Exodus » Mark

the fence. And in worst case, we needed to be able to easily keep them alive and eventually revive them.

An electric fence runs at about 8000-volts — This is to get an electrical current through hide, skin, and clothes to the nerves beneath them. Unfortunately, 8000-volts applied against the human body — with a resistance of about 1kΩ (thousand ohms) — leads to 8-amps of electricity flowing through that body. That amperage is about a quarter of the current that goes to an electric oven, but it is carrying more than twenty-times the voltage. So it might feel a bit like being cooked at 2500 degrees… if you remained conscious after the ‘jolt’ caused all your muscles to contract, your brain to shortcircuit, and your heart to stop.

The solution to cooking (not) the intruder is to put a limited amount of energy onto the wires. Each wall-container has an energizer which takes its power from a pair of Tesla Powerwalls, supporting about 40-amps of load and able to run a dozen lightbulbs for a day. The energizer puts energy into the wires like they are giant capacitors (storage for energy, like transitory batteries). That stored energy provides the initial shock to an intruder. The energizer also replenishes any lost energy, about once a second. This limited speed of replenishment combined with the capacity of the fence is what prevent it from frying (and worse) the intruder.

So all we need to do is run a standard 8000-volt energizer against the string of wires protecting the container, and any intruder would turnaround as soon as they encountered this obstacle. Except we thought that unlikely. People play with electric fences all the time and learn to handle the shock. The assault team would almost certainly have some kind of protection that increased their resistance. We needed to encourage intruders to turnaround of their own free will, but to disable them if they did not.

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So we tweaked the energizer — It started like normal and replenished the wires once per second, but it doubled the frequency every time the replenishment occurred within the same minute. So once a second would progress up to a thousand times per second if the doubling happened ten times. Doing this ramp within ten seconds seemed a bit draconian, so we gave the intruder a full minute to change their mind: every six seconds it would double. But in exchange for our generosity, the system never stopped increasing frequency until the replenishment was unnecessary: no more energy lost either because the intruder turned around, or they were down for the count. All living team members were warned to stay away from the container-wall during a breach because it could be deadlyhot depending on the behavior of the assaulting team. It was debilitatingly-hot for vampires too, but they would revive and repair eventually.

To add some fun to the defense system, we also blew bubbles at intruders with a misting system. This both made them wet, so the first shocks should be closer to 8000 volts, and because it contained some soap, it made the containers really slippery. Our vampires manning the tops of the containers had super-resistant and supergrippy boots & gloves so they could clamber around on the container tops in spite of these defenses.

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