Chapter 13

We spent a week on the southern half of South Island enjoying mountain hikes, jet boat rides, even a local race track, where we raced go karts. There was a beach excursion one day on the east coast. The Moeraki Boulders were very cool, just like the water. My power found a perfect sphere still buried in the hillside. I stored a copy of it, thinking it would make an awesome addition to a future garden.

We flew north to Wellington. There the plane would wait, as we boarded a huge boat. The private yacht began with fishing and kayaking in the magnificent blue waters of the sounds, bays, and reaches at the top of South Island. After that, we left South Island behind, cruising back to Wellington. The vacation complete, I conjured Kimberly back to her house, where she would wake up in her own bed with no memory, a nice thank you card for playing tour guide, and a stack of cash.

Val as Kimberly disappeared, returning as Val as Amy. The real Amy went back to storage. Our flight took us a different route going home, we flew to the tip of southern Japan, then across Asia to Zurich. I had considered making it an around the world flight, but my probe had already investigated and seeded pearls across North and South America. It was now investigating Africa, but I had no pearls in Asia, except a microscopic one in a solar panel I had given to Mr Po. That was now in Beijing, and being carefully deconstructed to see if they could replicate it.

My lawyers had a provisional patent on the design, even though very little of it was new in concept, they had never been put together quite this way. Just switching to the transparent circuitry of graphene would boost the efficiency of Chinese panels by 5 or 6 percent. But cost was keeping that from happening for now.

We were all very glad to get home. We were going to need a vacation after the vacation. Little did we know we were going home to a different world.

The day after I got home I went to the office, to meet with Adel. The property had been fenced in with interlocking Barkley Paper panels 3 meters tall above ground, with a pattern of 2cm holes in them. They had Barkley Paper posts, and went down five meters below ground, the posts were filled with concrete. The gate guard checked my ID badge, and then let us in, where Adele showed off the buildings, the inner perimeter road that the guards used, and the completed third building.

I got to work with Thomas driving trucks from the still rented secure warehouse, where he backed them in, and closed the door, twice a day, for a week, while I ‘built’ the solar panel manufacturing equipment. The equipment consisted of a tube where workers would add full sized graphene sheet rolls, sans cardboard. At the back was a large hopper for sand to be added, where an auger pulled it into the building, and dropped it into a deep pit.

The outer bin would need to be refilled every other day, but the pit it dropped the silica sand into would only need to be emptied once a week. There was a week’s worth of sand in the original steel building, waiting for workers to use a forklift, then drop the bags onto a conveyor belt that would take it into the hopper, and discard the empty bag. Thomas had designed it with european health and safety regulations in mind, as it didn’t require anyone to lift a 15 kilo bag by hand.

Inside there was no airlock, just five thin slots near the ceiling where a nearly complete solar panel would slide out. The mechanism produced one every minute, sliding thru the slot, where it slid down a rolling guideway, had a worker attach the power leads, and another worker add the aluminum border that protected the panel. It took about ten minutes to finish each panel, so each output slot had five workers. Two on one side that added the power cord, and the frame, and two on the other. Then the panel moved to the shift leader who ran a test to verify the panel was working, and pushed it into the labeler.

The labeler added a serial number to the panel on the metal border, a couple instructional stickers, wrapped it in plastic, and stored it into a box. Six panels to a box, two boxes per station per hour. Secondary crew collected the boxes, and put them on pallets, where they were wrapped, and moved to the original warehouse building. They also fed the labeler with new boxes, and stickers.

Unlike the graphene plant, the solar panel factory was designed to run 24/7. It was a nicely designed production system. The building had the roof racks ready to go, so the first three weeks of production got installed or stored for our own use on the roof of the factories. There was 30,000 square meters planned for the factories. The graphene factory was 50 x 50, with a second planned to be built against its back, filling out the 100 x 50 meters footprint.

The solar plant factory was 100 x 50 next to it. The next building would be my big structure building, which was 200 x 100 meters, and would sit across from it with a 10 meter concrete access road between them. The big structure building would have doors opening up into the field behind it, and towards the other factories. March 1st, the first panels started sliding out of the factory, from the five hoppers that I conjured the panels into. Each hopper had a two week capacity, but I only filled it up halfway, I was going to monitor it closely for the first week, looking for bugs in the system.

The first panel was wrapped in a big red bow to be mounted with a sign in Adele’s headquarters building. I proudly handed it to her in a startup ceremony we performed for the local media. The 88.8% efficient commercial production of the solar panel rocked the energy world, with the announced price of .5 francs a watt. We immediately had an order book filled through the end of the year, and had to stop taking orders.

March 3rd we had our first confirmed case of coronavirus in Zurich. Adele gave me a call and asked me to come in the following day. I sat down in her office, and she shut the door. “I know I’m not supposed to ask about the proprietary technology, but you said molecular assembly. I’ve got an idea, and I want to run it by you.”

“Go ahead, I’ll answer what I think is safe for you to know,” I told her.

“I know you said carbon makes up graphene, and that you use molecular assembly. I assume that the solar panels are the same way since the press kit explained that they were thin because of the tiny layers they were made up of, some only one or two molecules thick.

“My question, is there a limit on what molecules you can print with?”

“It’s technically printing with atoms to make molecules, but there is no practical limit. Provided I’ve got the source material ground fine enough, I can print any molecule.”

“Does that include drugs?”

“Yes.”

“What about vaccines?”

“Yes, but in both cases the exact molecular structure would have to be known. Feedstock for most organics would be simple, they are all chon,” I glanced at her blank look, I guess she had never read Frederick Pohl, “Carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, or chon for short. An atmosphere intake, and a bottle of water and I can make pretty much any organic drug, compound, etc. The problem is that four element molecules are pretty slow to manufacture. The solar panels have layers that bond to each other, but each layer is produced separately.”

“So if I gave you the molecular formula for cocaine, you could make that?”

“Or explosives, or jet fuel, or insulin. It just wouldn’t be worth the energy expenditure required. We are going to be using most of the 16 megawatts produced by the solar panels, it’s why I came up with them in the first place. I didn’t originally plan a solar panel factory, I want a big structure factory to play with graphene and Barkley Paper.”