Chapter 24: The City of Music

[September/October 2373 AD – POV Timotheus Sinterguth]

During the summer holidays, my twin cousin and I had spent a couple of weeks in Panem together with the two Heidecker girls, Esther and Rebecka, and after attending Finnick՚s wedding, a minor tsunami hat hit the coast, so that the locals were all busy with cleanup work. The four of us had spontaneously decided to leave early, and he had traveled north for a trip through part of the Mammoth Caves, before we had split up again.

When I had arrived back home from my nice summer vacation, work called once more, and I focused on my research for some time. After all, I did want to get my next and final academic degree, and my professor rightfully expected some serious quality research and work to be done. Although my family donated a lot of money to the university, this did not give me any preferential treatment, and I would not have it any other way. Alas, I really liked my work, and investigating something which was destined to add a few small pieces towards helping people and contributing to better and more efficient use of green energy was fulfilling.

The first youth group meeting after the holidays was focused on a specific biblical topic, but 'my' boys and girls insisted that I present some impressions from my journey next time, and I happily obliged and promised to prepare that accordingly. Being myself, though, I decided to not just show a few photos and video clips, but also add some historical and geographical background. Thus, when we met a week later, I had a longer video prepared, with a mix from own footage, content from some documentations, and maps. I used a large Panem map which I pinned to the wall to illustrate where we had been, and the show was rolling.

Some of the kids were most impressed by the magician. Naturally I had not been allowed to record the show itself, but there were trailers and individual highlights available on the guy's web page, and I showed some of those.

"How does he do that?" was the question more than once. "That's not supposed to be possible! Can he really do magic?"

"I agree, and I do not know either. However, I am quite sure that this is not real magic. Magicians like him are masters of illusion, and they are very experienced in making things look different from what the actually are, and they know how to direct the attention of everybody in the audience exactly where they want it, distracting from something they don't want to get observed. By the way, the magician is a friend of mine, and he actually attended university with me for a couple of years before he decided to become a full time magician. Maybe we can also book him for an event around here at some time in the future?"

When the tsunami was on the screen, I had tried to enhance the experience with some special footing I had found and a specially scary music as well, and this worked; some of the kids shuddered and almost yelped when the tidal wave was shown to come in. Fortunately, with the Mammoth Caves part, we had a nice and relaxing end part, and the kids in the group thanked me for allowing them to learn about my experiences. It had also been fun for me to prepare the session. There were a few final question related to similarities and differences between the Mammoth Caves and our local caves here, and I could only partially answer those, as I had not prepared myself for this. However, I suggested that those kids who were really interested in that might want to write a letter to Sabine and Daniel, our tour guides in the Sinterguth cave, and they might have some information on that particular topic.

Heike was still running the youth group meeting together with me, but today she announced that she was preparing to move away from Erlangen, and she tried to get the move done before Christmas time. She hope that I'd be able to run the group without her in future, and I actually found myself looking forward to the challenge.

In late September my professor requested me to come into his study, and he offered something:

"Mr. Sinterguth, would you be interested in a small exchange program for a couple of weeks?"

"What kind of exchange?"

"A friend of mine, who is a professor at the Technical University of Wien and researching similar topics, has a few doctorate students who would like to come here for a few weeks, and she suggested that I might want to send some of mine to her. That would be a good opportunity to exchange ideas and learn something new, and I thought that you might like it."

I had been in Wien (Vienna) before once as a child, with my parents, as a tourist, and I would indeed like to see the city again. The only problem was that I'd miss my youth group sessions, but somebody would have to jump in; besides, Heike was still here. My reply was quick:

"Yes, sir, I would like to go indeed."

In the second week of October I found myself on the maglev from Nürnberg to Wien, together with three other doctorate students, and we are all looking forward to spending a few weeks in the great city we were heading to. Fortunately, there was a decent connection between the two cities, with stops in Regensburg, Passau, Linz, and Melk, all cities on or at least close to the Donau (Danube) river. For some time the conventional rail line ran close to the maglev line, and we could see long freight trains moving there at slow speed; for those, the rail tracks were more efficient than the maglev system, and a lot of freight transport was done on them.

