Chapter 668 314: Revenge

Sterling pointed to the signature on the document.

"Look at this. It's an emergency dispatch order, jointly signed by the Governor's Office of Pennsylvania, the Industrial Revival Alliance, and the National Energy Association. All the legal formalities are complete."

"Now, execute the order."

O'Connor looked at the signature.

It was William Saint Cloud's, as flamboyant as an artist's autograph.

O'Connor was almost certain that the playboy hadn't even glanced at the document's title when he signed it.

Let alone the definitions of "high-consumption commercial users" within the document.

'Round-the-clock central air conditioning? Server rooms?'

'How could that pathetic amount of power consumption possibly compare to the electric arc furnaces in Pittsburgh, roaring day and night?'

'This was obviously bullshit, just blatant political maneuvering.'

'But the problem is, the signature is right here.'

'This is the order.'

In this control room, procedural justice was paramount.

Even if the order itself was absurd, as long as it followed procedure, it had to be executed.

O'Connor took a deep breath.

His hand hovered over the keyboard, trembling slightly.

Sterling stood behind him, hands on his shoulders, like a mountain pressing down.

"Press it, O'Connor."

Sterling said in a low voice.

"The furnaces in Pittsburgh can't stop."

"As for those big shots in Washington, a taste of darkness might help clear their heads."

O'Connor closed his eyes and gritted his teeth.

"Executing regional load-shedding procedure,"

he spoke into the microphone, his voice mechanical and stiff.

"Target areas: New Jersey Zone A4, Delaware Zone B2, District of Columbia Zone K1."

"Three-second countdown."

"Three."

"Two."

"One."

"Disconnect."

His finger slammed down on the Enter key.

...

Peapack-Gladstone, New Jersey. The Pfizer Global Research and Development Center.

This was a holy temple to modern medicine, the front line in humanity's war against disease, and the very apex of capitalism profiting from life.

The laboratory was kept at a constant twenty-two degrees Celsius. The air, passed through seven layers of filters, was purer than that of a surgical suite.

Chief Scientist Dr. Alan Morse was standing in front of an enormous cryo-freezer.

Through the thick viewing window, he gazed at the rows upon rows of neatly arranged test tubes inside.

Each test tube was labeled with an intricate barcode. They were the Phase III clinical trial samples for a new targeted drug, the result of a five-year, multi-hundred-million-US-dollar research effort.

The samples were live.

They needed to be kept dormant in an environment of minus eighty degrees Celsius.

Once the temperature rose, the protein structures inside would undergo irreversible denaturation, and those priceless samples would be reduced to useless liquid waste.

"This batch of samples is being sent to the FDA next week for final validation," Dr. Morse said to his assistant behind him. "Keep a close eye on them. They're worth more than your life."

The assistant nodded while taking down the temperature control data.

Suddenly.

BZZT—

The fluorescent lights overhead flickered once.

In the next instant, the entire world was plunged into darkness.

The darkness came so completely and so abruptly that Dr. Morse's first thought was that he had gone blind.

The next second, a piercing alarm blared through the hallway.

It was the alarm for the UPS kicking in.

"A power outage?"

Dr. Morse was stunned.

This was Pfizer's global R&D center. It had two separate power feeds from the city grid and its own dedicated substation.

The power here hadn't gone out for even a second in thirty years.

"Start the backup generators!" Morse bellowed. "Now!"

The facility manager's panicked voice came over the intercom.

"Doctor, the generators failed to start! There was a huge voltage surge when the city power was cut, and it fried our automatic transfer switch!"

"What?!"

Morse rushed to the cryo-freezer's control panel.

The green indicator light was out. A flashing red number stabbed at his eyes.

Current Temperature: -78°.

The cooling compressor had shut down.

The insulation would hold for a while, but in a field as precise as bioengineering, every degree of temperature increase was lethal.

"Manual override! Go throw the damn switch!"

Morse roared into the intercom.

"We're trying! But…" The facility manager's voice was trembling. "The circuit boards in the main control room are smoking. This doesn't look like a normal trip. It's like the external grid hit us with some kind of overload attack."

Morse stared at the temperature display.

-75°.

The temperature was rising faster than he had imagined.

With the ventilation system down as well, the lab's ambient heat had nowhere to go.

"This freezer of samples is worth five hundred million US dollars!"

Morse pounded on the freezer's glass door, his voice turning hysterical.

"If they thaw, we're all finished! The board will kill us!"

"Get help! Bring dry ice! Bring liquid nitrogen!"

The lab descended into chaos.

The scientists, who normally did little more than handle pipettes, were now forced to scramble through the dark hallways like laborers, searching for anything they could use for cooling.

But this was a rescue attempt doomed to fail.

The power to the entire campus had been cut.

The elevators were out, the electronic keycard doors were dead, and even the carts for moving the dry ice were locked away in a storage room, inaccessible.

Morse stared despairingly at the temperature display.

-60°.

Each time that red number jumped, it meant millions of US dollars in R&D funding had gone down the drain.

He stared at the test tubes.