Hawk watched the work they had done. The planet now had a dozen of bio habitat zones with stable levels of plants and animals. It was still an empty world; the zones only covered 0.003% of the available land. Still the seed had been planted; even without additional effort the planet will someday develop an active biosphere. With the current zones as source material it should take an estimated 27,384 years to reach 90% foliage coverage of the land. The oceans would take longer to develop above plankton levels. Existing animal types for the habitats are currently at 23 species. Estimation is that approximately 12 will die off before the biosphere stabilizes. New genetic variant sub-species will then start showing up until distinct specials start appearing.
The human Daniel’s efforts are still inefficient. Several more desirable and effective solutions for preserving Earth’s biodiversity are continuing to be overlooked or ignored. Hawk wondered if he should provide an example for Daniel on a more efficient approach to creating Tawny’s biosphere. The more likely example would be to split Earth’s biosphere for with Tawny. Such an approach is estimated to bring Tawny Earth’s current level in 38.2 years. The effect on Earth of removing half of theirs would be to only accelerate its final collapse by 8.3 years.
* * * * *
Sammy, Grandma and I were going over the status of the two dozen life habitats we had so far created. We had done this every week for months but were getting more frustrated each time we did. They were scattered across Tawny in different temperature environments from northern to sub-tropic. Each area had a soil and plant composition similar to the same environment on earth. Once the plants seem to be stable a few animals suitable for that area were added. Three of the habitats were now expanding without any more help. The growth was slow but it seemed to be increasing. Another eight habitats appeared stable but weren’t expanding for some reason. The others were not doing well at all. One of them was now completely dead. None of us could understand why, the soil, plants and the few animals added matched with the climate and one of the other zones had a very similar environment to it and it was doing fine. I was starting to get depressed at the state of our terraforming. We just didn’t have the expertise needed for what we were doing. At this rate we wouldn’t be ready to host any of the endangered species on the list until they actually became extinct.
As we sat around the table wondering what we should do I could tell I wasn’t the only one unhappy. Even our usually cheerful Sammy was downcast. As we talked about ideas to try Grandma was writing it all down in her notebook. Over the last couple of years she had become our unofficial documenter and archivist. She had even made a scrap book of all the endangered species and what they still needed to survive on Tawny. After spending an hour kicking around ideas Grandma finally closed her notebook and put the pen down.
She said “We just can’t do it by ourselves. If we are going to get suitable habitats ready for them in time we will need help, and a lot of it!”
Sammy jumped right in and said “We can’t do that, the more people who know the more likely the secret will get out”.
“Grandma’s right” I said, “We need the help, we are just going to have to take the risk”.
After a few minutes of thinking about it Sammy sadly agreed and shook her head in agreement.
“What we need to do is find a way the different governments and any others groups can’t interfere or at least not easily” I said.
“How are we going to do that?” Sammy said
I then proceeded to tell Sammy and Grandma my thoughts on how we might do that. Basically that we go public by actually hiring a large number of people to do the terraforming. Since the major issue of climate and seas/oceans is done we can hide the fact that it was done at all. Make them think the world was that way to start. The portals they see would just be transportation and we mask details about them some kind of physical device located on Tawny linked to a single spot on Earth.
For the people we can treat it like a long term remote contract with no transit back to earth until contract end. So we would have two groups one located on Tawny doing the planting and checking and another group here handling acquiring seeds and plants for transport. At some point some group will try to sneak into Tawny or even attack the spot here. We’ll still have to deal with those groups and their attempts to get a hold of the suppose portal technology. How to do that would take some deep thought and whatever we did the danger to everyone would increase.
We talked about what I said for a few minutes and Sammy and Grandma agreed it was the way to go. After that they started adding on their ideals and Grandma began taking more notes. It was late into the night before we finally finished with our planning. It was still a risky thing we were planning but we had done everything we could to reduce that risk. The next day looking at the list of steps for the plan I knew it was going to take some major jumping around to get the infrastructure established. Once we had that setup and ready we could then go ahead with the widespread hiring. The big question was could we keep the portals under wraps until we started the mass hiring?
As we got ready for bed I asked Sammy “What do you think Caribbean or maybe South America”
“The island?” she said
”Yes, since we’re making it we can put it almost anywhere” I responded
Originally we thought we could just buy an island to use. After checking online we quickly found out that although you can buy an island pretty easily it still belongs to a country. Owning one makes you a landowner not a separate country. It seems every piece of land in the world had either already been claimed or is in some kind of dispute between countries. Creating our own out in international water bypasses any claims by any countries. We wouldn’t even be the first group to do it. Making islands is something a few countries and corporations have already tried doing and some had even succeeded. Of course we with Hawk’s help could make the island overnight instead of over the years.
After a moment Sammy responded “Let’s go with the Caribbean but not too close to the U.S. Maybe further down south, there are a lot of countries and ports clustered around down there”.
“So, a hammock under the palm trees then” I said with a grin.