Wien had been fortunate during and after the apocalypse and the massive rise of the ocean levels, as the city and the immediate environment were just high enough to not get flooded. Most cities further downriver, starting with Bratislava, the former capital city of Slowakia, had been at least partially flooded and had to be abandoned, and the ocean – part of the enlarged Mediterranean Sea – started only a dozen kilometers downriver of the large city, which used to be capital of Austria, with more than two million citizens before the Great War. I had only been in Wien once before, as a child together with my parents, and just for a few days. From this visit I did not recall much, except for the old fashioned trams they still had running the circle line around the city center.

We arrived at the main station south of the city center, which had been built right next to the main railway station. Same as in some other Central European cities, the drastic reduction in population after the Great War had enabled city planners to demolish some older buildings and make room for something else. The hotel where rooms had been booked for us was conveniently located not far from the station, and we could walk there. The rooms we got assigned were on one of the upper floors, and we had a nice view from the windows. There were still some hours left before sundown, and we were expected to visit the local university at least briefly today. A guide picked us up, and he introduced himself:

"Ladies and gentlemen, my name is Hannes Moser, and I work for Prof. Heimschmidt. If you will all follow me, I will guide you towards the university campus for an introduction meeting."

We did as he suggested, and half an hour later we sat in a nice room together with said professor, and we talked for about two hours. The professor was a woman who looked to be in her forties, and she seemed to have a vast knowledge on the topics we were talking about. The guide brought us back to the hotel and offered:

"Now, as the official introductions are done, what about ending the day in a fitting way?"

"What would that be?"

"Wien is known for excellent wine, and if you are interested, I'd like to invite you to one of our Heurigen places to sample some. All right?"

I had heard about that; he was talking about smaller locations where people could sit inside or outside and drink, and I did not like the concept. My three colleagues were all eager to go, and it turned out that I was the only one declining. Sitting in a location where practically everybody consumed considerable amounts of alcoholic drinks had no appeal to me at all, and I expected the others to show up in the next morning with a hangover; but, that was their choice and not mine.

I managed to spend a quiet evening in my hotel room, read a few chapters in a book, and finally went to bed early.

When I went down for breakfast in the morning, only Frederika, my female colleague from Erlangen, was there, and she looked reasonably rested. When I asked her how her evening had been, she grinned and told me:

"Hannes was a good guide for the start, but once we got to sit in one of those small locations, the drinking started in earnest, and the two others joined him. After my first glass I decided that this was good enough and left; I was back in my room not very late. No clue how long the others might have stayed and how much they might have drunk."

We found my way to the institute on my own once we had eaten, and we met another local colleague, a Matthias Obermüller. He asked us where my colleagues were, and Frederika told him about the plans they had had last night. He almost facepalmed himself and said:

"Of course, I should have warned you. Hannes really likes to go out in the evenings, and it frequently happens that he shows up at work around noon time only. I am not sure why our professor tolerates that, but on the other hand, he's got bright ideas from time to time. Now, what do we do without the others?"

"When do you think they will show up?"

"No later than around noon, most likely. That's the limit the professor has set for those days."

"All right, so why don't we talk about our work and see where we have some common ground?"

That we did, and we barely noticed the time passing until Matthias lead us to the closest cafeteria for lunch. The food was excellent, and when we got back, Hannes and my two other colleagues were waiting for us. They did not look like they were feeling very well, but at least they seemed to be able to work, and we continued to exchange ideas and details on our respective work areas.

Two days later Prof. Heimschmidt took us out to the Wien fusion plant side, some 25 kilometers or so outside of the city, on slightly elevated ground and close to a smaller city called Tulln. As I knew, that plant and the one outside of München were the only two big fusion plants which had survived the Great War and the apocalypse in Central Europe; all others had either been destroyed in the war, got flooded, of had suffered from sabotage and demolition. Both plants had a peak sustainable power output of 10 GW, which was almost ten times compared to other power plants which had been common centuries ago. For both cities, peak capacity was much more than what was actually needed in the respective areas nowadays, considering that many areas had their local solar and wind power plants, too, and the fusion plants were running at reduced capacity.

"Fortunately," the professor explained, "our ancestors had planned and constructed those huge power plants in a way to make them extremely robust and safe. Within the core part of the plant, there are no moving parts at all, and there is very little regular maintenance required. For safety reasons, this plant here got shut down during the war, but it was not too difficult to get it up again afterwards, and fortunately a few operators had survived. Both big cities had immense benefits from having access to almost unlimited electrical power in those times, specifically infrastructure like hospitals and transport."

