A Script for On Batholiths and Fibre Optics

The damp cold of late October in Northwestern Ontario didn’t just sit on the skin; it worked its way into the joints of the tripod legs and stiffened the rubber coating on the coaxial cables. A low ceiling of grey cloud pressed down on the tops of the jack pine and black spruce, flattening the light and turning the world into a study of desaturated greens and browns. There was no wind, only the damp, pervasive stillness of the Canadian Shield waiting for the first real snow. The air smelled of wet granite, decomposing aspen leaves, and the faint, metallic tang of the heating element in Lenny’s pocket warmer.

Lenny adjusted the collar of his jacket, his breath pluming in short, white bursts before vanishing. He looked through the viewfinder of the mirrorless camera mounted on the tripod. The histogram was bunched to the left. Too dark. It was always too dark this time of year, the sun retreating behind the tree line by late afternoon. He wasn't trying to capture a sunset, though. He was trying to capture the rock.

“Battery’s flashing,” Ben said. He was standing a few metres away, hands shoved deep into the pockets of his parka, watching the drone hover nervously above the outcrop.

“Swap it,” Lenny said, not looking up. He adjusted the shutter speed, sacrificing a bit of exposure for sharpness. The texture of the rock was the only thing that mattered. This wasn't for Instagram. It was for the asset library.

“That’s the last one,” Ben said. He brought the drone down, the whine of its rotors cutting through the silence like a dentist’s drill. He caught it out of the air with a practiced snatch, flipping it over to pop the battery bay. “Cold’s killing the voltage. We got maybe ten minutes of flight time, max.”

Lenny straightened up and looked at the outcrop. It was a massive, rounded shoulder of crystalline bedrock, protruding from the thin soil like the bone of the earth exposed to the air. This was the Revell batholith—or at least, the surface expression of it. Solid, immutable, and old. Older than anything human. Down below, hundreds of metres deep, was where the waste would go. Spent nuclear fuel, vitrified and encased, sleeping in the dark for a hundred thousand years. And here they were, standing on top of it, trying to turn it into polygons.

“We have enough for the point cloud?” Sarah asked. She was sitting on a plastic equipment case, a tough-book laptop balanced on her knees, tethered to the main scanner by a bright orange cable. She wore a heavy wool toque pulled down low, her glasses fogging slightly at the edges.

“Maybe,” Lenny said. “Depends on if the overlap was good on that second pass. The light changed halfway through.”

Sarah tapped a few keys with gloved fingers. “It’s rendering a preview. It’s… messy. I’m getting a lot of noise near the moss line. The algorithm is confusing the lichen with the granite texture.”

“It’s fine,” Lenny said, though he knew it wasn’t. “We can clean it up in post. Retopologize it manually if we have to.”

“Manually?” Ben laughed, packing the drone into its foam-lined case. “I’m not spending my weekend clicking vertices, Lenny. I have a life.”

“Do you?” Lenny asked.

“I have plans. Hypothetical plans.”

Lenny looked back at the rock. The moss was a problem. The camera saw texture, but the software saw chaos. To build a truly immersive VR experience—one that could show people what this place really was, why it was chosen for the repository—they needed hyper-realism. They needed the user to feel the roughness of the stone, the density of it. If it looked like a video game, people would treat it like one. This had to feel like a document.

“Let’s pack it,” Lenny said. The cold was seeping through his boots now. “We can run the full bake back at the garage. If it’s garbage, we come back tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow’s forecast says snow,” Sarah said, closing the laptop with a snap. “Wet, heavy stuff.”

“Great,” Lenny said. “Texture variation.”

They broke down the gear in silence, a rhythm born of three years working together. Tripod legs collapsed, lens caps secured, cables coiled over elbows. The physical reality of the equipment was heavy and awkward, a sharp contrast to the weightless digital worlds they spent their nights building. The forest watched them, indifferent. A raven croaked from the top of a dead birch tree, a harsh, wooden sound that echoed off the rock face.

The Garage

The drive back to town was a blur of dirty windshields and the rhythmic thumping of the truck’s heater. They set up in Lenny’s uncle’s detached garage, a space that had been slowly terraformed from a place to fix snowmobiles into a high-tech command centre. Insulation batting had been stapled haphazardly between the studs, and the concrete floor was covered in a patchwork of remnant carpets to keep the chill down. In the centre of the room, on two folding tables pushed together, sat the nerve centre: a custom-built PC tower with its side panel off for better cooling, surrounded by a fortress of monitors.

