Inside a Fusion Startup’s Insane, Top-Secret Opening Ceremony

So the race is on to engineer an efficient surrounding for fusion. One of Fuse’s ideas is to get a bunch of big capacitors to discharge at once, thus kick-starting a reaction. That’s why, at our show, there were all those big caps behind the audience. (You also see constructions of big caps at other fusion startups, like Helion.) The goal of Fuse, as JC describes it, is to become the SpaceX of fusion, to enable “big tech” achievements with all kinds of partners.

Back to our story. JC contacts Serene and says we’re opening a second facility (the first was in Canada) and it would be nice to have a spectacular opening ceremony. Serene, being a startup founder who’s also, naturally, working on music robots, applies obsessive logistic efforts. Charlotte, being a director, does the same. Those of you with any life experience might be asking yourselves, “This sounds like an alien planet with two queens. Was it, um, a process?” I will not answer you directly except to compliment you on your finely hewn wisdom.

Now you know the basics. I am a scientist and do not enjoy superstitious takes on reality, but so many coincidences had to happen at just the right time for this show to come together in just a few weeks. At the last minute, we needed high-performance robots; a robotics professor at UC Berkeley, Ken Goldberg, found them for us. Why does reality synchronize like this sometimes?

I used to put on high-effort, high-tech music shows, often in VR, in the 1980s and ’90s. I burned out. It was bruisingly expensive, stressful, and exhausting. I used to long for the future when VR would get cheap and lots of people would know how to work with it. But when that time arrived, instead of relief, I had the feeling that VR had become too easy. There used to be a higher-stakes feeling. You had to make every triangle in the scene count, since there could not be too many, even though the computer doing the real-time graphics cost a million dollars. There’s a tangible sense of care in those earliest works.

If I longed for hassle and expense as guarantors of stakes, then I found them again in this show. The week leading up to the performance reminded me of those early days of VR. Late, late nights, which don’t come as easily to me as before, in rehearsal; Serene would be up there trapped in the cables and the mathematical dress, designed by Threeasfour, but there’s a timing problem with the robot motion. With assistance she frees herself, gets to a screen, and does 10 minutes of high-speed programming. The robots glide again.