The surrounding heat increased with every hundred paces they advanced toward the central round hall.
By the time Lin Tao and Tie Shan reached the third transverse avenue of the cathedral, the air heat had climbed to fifty-six degrees. The soles of their climbing boots softened against the quartz flat stone slabs. That left faint, sticky rubber impressions on the white floor.
Lin Tao paused beside a huge dark rock pillar. He unbuttoned his outer linen coat to let the stale air circulate over his damp tunic.
His heart was pounding at one hundred and twenty beats per minute—not from physical hard effort, but from the acute cardiovascular strain of surrounding hyperthermia. His skin was flushed deep crimson, beads of sweat evaporating almost the moment they reached the surface of his forehead. The blood rushing through his main neck blood vessels sounded like a distant waterfall in his ears, rhythmic, wild, and hot.
In distributed systems performance, Lin Tao thought, squinting through the heat shimmer dancing off the dark rock surfaces, when heat throttling kicks in, throughput drops non-linearly. A twenty percent reduction in clock hum reduces processing capacity by half due to pipeline stall cascades. The entire southern continent is running on emergency reserve cycles.
