The Wandering Island Factory Read online

  Chapter 2

  Jason took his week ashore at a local hotel the company rented for the crew. It was nothing special, but nice all the same. Fortunately, he spent little time in the room. Hawaii was all about bars and beaches that were better than silicone valley.

  The sites were something to behold.

  He watched as the women emerged from the ocean, their suits leaving little to the imagination. College roommates, he assumed. Perhaps on vacation, but it was difficult to tell from this far away. They didn't quite look local to him. They were all so pretty, but he was waiting for one in particular.

  "Gina," he said, getting up to pull out her chair, "Good to see you."

  "Aren't you supposed to be working?" she said with a flirt while the waiter was busy with another couple.

  "Two weeks on, one week off."

  "They got anything built yet?" she grabbed a handful of chips from the table and started dipping them in the sauce.

  "So far, it just looks like giant slabs— No, scratch that, it looks more like Legos, except more tongue and groove. From what I've been able to gather, they assemble them like interlocking building blocks into the hundred acres or so flat slab, then I don't know what, but some heavy construction equipment has already started showing up. Cranes, bulldozers, stuff like that. It's all very curious."

  "Islands. It'll be the first floating island ever made. I mean, sure, oil tycoons make islands in the shape of palm trees for millionaires all the time. But this is something different altogether. This is totally mobile. It's a brave new world," she said, looking over the menu.

  "I don't know, though. I just don't see how they plan on surviving one hundred foot waves. I mean, sure, the thing may hold together, I mean, it's built like a battleship, but what keeps the crashing waves from washing everything off the deck? Some of the concept drawings I saw in the paper made them look just like regular islands with trees and gardens and little grass huts and stuff. I just don't see how any of that would survive a hundred foot wave."

  She shrugged, then looked up from the menu. "When the island costs a billion and the landscaping costs a few million to replace. . . "

  He laughed, "You have a good point. I guess it's all relative."

  "They still keeping you in the dungeon?"

  "Yeah. The pay is good, but, it is so excruciatingly boring. I mean, I just watch dials all day long. It's insane."

  "I wonder how long it'll be before some pirates decide to track one down and hijack a whole island."

  They were still laughing when the waiter took their order.

  The mainland loved having the behemoth parked off their shore. First, the crew pumped a lot of money into the local economy. But secondly, everyone's electric bill dropped. The ship was designed to be as self-contained as possible. To that end, it used steam turbines to produce all it's electric needs. But it had an interesting trick. At sea, it burned tons of oil to produce the steam. But why burn oil when its primary function is pumping molten lava through tubes, and part of the process involves rapidly cooling the product before it's pushed out into the ocean. Running at full production, where it was now, it doubled as a geothermal plant and sold, for pennies, its excess power to the mainland. Cooling product this thick meant hundreds of megawatts of nearly free power.

  The same engineers that designed the behemoth had turned that kind of mind toward building floating islands. He simply had to trust that they had worked out every little detail.

  Either way, they were mostly treated like honored guests everywhere they went. Only a very few protested their presence. Naturalists that equated what they were doing with raping the land. But they were rare and mostly ignored.

  Gina favored a small amusement park with bumper cars, games, and two roller coasters.

  He liked the giant sourdough pretzels with a cream cheese center.

  He woke in his room after a night at the park. She was sleeping in his bed, still fully dressed. He looked over the empty bottles decorating the floor. They had had quite a night. . . too bad he didn't remember any of it.

  She was very cute, yet, they had never done anything.

  He had met her online through MySpace almost two years ago. They had chatted from thousands of miles apart for the entire time.

  She was the reason he pushed so hard for this new assignment.

  It was a little terrifying, but he had never actually met her in person before this week. Their first face to face.

  She wasn't perfect.

  He had idealized her over that first year of chatting. That honeymoon phase where daters are blind to the flaws that are obvious to everyone else had passed without ever physically meeting. He liked her even more now, flaws and all.

  She was facing away from him, short hair covering her face. Drool down the side of her cheek. Her muffled little snore was faint and difficult to hear.

  Her freckles didn't show at all on emails. Her hair was a little stringy, she smoked a pack a day, her accent and voice didn't come close to how she sounded across computer speakers. She was taller than he imagined, and slightly heavier too. But none of these superficial things mattered at all to him.

  Had he met her first in a bar, he would have overlooked her without so much as a polite hi. She just didn't fit his mental image of his type.

  But in a bar wasn't how they had met.

  They met first through words. Ideas. Ideals.

  He moved her hair with his finger.

  They had kissed, but just on the cheeks. They had hugged, but seemed reluctant to cross that line once occupied by thousands of miles. She was interested in his boring job. She liked the idea of building boats out of rocks that float.

  She was probably smarter that he, but just about some things.

  He adored their conversations the most, and perhaps that was for the best.

  It was a perplexingly weird relationship to be in. He never would have dated a woman for over a year without her putting out, yet, he had already put in that much time with her. And he was ready to put in more.

  He had dated prettier, yet prettier rarely turned out to be everything.

  He crawled over her, careful not to wake her, on his way to the bathroom, then to the juice in the fridge.

  He handed her a glass of tomato juice when she sat up.

  "I hate V8," she said, taking the glass anyway. "But I'd drink anything this morning." She guzzled it in a single shot. She shook her head, eyes opened extra wide, then smiled at him, "Thank you." She handed him back the empty glass.

  "You feel like breakfast? They have a breakfast bar here. Don't even have to get dressed. Usually nothing more than bagels with eggs or bacon, and pots of coffee of course."

  She started looking for her shoes, "Coffee?!?" She slapped him on the thigh, "I would have started with that."

  Something about watching her tie her shoes overwhelmed him. He kissed her on the lips, just briefly, then said, "If you're not careful, I'm going to fall head over heels for you."

  She smiled, then kept tying. "I do have a reckless streak."

  They went for breakfast in last night's wrinkled and slept-in clothes, smelling of beer, vodka, and smoke.

  They fit in just fine.

  She surfed, which was new to him. He could paddle a board out and back just fine, but his balance was so poor that he could barely sit on the board, let alone stand on it in the peak of a wave.

  Even being a surfing klutz, he still had a ball trying to keep up with her. And she was quite something to watch when she caught a 'righteous wave, dude.'

  All too soon, he found himself waiting for a boat to take him back to his personal prison in the belly of the beast he called behemoth.