"How did the knowledge survive during the war? Wasn't there some radiation impacting electronic data storage?"

"There was, indeed. However, some smart people predicted a war, and they constructed special long term data storage areas with huge amounts of data copied onto mechanical media."

"Mechanical, like chiseled in stone?"

"No, son, not like that. Does anybody remember the times when people had rotating media like vinyl discs first and then CDs, DVDs, Blu-Ray discs and so on? Nobody? Well, those discs had small mechanical dots on them, and from the CD on, they could be read with lasers. Data on those media cannot be erased by EM pulses, and smart people found a way to create long term storage media using a similar technology. So, when the nuclear war happened and electromagnetic pulses destroyed many storage media and even hardware, those sites and the media in them were still intact, except for one location which was hit by a bomb, and when we had some time, we could read the data and copy to other media and into the repaired hardware. This was a slow process, and downloading the data the fusion plant needed alone took a month or so. Fortunately, the plant's hardware itself had been hardened and over-engineered, and within another month or so we could slowly run the power up procedure. That was before my time, of course, but it is well documented, and I know that something similar happened with the München plant, too."

"Why did the people at that time not just forget about the fusion plants and use the solar and wind energy only?"

"Most of those were destroyed, and production capacity for new ones was almost non-existent after the war. With the fusion plants running, we had plenty of energy to get other industrial areas started again, which would have taken much longer otherwise."

I had heard and learned about that part of our history before, of course, but I had lacked some details. Yes, here in Central Europe the people had been fortunate, and I did not know if there had been other areas in the world as well with a similar situation; I did not think so. Of course, Panem had also managed to keep some of the technological knowledge, maybe without the fusion plants, but with plenty of hydro and fission power and also coal. However, as a despotism had emerged there soon after the Great War and had lasted for more than century, that expertise had mostly not been used for everybody's benefit, but more to enforce the tyranny.

At the end of the week, on Friday night, the professor invited us to one of the city's largest theaters. They performed a musical which had been created centuries ago, and it was called 'The Phantom of the Opera'. It was about an Opera House which was believed to be haunted by an entity known as the Phantom of the Opera, or simply the Opera Ghost. The story was a little bit nebulous, but although I was not really a fan of operas and such, I enjoyed the singing and the music a lot.

During the weekend, we had plenty of time to stroll through the city, and whereas Hannes took my two colleagues off to drinking once more on Saturday, Frederika and I joined for some sightseeing. As mentioned before, the old fashioned trams, meticulously maintained, still ran the traditional circle line, and many buildings from the previous millenium were still there in the central part of the city. Notably some of the museums and theaters in and close to the city center, but also some of the castles further outside, had been restored and were open for visitors. In particular I enjoyed 'Schloß Schönbrunn' with the extensive park and the nearby zoological garden, and I also marveled at the ancient building housing the 'Museum of Natural History'.

On Tuesday we had another excursion, this time to the former particle accelerator southeast of the city. It had not been in operation for centuries, but the tunnels had been built to last and were still almost completely intact. As a team of experts had announced some time ago, work was now ongoing to remove the old hardware and install loops with superconducting material; they wanted to find out how well this technology could be used for electricity storage. We got a chance to get below ground and inspect the work, and we found most old stuff already gone. One team was applying insulating material to ground, walls, and ceiling, and another was preparing the mounts for the loops.

"This will still take a year or two to complete, but once it's ready, we should be able to get a better idea on scalability" the professor explained.

A few of the professor's students were with us on that day, and on of them asked:

"Why is electricity storage that important? We have that fusion plant, don't we?"

"Yes, we do, and we have plenty of solar and wind power as well. However, specifically for solar and wind power, they are not always available and they are not constant. We need a way to save energy on sunny and windy days for those days with clouds and no wind."

"Can't we use the fusion plant for those?"

"Big plants cannot adjust their power output quickly enough for short term changes in demand. Does anybody happen to know how quick fluctuations were regulated before the war and before green energy became wide spread?"

One of my colleagues actually had an idea:

"When they used the old coal and gas plants, they generated electricity with huge turbines, and the kinetic energy in those could compensate some by small variations of frequency."

