The Wandering Island Factory Read online

  Chapter 6

  At the end of his shift, he watched the news unfold live from the deck. It looked like two thin pencil-like tubes were slowly inflating in the distance. But scale was everything. On the two hundred acre floating island, they could easily be longer than blimps with the diameter of at least ten or twenty feet. The inflating tubes slowly carried the giant parasails a thousand feet into the sky as the island inched from view on what seemed like a windless day.

  He never would have believed it, but it seemed the most fitting way for an infant island to leave Hawaii, like the hundreds of teens who did the same things with surfboards strapped to their feet. The paper even linked the idea to one of its old stories about a local teen who parasailed to Mexico for spring break.

  The behemoth, on the other hand, remained stationary and was busy cranking out solid slabs again. Riding a different kind of wave, that of free publicity, they were getting flooded with orders, and it was looking like he could stay there indefinitely.

  If Gina would have him, that was.

  He watched it slip past the horizon, yet the sails remained visible (with binoculars) for an hour longer.

  When it was gone, he returned to his small room and checked his email.

  Two messages from his brother, one from his mom.

  His mom wanted him to come home.

  He couldn't afford the trip. In the states, what he made would be a small fortune, but Hawaii was very expensive, and he wasn't saving up as much as he should.

  He answered her last.

  Since he had it off and was so far away from home, Gina's family asked him over for Thanksgiving, and left Christmas open, if he could attend. The behemoth couldn't be shut down, not for a minute, without lava hardening in the tubes. It worked 24/7/365, and that probably meant that he would be scheduled for Christmas. Someone would, and he was still the lowest on the totem pole. It was a miraculous fluke that he had this week off.

  He got out of the cab and walked up the steps to the small apartment where Gina's family was staying. Protocol suggested he should have brought a fine bottle of wine, but he brought a huge pecan pie and a strawberry cheesecake. The wine probably would have cost him less.

  Gina's mother put an enormous amount of effort into the dinner, and it showed. The mashed potatoes were even put back into the oven for an extra ten minutes, just to brown the buttered tops before being covered in shredded cheese. The yams and cranberry sauce were the only things that came pre-prepared, from a can. It was all much better than he could have done, and Thanksgiving just wasn't Thanksgiving without those touches of home.

  The after-dinner conversation naturally settled on the floating island, with Nathan peppering Jason with questions.

  ". . . Buck, the engineer in my section, could answer that question better than me," Jason answered.

  Nathan elbowed Gina, "I told you to date Buck instead—"

  "But," Jason continued, "I asked the same kind of question. 'How do you anchor two hundred acres of drifting boat?' Well, the only answer I got, that I understood, was that it had something to do with the thermal generator, which I also don't understand all that well.

  I get how the behemoth makes power from lava, that's easy, it makes steam and shoots it past a couple of turbines. But somehow, the island's design makes hundreds of megawatts off of the small temperature difference between warm surface water and the frigid water hundreds of feet below. Anyhow, to get that much power from lower temperature differences requires moving large sums of surface water. Moving large sums of water is just what you need to keep an island stationary. It stays anchored as a side effect of how it makes electricity."

  "I don't know," Nathan said, "that sounds a little far fetched. I believe the internet stories about it being the first civilian ship with a nuclear reactor."

  Jason laughed, but had second thoughts. "You might be right, for all I know. If a billionaire can't buy a nuke, who can?"

  Gina returned from the kitchen with her mom, each balancing plates of pie and cups of coffee.

  Everything was going great, until the mother suggested, to the horror of everyone, that they move the table and play twister.

  A month later, Gina spent the holiday with her family, as only seemed right. And though they were very gracious and invited him to stay, he felt like a fifth wheel the whole time. The apartment was small for a family of four, plus him, and it always felt like he was crowding them. But he stayed and got to know the people Gina grew up with.

  He watched the late night news with Nathan.

  The floating island was still front and center.

  He would think that its ultra-green pedigree would have saved it from hippie protests. It didn't. It was made from lava and sand, yet because they altered its chemistry ever so slightly so that it didn't decompose into dirt after a few years, it was deemed a mortal sin against nature.

  Next on the protest list was its chosen source of power. The thermal generator. It was a banned technology for generating power because it artificially cooled the surface of the ocean. Ironically, the loudest protests came from global-warming advocates who claimed that the world was going to end because, "greenhouse gasses were WARMING the surface of the ocean TOO much!" As a ship intended for international waters, they could use whatever source of power they could afford, and neither had to ask for permission nor care about complaints. The company was even petitioning the UN, most likely for publicity reasons, for official country status for the island.

  The thermal generators seemed to make an enormous amount of sense. Anyone who owned a mobile island would naturally keep moving it to chase the seventy-degree weather, all year round, which was perfect for just such a machine. Besides that, refueling with oil or anything like it would be insanely expensive and complicated to say the least. Most of the vehicles planned for transportation on or within the island were some form of electric.

  Windmills and solar, what the protesters wanted, would have covered every inch of the island and would have destroyed its aesthetically pleasing appearance. Windmills would have added another complication by acting like giant sails.

  It seemed environmental protesters would protest anything that got their faces in front of a camera or in the local paper. Their beliefs didn't seem to extend much further than publicity and fundraising, same as the average politicians.

  Had they truly believed in global warming, they would have supported ANY technology that cooled the ocean; that it made a hundred fold the free energy of a windmill with the reliability of a nuclear plant, as the thermal design promised, should have been seen as a bonus. In a rational world, it should have looked like an answer to every environmentalist's prayer. But it wasn't. They only seemed interested in plans for cooling the oceans that CONSUMED large amounts of energy or closed businesses and punished people with lowered standards of living, all while paying more for energy and taxes.

  He wasn't an engineer guy, changing oil and the occasional brake job was about the limit of his usefulness. The news anchor lost him a little, but it made sense the way Buck explained it. Steam was the expanding gas used in turbines; the thermal generator simply used a different gas, or working fluid as he called it, and used pistons instead of turbines. Steam depended on temperature differences too. If a steam turbine vented into a planet filled with steam, like Venus, it wouldn't work. It only works on Earth because the cooler ambient temperature and lower pressure of this planet gives the steam somewhere to go. He still didn't understand the thermal design enough to build one or fix one if it ever got broken, but that was true of cars, too. He understood the standard combustion engine in the most general ways. Yet, even without holding such in-depth understanding, cars continued to work despite his ignorance. The thermal engine probably would work as well.

  Nathan, on the other hand, was fascinated and researched every aspect of it, and was confounded by Jason's ignorance of the intricacies of his own supposed occupation. But the reality was, Jason just sat and watched gauges, and rarely go
t a chance to do more.

  Or learn more.

  When he got the job, he had hoped that he would be intimately involved with every aspect of— but who was he kidding? He was just a high school graduate, nothing more. He was a laborer. He did grunt work. Low pay, by comparison, and low skilled.

  He learned more from late-night conversations with Nathan than he did from the job. But then, he only took the job because of Gina. Knowledge of anything else was an extra.

  To get back in the swing of nightshift, he returned to the ship a day early, with a new bottle of melatonin.

  Over Easter, he was scheduled to work. A part of him was glad to not be a burden on Gina's family. The rest of him sorely missed them, quirky mother and all.