Dopecentury XIX --- The Plant
This short fiction is part of Dopecentury, an experimental project where I attempt to channel the aural aesthetics of Dopesmoker into written text. (Dopesmoker is the legendary stoner-doom metal masterpiece by the band Sleep, of which it is said: "the monotony rarely becomes tedious.") My plan is to listen to the single hour-long track of Dopesmoker while writing each of these "Dopecentury" entries. And repeat that 100 times. See the Dopecentury project page for more details.
When the plant ran at full bore, it could be heard for dozens of miles in every direction. The sound splattered across the spectrum. Lows shook the ground, highs pierced the air. Foundation of nearby buildings cracked. Birds became disoriented. Lights flickered and dogs howled.
That was at full bore, which was not often required. Full bore brought in the executives and the VIPs and the curious onlookers, who would monitor the action from a safe distance. But on an average day, the plant operated at some percentage less than that. Certainly close by the sound was still intense — long, low, loud and penetrating. But any reasonable distance from the plant (when operating at say, 20 percent of capacity, which was typical) would diminish the disturbance to a background hum.
The plant was able to achieve such volume because it was massive. Thirteen stories high (except for occasional towers that reached up an additional ten to 15 stories), it covered an area of nearly a square mile. Not visible on the surface, it also delved three stories below ground. The size and layout were determined by the manufacturing steps necessary to create the product the plant produced.
A tour of the plant (only done when operating at 23 percent capacity or below) began on the ground floor as you might expect. The ground floor was one continuous open space, three stories high. This was the primary manufacturing floor. Metal cables and spring of various thicknesses stretched across the entire length of the floor. Wind turbines two stories high were mounted along one wall, and when engaged would blow a fierce wind laterally across the cables, which would set most of them vibrating and humming. Hearing protection was required in the room, and would be distributed to those taking the tour.
In addition to the turbines, there were weighted hammers, each the size of a semi truck, that sat on rocker arms above the cables. When necessary, the hammers would slam down upon the cables and set them vibrating. When the plant ran at full capacity, most hammers would be engaged simultaneously and repeatedly, with a kind of rhythm. From the glassed-in control booth on the third floor that looked out over the manufacturing floor, operators made continual adjustments to how often the hammers were engaged, and which hammers were needed at any particular time.
Steel stairs climb up to the control booth, and from there one can access the fourth floor. This is the middle section of the plant. Large rooms that supply supplemental manufacturing to the main floor. The rooms vary from single-floor spaces the size of a small house, typically filled with rows of small spinning machines each humming at a slightly different frequency, to open multi-floor spaces up to four stories high, each the size of a department store.
These larger spaces in the middle of the plant were often given over to giant cylinders that filled the entire space. Each cylinder had rows and rows of steel plating that stuck out. As the cylinder spun, a rocker hammer similar to the ones on the main machine floor would come down and hit the steel plates and they passed, resulting in a loud gonging tone. These machines were controlled by operators standing at control panels in front of the spinning cylinders. The operator was responsible for positioning the hammer along the lateral axis of the spinning cylinder, and for lowering the hammer. Sometimes as few as a single operator were responsible for a machine three or for stories tall. Those operators were in contact via radio with the control room on the main floor, of course. The main control would tell the operators in these rooms when they needed to increase or decrease production, and the specific characteristics of what production pieces were needed.
The upper floors of the plant, typically reached by cargo elevators, were three stories of a warren of small rooms. Each room contained a single machine. Here, small runs of production were executed as needed. Some of these small rooms would not be used for a year or more. But they were kept ready for when a specific production piece was required.
The types of machines in the small rooms varied widely. One might have large bellows attached to a series of expanding funnels. Another might consist of nothing but a large plate of rusting steel and a smaller version of the rocker hammers from downstairs, waiting to be set off from a small control pedestal in front of it. Another had a series of pipes and a steam system that would pressurize the pipes in different configurations until they squealed from their open vents.
Above the small rooms were only the towers, though the tours often were most excited to see these. The towers were for specific custom manufacturing that required the height the tower provided. Each was for a different component of production, so each tower was filled with a different set of tooling. One had pipes of steel that hung from lines at the top of the tower, and swung freely in the air down nearly the entire length of the tower. Another was configured with tens-of-thousands of steel ball-bearings that traveled up to the top of the tower by a scoop mechanism, and then fell downwards among many steel pins and plates that jutted from the sides of the interior of the tower. Another had a huge engine standing on end, that could be fired when necessary to burn tremendous amounts of fuel with a rocket roar that would temporarily drown out all other sound. This tower was open to the sky.
The subterranean floors of the plant housed the largest machines by weight. The rooms to accommodate these machines are enormous, and often required reinforcement in architecturally interesting ways, such as a rotary splay of two-foot diameter steel beams. One room here contained a number of iron shafts, the diameter of a car and driven who knows how deep into the earth below the plant. These would be struck by hydraulic rams the size of a small building. Another room had steel blocks that slid back and forth on ramps that were lifted by hydraulic lifts at either end. One room contained another cylinder, but this one made of solid iron and weighing something like a wide-body airplane. It spun glacially slow and a spinning cutting wheel of tungsten was occasionally pressed against it by an actuated arm. Another room had a thin piece of sheet steel that stretched almost the whole length of the building which was warped and waved by it's attached armatures at either end.
On a typical production day, the lower levels of the plant would run continuously, but slowly, all day and night. The main production floor would be activated repeatedly for hours on end, all during the midday shift, with small adjustments continually made. The middle floors would similarly be called into action at regular intervals throughout the midday shift. The upper floors and the towers would often be left unused or only lightly used on a typical midday shift. Though occasionally at night one or two of the towers, or a selection of the small rooms in the upper floors, would be called up into production and their distinctive call would be heard, light and airy, for miles and miles across the desert valley the plant sat in the center of.