Gordan opened his eyes and looked over at Candice. She laid on her stomach and hugged a pillow. “Hey.” he whispered and she sleepily opened her eyes.
“Hey, old man.” she said with a smile.
“I may be old, but you’ve got to admit I’m better than any young man you’ve been with.”
She turned over and sat up slightly, the sheet sliding off of her top half. “Second, maybe third place.” she said, then giggled. “Of course, first place is married now.”
Gordan reached over and gently rubbed her chest. “If you’d be willing to give me a bonus round, I’m sure I can make up the difference.” She smiled and he slid over and kissed her.
An hour later Gordan got out of bed. Their clothes were laying on the top of the wardrobe, cleaned and neatly folded. Darsy must have come in while they slept and gathered their clothes to clean them. He had bought one other suit, but he put on the same one he wore yesterday.
Candice stood up shakily and the took a step before her legs started to buckle. He grabbed her and helped her sit down on the bed. “Sorry, I think I overdid it.” he said, wearing nothing but his boxers.
“Give me a minute to rest, and I’ll give you another chance to try again.” she said.
“Maybe tonight. Not sure you could handle it right now, and we have work to do.”
She nodded. “You’re right. Business before pleasure, no matter how much that pleasure is.”
He smiled. “Yeah. In general, that’s a good idea. For now, though, lets get you dressed and get some food in you. Maybe a sports drink for each of us, with all the sweating we did. Then you can show me some more real estate on the planet.”
She nodded. “Sure. So, what do you want to look at first?”
“I should probably meet with some of the local construction companies first, just to sound things out, then we can go look at land. I would prefer to be able to just claim it, but I’m sure the good land will probably be claimed already.”
“They only build roads to it if it’s already been claimed, so unless you want to pay for a private road to be built to your land, you’ll need to buy land that already has a road built to it, and is therefore already claimed.” She stood up and carefully put on her clothes. When she was done she rubbed her thigh. “I think I pulled something last night, or maybe this morning.”
Gordan knelt down and rubbed it and the knot in her leg started going away as she relaxed. “Leg cramp.” he said. “A pulled muscle wouldn’t go away when you rubbed it. I take it you’ve never used a muscle too much before?”
She shrugged. “Not really. I work out, but only so much every day. Never really push myself.”
“And mostly aerobic exercises, I’d guess, judging by your stamina. Lots of running?”
“Is it obvious? I prefer swimming, but there isn’t really a proper public pool on Hermes, even in the private gyms. Destabilizes the spin grav when you put that much mass in one place.”
“Well, I’ve got a pretty large yard here. I could build one here, if you want.”
“Who said I want to live here?” she joked.
“You don’t have to, I suppose. You could just stay in a hotel whenever you come to visit me.”
“And why would I want to do that?”
“Second place, remember?”
She nodded and giggled. “Fair enough. How about we see if your businesses will pan out before I ask my dad to transfer me to the local branch office?”
“Or you could just become my secretary. Historically, it’s not uncommon for rich men to have their lover act as their secretary.”
“We’ll see.” she said. “But, like you said, business before pleasure.”
They went downstairs and, after bacon and eggs with a coffee and a sports drink, they left for the real estate office. It had sat in the garage all night. Technically, it was being rented by the hour, so leaving it there had cost him, but not that much, especially when you considered how much money he had.
At the real estate office he learned a bit about the details of real estate in the area. The first thing was that he only actually owned the dome and the land it sat on. If the construction company that owned the land wanted, they could put other domes in the gaps between domes as long as as they didn’t touch his dome. The way they stacked the domes in alternate row meant that there was little room to do that, however.
The second was that the cost of a bare dome was based on the square of its size. A one hundred and twenty five meter dome like his would cost about five hundred thousand, ten thousand of which was the cost of the land. A twenty five meter dome, one twenty fifth of the size, cost twenty thousand to build, and only four hundred for the land. His estate could have fit in a twenty five meter dome, but he wanted to have more land so he paid for the larger dome. That wouldn’t be necessary for employ housing, though.
The third was that the cost varied based on the style and which world it was on. Construction costs were 50% higher on Demeter due to the large amount of human labor involved and twice as high on Freyja because the land was an artificially constructed platform. You could build on the island for only a 50% higher cost due to the scarcity of land on the planet, but few people chose to do that because it meant that all of your goods would have to be shipped via boat to the elevator. The only land that had been sold on the island was a small amusement park where you could go diving and a few small estates. Making the domes entirely out of concrete without windows cut the cost in half, but that was only done for factories and warehouses, and because most people considered them ugly, on Euporie you would only be allowed to build them in industrial areas.