"Very good, indeed! Now, we don't have those turbines any longer, and we use some battery blocks and pumped hydro storage, but we could use more. Long term, you see, when the fusion plants are end of life, we may want to try to get along without them, and we may have to cover days or even weeks with low output from solar and wind power. That's why we are researching other options for storage, too. This site here should be able to store somewhere between 10 and 100 MWh of electrical energy, and if it works out well, we will be looking at other similar sites as well."

"In addition to that" one of professor's most senior assistants added, "we want to provide options for more remote area, both in our country and in other areas of the world. For those regions, we need to combine solar and wind power with some means of storage, and we are still investigating options."

On Wednesday morning I talked to Prof. Heimschmidt and asked her if there was a chance that I could join my youth group meeting via video conference. She smiled and showed me into one their meeting rooms, and she was kind enough to book it for me for the time I requested. I sent a message to Heike at home, and a few minutes prior to the designated time in the afternoon I was able to connect to the smaller system we had in a large room in the parish hall at home in Erlangen.

Being remotely connected to my youth group was something special, and it seemed to work quite well. Two weeks ago we had given the kids some homework; they had been asked to find some information about the city of Wien to be prepared for today, and now we had some kind of quiz to find out what they had learned. An easy one was the one to start with:

"What is the name of the big river passing the city?"

One of the younger girls was first: "Donau!"

"What is the name of the most known church in Wien?"

One of the boys had that: "Stephansdom."

That huge church had indeed survived the centuries and was still intact and known as one of the city's landmarks.

"What was the city's name at the time of the Romans?"

That was obviously too difficult and nobody knew the answer, so that I gave it (I had had to look that up, too, but had prepared well in advance):

"The Romans established a military camp and a city they called 'Vindobona' in the first century."

After few other questions I had my last one:

"What is the 'Prater'?"

One of the kids actually knew that one:

"The Prater is an area where one can have fun with a big wheel and so."

"This is correct! Actually, the big wheel there was built in the year 1897 and still exists; they had restored it after the Great War. I have been riding it, and it really looks very ancient, but it works. I wish that you all could have been there with me!"

The Prater itself was more a larger area, and the old big wheel was just part of that, but that was good enough for the kids. I concluded my part with a short video about the Wien fusion plant, and soon our today's meeting was over.

At the end of the week my colleagues met with Prof. Heimschmidt and her team for the last time and talked about what we had learned and some of our future plans. We left the university campus and went back to our hotel rooms, and on the next day we'd catch the maglev back to Erlangen.

During the youth group session one week later some of the kids had a number of follow-up question Wien, and I tried to answer them. One of the older boys asked if I could use the same money to pay there, and I confirmed that:

"Yes, our money, the Mark, is valid everywhere in the BARBÖ and even in some regions outside. A long time ago, this was different. Up to the very early 21st century, each country had their own currency. Deutschland had the 'Deutsche Mark', Österreich had the 'Schilling', Italien had the 'Lira', and so on. They introduced the 'Euro' to replace most local currencies and used that until the system broken down during the Great War. Afterwards, the 'Mark' was created, named after the original 'Deutsche Mark'."

"And what about Panem?"

"They have their own currency, the 'Dollar'."

"So why do we have different currencies in different countries at all? Wouldn't it be easier to have for everybody in the world?"

"Guys, I am not an expert for that. In general, governments want to decide some details on their own currency, like to control inflation or change of prices. It was already quite difficult for the Euro in the first half of the 21st century, and one currency world wide probably would not work. You may want to keep those question in mind until you learn more about economics at school, though."

They had touched an interesting topic, and according to my knowledge many people might want to get a real good answer to this issue. Balancing low interest rates to make it easier for some countries to pay interest for their debt versus the intention to not have the economy shrink versus the need to increase interest rates to counter inflation had not worked well in the first half of the 21st century, based on what I recalled from my lessons on those topics.

[Author's Notes: The musical 'The Phantom of the Opera' is from Andrew Lloyd Webber, and it just so happens that I actually enjoyed that in the city of Wien (Vienna)in real life, in the last decade of the previous century.

BTW, as there has not been a single follow/favorite/review yet, I will slow down writing and publishing more chapters and focus more on my Balu story.]