Scott was sitting in a small submarine, looking out at a school of fish through a transparent aluminum window. Adriana had invited him to look at the site where they had started work on their first deep sea habitat. Various building shells made from dark graphite embedded steel were being assembled on the edge of the underwater mound that had risen up from mine tailings and coated with slag from their electric forge. Much of the habitat would be under the seafloor, but these buildings marked where airlocks allowed various submarines or robots to enter or exit.
Large frames made from a lattice of pipes spread out overhead forming a grid that would grow various types of algae and underwater plant life a dozen meters below the surface. The lattices could be raised or lowered in sections in case a cruise ship or cargo ship needed to pass by. There was not much traffic here due to the lack of beaches and the distance to oil wells or major ports.
Scott was learning to drive the submarine which had been designed for simplicity. He had worked on some of the software, but using the finished product was a new experience. Most of the work had been done by other programmers, but it had been a good project to keep his programming skills sharp.
“Let’s go check out the farm.” Adriana said, pointing upwards.
Scott guided the sub up through the lattice which had holes big enough for the smaller subs to pass through. The aquatic plants were genetically modified, and the current field had stalks covered in grains. It was an underwater variant of rice if he remembered correctly. Melinda had hired botanists who were gleefully designing aquatic versions of a wide range of fruits, vegetables and grains. He had tried the rice - it was barely edible, and the other crops were still early in the testing phase.
They passed by a plot with small plants of different types.
“Are those fish eating our crops?” Scott asked.
“Well, there have been a lot of fish sampling the merchandise.” Adriana said, “I think they are trying to grow some kind of melon in that zone.”
“An underwatermelon?” Scott asked, laughing.
“Ugh, it might be sea cucumber,” Adriana replied, rolling her eyes but she couldn’t resist matching him with another bad pun.
“Those things are gross. I saw one spitting out its guts.” Scott said. They were spending a lot of time underwater these days, so watching sea creatures was becoming a normal part of their day. The new cafeteria had a nice wide window with a view into the shallow water near the shore.
“We won’t need the outside world much with all you have planned.” Scott said.
“Yeah, Melinda even hired a guy working on vat grown meats, so we won’t have to just eat fish. She’s also working on fish that taste like pork or chicken. That is going to be so confusing. The biggest problem is we don’t have enough CO2 for growing so many plants. There is not enough dissolved in the water and the concentration in the air is too low for us to get the level we need for rapid growth.”
“Are we going to have to ship in dry ice or something?” Scott asked.
“That is the current plan. Melinda is talking to a local gas fired power plant,” Adriana explained. “They are skeptical that we offered to reduce their emissions to zero, but we will let them keep the carbon credits and it’s not costing them anything other than some minor downtime while we install the first unit. We had an engineering team build a prototype to show it working. It’s kind of funny using a fusion power generator to convert emissions on a gas plant. We could probably design something better, but it’s the cheapest solution we could come up with for now.”
“How is the Atlantic base planning coming along? Did we even pick a name yet?” Scott asked.
“Yeah, Barry wanted to call it ‘The lost city of Atlantis’. Fortunately, no one listens to him.” Adriana said, rolling her eyes.
“So, we are going with the mythology names then?”
“Yeah, it’s kind of traditional for Sci Fi bases, but at least we aren't using something so cliche as Sanctuary or Haven. This habitat will be Proteus and the Atlantic base will be Triton.” Adriana explained.
“Do we have a site picked out?” Scott asked.
“Not really. It will be on the Mid-Atlantic ridge. There are a lot of volcanoes so there will be sites very rich in minerals, but we haven’t narrowed it down yet. Zaliha’s next submarine is designed for long term exploration, and it can go really deep. A crew of about 20 people will be able to stay down there for months looking for potential sites. Initially they will test for geologic stability and take mineral samples.”
They enjoyed the view in silence for a few minutes before heading back towards the shore.
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Barry and Dr. Springer had been working for several months on their latest project. They had tried and failed to create a fusion reactor that could combine four normal hydrogen nuclei into a single helium. It had been an expensive failure but at least nothing exploded. In theory, they could accelerate the protons enough and modulate the frequencies to ensure the four channels would overlap precisely. In practice, they generated some fusion reactions, but it had been too infrequent to produce the energy needed to sustain power for the synchrotrons.
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They had collected good data, but the results indicated that to make it work they would need a reactor at least ten times as large. Their equipment was already filling a fairly large room. It wasn’t impossible, but the cost would be impractical given their current resources.
The new machine took a different approach. They used multiple deuterium reactors to provide the initial energy to get the machine running. Like their smaller designs, it took significant power to get their machine started, but once running it would generate a surplus of power until they ran out of fuel. Their latest idea was to simply smash electrons directly into protons inside a region with an extremely powerful sustained magnetic field at about 10 Tesla. Superconducting magnets could not support the field strength needed, so they had built big rings made from silver reinforced with iridium wire that could support massive currents. They had diverted most of the silver output from the mine from this experiment, but there was nothing else known that had the same combination of strength and conductivity at high field strengths.
