Chapter 7 The German with a Conscience
Tuesday
The thing that undid Dieter Wolffe was a pipe.
He had spent two years signing load projections. He had read the power study and the water study and the redundancy study, and he had asked the questions a founder is supposed to ask, and had been given the answers a founder is given, and had initialed the bottom right corner of four hundred pages.
He knew the numbers. Ninety-four megawatts at full build. Forty million liters a day through the chilled water loops. He had said those numbers out loud in Zurich in March to a room of people who had written them down.
But a number is a species of sentence, and Dieter Wolffe had spent his professional life in a field that had taught him, at cost, that a sentence and a specimen are not the same object.
So on Tuesday afternoon, in the rain, in a linen suit and the wrong shoes, he asked where the discharge went.
They had shown him the halls first, which was correct, because the halls were magnificent.
Hall 3 was two hundred and eleven meters long and the racks went away from him in rows under a ceiling of cable gantry until perspective closed them, and the sound was not a hum.
Everyone who had never been in one said hum.
It was closer to a pressure, a broadband roar somewhere below hearing that arrived in the chest and the teeth, and it was made of forty thousand fans and thirteen kilometers of coolant moving through manifolds at a pressure Dieter had signed off on in a document.
He had stood in the aisle for some time with his hands behind his back.
Because it was his. That was the part nobody understood about Dieter Wolffe, and the part Hansel understood and used.
He was not a man in a linen suit who disapproved of computers.
He had written the first version of the binding predictor himself in 2009 on a machine in a corridor in Heidelberg, and it had taken nine days to score a single patient’s candidate space, and score it poorly, and he had cried in a stairwell when it worked.
Every rack in that hall was that corridor, multiplied.
“How long for one patient,” he had asked.
“On the current partition, about nine hours end to end,” Kirsten said. “At full build, under two.”
Under two hours. He had run the arithmetic without wanting to.
A woman comes in on Monday with a biopsy and a blood draw.
On Wednesday she has a therapy that exists nowhere else in the universe and is addressed to her, to the exact wrong sentence in her own cells, and to nobody else who has ever lived.
He had put his hand on the end of a rack, the way he put his hand on everything.
It was warm.
Of course it was warm. Ninety-four megawatts of electricity does not vanish. It becomes heat, all of it, every watt, that is not a design flaw but a law, and the entire second half of the engineering of a building like this is the question of where you put the heat.
Which is when Dieter Wolffe, standing in the most beautiful thing he had ever built, asked where the discharge went.
The site manager was a pleasant Australian named Kirsten who had answered five of his questions well and this one poorly.
“The outfall? It runs south into the channel, and the channel is tidal, so it flushes.”
“Where does it enter the channel?”
“About four hundred meters that way.” She gestured at a gray middle distance behind a hoarding. “Doctor Wolffe, it is really coming down, and the vehicles are just.”
“I would like to see it.”
“There is not a path.”
“Then I will walk on what there is,” said Dieter Wolffe.
He was fifty-eight years old and slightly stooped and he had a slow lymphoma that a very good man in Heidelberg was watching for him twice a year, and he set off along the outfall in the rain with his glasses fogging, and Kirsten went with him because she had no choice, and two men from site security followed at eleven meters because that was their instruction.
The pipe ran on cradles above the ground for the first two hundred meters.
That was the part on the drawings. He put his hand on it as he walked, which he had done since he was a boy, and he noted without alarm that it was warm, because of course it was warm, it was a heat rejection line and warmth was its entire function.
Then the site boundary came, and the hoarding, and a gate that Kirsten did not have a key for and one of the security men did.
On the other side, the pipe went down into a concrete headwall and the headwall discharged into a channel.
Dieter stood in the rain and looked at it for a long time.
The channel was perhaps nine meters across.
It had been, at some point in the last century, a proper engineered estero with sloped concrete sides, and it was now three quarters full of everything a city produces.
Plastic. Styrofoam. A tire. A great raft of water hyacinth grown so thick that in the middle of the channel it had become ground.
And on the far bank, fifteen meters away, close enough to see a woman’s face in a window, was Barangay Isla Puting Bato.