Roads were relatively cheap to build. Each kilometer of road cost only one hundred thousand credits. Every five hundred meters along the road there would be an outside access hatch which would let people, robots, or vehicles leave the road for the surface. In every other location, however, you could attach a side tunnel for a branch road or property wherever you wanted, given that none were closer than ten meters from each other. One such road had already been built to a mountain town north of the city where several mines were located.
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This meant that Gordan could buy or claim land anywhere he wanted and hire a construction company to build his domes. Several of them had given him prices 20% lower than you would buy a raw dome for, including life support tie ins and the life support equipment, but not any form of power generation. There was enough excess power generation in the city that you generally didn’t need it. Gordan would want to build it anyway, though.
Gordan and Candice searched the local automated survey area and found a large flat area beside a small salt water lake around three kilometers west of the city. The lake had apparently had a large basin around 23 million years ago, but the level had dropped considerably after that, and the rain had washed what salt was left behind back into the much smaller lake, concentrating it. The salinity in the lake was a bit lower than the ocean on Earth, but not by so much that Earth oceanic life couldn’t live there. The local government asked for five thousand per hectare of land that was claimed, to register the land with the government, which was presumably why land cost what it did instead of being cheaper. He would have to pay that if he claimed any land, but that wasn’t a big deal.
He contacted the city to negotiate the fee. After getting in touch with the city development manager, Candice helped him to negotiate to purchase the sea for one tenth the normal cost. After all, you couldn’t build houses on it unless you wanted to build small house boats or do like Freyja and build a floating platform. They also negotiated to cut the claiming cost of land in half if he claimed at least a square kilometer.
So he made his claim. Nine square kilometers of land, in the middle of which was a four point three square kilometer sea. That made it four point seven square kilometers of land at two thousand five hundred per hectare and four point three square kilometers of lake, at five hundred per hectare. A hectare being one hundredth of a square kilometer, that meant four thousand seven hundred hectares of land and four thousand three hundred hectares of lake. That came to a cost of 13.9 million credits. He now, however, had all of the land he could possibly need.
He named the plot “McDowellburg” as he was essentially starting a subdivision and contacted the construction company. They would be quite busy for the next several months. Soon a month passed as all of his businesses were formed. First, he had the road built out to his property. Three kilometers to the lake, then a road which went around its perimeter that was five kilometers long. This cost an additional eight hundred thousand, taking his ninety million credit budget down to 75.3 million.
Next was a desalination plant, a one hundred meter dome which cost another million credits, including the solar panels which surrounded it and provided his community with plenty of power. Thankfully thermal desalination was cheap, especially when you just needed to pump water into a dome that was heated by a constant sun. 74.3 million left.
With his water supply secured he built an atmospheric scrubber so that they would have enough carbon dioxide. It should be able to produce around twenty tons per day, but was much cheaper than the atmospheric plants most worlds used. This cost five hundred thousand and only took up a twenty five meter dome’s area. 73.8 million left.
Next he set aside a nice area on the shore of the lake, one with a gentle slope and a wide beach. The largest dome that could be built was a two hundred and fifty meter one, so he had one built which went slightly into the lake, giving him over a hundred meters of beach front. Because he had the construction company leave the bottom open and connect it to the rock underneath instead of making an enclosed dome, inside he had the first area of his community that could support life. It might leak air slowly, but that didn’t matter that much. He filled it to eighty percent with local air, and added twenty percent oxygen from the city. He then had it rain continuously inside the dome for a week to wash the perchlorates out of the soil before spraying hydroponic nutrients everywhere but the beach and lake and seeding grass. The water was then seeded with several aquatic plants and algae. This dome cost him two million with all of the other work included, but in his estimation it would become a major tourist attraction. After all, even on Freyja, where you could go diving, they didn’t have a beach. 71.8 million left.
Next, he needed houses and shops to attract people to the area. He built large domes for this purpose. After all, while the cost went up by the square of their radius, the internal area went up by the cube of the radius. He built three two hundred and fifty meter domes. They used considerably less transparent material than the beach dome, as the outside were all apartment buildings and only above the apartments was the glass needed. The center of all of these domes had a park and several small stores, and a one lane roundabout allowed cars to enter and turn around, parking in parking lots beside the road and the businesses. Still, with all of the internal construction the domes cost twice what the dome normally would at 3.2 million each. 62.2 million left.
Part of his plan was to build a fishing industry here, so he spent another two million running aeration hoses under the lake and placing air, pH and salinity sensors in many locations around the lake. Once it was done he stared dumping half of his CO2 production into the lake as well as ten tons of oxygen per day. Oxygen was about half the cost of carbon dioxide at the moment, so he could sell five tons per day in order to buy ten tons of oxygen. He then seeded it with the same life that the beach had. Once the plant population was large enough he would only need to add carbon dioxide to keep it going, but for now he needed both gasses to keep the plants alive. 60.2 million left.
