On Batholiths and Fibre Optics
In the silence of the Canadian Shield, a group of digital creators discovers they aren't alone. A research team in China is asking the same questions, scanning the same rock.
EXT. REVELL BATHOLITH - LATE AFTERNOON
A low ceiling of grey cloud presses down on a vast expanse of jack pine and black spruce. The light is flat, desaturated. The air is still, damp, and cold.
SOUND of pervasive, wet silence
LENNY (30s), focused, breath pluming in the cold, hunches over a MIRRORLESS CAMERA mounted on a tripod. The tripod legs are stiff, the rubber on the coaxial cables rigid.
He peers through the viewfinder.
CLOSE ON - CAMERA VIEWFINDER
The histogram is bunched to the left. Underexposed. Lenny's gloved fingers adjust a dial.
BEN (20s), pragmatic, stands a few meters away, hands shoved in his parka pockets. He watches a DRONE hover nervously over a massive, rounded shoulder of granite bedrock.
BEN
Battery’s flashing.
Lenny doesn't look up. He tweaks the shutter speed.
LENNY
Swap it.
BEN
That’s the last one. Cold’s killing the voltage. We got maybe ten minutes of flight time, max.
Ben brings the drone down. The WHINE of its rotors cuts through the silence. He snatches it out of the air, flips it, and pops the battery.
Lenny straightens up, rubbing his hands together. He stares at the outcrop—the bone of the earth, exposed.
SARAH (20s), methodical, sits on a plastic equipment case. A TOUGHBOOK LAPTOP is balanced on her knees, tethered to a LiDAR scanner by a bright orange cable. Her glasses are fogged at the edges.
SARAH
We have enough for the point cloud?
LENNY
Maybe. Depends on if the overlap was good on that second pass. The light changed halfway through.
Sarah taps a few keys with gloved fingers.
SARAH
Rendering a preview. It’s... messy. Getting a lot of noise near the moss line. The algorithm is confusing the lichen with the granite texture.
LENNY
It’s fine. We can clean it up in post. Retopologize it manually if we have to.
Ben laughs, packing the drone into its foam-lined case.
BEN
Manually? I’m not spending my weekend clicking vertices, Lenny. I have a life.
LENNY
Do you?
BEN
I have plans. Hypothetical plans.
Lenny turns back to the rock, frustrated. The texture has to be perfect. This has to feel like a document, not a video game. The cold seeps through his boots.
LENNY
Let’s pack it. We can run the full bake back at the garage. If it’s garbage, we come back tomorrow.
SARAH
(Closing the laptop)
Tomorrow’s forecast says snow. Wet, heavy stuff.
LENNY
Great. Texture variation.
They break down the gear in practiced silence. Tripod legs collapse, lens caps click, cables are coiled.
SOUND of a single, harsh RAVEN'S CROAK echoing off the rock face.
INT. GARAGE - NIGHT
A detached garage converted into a makeshift digital studio. Insulation batting is stapled haphazardly between exposed studs. A patchwork of old carpets covers the concrete floor.
In the center, a custom-built PC TOWER sits on folding tables, its side panel off. It's surrounded by a fortress of monitors. The air smells of stale coffee, soldering flux, and warm electronics.
SOUND of computer fans humming under load
Lenny slots an SD card into a reader. The fans on the tower spin up, the HUM growing into a ROAR.
LENNY
(Muttering)
Seventy gigs. It’s going to take hours to align.
From a couch in the corner, CASSIE (30s) pulls off a pair of headphones.
CASSIE
Put the kettle on. I need caffeine if I’m going to listen to the Mayor say ‘long-term stewardship’ one more time.
Sarah sits at a secondary station, a laptop hooked to a vertical monitor. She’s supposed to be sorting metadata, but she has stopped typing. The silence from her corner becomes noticeable.
Lenny spins his chair around.
LENNY
What? File corruption?
SARAH
No.
Her voice is quiet, distracted. She leans toward her screen, scrolling slowly.
SARAH
Come look at this.
Lenny rolls his chair over.
ON SARAH'S SCREEN - A dense academic paper. The letterhead is dual-language: English and Chinese characters. *Lanzhou University - School of Nuclear Science and Technology*.
SARAH
I was looking for reference material on granite permeability. For the educational overlay. I found this. Look at the date. Last month.
Lenny leans in. He squints at the abstract.
LENNY
(Reading)
‘Application of Virtual Reality in Public Participation for Deep Geological Repositories: A Case Study of the Beishan Site.’ Beishan... that’s the site in Gansu, right? The Gobi Desert.
SARAH
Yeah. But look at the methodology.
She scrolls down. The screen fills with wireframe meshes of rock formations. Photogrammetry captures of drilling equipment. A breakdown of a VR narrative structure.
