The lead-sheathed walls of the bunker trapped the rising heat like a brick kiln.
Lin Tao knelt upon a folded woolen horse blanket, his back rigid, his elbows resting firmly on the land-mapper’s bench. His left pupil had tightened to the width of a needle point, blazing with an intense, amber soft glow that cast long, sharp-angled shadows against the dark granite blocks. In his mind, numbers were falling like hailstones upon an iron roof.
He was computing the polynomial remainder of a one-gigabyte execution stream.
Without a digital workstation, every single step of the thirty-two-bit cyclic division had to be carried out across his living neural pathways. His visual cortex served as an order cache, his frontal lobe carried out the twin shifts. His parietal lobes managed the register carries. The sheer calculating friction generated a huge body-energy heat load.
His skin was slick with hot, greasy sweat. His inner body heat had climbed to thirty-nine point eight degrees.
“Change the compress,” Doctor Su commanded, her voice cutting through the ringing static in Lin Tao’s skull.
An apprentice nurse hurried forward with a wooden tub filled with melting mountain ice and well water. Su dipped a thick linen towel into the freezing slush, wrung it out with violent twists of her forearms. Then it pressed it firmly against the nape of Lin Tao’s neck.
