CORTEX'S BIG SECRET
There's a reason the lake boils day and night…
Cortex's Inner Sanctum—“The Machine Room.”
I will be careful now to avoid spoilers as this illustration shows a key setting for part of the second Cortex book, This Automatic Eden.
In The Paradise Factory Cortex Intelligent Machines have their headquarters in an old Midtown Manhattan office building. Whilst flying there at the end of the book, Alice sees Cortex’s new headquarters being constructed in Cortex Park (previously known as Central Park—Charles Takamatsu purchased the land in 2054 and turned it into a private park for his business).
In This Automatic Eden Alice visits Cortex’s new HQ to meet Takamatsu in person. He takes her to a room containing eleven Mechanical Intelligences arranged like hour marks around a clock, with only the 12 missing. This is a drawing of that room.
In the 2050s a typical Mechanical Intelligence is a foot square cube. The ones in the Cortex machine room are twenty-feet tall offering massive computing power. The power and cooling requirements for this level of machinery are equally colossal.
Electricity is provided by North America’s largest fusion reactor, which is buried in the basement of this building (along with something far, far worse… you'll find out what that is in Book 3).
Cooling is more of a challenge, and a main reason why Takamatsu purchased the park. Cortex Park holds Manhattan’s only large body of water, the lake formerly known as the Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis Reservoir:
The reservoir is stunningly beautiful . . .
. . . and clearly seen in an aerial or Google Map's view of Central Park
The reservoir was part of the Manhattan’s water supply until 1993, when it was decommissioned, and covers 106 acres, holding over 3,800,000 cubic meters of water.
All of which makes it a fantastic place to cool hot machinery.
The Cortex HQ is a half-mile-high tower built in the middle of this reservoir. The eleven MI’s cooling oil is pumped through a series of heat exchangers set in the lake, dissipating their heat into the water. This causes the lake to steam day and night, and its elevated temperature killed all indigenous life leading to reprinted versions being designed and manufactured to live in the boiling water.
An industrial sized heat-exchanger of the scale needed to cool the Cortex MIs
But what is the room actually like inside? How to those eleven (12?) vast machines work together?
Find out on the next page!