LENNY
They’re doing the exact same thing. Down to the software. Is that Unreal Engine?
SARAH
(Pointing to a footnote)
Unreal 5.3. And they’re using AI to generate script variations based on user questions. That’s what we wanted to do. The dynamic dialogue system we couldn't figure out.
Ben wanders over, a mug of tea in his hand.
BEN
Who is?
LENNY
(Tapping the screen)
These guys. Students and researchers in Lanzhou. They’re building a digital twin of their repository site. Same as us. Except they have funding.
BEN
(Peering at a photo of a sleek lab)
And better hardware, probably. Look at those motion capture suits. We’re using Kinects taped to broom handles.
SARAH
It’s the geology that’s crazy.
She opens another browser tab.
SARAH
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 sits back. The wheels of his chair crunch on a loose screw. He glances at his own monitor. A progress bar crawls forward: *Aligning Photos: 14%*.
Cassie stands up from the couch, headphones off.
CASSIE
We should talk to them.
LENNY
They’re a university research division. We’re four people in a garage in Borups Corners.
CASSIE
So? 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 is already typing.
SARAH
I found the lead researcher’s contact. And there’s a student group listed in the acknowledgments. ‘The Gansu Digital Heritage Collective’.
BEN
They sound official.
LENNY
(Musing)
‘Digital Heritage’. That’s a good way to put it. We’re archiving the future.
SARAH
(Fingers hovering over the keyboard)
I’m going to email them. What do I say? ‘Hey, nice granite’?
LENNY
(Energized)
Tell them about the timeline. 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.
BEN
We need to translate it.
SARAH
We can use the AI translator for the initial outreach. 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
Do it. Attach the ‘Borehole_04’ scan. The one with the audio embedded.
Sarah begins to type a new email. The room is quiet, filled with the hum of potential.
SARAH
Subject line?
BEN
‘Two Sites, One Future’? Too cheesy?
CASSIE
Way too cheesy.
LENNY
‘Parallel Granite’. Keep it simple.
Sarah types it in. She drags a massive project file into the attachment window.
SARAH
This is going to take forever on this connection. Upload speed is crawling.
LENNY
Pause the render. Give all the bandwidth to the email.
He reaches over and kills the photogrammetry process. The ROAR of the tower fans drops back to a HUM.
Sarah hits send.
INT. GARAGE - MOMENTS LATER
They watch the email client. A progress bar moves with agonizing slowness. *Sending… 45%*.
BEN
What time is it in China? It’s like... 4 PM here. So it’s, what, 4 AM there? 5 AM?
LENNY
They won’t see it until tomorrow. We should go get food. Let it send.
SARAH
Wait. Look at the traffic monitor.
She points to a small widget in the corner of her screen tracking network activity. The green upload line is flat. A second line, for downloads, is SPIKING RED.
LENNY
Is that us?
SARAH
(Frowning)
No. That’s inbound. We’re downloading something. Fast.
LENNY
I didn’t request anything. Windows update?
SARAH
Not at 50 megabytes a second. This connection can’t even do 50 megabytes a second. How are we pulling that?
The main monitor flickers. The mouse cursor freezes. The email window grays out, unresponsive.
BEN
Virus? Unplug it. Lenny, pull the cable.
LENNY
Hold on.
He’s not looking at the cable. He’s staring at the desktop. A new folder has just appeared.
The folder name is in Chinese characters: 北山_Beishan_Deep_Geo.
CASSIE
(Whispering)
They’re sending files to us? How? We haven’t even finished sending the email.
SARAH
(A realization)
P2P. 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.
LENNY
That’s impossible.
But the folder is filling up. Thumbnails generate. Images of a desert landscape under harsh, blinding sunlight. Brown rocks, structurally identical to theirs, but stripped of moss and trees. 360-degree videos.
CASSIE
Open one.
Lenny reaches for the mouse. It moves sluggishly. He double-clicks a file: *Test_Site_Alpha_Drone.mp4*.
The media player launches. The screen fills with the beige and gold of the Gobi desert. The camera sweeps low over a grid of boreholes, identical to the ones at Revell.
The drone turns, panning toward a group of young people standing near a truck. They are their age. One of them, a guy in a windbreaker holding a controller, looks up at the drone.
He WAVES.
SARAH
(Breathing the words)
It’s them. That’s the Digital Heritage Collective.
Suddenly, a CHAT WINDOW overlays the video. A direct message from the file-sharing client. Simple text appears.
ON SCREEN - CHAT WINDOW
User [Lanzhou_Lab_01]: We see your node. Your texture maps are interesting. Why is your granite so wet?
