Chapter 69: Opal

THE HIGHWAY DEPARTMENT chose a stretch of I-80 that was in particularly rough condition between exit 35 and exit 42 for the paving test. This stretch had a reasonable side road to divert traffic onto without having to reduce to one-lane travel in each direction. They could close the westbound lanes between the two exits and then switch to close the eastbound lanes when the west had been repaved.

It was only a seven-mile stretch, but it would be the first true test of a highway that could show the value of the machine. The machine itself would cost over $1.2 million. But the estimated cost savings on paving one seven-mile stretch of highway would pay for the machine in a month.

They had to give a thirty-day notice on the highway regarding the future closing, so the test did not begin until mid-April. The team moved in to begin paving at 12:00 a.m. on Saturday April 17. They had used the time to assess and plot the route to feed into the AI. The intent was to pave both lanes and both shoulders of the highway westbound and then switch to pave both lanes and both shoulders of the highway eastbound.

One feature of this stretch was that it was paved in a concrete composite, so the deconstructed pavement would be used as the raw material for the new surface. This would significantly reduce the number of supply trips trucks would need to make. No asphalt needed to be removed, and no gravel needed to be imported. Only water and binder would be delivered.

Highway officials were nervous about starting the test in the dark, but AIM assured them the device could tell where the edges of the highway were and did not need daylight to function. Once the machine started, it was mostly self-sufficient.

While the reduction in supply trips helped smooth the process, it also slowed slightly. The deconstructed material had to be ground to a consistent size and the substrate had to be packed and evened out before the new pavement could be laid. The sound of the grinding echoed from beneath the overpass where the test began. In an hour, the obvious sight of new pavement began to stretch out behind the machine.

The test patch was approximately 1.75 million square feet. It took the device thirty days to completely resurface the road like new, including lane stripes. There was no pavement bump when moving from lane to lane. It blended seamlessly. The highway department was all too happy to close the eastbound lanes and move the equipment for another thirty-day closure.

A project of this scale would have kept crews busy for the better part of a year with traffic disruptions and lane closures if done traditionally. The cost would have been between $2- and $4-million per mile. The total cost of materials and labor for the four-lane highway completed in sixty days was $10 million. The order was firm. AIM would gear up for production of the monster machines and deliver by summer of 2033.

A surprising customer for the paving machine was a contractor who specialized in airport runways. The company ordered three of the machines with specific modifications that brought the price up to $1.8 million per machine. They specified their standard runway installation as being 10,000 feet long, 200 feet wide, and 12 inches deep. Divided highways were typically under fifty feet in width on each side of the divider and were laid at a depth of just eight inches. Even with the new material, though, the contractor insisted on traditional depths for international runways.

The manufacturing facility, which had found producing the sidewalk-size paver to be a very profitable endeavor, immediately began tooling up for the full-scale model. The facility would need to expand in order to produce the machine and required several new robotics for assembly. ARDC was happy to take the order for assembly line robots. These required considerably less intelligence than the finished machine.

A surprise customer was the Pentagon. With their experience of the military attempting to control and dominate their products at Open Cloak, they were initially cautious about entertaining orders from the Pentagon. The military had its own needs for paving and road-building. Working where there was no existing road to tear up and repave involved additional features and re-engineering. It was determined that the device would be more usable for the military if it was cut into at least two parts—one for surface preparation and one for paving. It made sense and the engineers were only too happy to start work on a new version of the machine that met the Pentagon’s specifications at a significant increase in delivery price.

All of this would take months to complete and cost several millions of dollars in development costs. It was time to spin off AIM and take it public to fund the expansion.

“It looks just like you,” Luke said. He wasn’t refe rring to the paver. Instead, he was invited to Henry’s office to view the holographic projection of his Forever Yours singularity. The team had managed to project the hologram in a glass cylinder.