The Wandering Island Factory Read online

  Chapter 4

  In under six months, they had a flotilla of carrier-sized slabs joined together and all the rough spots sanded, pounded, and ground off. The water around the ship was spotted with floating gravel, like a speedboat's props ate a thousand Styrofoam coolers. Every day, villagers in small canoes came out and netted them out like leafs on a giant pool. The buoys and a twenty-mile long net kept their debris from washing ashore all across the island chains, but even that wasn't perfect. Storms could still wash a few over the nets. This was the state's main topic of complaint, debris.

  But to him it just looked like snow on the water.

  It was chemically identical to sand and lava, and no more toxic than that. Yet every day he watched a vigil of fifty or so on the shore waving picket signs in protest.

  Whatever. He was still getting paid.

  The flotilla crawled with hundreds of construction workers from all across the island chains. The behemoth made the blocks, but someone still had to put it all together.

  He watched as a tiny tug positioned the slab marked 18764 in giant painted numbers. Two cranes lifted it out of the water and onto the growing island as four modified tractor-trailers wrestled it into place. As they jockeyed it around, he saw that 18764 had been hollowed out and probably came complete with rooms and halls and trenches for pipes and such.

  The idea that the behemoth was capable of forming rooms and pockets was simply fascinating. Like the last piece in a puzzle, it all suddenly made sense.

  To survive hundred-foot waves meant that most of the living space would be INSIDE the island, with just a minimal amount of structures and landscaping above. Why take a messy, congested city to sea when you can take a virginal island paradise and build the city just beneath the golf-course grade sand and palm trees.

  The hollow nature of these upper pieces were a little more complicated to make and explained why it was consuming less lava this month, and correspondingly was producing fewer free megawatts for the mainland.

  A lava pipe even extended to the floating island to supply it with molten 'grout' to cement the blocks in place. The pours went on, day and night. He watched the workers crawling across the slowly forming island like ants swarming a grasshopper. The entire horizon was filled with these giant slabs. He looked at his watch, picked up his thermos, and descended into the bowels of the ship. He had a job to do too.

  "How big is it?" Jason asked at the lunch table.

  "Well, we only get the specs for the slabs, you understand. Back in the military days," the engineer said, "it was all hush hush. But this guy is very rich, and he doesn't want all the tunnels and passageways disclosed in any single document. In fact, this thing has several secret rooms, halls, and passages that the construction crew doesn't even know about. He'll have to jackhammer sections of wall out later just to access them. They have it set up in such a way that the only copy of the plans are on a flash drive that one of his staff oversees constantly. He's got a little of that Howard Hughes thing, if you ask me."

  Putting his fork down, Jason tried again. "Yeah, I get that, but how big did you say?"

  "Do you realize that if you added all of the carriers in existence in 2009 together, you wouldn't even come up with half the acres as this single, small island? I mean, just as an airport it would rank as a superpower, all by itself."

  Jason rubbed his eyes, it was like pulling teeth. "Yeah, ok, but how big is that?"

  "Two hundred acres, above. Sixty acres of offices and business beneath. Eighty acres of residences, twenty for utilities, ten for hydroponics, and another forty left open for future, but now designated as bulk storage."

  "Wow! Any idea what kind of price tag comes with something like that?"

  "Oh, that isn't all of it. It has a small runway for private jets, boat docks, cranes for loading and unloading. Two internal monorails, sixty elevators, a control tower, and—"

  "Yeah, big, got it. How much?"

  "It even has two of its own geothermal power plants of a few hundred megawatts or so, each. It pumps up freezing cold water from hundreds of feet down and uses the thermal difference between that and the surface temperature to make power, and air conditioning."

  Jason dropped his fork in his chicken potpie. "How much?"

  "Billions. With a capital B and ending in a capital S. Tens, or hundreds. And the next one will be even bigger. They are talking one, two, and even five square miles. Thousands of acres. Billions, boy, billions, reaching into a few trillion. All flowing past those little gauges."

  "It just seems like an impossibly huge amount for a big boat. I don't see how anyone can justify writing a check that—"

  "Square miles is big enough to land 747s, with enough room left over for casinos, prostitution, and drugs, all outside international law, unlike a regular island. The Trumps of the world can scratch that kind of money together over a few weekends, and that's just the obvious uses that a layman like me can see. I don't know what this guy is going to do with his two hundred plus acres. I think it's just going to be his corporate offices, but it's big enough for a research lab, too."

  "Wow. Tens of billions." Jason tried to work the math in his head. They could make enough blocks for these 'small' two hundred acre ones to crank out one or two islands a year. The bulk raw materials cost them next to nothing. Lava and sand. Tectonic plates did 95% of the work and supplied all the energy; they just mixed the ingredients. It was simply an unfathomable amount of money that someone was making. Someone other than those in this room, that was.

  But the behemoth itself was a multi-billion dollar investment, too. Both to build and design. Years of lucrative military contracts meant that the behemoth itself was more than paid for, this commercial stuff had to be all profit. He was jealous of the buckets of money getting tossed around, but he wasn't going poor here either. For just a helper, he was making some serious green.

  He shoveled down the rest of his meal, refilled his thermos, and returned to the bowels of the ship, notebook in hand.

 

  Gina was a complicated girl. Even in the tropical temperatures of Hawaii, she normally dressed in thin but long-sleeved clothes that covered most of her skin. The rare exception was surfing, but even then she wore a full wetsuit.

  Complicated, but not without reason.

  She had been molested by a gym couch, one of nearly two dozen children that were molested before he was caught. There was a side of her that believed she deserved it. That she had caused it. The coach was her first experience, and she hadn't dared get entangled with men since.

  She was Jason's age, early twenties, and had never dated, at all, in her entire life.

  It was sad in a way.

  No.

  Scratch that.

  It was horribly sad in every way.

  That coach had destroyed her life in an incredibly personal way, and all the judge did was revoke his license to teach and sentence him to six years. . . probation.

  That senseless sentencing from an idiotic judge only reinforced her misconception that she was responsible for what happened to her and the other girls.

  It was ludicrous, of course, but those thoughts were formed when she was ten, and had never left her.

  That she felt safe enough to be alone in a room with Jason was a major — Major — huge, big deal. It was a level of trust that was difficult for him to fully understand. But what he did know was he absolutely could never make the first moves.

  Two of the girls molested had committed suicide after a downward spiral of Springer-like escapades. Four were addicted to drugs and in and out of rehab.

  Few were living the normal lives they should.

  Gina might not be ready for sex, or anything close to it, even after a decade. But he still liked her. Hell, she was worth traveling halfway around the world just to see if something was there.

  She spent the night, when she wanted to. It took them longer to build a hundred acres of island than it took her to get used to holding hands.


  But he was prouder of the holding hands.

  She was a good person who bad things had happened to.

  He wanted to change that.

  She deserved that.

  He wanted to be that good thing in her life. He just wasn't sure how to do it.

  It was a delicate balance. He truly liked the girl, but his time here was not infinite, and one week with her every third week seemed to be flying by. He just tried to make the most of the time they had together. It would either be enough, or it wouldn't.

  He had too much time to think, staring at dials and taking meaningless notes nobody would ever see.