The smell here was different—stale coffee, soldering flux, and the warm, dusty scent of electronics running under load. Lenny plugged the SD card into the reader. The computer hummed, the fans spinning up as it began to ingest the raw footage and LiDAR data.

“Seventy gigs,” Lenny muttered. “It’s going to take hours to align.”

“Put the kettle on,” Cassie shouted from the couch in the corner. She hadn’t come to the field; she’d been editing the audio from the interviews they’d shot last week with the town council. “I need caffeine if I’m going to listen to the Mayor say ‘long-term stewardship’ one more time.”

Sarah sat at the secondary station, a laptop hooked up to a vertical monitor. She was supposed to be sorting the metadata, tagging the location files with the correct GPS coordinates, but she had stopped typing. The silence from her corner stretched out until it became noticeable.

Lenny spun his chair around. “What? file corruption?”

“No,” Sarah said. Her voice was quiet, distracted. She was leaning forward, scrolling slowly through a PDF. “Come look at this.”

Lenny rolled his chair over. The screen was filled with a dense academic paper. The title was in English, but the letterhead was dual-language. *Lanzhou University - School of Nuclear Science and Technology*.

“I was looking for reference material on granite permeability,” Sarah said. “For the educational overlay. I found this. Look at the date. Last month.”

Lenny squinted at the abstract. *‘Application of Virtual Reality in Public Participation for Deep Geological Repositories: A Case Study of the Beishan Site.’*

“Beishan,” Lenny read. “That’s the site in Gansu, right? The Gobi Desert.”

“Yeah,” Sarah said. “But look at the methodology.” She scrolled down to a section full of diagrams. “They aren’t just modelling the tunnels. Look.”

The images on the screen looked eerily familiar. Wireframe meshes of rock formations. Photogrammetry captures of drilling equipment. A breakdown of a VR narrative structure that allowed users to ‘travel’ through the granite barrier over a timeline of ten thousand years.

“They’re doing the exact same thing,” Lenny said. “Down to the software. Is that Unreal Engine?”

“Unreal 5.3,” Sarah said, pointing to a footnote. “And they’re using AI to generate the script variations based on user questions. That’s what we wanted to do, remember? The dynamic dialogue system we couldn't figure out.”

Ben wandered over, a mug of tea in his hand. “Who is?”

“These guys,” Lenny said, tapping the screen. “Students and researchers in Lanzhou. They’re building a digital twin of their repository site to engage with the local youth. Same as us. Except they have funding.”

“And better hardware, probably,” Ben added, peering at a photo of the Lanzhou lab. It was sleek, clean, and filled with matching equipment. “Look at those motion capture suits. We’re using Kinects taped to broom handles.”

“It’s the geology that’s crazy,” Sarah said, opening another tab. “Beishan is granite. Stable, crystalline bedrock. Revell is granite. Stable, crystalline bedrock. We are literal mirrors of each other on opposite sides of the planet. We have the trees and the water; they have the desert and the wind. But the rock? The rock is the same.”

Lenny sat back, the wheels of his chair crunching over a loose screw on the floor. He looked at the progress bar on his own screen. *Aligning Photos: 14%*. It felt slow. Provincial. Suddenly, their project felt both smaller and significantly larger.

“We should talk to them,” Cassie said from the couch. She had taken her headphones off.

“They’re a university research division,” Lenny said. “We’re four people in a garage in Borups Corners.”

“So?” Cassie stood up and walked over. “We’re the only other people on earth who actually care about this specific intersection of niche interests. Nuclear waste geology and VR storytelling? That’s a Venn diagram with two circles, and we’re in both of them.”

Sarah was already typing. “I found the lead researcher’s contact. And there’s a student group listed in the acknowledgments. ‘The Gansu Digital Heritage Collective’.”

“They sound official,” Ben said.

“‘Digital Heritage’,” Lenny mused. “That’s a good way to put it. We’re archiving the future.”

“I’m going to email them,” Sarah said. Her fingers hovered over the keyboard. “What do I say? ‘Hey, nice granite’?”

