With Finals over, most students were going home to visit with family over the holiday. Melinda had invited Scott, Matt, Barry, Adriana and Elsa to come to Mexico. She claimed it would be for business and a fun retreat that would last 10 days starting a few days after Christmas. Matt left shortly after his last final. Apparently he was needed to help set something up, but he didn’t know the details. His parents had moved to Singapore after he graduated High School and he had not planned to visit this year.
Scott enjoyed his time with family. His sister Alyssa was still in high school. Despite being a couple years younger, his sister had always been more confident and popular. She had been a bit nicer to him since he went off to college. Alyssa was planning to go to a smaller school in South Carolina on a soccer scholarship.
“So Scott,” Alyssa teased. “Have you met any girls yet?”
“You are worse than mom!” Scott complained. “There is a girl I like, but she’s not interested. We are working on a project together.”
“Oh, so she’s a nerd too,” Alyssa laughed. “Well, she’s probably not impressed by your appearance. But… don't give up too easily. You are a pretty good guy, and you’ll get a good job once you graduate - a girl could do worse. Don’t be too hard on yourself. That’s my job!”
“Wow, that’s surprisingly nice of you.” Scott said. “Don’t tell mom and dad, but I might not even finish school. That project I’m working on - I’m starting a company with some of my friends and so far it’s going pretty well.”
“That’s kind of awesome! But I hope you aren’t going to drop right now. Mom was bragging about how you got straight A’s this semester. “
“Yeah, I told myself I’d give it one more semester. It’s a lot of work, but I think I can keep passing my classes for now, and we aren’t making any money yet. I kind of need to keep living in the dorm. Oh, I forgot to tell you… our group is all going to Mexico in a few days! We will be doing some work, but it should be a chance to have fun hanging out with my friends.”
“Is that girl going to be there? What is her name?” Alyssa asked, interested.
“Adrianna. I’m not sure, but I think she will.”
“Nice, I want to hear all about how it goes.”
“I can’t tell you much. We are keeping everything secret right now.”
“Duh, I don’t care about your silly business. It’s probably just nerd computer stuff anyway. I want to know if you hook up with Adrianna! It’s so embarrassing to have an older brother who’s never gone on a real date!”
“Ugh. Well, nothing is going to happen, but if it does, I am not telling you!”
“Lame” Alyssa laughed. But she grinned and left him alone after that.
----------------------------------------
Scott, Barry and the girls were on the same flight. They were excited and curious about what this trip was about. Melinda had not shared much in the way of details despite their pestering her. Matt had gone up earlier and had been evasive about what he was working on.
They had flown into a city called Merida and a private driver was waiting for them. After leaving the city, the lush tropical scenery was beautiful as they drove to a small town called Sisal. They went past the town and continued along the coast to the East. The coast was rocky and did not have the large swamps that were common further around the peninsula.
They saw a series of what looked like vacation homes before they pulled up to a fairly modest house hidden in the trees. As they pulled up, Scott noticed a large metal shed next to the house which looked new.
There were a couple work crews. One seemed to be building a wall around the property. The other was unloading a truck filled with some heavy looking crates into the shed.
Matt and Melinda came out to greet them. Melinda was holding a margarita in one hand and her phone in the other. She smiled but refrained from babbling at them.
“Hey guys!” Matt said, excited. “I’ll show you your rooms. Scott & Barry are sharing a room. Adrianna and Elsa are in this one here.”
“Did you get your own room?” Barry asked.
“No, I’m sharing with a guy named Phillip, and Melinda is sharing with Lata.”
“Ooh, Lata is here?” Elsa asked. “That was a long way for her to travel.”
Melinda nodded.
A middle-aged Indian woman, who looked comfortable in the heat, emerged from one of the rooms.
“Hello, you must be Elsa. I had pictured you as being older given how diligent you worked on testing our chips.”
“Yeah, Elsa has completely ditched all her friends working on that project.”
“I worked with Matt a bit,” Elsa protested. “He assembled the testing equipment and even made a cool robotic arm to switch out the chips.”
Barry looked a bit jealous “So you ditched me to hang out with my best friend. I’m a bit offended.”
Elsa gave Barry a grin and a big hug. “Well, I did miss you, but I’ve been so busy! Besides, Matt’s robots are super useful.”
“I have to admit that is true. We used that contraption of his to assemble our latest reactor,” Barry admitted.
“Oh, was that your work?” Lata asked. “We’ve been running our X-Ray laser around the clock and only had to refuel your reactor twice. It is amazing!”
