Chapter 6

Native Title Land 3408, near Harts Range, Northwest Territory, Australia

January 2062. It was the hottest part of summer in the Australian Desert. NT3408 is in the middle of the Great Australian Desert, about 450 km east-northeast of Alice Springs and 100 km southeast of Harts Range. A bleak and apparently deserted series of buildings was surrounded by a security fence that kept out only the rare wildlife and did nothing at all to exclude lizards and arachnids. It included a helipad and brief runway, inside the fence that read NT 3408 / Private / Keep Out, on a weathered sign near the sole gate. No one ever tried to use the gate. Only the existence of a pair of high tech electrical generating windmills turning in the nearly constant desert wind gave any indication that the facility was not abandoned. The winds in the Australian Desert used to be non-existent, but with the change in climate, winds were fairly constant and strong. If anyone had come, they would find a small family of aboriginals who lived there.

The guts of the 3408 facility was underground, fortunately for the livability of the residents. The family of aboriginals who pretended to live above were actually the security / camouflage for the place. They and the other twenty or so techs and engineers lived in very serious luxury, with every amenity you could think of – except the comforts of a nearby city. Every two weeks, a small jet would come and take all the residents who wanted a vacation to Darwin, about 1500 km to the north. The mini-vacation was a break from the underground life on the 3408 facility. And on Monday morning, the plane would return. There was no limit to the number of little vacations a person – or any of his family who might be living there at the time – could take. The residents – including the camouflage ‘residents’ – were extremely well paid, and the trips were free, after all.

For the last six weeks, no one had taken so much as a day off. Ms Soon, the Korean person who was the point of contact between 3408 and the rest of the world, wanted to know if anything was wrong. She video comm’d to 3408.

“No,” she was told by the person assigned to the radio that day, one Rafe Allerington, “We’re just very close to the end.”

“Ahh,” said Ms Soon. “Don’t work too hard. We don’t want to have anybody burn out.”

“Right-o,” said Rafe. “Gotta run. I’ve got a regenerator to rebuild. It burned out last night.” And he clicked off the radio.

Two weeks later, nobody had still taken so much as an afternoon nap. The weekly supply helo arrived with 16 crates of excess vegetables and a full ton of stainless steel bars; excess in this case being above and beyond what the facility would normally order. They never ordered any steel bars – that was all ‘excess.’

Ms Soon was on the comm watching the first live run of the device developed at 3408. Dr. Astrid M’Batu, a rather plump black woman who grew up in the Ga-Rankuwa suburb of Pretoria, South Africa, put a handful of carrots, a few cabbages, some spinach, and a half-pound of hamburger into the hopper in the back of the machine. She pushed some buttons on the front, and then the start button. The machine started to emit a high pitched whine.

She explained the process – again – to Ms Soon. “For this first live trial, we want to make sure all the raw materials are present in sufficient quantities. We only need something with the atoms we’ll need for the target product. All the atoms are in those raw materials. But all we really need is something that has the required atoms. We get iron and calcium from spinach but we could as well have gotten them from ore dug from the earth.