Lenny, Sarah, Ben, and Cassie stare at the screen, a 10,000-kilometer gap bridged in an instant. Speechless.
A low ceiling of grey cloud presses down on a vast expanse of jack pine and black spruce. The light is flat, desaturated. The air is still, damp, and cold.
SOUND of pervasive, wet silence
LENNY (30s), focused, breath pluming in the cold, hunches over a MIRRORLESS CAMERA mounted on a tripod. The tripod legs are stiff, the rubber on the coaxial cables rigid.
He peers through the viewfinder.
CLOSE ON - CAMERA VIEWFINDER
The histogram is bunched to the left. Underexposed. Lenny's gloved fingers adjust a dial.
BEN (20s), pragmatic, stands a few meters away, hands shoved in his parka pockets. He watches a DRONE hover nervously over a massive, rounded shoulder of granite bedrock.
BEN
Battery’s flashing.
Lenny doesn't look up. He tweaks the shutter speed.
LENNY
Swap it.
BEN
That’s the last one. Cold’s killing the voltage. We got maybe ten minutes of flight time, max.
Ben brings the drone down. The WHINE of its rotors cuts through the silence. He snatches it out of the air, flips it, and pops the battery.
Lenny straightens up, rubbing his hands together. He stares at the outcrop—the bone of the earth, exposed.
SARAH (20s), methodical, sits on a plastic equipment case. A TOUGHBOOK LAPTOP is balanced on her knees, tethered to a LiDAR scanner by a bright orange cable. Her glasses are fogged at the edges.
SARAH
We have enough for the point cloud?
LENNY
Maybe. Depends on if the overlap was good on that second pass. The light changed halfway through.
Sarah taps a few keys with gloved fingers.
SARAH
Rendering a preview. It’s... messy. Getting a lot of noise near the moss line. The algorithm is confusing the lichen with the granite texture.
LENNY
It’s fine. We can clean it up in post. Retopologize it manually if we have to.
Ben laughs, packing the drone into its foam-lined case.
BEN
Manually? I’m not spending my weekend clicking vertices, Lenny. I have a life.
LENNY
Do you?
BEN
I have plans. Hypothetical plans.
Lenny turns back to the rock, frustrated. The texture has to be perfect. This has to feel like a document, not a video game. The cold seeps through his boots.
LENNY
Let’s pack it. We can run the full bake back at the garage. If it’s garbage, we come back tomorrow.
SARAH
(Closing the laptop)
Tomorrow’s forecast says snow. Wet, heavy stuff.
LENNY
Great. Texture variation.
They break down the gear in practiced silence. Tripod legs collapse, lens caps click, cables are coiled.
SOUND of a single, harsh RAVEN'S CROAK echoing off the rock face.
INT. GARAGE - NIGHT
A detached garage converted into a makeshift digital studio. Insulation batting is stapled haphazardly between exposed studs. A patchwork of old carpets covers the concrete floor.
In the center, a custom-built PC TOWER sits on folding tables, its side panel off. It's surrounded by a fortress of monitors. The air smells of stale coffee, soldering flux, and warm electronics.
SOUND of computer fans humming under load
Lenny slots an SD card into a reader. The fans on the tower spin up, the HUM growing into a ROAR.
LENNY
(Muttering)
Seventy gigs. It’s going to take hours to align.
From a couch in the corner, CASSIE (30s) pulls off a pair of headphones.
CASSIE
Put the kettle on. I need caffeine if I’m going to listen to the Mayor say ‘long-term stewardship’ one more time.
Sarah sits at a secondary station, a laptop hooked to a vertical monitor. She’s supposed to be sorting metadata, but she has stopped typing. The silence from her corner becomes noticeable.
Lenny spins his chair around.
LENNY
What? File corruption?
SARAH
No.
Her voice is quiet, distracted. She leans toward her screen, scrolling slowly.
SARAH
Come look at this.
Lenny rolls his chair over.
ON SARAH'S SCREEN - A dense academic paper. The letterhead is dual-language: English and Chinese characters. *Lanzhou University - School of Nuclear Science and Technology*.
SARAH
I was looking for reference material on granite permeability. For the educational overlay. I found this. Look at the date. Last month.
Lenny leans in. He squints at the abstract.
LENNY
(Reading)
‘Application of Virtual Reality in Public Participation for Deep Geological Repositories: A Case Study of the Beishan Site.’ Beishan... that’s the site in Gansu, right? The Gobi Desert.
SARAH
Yeah. But look at the methodology.
She scrolls down. The screen fills with wireframe meshes of rock formations. Photogrammetry captures of drilling equipment. A breakdown of a VR narrative structure.
LENNY
They’re doing the exact same thing. Down to the software. Is that Unreal Engine?