“Wait a minute. X-Ray laser? When did we get one of those?!” Scott asked.
They all chatted a bit longer, getting caught up on the various projects they had worked on the past couple months.
Finally, the subject turned to what Matt had been up to in Mexico the past week.
“Oh, so we finally got to the main event!” Matt said with glee.
He led the group outside where they went into the large metal shed. It was almost as big as the house - could you even call it a shed? Scott wondered as they entered.
Inside there were stacks of the large crates. A wide array of parts and partially assembled equipment covered one side of the interior room. On the other side, a guy who appeared to be late 20s with a rather impressive beard smiled and walked over.
“Hey everyone! I’m Phillip Schuman and I’ve been working with Matt. He told me it was OK to show you all what we’ve been doing here.”
The small group introduced themselves.
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Phillip showed them a 3D printer that seemed to be printing metal parts at a high temperature. They were behind some heavy double paned glass and there seemed to be some heavy-duty air conditioning keeping the rest of the facility at a pleasant temperature.
“We are leasing these.” Phillip explained. “They are really expensive. I totally want one, but it would cost over a million. Hopefully I can borrow it to build my next fighting robot once we get this project up and running.” Matt scowled at him.
They moved on to a large machine with 6 large arms darting around. It was fascinating to watch as it changed attachments between a screwdriver, drill, clamps, a welding tool, and some kind of saw. It looked like what it should be doing would be really loud.
“Yeah, we have an active noise cancellation system. It was also not cheap, but the boss insisted we needed to keep our activity from bothering the neighbors.”
The group watched as the machine assembled what looked like a metal shell with various modules attached. Scott asked what it was building.
“Oh, that looks like a fusing mod. It basically takes a bunch of sediment and flash boils excess water. The remaining sand and clay fuses into a brick which we can stack up or use for surface construction.”
Barry recognized the latest design of his fusion generator. This was similar to the one they had sent to the lab in Hyderabad, but he had not helped build it. He asked about it.
“Oh yeah, we had Professor Springer up here last week. He had to leave for a vacation he had planned with his family, but we were able to assemble it and get it running. He said you guys were still not happy about the conversion efficiency, but it is much more efficient than the small portable units.”
“Yeah, we are stumped on those. They give off so much heat, we need some pretty exotic materials to get them working.” Barry complained.
“Well, that brings up a good point. That’s what you are working on this week! We were able to acquire some of those materials and have a small electric forge. You can try to make some of the more portable units,” Matt said. “Right now, we are just powering the robots with long cables, but it is a hassle and won’t be feasible after we get to a certain depth.”
“Wait a minute,” Scott interrupted. “You are already starting to dig?”
“Yeah!” Phillip interrupted. “We had a lot of this pre-assembled and started producing robots a couple days ago. They have been hard at work” He pointed to a set of stairs heading down, practically bouncing with excitement.
The group went downstairs. There was a fairly large room that had been roughly carved out of the limestone under the shed. The room was larger than the shed and had a large pool covering about half the floor. There was another generator down here with a bunch of cables going into the water. Sitting in front of a large monitor was another man with graying blond hair and a middle-aged physique.
“Hello, I’m Rafael Sarkisyan. I helped design the cutting tools on the mining robots and right now I’m making sure they are following the plan.” The main switched the screen he was working on to show a diagram.
It appeared to be a side view of a tunnel system under the sea floor. There was a long tunnel near the top that started at what was labeled as the factory. The scale wasn’t clear, but the tunnel sloped down and then went through a series of switchbacks going down. There was a more vertical shaft roughly in the center of where the tunnels went back and forth. Most of the tunnels were colored red, but a small part of the first slope down and the upper part of the vertical shaft were colored green. Looking closely, there were several dots moving up and down the tunnel.
They all received an email from Melinda at about this time.
Welcome boys to our first mining operation! I figured I’d wait to send this so it wouldn’t ruin the surprise.
Early on in the process I decided that the walls of the Chicxulub crater would be a great site for our first operation. As you probably know, this is a 110 mile-wide impact crater believed to be where an asteroid hit 65 million years ago.
“Oh yeah, that’s what killed the dinosaurs.” Barry said.
About a mile below the seafloor are some large faults where liquified material from the asteroid and the mantle layer intruded far up into the crust. As a side effect, this area is poor in hydrocarbons and the faulting makes drilling operations difficult. In short, it is a large region that is potentially rich in rare elements but not valuable to the state-owned Mexican oil company that holds the lease.
