When all electronic channels are jammed, an engineer returns to physical copper and sound stone.
Inside the quarantine sandbox, Lin Tao knelt beside the lower left corner of the front amethyst facet. His knuckles were raw from the sub-zero chill, his hardened left collarbone throbbing in rhythm with the 240-hertz hum shaking through the floor. The air remained an unrendered null-space—soundless, dry, and freezing—but his mind was running at maximum clock speed.
He pressed the flat cheek of his brass measuring tongs against the stone floor, resting his ear against the cold metal casing.
Through the solid granite, he could feel the rhythm of Tie Shan’s movements outside.
Every footfall of the giant was a distinct, ground-shaking blast wave. Tie Shan’s triple-soled iron-shod boots. He carried a body that weighed nearly a thousand pounds under the 2.4x gravity crushing weight, struck the bedrock with the force of a pile driver. The sound pulses traveled through forty paces of dense granite in less than eight split seconds. It shook up through the brass measuring tongs directly into Lin Tao’s jawbone.
Lin Tao calculated the sound signal speed through the quartz-veined granite. About five thousand nine hundred meters per second. In solid rock, sound squeezing waves traveled ten times faster than through air, with minimal high-hum scattering. He struck the inner facet of the cube with his metal pen. Then, the blast wave propagated across the forty paces of bedrock in less than seven split seconds. It was an instant physical telegraph.