A pinch on my thigh from a red faced Sammy was the only response I got to that. I resolved then and there that a private island somewhere in the tropic zone on Tawny would be early on the list for development. I would make sure it’s somewhere so far from anyone else on the planet that Sammy would be comfortable enjoying our time together. I fell asleep with a smile dreaming about an island with palm trees, a grass shack and alone with Sammy in a hammock
The next few weeks were spent traveling on a charter boat going back and forth off the shores of Central America. The captain thought I was crazy with the weird course I set for him but he was fine with it after I handed him enough cash. The course took me from port to port checking travel and route paths along with the local attitude of the people towards the different and unexplained. Knowing how they felt about weird and unusual things was important for our plan. We needed them to have a live and let live attitude toward the unusual. Government groups we could handle but a suspicious public demanding they do something about what we would be doing was another thing entirely.
As one famous writer once put it at a high enough level magic and science are indistinguishable from each other. So using a portal and a quick disguise I did a few appearing and disappearing in public areas. Making sure to be seen but not photographed doing it. After a few weeks of this rumors started to appear about the disappearing man. I checked on what the locals thought of the story and it seemed to be more wonder and disbelief than fear which was great. The important part though was the locals had a very live and let live attitude toward mysterious things. The disappearing man legend ended up being an amusing ghost story for the tourist. I even found one enterprising family printing and selling t-shirts of the “Fantasma Amistoso” or Friendly Ghost in English to the tourist. I got a couple for Sammy and her Grandma as a joke. Surprisingly Grandma loved it and wore it all the time.
After a lot of looking I finally decided on a spot out on the ocean about 40 miles East of Panama. Once I had picked the spot for the island a quick check of the GPS and depth finder was all that was needed and I was ready to start on it. The water depth was also only 80 meters at that spot. Not that a deeper depth would have been more difficult to build on but with the lighter depth people would find it easier to accept someone making an island there. Hawk had done a lot of historical back tracking of the spot as well as a few dozen others we had checked. This spot for some odd reason had almost no traffic going by it. This should give us a bit of time before it is stumbled upon by boat traffic. A satellite would probably spot the island first but holding off as long as possible was out intention. It wasn’t time to actually make the island appear yet but Hawk did move enough rock over to the spot reducing the depth to 20 meters. This was just enough for the water color to change indicating shallow on satellite images. When our island did finally appear anyone checking older images should assume it had been created over a period of time instead of overnight.
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With the island started looking at how the seeds and plants would get there was next. The location should make getting what we needed delivered to the island easy. The canal meant a lot of merchandise was passing through all the local ports. Panama also had a “not so trustful” attitude toward the U.S. government. It was something to do with the history of the canal but they were still friendly enough to Americans in general. Several other countries around the area had a more hostile relationship to the U.S. but they didn’t let it affect trade. Those countries also had active shipping ports within a hundred miles or so of where the island would be. All together we should have multiple choices for cargo transfers to the island.
The next thing on Grandma’s list was to create a couple of companies. This would be a public company that was a subsidiary of a private one. Neither could be connected to Jane’s company. That would cause future issues as well as bring to much attention on what we are really doing. The anonymous nature of corporations as well as their pseudo personhood would be helpful. This faceless ability essentially allowed a company to act as a legal entity with a "personality" in the eyes of the law. Using the public one to visibly be doing everything and let the other be the parent company with 100% ownership. This would help obfuscate the lack of any kind of management from the parent but still keep control. It would also help explain the lack of a visual board for the company and hide who was really calling the shots. It should also come in handy in the future when we provide an alternative explanation for the portal’s technology.
A little research on where to incorporate the new companies provided a bit of a surprise. It seems that for countries famous for hiding company ownership the country of Panama ranked top of the list. It turned out Panama was considered a global banking haven with high confidentiality and anonymity for all its corporations. Their tax and reporting laws also seemed tailor made for what we needed. As long as the business revenue isn’t sourced from within the country, no tax needs to be paid in Panama. With the country decided I quickly hired a local law firm to handle the registrations making one “Hawk Habitats” a subsidiary company of the “Stellar Hawk Group”. They were both setup in a week.
The next step was to acquire initial funding for the company. We had discussed a number of possibilities for that, everything from duplicating gold and other commodities to just stealing it from bad people. Sammy was all for selling things, she thought it was more honest but Grandma surprisingly thought that just taking money directly from criminals would do the most good. Sitting around Granma’s little kitchen table we talked about the difficulties in selling hundreds of millions in gold and jewelry or the risk in stealing billions from incredibly dangerous drug cartels. After discussed the dangers of both approaches and Sammy’s view on selling was still wanting to go the gold and diamond route. Grandma finally convinces her otherwise when she mentioned how drug dealers hurt and killed people and taking their money would cut down on all the lives the drugs ruined.
