Chapter 8: Second Revelations

Early next morning.

Time: Saturday, July 11, 2048 6:05 AM

Alvaro and Megan rode up the central power station of Porto Santo an hour after sunrise, in time to wave greetings with the departing shift. It was the first time Megan had been to this green-badge area, and the guards spent several minutes meticulously verifying her ID. This was the day Alvaro and she had reserved to talk about his work, and her mind was full of questions.

Megan had been thinking about what Alvaro had revealed to her for the last six weeks. She had found it frustrating at first when he absolutely refused to talk about anything work related while they were at home, even in the privacy of their bedroom. But on this point his mind was absolute, that green-badge discussions should occur only in green-badge areas. Megan gritted her teeth for a while, but then finally accepted the standard as appropriate and even apologized. She told him she never had a high-level security clearance before, and it just took some time to develop the correct mindset.

After going through several control gates guarded by armed men and women, Alvaro led Megan into the inner core of Porto Santo's source of energy. It was a small, delightfully cool cubical room, deep underground and very well lit and ventilated. It was almost vacant except for what Alvaro said were two dark energy generators at opposite ends of the room. They were a lot smaller than Megan had imagined. She had seen cows that were bigger.

The most amazing thing around the room was the almost complete silence. Most if not all of the soft white noise appeared to be coming from the ventilation system that was providing an ample amount of fresh air. Megan pointed this out to Alvaro.

"Yeah. The surfaces of the generators run about 10C below whatever the temperature of the surrounding air. We could use heaters, but decided just to keep the room well ventilated."

"What would happen if it did get very cold, if the ventilation stopped?"

"Huh? I don't know. These deep rocks are very good insulation." He raised his eyebrows playfully. "Maybe the air would liquefy."

"Yikes! That cold, really?!"

Alvaro just shrugged. "No, I think I was just joking. But caloric experiments are surprising difficult to predict. I don't know what the equilibrium temperature would be." He paused for a second and then continued. "We left this open space in the middle for repair work, or to be able to remove one generator and still keep the other running."

"Okay. And they're identical generators?"

"No. That would put the surfaces of their resonance spheres in the same location. The surfaces should absolutely not intersect with each other. The one on the left is G1, the slightly less powerful brother of G2. Their radii are 31 and 32 light-milliseconds, generating 75 and 80 MW electric."

"So, 155 megawatts of base power, wind or no wind. I knew you couldn't run the desalination plant with just the wind turbines. I knew it! Enough power to run all of Madeira!"

Alvaro nodded. "And for several years, we did just that, ran the entire country from these two small generators. After the flashlight, these and a prototype that is not currently in use were the first dark energy generators we built. These two were put into service the summer of 2042 and have been running flawlessly ever since, first on Madeira and now here at Porto Santo. We run these generators flat out."

"And what do you do with the excess power? Transfer it to Madeira?"

"No. There is a high voltage line linking the two islands, but it's only there as a backup for emergencies. There's a high capacity desalination plant at Ilhen na Cahleta. We use a process called multi-stage flash distillation. One megawatt will produce 100,000 liters of potable water per day, 100 MW is enough to add 1 cm of water over one sq km of farmland per day. We also disassociate hydrogen for the fuel cells. That's where most of the power goes."

"What's the island's power grid like?"

"A few key connections at high voltage. Otherwise Porto Santo is so small, it's a very simple system. The 3.6 MW of power coming off the wind turbines is at 50 Hertz and 690 volts, and that what we use for our primary feeder system. We use simple three-to-one step-down transformers for the 230 volt household current."

"And the cable to the main island?"

"The key connections are at 110 kilovolts. It's a European standard. The lines are rated at 1.5 kilo amps."

"AC?"

"Oh of course. You need to use high voltage to cut down on the transmission power loss. But there are also power losses reducing high voltage DC to low voltage DC. Simple transformers can do the job efficiently with AC. The 110 kV lines run at 16.67 Hertz."

Megan nodded, satisfied and happy there was something about this unbelievable system she could actually understand. "It's so incredibly quiet in here."

"Well, the turbines are spinning isolated in a vacuum, converting their rotational energy into AC through direct magnetic induction. There's really nothing in the system that makes any noise."