The next month was spent hiring those same construction companies to build ten more two hundred and fifty meter domes. Seven of those domes were fully glass, and three were fully concrete. Inside five of the glass ones he planted cotton, and bought a robotic tractor to tend to all of them. The variety of cotton he chose took one hundred and fifty days to fully grow, so he had them planted thirty days apart. The seed itself hadn’t been cloned yet, and therefore wasn’t available for immediate purchase, so it cost him one hundred thousand to have enough seed created for the five domes to be seeded. They would yield approximately thirty tons of cotton per 30 day month.
One of the concrete domes became a cotton mill, separating out the fibers and spinning it into thread. A second became a silk worm factory, raising the worms and spinning the silk into thread as well. The third was a clothing factory. It would take the thread from the other two and turn it into fabric, then clothing. That clothing would be shipped off to the city and other worlds. The domes were actually much larger than they needed, but once he developed a demand he would put in many more cotton fields and expand the operation.
The last two glass domes were used to plant trees. To keep with the theme of Luxury that the world currently had, one dome had pineapple trees and the other coconut trees. Once they grew their fruit would be sold at the beach first, and the excess would be shipped to the city. Those two plants also hadn’t been cloned before, so he paid another ten thousand for those seeds.
The seven glass domes came to 1.6 million each, or 11.2 million in total. The factories cost an average of two million each, for an additional cost of six million. Then there was the cost of one hundred thousand for the tractor and one hundred and ten thousand for the seeds. All totaled, that was 17.41 million in cost. 42.79 million left.
He was ready to start earning money now, though. At the end of three weeks he had enough people living in his housing, as it cost around half of what a normal place in the city would, that he was able to hire fifty people to work in his factories, overseeing the robots. Each of his apartments cost fifty credits per month, and each dome had two hundred apartments. All of the utilities were included with the rent, however. Such a low rent would let even the lowest income employed people rent a place to live. The housing would therefore take in thirty thousand per month once it was full.
The clothing plant brought in over two hundred thousand per month and soon people started hearing about the beach, and came to McDowellburg just to relax. He spent another two hundred thousand, the first month’s factory profits, on building shops and bars near the beach and it quickly became a tourist attraction. And when the algae became a bit much at the beach, he spent the next month’s profits on getting shrimp, fish, and crabs to stock there.
A month later, six months after he had started building there, he was ready to do a bit more expansion before going to Demeter to do the same thing there. First, he put in a second beach dome at the request of some of the tourists. The first one was constantly full, as it could only hold a few hundred people at a time. There were also complaints by adults who wanted to not be bothered by the children when they went to the beach. So Gordan made the second beach clothing optional, and required that you be at least eighteen to enter it. The first five meters of the dome’s bottom was made of concrete, so that no one could look in, and he had the shops built when he built the rest of the dome. All in all the dome cost him 2.2 million, not including the pay for the ten employees that looked over it.
He was now up to seventy employees, ten in each beach dome and fifty in the factories. The real estate company was currently managing the housing or he would have had to hire someone to manage that as well. As it was, however, Candice’s company had earned over two hundred and fifty thousand in commissions already as mediators for the construction company and the housing.
If he was going to continue to grow his company he would need to hire managers. He and Candice had handled everything so far, but they were reaching their limits as managing people wasn’t their strongest area. If he wanted to hire managers, however, he would need larger housing. This was relatively simple to accomplish, though. The basic apartments had been built with two neighboring apartments mirroring each other, with the two apartment’s bathroom, bedroom, and hall sharing a wall. He simply removed the wall in the hallway from the design and converted one of the bathrooms into a third bedroom. You could now have a three bedroom, one bath apartment for only twice what the normal apartment cost. This housing would no doubt attract families to the area, most of which had two adults, and therefore two potential workers. These two domes cost a total of 5.4 million credits. 37.39 million left.
Two days after the new domes were finished, seven after the subdivision started being built, Gordan was getting out of the pool on his estate, preparing to leave for the space elevator in an hour, when Tyrell Nirupama called him. Tyrell explained that he had been managing a small team of developers on Euporie that were making VR games, but had heard that Gordan was building a company and wanted to apply for a management position. The development team had only contained thirty people, but he was hoping for something a little higher up, as his last job on Earth had him overseeing over three hundred people at a tech company. After some discussion Gordan agreed to hire him for five thousand a year. As he was only offered three thousand a year at his current job, he immediately put in his resignation. Gordan now had someone to oversee his company.
He sent Candice ahead to look for land for their endeavor, and stayed behind for two days to teach Tyrell what he would need to know. He was introduced to all of the employees that were on shift at the time, and once he understood what everyone needed to do, Gordan let him take over. Tyrell would still need to get an Impressionator and learn the basics of cotton farming, silkworm raising, and textiles, but that wouldn’t matter in the beginning.