Chapter 27: High Tech's Cho Cho

Time: October 9, 10:35:49 AM

The massive bullet-shaped monorail came to rest exactly on time on Track-2 at the Tyre rail yard. The layover would be exactly 9 minutes and 11 seconds. As my royal guards studied the light crowd, I glanced up at an overhead display in the terminal and confirmed we were boarding the right train. The display read Local 10:45:00 to Sidon, which was the home township of the Nuclear Fusion R&D Guild. Yep, this was my train. After nine days of traveling, I found myself still blinking at the posted distance and arrival time, 11:16:09 AM. The 360 km trip to Sidon would take only 31 minutes and a handful of seconds.

The laborers of the Rail Operations Guild bowed deeply as we boarded and immediately escorted us to a private, spacious booth reserved for royalty. My guards and I settled into the plush leather chairs. The chairs were electronically controlled and automatically swiveled to face the front of the train in anticipation of the pending acceleration. In the few minutes left before departure, I turned and gazed at the township beyond the train's elevated platform. The view was of the sprawling laboratory complex of Tyre's Condensed Matter Guild.

I actually managed to get some living time in summer this year. My family and I arrived at Dakar on September 20'th, ten days before the autumn equinox in the northern hemisphere, and we found the weather and lake at our new home delightful. The climate was very dry, with highs reaching 30C each day but dropping below 15C at night, a perfect combination. The elevation of my new Cathedral is almost 1400 meters. It's nothing like the 4100 meter elevation of Qataban of course, but it is high enough to have the wonderful mountain swings in daily temperature.

And so I began my life as the Domine of High Tech's capital. The core of High Tech's power lies in a set of 27 townships, roughly arrayed in a 9 x 3 grid in the western half of the North American continent.

The southern run consists of nine coastal towns circling the Gulf, from Ariel on one end (located at the ancient site of Mobile, Alabama) to Ebla at the other end, the fabled "City of the White Stones", at the ancient site of Cancun, Mexico. There is a middle row of nine townships cutting across the heart of the American Midwest and Southwest, and then the great northern run which holds Dakar, High Tech's seat of power.

The northern run consists of nine towns from Baalbek (at the ancient site of Stockton, California), home of the Photonics Guild, to Neveh (the ancient site of Green Bay, Wisconsin) on the Great Lakes, home of the Nuclear Fission R&D Guild.

I was aware of course of the new rail system High Tech is funding for the North American continent. It's been under construction from before I was born, and now connects forty cities, with many of the links just completed within the last three years. There is still massive construction in progress to complete the integration with the Eastern seaboard.

The train sounded a one-minute warning chime. I checked my seatbelt and chair controls. Everything seemed in order. I left the default mode on for opaque windows starting at 15 seconds after departure. There was a slight sense of pressure as the train sealed, and then a final warning chime. My seat locked in the correct orientation with full computer control, and at precisely 10:45:00 the train departed.

Superconducting trains are known to be smooth, but this one was so gentle my view out the window was the only indication we were moving. In the first fifteen seconds, forward acceleration was ramped linearly from zero to 20% gravity. By that time, the train had moved 74 meters and was traveling 53 kph, an impressive achievement for something so bulky. But the real miracle was what happened next.

The windows darkened, and I was pushed back into my seat with 20% of my body weight for another ninety seconds. This was the train's primary acceleration pulse. The push was very noticeable but not uncomfortable. At the end of the ninety seconds, the train had traveled 9.3 kilometers and reached a velocity of 688 kph. Next there was a final fifteen seconds of terminal acceleration, a mirror image of departure, during which the forward acceleration was dropped linearly to zero.

Two minutes after departure, the train had traveled 12.3 kilometers and reached its cruising velocity of 741 kph. The ride was so smooth, it was difficult to detect even a vibration. The overhead displays mapping the train's position and status were the primary indications we were moving at all. We would cruise like this for 27 minutes, and then have a two-minute deceleration before stopping at the train terminal in Sidon.

Someday I have an idle fantasy of catching the express from Tehran to Neveh. The non-stop trip travels over 3,130 kilometers, taking you from the shores of the Pacific coast to the western edge of the Great Lakes. It departs precisely at noon and arrives in Neveh at 4:16 PM.

And where do the trains get the fantastic power required for these fantastic feats? Sidon! It was less than a hundred years ago that the breakthroughs were made in the new field of quantum harmonic physics. The nuclear fusion researchers at Sidon realized the new physics was pointing to a brand new power source for Earth, one that was sorely needed.

There is a quantum resonance at the 1/64 sub-harmonic for fusing simple hydrogen with the Boron-11 isotope. The reaction is completely aneutronic, producing three Helium-4 atoms with 8.7 MeV of kinetic energy. These high-energy charged particles generate the train's power directly through magnetic induction. And all this is made possible by the sub-harmonic resonance window far below the energies normally needed to fuse protons with Boron-11.

Within the train's locomotive, the engine's power source consists of a beam of 8.932 keV nuclear-spin-polarized protons hitting a stationary spin-polarized target of magnetically locked Boron-11 nuclei. Within the resonant energy window, the sub-harmonic fusion-capture cross-section is gigantic, billions of times higher than the non-harmonic values just outside the window. The resonance boosts the peak fusion cross-section to more than three orders of magnitude higher than the scattering cross sections. The end result is that the train is getting a 92% burn efficiency on its proton beam. Even with the inefficiencies of the beam accelerators and the inductive drives, net power multiplication of the engine is still over 400.

It's the ultimate power source. The inductive motors are still a bit too heavy for aircraft but are perfect for both train and base load power generation. Projections are that a 100% of the world's primary power needs will be done though p-b11 by the end of the century, when the last of the hydrogen / oxygen disassociation plants switch to p-b11 as their power source.

Eight days after my arrival at Dakar, I was invited to dinner by the Domine of Tehran (a member of my old Utility faction overseeing the Ship Construction Guild at the ancient site of San Francisco, California). High Tech scheduled an express non-stop Dakar to Tehran on October 1'st just for the occasion, the train skimming the outskirts of Biblos and Baalbek at full speed and completing the 972 km journey in one hour and twenty-one minutes. Like most people on the bullet trains for the first time, I tried making the windows transparent for a while. Like most people who ride the bullet trains, I doubt I'll ever try that again.