Combining hydrogen into helium was the reaction that powered the sun, but combining individual protons and electrons was more similar to the reaction that happened when a star went nova. Free neutrons were dangerous and could turn ordinary atoms into a radioactive mess. The current configuration had electrons and protons entering the field at small but opposing angles so they would spiral together in a tight helix. A third beam of hydrogen ions circled in the magnetic field which would absorb the free neutrons that exited in a disk to form deuterium or possibly tritium. The process produced a lot of free energy which could be converted into electricity. They used thermoelectric generators chained to steam turbines to convert the extreme heat levels to electricity and needed a lot of the osmium and iridium to handle the high temperature heat exchangers. Waste heat was a problem, so they circulated a lot of water through the final stage for cooling.
Like their fusion reactors, restarting was a pain so these technologies were not great for applications like weapons or vehicles unless they could deal with the surplus power when they weren’t active. The mining robots had been a great application because they were always running, and fixed installations also worked because you could dump excess power back into the grid.
This device needed four industrial sized fusion reactors to run the oversized synchrotrons and the massive electromagnets. They didn’t even try to recycle the power generated by what Barry was calling the Nova reactor. It could produce up to 50 MW of energy but more importantly it enriched hydrogen into deuterium which was the fuel needed for their normal reactors. Normal seawater had deuterium in about 1 part in 1000 of the abundant hydrogen atoms, but this reactor increased it to about 50 times the natural level. In theory, they could also configure the device to emit a high energy neutron stream which could transmute other elements. That had the downside of a lot of radioactive byproducts, so they didn’t plan to implement it in the near term.
“Our reactor test was successful,” Dr. Springer announced, talking to Melinda over the phone.
“Excellent, I’ve been working with the power grid so we can tie in and sell excess power. They move at a glacial speed, so it will be about 18 months before they even start working on running power lines. For now, we’ll just want a couple more reactors for redundancy and run them all at low power. I remember reading your notes that a low power setting reduces efficiency, but it will be better to have redundant capacity in case of unit failure.” Melinda replied, “We need to organize a party to celebrate your success. I understand this is kind of a big deal!”
“What kind of budget are we talking about for this party?” Barry asked, suddenly interested.
“Depends on if you are willing to wait until the next Dark Siren shipment returns from Houston.”
“Yeah, of course! I don’t want Scott’s Pirate Dad to miss out on the party!”
“Right, well they unloaded their cargo. We only made about half of the dollar amount as the first run because the economy is soft now. Also, we’ve been keeping most of the precious metals for your projects.”
“So, I’m not super interested in accounting stuff but how is my company doing?”
“You used about $1 million in silver, $3 million in iridium and about $500k in osmium. Other materials and use of construction robots is under $1 million. Your expenses the past few months were about $5.5 M.”
“Uh oh. Don’t you credit us some back for all the reactors we made for the robots?” Barry asked, a little bit alarmed by the big debt they had racked up.
‘Of course, dear. We’ve licensed 160 or your smaller reactors at 50k each and 4 of your facility sized units at $800k. Your company was credited $11.2M minus expenses of $5.5M. You also have other expenses for Dr. Springer’s salary, living expenses, renting space in our facility and your share of the overhead for the house servants. I’m currently projecting your profit this quarter at about $5.4M.”
Melinda continued, “You’re going to have to start paying a lot of taxes, but I think we should pay out a dividend and decide how much to spend on your party. It’s better to spend some of the money as a corporate expense than just pay more taxes, don't you think?”
“Hell yeah!” Barry said. “Can we hire a party planner or something? I want every worker invited along with their families. Limos, open bars, a DJ. Oh yeah, I totally want some of those Mariachi guys!”
“Wow, we made over $5M this quarter?” Dr. Springer finally interjected, a little slower than Barry on the uptake. “Am I right to assume that our Nova reactor is going to make even more money? I know we have to go slow introducing our tech to the world; by the way I’m fine with that! This is my dream job, and it sounds like we are doing great financially.”
“We’ll be crediting you guys $30M for a Nova unit the size you just successfully tested. You could probably sell it for much more to various governments, but they would be focused on stealing your technology. We’re planning to buy a couple next quarter for Proteus along with a lot of the midsize fusion units for submarines. Of course, we’ll need lots of the smaller packs for robots and other things we have planned.”
“What do you think about the dividend? We had talked about that at Spring break, but obviously the whole base getting blown up got in the way.” Barry said.
“As CEO, I’ll send out my recommendations to all the company owners. We’re due an update on our finances and it will be a nice treat for everyone to get their dividend numbers during the party,” Melinda said.
“I can’t wait!” Barry agreed.