With the money source decided Hawk and I went looking for whom to get it from. I checked online news and DEA files to find several major drug dealers that were supposedly killed by their own cartels. There are probably lots of reasons for cartel members to have a falling out but we needed ones killed for being sticky fingered about the cartel’s money. Surprisingly it seems it’s quit rare for members to steal from each other. Still, by going back a couple of decades I did manage to find a few. Checking on them before they were killed I quickly saw where the money ended up. Some were long gone for gambling, drug use and women but I few had buried or hid it and some had stashed it away in foreign bank accounts. A quick reach through a portal got me a few million that was hidden. Most of the online accounts I left alone for now just transferring a few million into our Hawk Habitats business account. The transfers did raise some eyebrows at the Panama bank we had selected for our accounts. It seemed more because of a mistaken impression they had over what kind of company or charity they thought we were. Good thing the amount was only a few million, if the hundreds of millions of stolen cartel money had been moved it would have attracted a lot of attention.
The next step in the plan called for a front man for the CEO. It needed to be someone to act as the face of Hawks Habitats to the public. Once they were onboard I could step back into the shadows and everything public would be through them. Sammy had expressed a concern that whoever the front man was they would be in danger when groups started to come after the portal technology. This was a valid concern but in discussing it we decided to limit the company only handled purchasing and shipping the seeds and plants to the island. Anyone looking for portal technology would focus on the island not that company. This would require someone else to head up island operations but we could get to that later. I was thinking a military man would be a good choice for that, probably a mercenary familiar with the risk of the job.
Hiring a CEO did present problems in who would hire them. We had used Grandma for Jane’s company in Canada but that was too risky here. The parent company would help a bit but still a representative of Stellar Hawk Group needed to be involved for hiring someone like a CEO for a subsidiary company. Unfortunately I was to young looking to be taken seriously as someone a company would send to hire a senior executive. However, in thinking about it I remembered a common trope I use to read in books. I could pose as the chairman’s son, someone whose father might want him to get experience doing this. To make it more believable there would need to be a senior team back him up and supposedly keeping an eye on him for his father. For this I would need an impressive looking management team for the interviewing. They wouldn’t need to say much just look impressive so a fake team should do.
Getting a fake team together was straight forward. A call to Panama’s local version of the Screen Actors Guild the IFA got me a contact list of actors with experience playing business men. Finding a few willing to put on a prank type performance with no questions asked just took some calls and a lot of cash. As a bonus I did have to pay for tailored suits and brief cases for the part but I let the actors keep them. With a script that had them ask a few questions but leaving most of the talking to me I was ready. Checking the local job board I made appointments with a few job seekers to meet at a local hotel’s conference room.
Emiliano Garcia was surprised to get a call about a job. His resume had been up on the job site for over six months without a nibble. For the last few months he had been reduced to working as a waiter in a restaurant to keep his family fed. Emiliano didn’t regret giving up managing the banana plantation in Columbia. He would do anything to keep his family safe. After a local member of the Vallente Cartel got interested in his 15 year old daughter he knew he had to get them out of the country away from the cartels. Unfortunately jobs for an outsider in Panama were hard to find but the safety of his family was worth it. As he walked into the conference room in a suit that had seen better days Emiliano hoped this job would work out. He wasn’t sure at what level it was but any manager position would have to be better that the restaurant he was at now. As he entered the room a young man in a expensive suit stood up from the table and held out a hand to him to shake. He could tell at once the young man was a foreigner and his job expectations dropped as he thought about how young he was.
“Hello” said a young man, “My name is Dan Falke, how are you doing? Can you understand my English alright Mr. Garcia?”
“I’m fine, I understand your English” said Emiliano with his strong Spanish accent.
“Allow me to introduce my team” said the young man.
“This is Mr. Ralph Robertson he’s in charge of new acquisitions and this” pointing the other man “is Mike Garcia my minder” said the young man with a grin.
“Dad thought I was too young to handle this hiring myself so he sent a couple of his regular team with me. Why don’t we sit down and you can tell me about your experience running the large operation of a plantation?”
Emiliano walked out of the meeting an hour later shocked. Not only did he get the manager job but it was as a CEO. He was about to become a boss of a company supplying material for large scale forest restoration. Admittedly the company was just starting out and he’d have to do a lot of hiring himself until and HR department could be set up but it was still an incredible opportunity. It was a little strange that the young man Dan was the one to asked most of the questions and gave all the answers. Emiliano thought the other two might jump in at some point but they stayed quiet after a couple of initial responses. That man’s father must have a lot of faith in his son to let him travel to Panama for something like this he thought. The only puzzling piece left was the comment that the operation would be shipping to a small island. The explanation given that transporting plants and later animals this way would avoid health and quarantine requirements seemed somewhat valid. Still, his daughter little Cory had just gotten settled at her new school and he wasn’t sure about being away for long periods. The young man Dan seemed pretty accommodating about it and did mention actually trips to the island would not be necessary. The shipments could be arranged from Panama City for delivery to the island. This would allow him the option to stay here and maybe an occasional trip to other ports to arrange deliveries.