It turns out that Glitch_HR is not only good at finding conventional employees, but it can find government officials willing to expedite permits for an unofficial fee. I was able to negotiate rights to an area of about 5000 acres that extends in a strip from here to out deep in the gulf. Since we are a new company, they insisted on a pretty sizable yearly fee. I was able to convince them we were researching techniques to access difficult geologic formations. They either didn’t notice or didn’t care that I kept full rights to any minerals extracted in exchange for giving them a large share of any revenue from hydrocarbons.
We have taken efforts to keep our operations hidden. We are technically honoring the permits and contracts, but if the government or oil company realizes what we are doing they may try to renegotiate our terms. Needless to say, we expect everyone here to keep this confidential.
As for the ladies I have invited here, Elsa and Lata will be working with me on planning a biotech lab which we will operate underwater in our permitted area. Adrianna will be modifying her underwater habitation plans to accommodate the expanded lab and she can start planning the materials needed and starting construction. We will be starting construction of a base for the habitat near the top of the vertical shaft. This will be used to pull out materials from the tunnels. Initially we will build up a foundation that will rise about 150 meters off the seafloor using materials cleared from the tunnels. On this base we will eventually build our first habitat and lab, which will have access to the surface by submarine and can take the elevator down to any subsurface structures we decide to build.
Matt’s robots are digging the tunnels at a rate of roughly 4 meters per hour. We are continuing robot production to keep this rate up even as they have to travel farther down to get to the active face.
“Yeah, so we started digging a few days ago.” Matt explained. “The green part on the map is what we have cleared. As you can see, we have a long way to go! We might get there quicker with a vertical shaft, but this configuration has room at each switchback for robots or vehicles to pass each other so we don’t need to worry about elevator bottlenecks as we go farther down.”
“So, if we don’t run out of money, we’ll get down to the depth indicated in about 2 months?” Scott asked.
“Well, it sounds like portable fusion cells are going to be expensive due to the cost of exotic metals. I think this will slow us down. Not to mention we don’t have the money to build the habitat.”
“We could sell some of the fusion tech.” Barry said reluctantly.
Melinda shook her head. She went to the house and called them on her phone app.
“We can’t sell that tech yet. You are only a couple generations in. If you sell it now, companies and governments will reverse engineer it within a year. We will lose our edge in a lot of different businesses! I am planning to hire an engineer to help you improve the failsafe device so that it will meltdown if someone attempts to tamper. You guys put in something like that, but we need an expert to make sure it can resist the efforts of governments and big energy companies.”
“Could we just sell electricity?” Barry asked
“No. There is a lot of government oversight of the power industry so you can’t dump power onto the grid without proper permits and inspections of your facilities. For now, we can only use this to power secret facilities.”
“Maybe we could do bitcoin mining.” Scott suggested. “The hardware isn’t that expensive, but it takes a lot of power to run. We could build a farm here and use seawater to cool the equipment room.”
“Not a bad idea. Why don’t you run numbers on that?” Melinda replied. “Eventually I want to have a larger foundry and chip fabrication facility here. There is not much point until we are getting iron out of the mine. We can take advantage of the high-pressure conditions underwater and produce carborundum and graphite. Carborundum is not super valuable, but we use a lot of it on the cutting surfaces of our robot boring tools. Graphite is used in a lot of our tools and equipment.”
Melinda continued, “Near term, we need to excavate some more space and make sure we can keep it watertight and handle ventilation. Our space on land is extremely limited. Ocean front property is not cheap, even here away from the main tourist spots. Adding room for workshops, storage and laboratories will help us move forward quickly. This can work short term before we build out the habitat.”
Another email popped up on everyone’s phone. Apparently from
Enough of that. We’ve all worked hard enough. We hired some local people to prepare dinner and they are serving drinks! It’s time for us to all have a bit of fun. The robots will keep working without us, and everything else can wait!
Everyone went upstairs. Sure enough, a large table had been set up outside along with a canopy for shade. The group sat down and forgot about business for a few hours. Scott had a bit too much to drink.
Barry and Elsa disappeared, and Scott realized he shouldn’t go into his room right now. He noticed Adrianna had approached. He was buzzed and she looked amazing!
“Hey Scott. Looks like our roommates are in your room and need some privacy.” she smiled. “Do you want to go to my room…”
Was this really happening?!!
“And help me design a submarine?”
Oh… Well, that was actually pretty awesome too.