Houses. Not a settlement in the abstract, not a red polygon on a parcel map in a presentation in Zurich.
Houses, three deep and then more behind them, tin and concrete block and salvaged plywood, built out over the water on stilts and drums, with a plank walkway running along the bank, and washing under the eaves, and a boy of about eight sitting on the walkway with a fishing line.
The water coming out of the headwall went into that channel at a temperature Dieter estimated, from thirty years of putting his hands on things, at somewhere above forty degrees.
It did not flush anywhere. The hyacinth had made a plug of the channel three hundred meters down. He could see the plug from where he stood.
The boy on the walkway was fishing seventeen meters from the outfall.
“Kirsten,” Dieter said. “Is the channel dredged?”
“That is a city responsibility.”
“That is not what I asked.”
Kirsten did not answer him.
Dieter Wolffe went down the bank in the rain, in his wrong shoes, and put his hand into the water at the edge of the outfall plume.
He held it there for four seconds, which is four seconds longer than anyone else would have.
Then he stood up and cleaned his glasses on a wet handkerchief, which accomplished nothing, and put them back on and looked across at the boy, who had noticed the strange tall man and was watching him with frank interest.
“Magandang hapon po,” Dieter said, because he had learned four phrases on the plane, in the way of a man who considered it a discourtesy not to.
The boy laughed at his accent and waved.
“How long has the channel been like this,” Dieter said, to Kirsten, without turning around.
“I honestly do not know.”
“Since we came?”
“Doctor Wolffe.”
“Since we came, Kirsten?”
There was rain on the hoarding and rain on the pipe and rain on nine meters of dead water.
“There is a dredging schedule,” Kirsten said. “It is in the community works package. I have raised it four times.”
“With whom?”
“With Mr. Brand’s office.”
Dieter Wolffe stood on the bank of a drainage channel in Tondo and did the arithmetic he had been avoiding for two years, and got an answer, and the answer had a boy in it.
The HelixCompute APAC offices occupied the eleventh floor of a tower in Pasay with a view over the bay reclamation, and Hansel Brand had been there since six that morning.
He came out of the lift at half past nine at night and found Dieter in the corridor, wet through, having declined a towel twice.
“You look like a shipwreck.”
“I have been to the site.”
“I know. Kirsten called me from the car.” Hansel held the glass door.
“Come in. Sit down. I am going to have someone bring you a shirt, and you are going to put it on, because you are fifty-eight and you are on a treatment protocol you refuse to start and I am not having you get pneumonia in a country with this air quality.”
They sat in a glass room with the storm going against the window and the bay somewhere out there in the dark.
Hansel Brand was thirty-eight and immaculate at half past nine at night.
He wore a technical-fabric suit that shed water and a titanium watch that told him, continuously, what his own heart was doing, and who sat down opposite Dieter and put his forearms on the table and did not reach for a device, which was, from him, a form of respect.
“Say it,” he said.
“The outfall enters a blocked channel nine meters from occupied housing.”
“Yes.”
Dieter had been prepared for a great many things. He had not been prepared for yes.
“You know.”
“Dieter, I have a photograph of that channel in a folder called RISK. I have had it since February.” Hansel spread his hands. “What do you imagine I do all day?”
“Then why is it blocked?”
“Because dredging the estero is a municipal responsibility, and we made a contribution to the municipal works package, and the municipality did not dredge it.” Hansel’s voice stayed level.
“And before you ask the next question, which is why we did not simply do it ourselves: because we are a foreign entity with a special economic zone designation, and we are legally prohibited from performing works outside our perimeter, and if we send a barge into that channel we hand the opposition a photograph of Germans dredging Tondo, and we lose eleven months.”
“So the water stays warm.”
“So the water stays warm.”
“And the people on the bank.”
“There are forty thousand people on that bank, and there have been for three generations, and they have no title, and every dry season the fire risk in there is a national scandal and every wet season the flood risk is, and none of that started with us and none of it will end with us.” Hansel leaned back.
“I am not going to insult you by pretending we are good for that channel. We are not. We are, at worst, the eleventh worst thing that happens to that channel.”
Dieter took his glasses off and set them on the table.
“Say the number,” he said.
“Which number?”