Neutralizer Finished!

With the ingredients in Tom's arms, the three of us followed behind Ralph as he led us to a sector I had never been to before. Just like the visit to the Chemistry department, we passed a large double door. But this double door was slightly different. There weren't any large signs stating that we were crossing departments. Instead there were many warning labels of symbols that I did not fully understand.

Walking through those doors, quite concerned and worried, we walked through another corridor of exactly the same boring color, until we came to the third door on the left.

"This is where the company houses its supercomputers. Each room holds a single computer and there are 4 rooms here. To check which are occupied or not, we look at the color of the 'occupancy light'."

Ralph pointed to a small light near the door that was currently green.

"We share the supercomputers with the Chemistry department, and sometimes with the Manufacturing department or any department that needs it. It's usually occupied by our Research department though. After all we deal with synthetic and sometimes not yet created materials due to always experimenting."

Pushing open the door, Ralph reached his hand into the pitch black room and turned on a light switch with a 'click'. Immediately light flooded the large room to display a computer that seemed to be embedded into the wall. The only thing jutting out was a rectangular gray square.

We walked into the room, with Ralph moving aside and shutting the door for us. He then pressed another switch and I could faintly see the green color 'occupancy light' outside turn red.

I then turned my head and saw Tom pull down the lid of the gray square and dumped the ingredients inside. He then turned around and gestured for me to come closer.

Walking up to the square, I saw a display screen as well as several buttons of different colors and shapes.

"This super computer allows us to pull data from a vast network containing all the data in every experiment that has ever taken place in this company. And since it has so much data about practically every ingredient that is available to the company, it'll run through all the possible ingredients and simulate them with every cooking method and every ingredient to find our desired chemical. A time saver, and a money saver!"

Pressing a blue square button, a little chut opened up from beside Tom.

"But we can make the work faster and easier for the super computer if we know a larger percentage of the recipe."

Saying that, Tom then casually dumped each ingredient individually into the chute, while pressing a blue circle button after each one.

"After we make sure the machine knows which ingredient we have narrowed the recipe down to, we can start the processing."

Tom pressed the blue square button again and the chute closed and disappeared into the 'wall'. He then pressed a green square button.

"Now we wait for the calculations to be done."

Pointing to the display which was in the middle of a half and hour countdown, Tom then left the gray square, the control panel, and took one of the chairs from the side to sit down on.

A little stunned that this was all it took, I was slow in reacting when Ralph pushed a chair towards me before sitting down on his own.

Feeling a pull on my hand, I glanced at Sazzy from the corner of my eye. She then guided me to sit down.

"Now we wait? Is that it?"

Leaning back on the chair, Tom raised his arms behind his head.

"Yep. That's it for now. We can't leave this room. There is a chance that the timing will speed up the closer the machine gets to the answer, but there is also a chance that there will be a sudden error and the analysis will stop and we have to troubleshoot. Some people will bring extra ingredients here and do another experiment while waiting. But since we are only doing this one, we just wait."

Ralph had already pulled up his personal terminal and was typing away. Once he finished explaining, Tom did the same.

[Researchers surprisingly have a lot of free time.]

Following the two of them, I pulled up my personal terminal to chat with Sazzy.

"To be fair, they are on work vacation. And they did say that others would use this time to work on other experiments. Maybe that's why the barrier is portable instead of being a stationary thing. So that they can bring it into rooms like this. Speaking of which..."

I glanced up at Ralph and tried to draw his attention.

"Hey Ralph. How does the barrier keep us safe? When you were explaining the significance of the color of the chemical containers, you mentioned the lock that only releases if there is increased airflow. I have been wondering since then, but how does that work? Does it open a hole in the ceiling?"

Tom and Ralph looked at each other as if they had heard something funny.

"I mean, you can technically say that. What actually happens is that the ceiling tiles are slightly special as they are made to activate under the barrier device and suck the air in as a column. They also suck it fast enough so any toxic materials are immediately removed and cannot injure you too much. You also have your full body suit to protect you. The toxic waste is then dumped outside the building."

