From “A Voyage to the Sun,” a really nice piece of writing from 1999 by Michael Paterniti in Esquire, about extreme science in the New Mexico desert:

“See, the Machine is not like other machines. It’s not a Saab with heated leather seats and a refrigerated glove compartment. It demands security clearance. It demands care and reverence. And if you’re Chinese–or if you’re a Toblerone-loving Swiss, for that matter–you can’t come here. You can’t get past the armed guard at the front gate or the second gate at Area IV or the concertina wire or the ID-activated, secret-combination metal doors to the hangar-sized sandstone building where the Machine lives.

And the people here, Jimmy Potter and his tech crew and the array makers and the laser technicians and the classified team of scientists burrowing in the Habitrail of their own minds for some small epiphany, for some shred of insight into the Machine–the whole lot of them numbering maybe 130–they bring their love, their dizzy, stupid, human love, and their vanity and ambition and dreams, and all of it gets shot into the Machine. Envy, greed, betrayal . . . shot into the Machine. Glory, honor, brilliance . . . shot in. Some shoot in their god, too.

It begins with the simple flip of a cyber switch in a control room at the north end of the hangar. Before a bank of computer screens, a man clicks a mouse, and then electricity, quietly sucked right off the municipal power grid in Albuquerque, floods into the outer ring of Marx generators. Which is when the Machine takes control. A siren sounds, red lights flash, doors automatically lock. The frogmen and the white and blue jumpsuits clamber over the high bay, down the metal steps, and retreat to a copper-coated room behind a foot of cement.

Another switch is flipped, another mouse clicked. To the piercing sound of an alarm, a countdown in the Marx generators ensues, or rather a count up, in kilovolts. Comes in a monotone, almost hollow voice beneath the frantic alarm. The man in the control room on a tinny loudspeaker, the Machine speaking through the human.

‘Twenty kV. . . .’

‘Thirty kV. . . .’

‘Forty kV. . . .'” (Thanks TETW.)