SARAH
(Pointing to a footnote)
Unreal 5.3. And they’re using AI to generate script variations based on user questions. That’s what we wanted to do. The dynamic dialogue system we couldn't figure out.
Ben wanders over, a mug of tea in his hand.
BEN
Who is?
LENNY
(Tapping the screen)
These guys. Students and researchers in Lanzhou. They’re building a digital twin of their repository site. Same as us. Except they have funding.
BEN
(Peering at a photo of a sleek lab)
And better hardware, probably. Look at those motion capture suits. We’re using Kinects taped to broom handles.
SARAH
It’s the geology that’s crazy.
She opens another browser tab.
SARAH
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 sits back. The wheels of his chair crunch on a loose screw. He glances at his own monitor. A progress bar crawls forward: *Aligning Photos: 14%*.
Cassie stands up from the couch, headphones off.
CASSIE
We should talk to them.
LENNY
They’re a university research division. We’re four people in a garage in Borups Corners.
CASSIE
So? 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 is already typing.
SARAH
I found the lead researcher’s contact. And there’s a student group listed in the acknowledgments. ‘The Gansu Digital Heritage Collective’.
BEN
They sound official.
LENNY
(Musing)
‘Digital Heritage’. That’s a good way to put it. We’re archiving the future.
SARAH
(Fingers hovering over the keyboard)
I’m going to email them. What do I say? ‘Hey, nice granite’?
LENNY
(Energized)
Tell them about the timeline. 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.
BEN
We need to translate it.
SARAH
We can use the AI translator for the initial outreach. 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
Do it. Attach the ‘Borehole_04’ scan. The one with the audio embedded.
Sarah begins to type a new email. The room is quiet, filled with the hum of potential.
SARAH
Subject line?
BEN
‘Two Sites, One Future’? Too cheesy?
CASSIE
Way too cheesy.
LENNY
‘Parallel Granite’. Keep it simple.
Sarah types it in. She drags a massive project file into the attachment window.
SARAH
This is going to take forever on this connection. Upload speed is crawling.
LENNY
Pause the render. Give all the bandwidth to the email.
He reaches over and kills the photogrammetry process. The ROAR of the tower fans drops back to a HUM.
Sarah hits send.
INT. GARAGE - MOMENTS LATER
They watch the email client. A progress bar moves with agonizing slowness. *Sending… 45%*.
BEN
What time is it in China? It’s like... 4 PM here. So it’s, what, 4 AM there? 5 AM?
LENNY
They won’t see it until tomorrow. We should go get food. Let it send.
SARAH
Wait. Look at the traffic monitor.
She points to a small widget in the corner of her screen tracking network activity. The green upload line is flat. A second line, for downloads, is SPIKING RED.
LENNY
Is that us?
SARAH
(Frowning)
No. That’s inbound. We’re downloading something. Fast.
LENNY
I didn’t request anything. Windows update?
SARAH
Not at 50 megabytes a second. This connection can’t even do 50 megabytes a second. How are we pulling that?
The main monitor flickers. The mouse cursor freezes. The email window grays out, unresponsive.
BEN
Virus? Unplug it. Lenny, pull the cable.
LENNY
Hold on.
He’s not looking at the cable. He’s staring at the desktop. A new folder has just appeared.
The folder name is in Chinese characters: 北山_Beishan_Deep_Geo.
CASSIE
(Whispering)
They’re sending files to us? How? We haven’t even finished sending the email.
SARAH
(A realization)
P2P. 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.
LENNY
That’s impossible.
But the folder is filling up. Thumbnails generate. Images of a desert landscape under harsh, blinding sunlight. Brown rocks, structurally identical to theirs, but stripped of moss and trees. 360-degree videos.
CASSIE
Open one.
Lenny reaches for the mouse. It moves sluggishly. He double-clicks a file: *Test_Site_Alpha_Drone.mp4*.
The media player launches. The screen fills with the beige and gold of the Gobi desert. The camera sweeps low over a grid of boreholes, identical to the ones at Revell.
The drone turns, panning toward a group of young people standing near a truck. They are their age. One of them, a guy in a windbreaker holding a controller, looks up at the drone.
He WAVES.
SARAH
(Breathing the words)
It’s them. That’s the Digital Heritage Collective.
Suddenly, a CHAT WINDOW overlays the video. A direct message from the file-sharing client. Simple text appears.
ON SCREEN - CHAT WINDOW
User [Lanzhou_Lab_01]: We see your node. Your texture maps are interesting. Why is your granite so wet?
Lenny, Sarah, Ben, and Cassie stare at the screen, a 10,000-kilometer gap bridged in an instant. Speechless.