tons had a computing speed that couldn't even match a basic pocket calculator. If a super EMP hadn't been capable of frying calculators right along with everything else, you'd be better off carrying a pocket calculator instead of this monstrosity. Yet, it possessed one irreplaceable advantage: it feared neither lightning strikes, nor gamma rays, nor electromagnetic pulses.

It was simply enough. What was a vacuum tube? It was a sealed glass bulb containing three metal electrodes with the internal air evacuated, functioning as a unidirectional valve. It was such a simple device, with the large ones as thick as a wrist and the small ones the size of a finger. Vacuum tubes had all but vanished from everyday use by the 21st century, surviving only in certain high-end audio equipment where they were used as amplifiers in pursuit of "sweet highs, accurate mids, and deep lows—in a word, transparent."

A single vacuum tube could represent a zero or a one. A vacuum-tube computer plugged thousands of these glass bulbs onto circuit boards and wired them together into logic circuits. One could easily imagine that its physical size, weight, and power consumption were beyond what modern people could fathom. Using 21st-century microelectronics technology, a cumbersome computer that occupied an entire estate could be shrunk down to the size of a fingernail on a pinky finger via large-scale integrated circuits.

Yet Old Man Ji gave a grand wave of his hand and turned the clock all the way back to the 1940s. In terms of technological level, this vacuum-tube computer was roughly on par with ENIAC, the very first computer in human history, and perhaps only marginally more advanced than the Bombe machine Alan Turing had built at Bletchley Park. Old Man Ji resolutely dragged this antique onto the battlefield. It was akin to the era of starship-to-starship combat, where one faction suddenly hauled out a muzzle-loading cannon on their deck. Was it backward? Extremely backward. But its projectiles could ignore the enemy's guidance jamming and blow them to hell. Being backward was not a flaw!

It was just so damn Warhammer 40K.

If one day the angel were to unleash another global-scale super electromagnetic pulse, rendering all of humanity's modern giant mechas completely defunct, then Zhaofeng would have to lead an entire legion of vacuum-tube, punk, steam-powered, hydraulic giant mechas onto the battlefield. Just imagine that scene! Colossal divine soldiers venting steam walking across the earth, their brains consisting of glowing, heat-radiating vacuum tubes. The pilots sitting in the cockpit, with steel cables strapped to their hands and feet, staring at glowing green CRT displays and mechanical gauges amidst a cacophony of roars and the heavy stench of engine oil—

How utterly bloody marvelous, though perhaps that was looking a bit too far ahead... Old Man Ji shook his head.

He shoved both hands into his pockets and stood atop the operation platform.

The giant mecha was suspended within the cavernous hangar, revealing only the upper half of its body. Unlike the Crimson Lotus, this mecha was pitch black, with thick pipes and cables dangling from the severed fracture at its waist and abdomen, resembling the entrails of a giant.

It was draped under an enormous plastic tarp, and the workers of Workshop 112 were pulling on steel cables to hoist the tarp away.

Old Man Ji clapped his hands hard in the echoing, empty cavern and shouted loudly:

"Let's test an arm first! Little ones, fire up the boiler!"