Cybernetic Ecology
solarpunk
The fuse had blown sometime Friday, and Ignacio had spent breakfast Saturday explaining to Carlos why this was a teaching opportunity instead of an inconvenience taking up his Saturday morning. Now they were on the roof, knees pressed into asphalt shingles that gave off the smell of warm tar, and Carlos was holding the multimeter the wrong way around.
“Other end, mijo. The red probe goes on the positive lead.”
Carlos flipped it without comment. He was at the age where every correction registered as an attack, and Ignacio had learned to keep his voice flat, almost bored, the way you talked to a cat you wanted to keep in the room.
“Okay. Now what?”
“Touch it to the terminal. Tell me what the screen says.”
“Zero point four.”
“That’s our problem. Should be reading twelve. The fuse on this panel popped, so the whole string is offline. You’re going to replace it. And I’m going to stand here and look impressive.”
Carlos made the small huffing noise that was his version of laughter. From this height the cul-de-sac unrolled below them like a circuit board, every house wearing its own dark rectangle of glass; the Hendersons’ roof angled west and the Patels’ angled south, a quiet competition of orientations nobody acknowledged out loud. A spring cloud was crossing the sky to the east, casting a slow shadow over the Maldonados’ yard three doors down. Through the open window of Ignacio’s office, two stories below, the gaming desktop on the desk was running its fan at full tilt, the sound carrying up through the eaves like a small refrigerator someone had left on in another room. Carlos had noticed it running loudly that morning. Standing on the roof, he could still hear it.
“Why is your computer on if you’re up here?”
“It’s working.”
“On what?”
Ignacio fished the replacement fuse out of his shirt pocket and held it up between thumb and forefinger. A glass cylinder no bigger than a peanut, with silver caps at each end and a hair of wire suspended through the middle. The sun caught it and made it look like a tiny vial of something pharmaceutical.
“Here, slot it where the old one was. Same orientation. Push until you feel the click.”
Carlos took it. The fuse went in with a small mechanical satisfaction, the kind of click his father used to engineer into the toys he assembled when Carlos was six. He touched the probes back to the terminal without being told.
“Twelve point one.”
“There it is. You just brought two hundred and forty watts back online.”
“You still didn’t answer my question.”
Ignacio sat back on his heels. He rested a forearm on his knee and squinted out across the neighborhood, his face going into the half-pleased, half-distant expression Carlos recognized from a hundred dinner-table monologues about the planet.
“So you know the battery wall in the garage?”
“Yeah.”
“It fills up by eleven in the morning on a day like this. After that the panels keep making power, but the battery has nowhere to put it. The utility used to buy the surplus back. They capped that program in 2027. So anything we generate above what we use just gets shunted to ground. Heat in a resistor. Gone.”
“Okay. So?”
“So I ran a line off the surplus into the desktop. When the battery is full and the sun is up, the computer runs. When it’s not, it doesn’t. The whole machine is a bucket I put under a leak that was already happening.”
Below them the fan hummed on, steady, the small refrigerator note.
“And it’s doing, what exactly?”
“Folding proteins. There’s a distributed project, you donate compute cycles, a research consortium uses them to model how proteins fold up. Helps with drug discovery. Alzheimer’s, mostly. The GPU is built for it. Three hundred work units since February.”
“So your gaming computer is curing Alzheimer’s.”
“Contributing to a project that might, eventually, help with developing treatments. Don’t oversell it.”
“You’re the one who set it up, Dad.”
Ignacio laughed. The laugh was good, surprised, the laugh of a man whose son had landed one. He clipped the multimeter to his belt and ran his palm along the warm aluminum frame of the panel they had just repaired, the gesture of a farmer checking a fence post.
“The energy was already here. The sun was going to hit this panel either way. The panel was going to make electricity either way. The only question was whether that electricity did something or got dissipated as heat. So I gave it a job.”
Carlos didn’t answer right away. He was looking down the long row of panels, dark blue and faintly iridescent in the angled light, each one tilted at the same precise angle as the one beside it like a deck of cards mid-shuffle. He thought about the desktop two floors down, drawing sunlight through copper, throwing it at a math problem about a disease his grandmother had died of in 2031.
He pulled his phone out of his back pocket. The screen woke up under his thumb, and he sat down on the warm shingles with his knees pulled up, scrolling, the phone tilted away from the sun. Ignacio watched him from the corner of his eye and said nothing. Carlos was a careful reader when he wanted to be; you could tell by the way his lips moved very slightly when he hit a paragraph he meant to remember.
After a minute Carlos looked up.
“The PS6 has a GPU in it.”
“It does.”
“Does it have to be a computer, or could it be a console?”
Ignacio’s hand was still resting on the warm aluminum frame. He felt the panel pulse very faintly under his palm, the way a beehive pulses when you put your ear against the box, current moving through the string Carlos had just repaired.
“It could be a console.”
“Okay, cool,” Carlos said.
He went back to his phone.