Victor Grippo: Analogía I
They led Jones to a warehouse located in the very center of the property. Louie fumbled for a key, unlocked the door, and held it open for Jones. Jones stepped through and was overwhelmed by the smell of starch. The room in front of him, about the size of a high school gymnasium, was filled end-to-end with a massive pile of loose potatoes.
“The potatobase!” exclaimed Marius, sweeping his hands out to indicate the whole room.
Society Acolytes in knee-high rubber boots waded amongst the pile, carefully avoiding the tangle of wires that swooped in and out, connecting potatoes to each other and to a handful of computer terminals scattered around the room. Some Acolytes carried voltmeters, occasionally bending down to move a potato here or there, or to adjust the connection between a potato and a wire. Others seemed concerned with the task of weeding out potatoes that had begun to molder, replacing them with fresh spuds from a yellow plastic bucket attached to their waist. Yet another group had clipboards, and were constantly scribbling notes as they scrutinized the mass of tubers.
“So how does it work?” asked Jones.
“Great question,” said Marius. “It’s mostly chemical. Have you ever heard of a potato battery? It’s the same general idea, but with a few twists and turns.
“With a potato battery, you just need to combine zinc and copper wires with the potato to generate spontaneous electron transfer. The ion exchange between the two metals passes through the starch of the potato, which acts as a buffer, creating a current that you can then channel, with sufficient potatoes, to your own devices. The potatobase expands on this principle by introducing rare earth magnets. As the ions move through the potato, tiny magnet flakes are pushed this way and that by the current. Following conventional principles from binary encoding of information, careful calibration of the currents via potato placement allows us to store vast quantities of information inside the direction that the magnets are pointing.”
Marius seemed exhausted, so Louie took over.
“This is an entirely proprietary technology that allows us to store all the data we need to solve the Perfect Meal Algorithm without fear of surveillance or a hacking. No one can break into this system, because they have no idea how it works, and even if they did, they wouldn’t know how to read the contents.”
“I don’t believe it works at all,” said Jones.
“If you’re willing to wear some boots,” suggested Louie, “you could get in there and take a look around yourself.”
“There’s no other option,” Jones agreed. Louie disappeared through the doorway to find Information Jones some galoshes. Jones mentally steeled himself for the task ahead.