“Tell them about the timeline,” Lenny said, suddenly energized. He leaned in, grabbing the mouse to minimize the rendering window. “Show them the asset we built last week. The timeline slider that shows the isotope decay alongside the forest regrowth. That’s the best thing we’ve done. It proves we aren’t just messing around.”

“We need to translate it,” Ben said. “If we send them a bunch of English text, it might get ignored.”

“We can use the AI translator for the initial outreach,” Sarah said. “It’s decent with technical mandarin now. And we can attach the raw project file. Code is universal, right? A .uproject file opens the same way in Lanzhou as it does here.”

Lenny nodded. “Do it. Attach the ‘Borehole_04’ scan. The one with the audio embedded.”

Sarah began to type. The room was quiet again, but the quality of the silence had changed. It wasn't the heavy, tired silence of the field. It was the hum of potential. The garage felt less like a bunker and more like a node in a network.

“Subject line?” Sarah asked.

“‘Two Sites, One Future’?” Ben suggested. “Too cheesy?”

“Way too cheesy,” Cassie said.

“‘Parallel Granite’,” Lenny said. “Keep it simple.”

Sarah typed it in. She dragged the project file into the attachment window. The file size was massive. 4.2 Gigabytes.

“This is going to take forever on this connection,” Sarah noted. “Upload speed is crawling.”

“Pause the render,” Lenny commanded. “Give all the bandwidth to the email.”

He reached over and killed the photogrammetry process. The fans on the tower spun down slightly, the roar dropping to a hum. Sarah hit send.

The Wait

They waited. The progress bar for the email attachment moved with agonizing slowness. *Sending… 45%*.

“What time is it in China?” Ben asked, checking his watch. “It’s like… 4 PM here. So it’s, what, 4 AM there? 5 AM?”

“They won’t see it until tomorrow,” Lenny said, standing up to stretch. His back cracked. “We should go get food. Let it send.”

“Wait,” Sarah said. “Look at the traffic monitor.”

She pointed to a small widget in the corner of her screen that tracked network activity. Usually, it showed a steady green line for uploads. Now, it was spiking red.

“Is that us?” Lenny asked.

“No,” Sarah said, frowning. “That’s inbound. We’re downloading something. Fast.”

“I didn’t request anything,” Lenny said. “Windows update?”

“Not at 50 megabytes a second,” Sarah said. “This connection can’t even do 50 megabytes a second. How are we pulling that?”

The main monitor flickered. The mouse cursor froze. The window showing the email draft greyed out, unresponsive.

“Virus?” Ben stepped back. “Unplug it. Lenny, pull the cable.”

“Hold on,” Lenny said. He wasn't looking at the cable; he was looking at the file directory that had just popped open on the desktop. It wasn't a system folder. It was a new folder, created three seconds ago.

The folder name was in Chinese characters. *北山_Beishan_Deep_Geo*.

“They’re sending files to us?” Cassie whispered. “How? We haven’t even finished sending the email.”

“P2P,” Sarah realized. “We had the torrent client open in the background for the texture libraries. They must have scanned for active nodes on the same hash. If they’re looking for ‘Granite_Texture_4k’, they found us.”

“That’s impossible,” Lenny said. “That’s not how it works.”

But the folder was filling up. Thumbnails began to generate. Images of a desert landscape. Harsh, blinding sunlight. Brown rocks that looked structurally identical to the ones they had just scanned, only stripped of moss and trees. There were videos, too. 360-degree videos.

“Open one,” Cassie said.

Lenny reached for the mouse. It was sluggish, fighting through the lag of the massive data transfer. He double-clicked a video file labeled *Test_Site_Alpha_Drone*.

The media player launched. The screen filled with the beige and gold of the Gobi desert. The camera swept low over a grid of boreholes, exactly like the ones at Revell. The geometry was perfect. The stabilization was professional. Then the drone turned, panning toward a group of people standing near a truck.

They were young. About their age. One of them, a guy in a windbreaker, was holding a controller. He looked up at the drone and waved. He shouted something, but the audio was just wind noise.

“It’s them,” Sarah breathed. “That’s the Digital Heritage Collective.”

Suddenly, a chat window overlaid the video. It wasn't an email. It was a direct message through the file-sharing client's chat protocol.

**User [Lanzhou_Lab_01]:** *We see your node. Your texture maps are interesting. Why is your granite so wet?*