[No wonder they have so much pollution! I bet they throw everything outside as well! Is there no filter? Nothing to clean the air before it's thrown outside?]

In this line of thought, we started a conversation where the two of them explained the instruments they used as well as how they usually work.

"Having a healthy sleep schedule is important in the company. Although we have Ben and Wilber are the health officers in charge of this department, they can't handle everyone's health at once. And since the company has linked our personal terminal to the private servers they own, we can't access a lot of services. Especially a lot of entertainment services during work hours."

Tom rolled his eyes at the mention of the private servers. He then pulled up his personal terminal to complain.

"Look! I can't even access Jolt! Chick also had limited access and all the known pages that I can watch videos on are blocked!"

He pressed the Jolt button, and I saw the webpage buffer before a "your server has restricted access times to this site' appeared.

[So this is what Kyle meant by 'they don't have much entertainment'. This is quite ... extreme.]

"We can't even play any games!"

Tom swiped to the icon that I recognized. It was the game Ken's mother always liked to play. Clicking on the icon, the app buffered before a similar message appeared on it.

"Thanks to all this, the most interesting thing that happens would be the 'shows' and education debates that happen in the brainstorm room."

I guess that explains a lot of things that Kyle and Wilber had been saying for the past couple of days. It also explained why a stress area was so necessary in this company.

[Talk about slightly dystopian.]

Tom continued to wail about how bored he was, and how much torture that everyone in the company had to undergo due to this 'anti-fun policy'. And surprisingly, Ralph didn't interrupt his long speech. Maybe Ralph agreed, maybe he couldn't bring himself to bother. Or maybe he was also trying to kill time as we waited for the machine to finish its calculations.

Halfway through the rant, a sharp ding sound rang throughout the room and effectively shut Tom up. It also caused him to shoot up from his chair and hurry over to the control panel.

Following him, Ralph and I peered over Tom's shoulder to look at the display screen. It showed the time elapsed was 25 minutes and 34 seconds, and that it found a recipe that had a 97.01% match rate.

Pressing several buttons, Tom then took out a cord from the control panel and plugged it into his personal terminal.

"We got a pretty decent result. 97% is not too bad for the first analysis. What we do now is to take the data Tom is downloading into his personal terminal and polish it through several tests. After that we can re-input it into the super computer, and the analysis will probably only take several minutes, and aim for the minimum match rate of 99%. After that we can safely pass the news onto Liz that we have completed the project!"

Helpfully explaining, Ralph also added in what were the next steps we needed to do. Well, the next steps the both of them needed to do. Because polishing this match rate was something incredibly technical and it was faster if they both did it alone.

However, instead of leaving me out this time, they both told me that I can start reporting our progress to Liz and plan out what we wanted to do with this neutralizer.

Currently the time was still decent enough to text her, so I did.

"Hello Liz, we are currently on the last steps to perfect the neutralizer to neutralize the poison. Could I ask what the plan is next?"

Immediately after I sent that, I saw that Liz was typing.

"Wow! That was quite quick! Currently, I'm thinking about two options. If the neutralizer cannot be burnt without producing toxic fumes, we can invite Barbie's family as well as the other families of the victims to a waste planet and allow them to burn the poison there. But if the neutralizer can be burnt safely, I think we could just hand it out to them. I want to respect their wishes to burn the poison, so it will probably be either one of these options. Either way, I'll make some time to come to the research facility tomorrow and look at it. We can finalize the details then."

Liz sent a cute sticker of a character bowing its head, and I sent a similar sticker but with a different character back.

Closing my personal terminal, I told the two of them what Liz and I discussed. And that she was coming here tomorrow.

Tom and Ralph both nodded their heads as they closed the control panel and we exited the room. They then told me to go eat lunch and relax for a while. Once they were done they would contact me.

[I see they like to leave people out, as usual.]

Sazzy huffed as the two of us separated from them and headed to the canteen.