T-042 Endless Battery

Threshold Institute · Case file T-042

Number

T-042 in the catalogue

Kind

Object

Class

Class I: harmless while it is left alone

Found

Year 40, month 8, day 30

Where found

The rift, in the cold room's (T-013) equal there, a bare concrete box where the run's lamps went dim and frost grew on their sleeves

Status

Contained

Now

At the lab and in the rift

Part

Part III: Going through (the objects)

Containment procedures

The battery is held in an insulated case and carried on a pole between two people, turn and turn about, no one for more than an hour. No one is to hold it in their hands, carry it in a pack or sleep within five metres of it. It is not stored on the sealed level near the cold room (T-013). Carriers have their temperature taken at every change.

Description

A heavy cell of black glass and brass terminals, about the size of a lunch box, always warm. It does not run down. Wired to a lamp it lit it for the full ninety days of the first test and the second ninety, and its charge, as far as any meter could read, did not move. It runs a radio, a heater, a pump and the lights of a cell.

The cost is warmth. Whoever carries it grows cold, and colder the more it is drawing: a lamp is a chill, a heater a shiver that does not stop. The cold does not leave when the battery is set down; it fades as the body warms by its own means, slowly.

Discovery

It sat in the middle of the concrete floor, the only warm thing in the room. Surveyor Lina Dahl picked it up with bare hands and said it was like holding a cup of tea. By the line home her lips were blue. Okafor's teams carried it as the run's one source of power from that autumn.

Addenda

Addendum T-042-A

Incident

Year 40, month 11, day 14. Surveyor Mats Ekholm carried the battery through a night in the rift, running the run's heater from it. He came home with frostbite on both feet. The heater had kept no one warm. Rehn noted that the cold room on the Institute's own sealed level had grown colder by two degrees in the month the battery was brought home, and by two more since. The cold room is not on any line that the battery's cable reaches. Ruth Abel proposed that the battery does not make its charge but draws it, from whoever holds it and from the rooms most like the one where it was found. The proposal was filed and not tested.

Addendum T-042-B

Transfer

Year 41, month 1, day 9. The space agency, told of it, asked to take it to the launch site as a power source that would never fail far from home (T-043). The Institute agreed. The form is signed by Kerstin Holm, with a line in her hand: "Carry it on a pole." It flew on the agency's next flight to the planet and came home with the crew. Holm's flight notes for the return record that the cabin stayed cold the whole way back, and that something in the hold had been warm.

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In the file

• People: Tomas Rehn, Mara Okafor, Kerstin Holm, Lina Dahl, Ruth Abel and Mats Ekholm.
• Places: The sealed level, The cells, The land beyond the rift and The launch site.

In the game

The note you find in the game:

Year 40, month 8, day 30. Found beyond T-001 in the cold room's equal there, a bare concrete box where the run's lamps went dim and frost grew on their sleeves, standing in the middle of the floor. The surveyor Lina Dahl picked it up with bare hands, and by the line home her lips were blue; Mara Okafor's teams carried it as their one source of power from that autumn.

A heavy upright cell of old brass, rimed with frost that never melts. Carried, it keeps a flashlight lit and a field radio playing without draining their cells, even when their own cell is flat, and it never runs flat itself. In a charger it charges the cells beside it with no power. What it gives, it takes from whoever carries it: while it powers a device that is on, the bearer's body loses half a degree a minute, and on a cold night the bearer freezes. Left in a charger, it takes the cold from no one.

Held in a sealed cell, away from any device. Status: contained.

Today it is found at the lab and in the rift.

It is an item you can carry: Endless Battery.