"So amazing." She smiled. "So, what now?"

"Well, I could show you the control room upstairs that monitors the turbines. After that, why don't I show you my office and I'll answer any questions you might have."

"Okay. Alvaro? I've been wondering how to do this. Could you just give me a layman's history of all this? When did you first get the idea of using dark energy like this? What was it like developing your program? Maybe a little light on the physics, a little heavy on the politics and practical impacts. And what are your future plans? Where is all this heading?"

"Yes. Those are all excellent questions. Okay." They shared a brief kiss, and then headed up the stairwell to the control room.

Twenty minutes later...

Megan smiled and spread her arms as she entered Alvaro's Porto Santo office. "Nice! Central AC, huh?"

"Well, it's not the only building. The school and hospital have AC, and your clinic too. And almost all the buildings at Funchal have AC, public and private."

"Oh, I'm not complaining. This feels great!"

They walked to some nearby chairs. Megan looked around. This was the first time she had been in her husband's Porto Santo office. "So how's it working out? Do you miss your labs on Madeira?"

He smiled. "Actually, I love this new setup. Back at Madeira, I wind up spending all my time working on the latest experiment. I've been neglecting the theoretical work. Here I've got my own small computers and lots of free time to think about problems that have been on the back burner for too long. It's a perfect setup!"

Megan settled down in a comfortable chair and nodded in encouragement. "So, the history of dark energy, and heavy on the politics."

"Right. Where to begin?" Alvaro walked to the window and stared out for a moment at the morning sun shining on the farmlands below. He sighed and came to his wife, sitting down beside her in a second chair. "I think to understand the politics behind all this, we should go back a dozen years, back to February of 2036."

"The Satan Bug?"

"Uh huh. The population of Madeira was completely different then Megan. It's difficult now to remember how crowded everything was, even here at Porto Santo, and it wasn't just the numbers. It was demographics. The impact of the endophage was tremendous. The A-strain of the Bug was almost universally fatal to elderly people. I remember the numbers. Before the plague at the end of February, our profile of 262,000 was 17% children, 49% working adults, and 34% retired. By the end of March, the 106,000 survivors had a profile of 41% children, 57% working adults, and 2% retired."

He paused for a moment and then continued. "I'll give them credit. Almost all the retired survivors reentered the work force, all who were able. Mortality for people over eighty was 99%. We went from almost thirty thousand to under three hundred in one month..." Alvaro sighed deeply and closed his eyes, leaning back in his chair and appearing to be asleep. Megan did not want to rush him. She waited patiently, her thoughts returning to her own memories of the terrible year of the Satan Bug.

The first reports began to make the news in mid February of 2036. There seemed to be some new form of influenza breaking out in Tel Aviv. The contagiousness of the disease was unlike anything ever recorded. Everyone seemed affected, at least to some degree. The defining characteristics of the disease were violent, uncontrollable sneezing and profuse sweating often followed by a high fever. People assumed the prolonged sneezing and sweating were the reasons for its remarkable power to spread. The people were only partially correct.

Within two weeks of onset, the influenza symptoms would begin to clear. This first phase would later be known as the propagation phase of the endophage. What followed next was the payload phase, a massive system-wide cascade failure of the human body, with the neural and endocrine system breakdowns as the primary cause of death.

In the coming months, it would be discovered that a completely synthetic self-replicating life-form had been released in Tel Aviv. Non-cellular but also not a virus, it attacked the "sealing wax" strands at the ends of human DNA chains. The afflicted person's DNA would begin to unravel from both ends, destroying the cells' ability to function and preventing replacement cells from being created. The body literally choked to death on itself, overwhelmed by the decay of the non-functioning cells and the lack of replacements.

Megan remembered her own high fever. She thought it the strangest experience of her life, burning with a fever of 40C and grateful for the misery. And the reason for the gratitude was the strain of the Satan Bug that affected her and most of the world, the B strain. Except for children, it was a less lethal version of the primary disease. And the lack of fever was strongly correlated with the body unable to fight off the phage. It was the people with the high fevers who survived.

For most of the world, the B strain resulted in 5% child mortality, 9% working adult mortality, and a 13% mortality rate for people over 65 years of age. A horrible scourge, but mild compared to the A strain lethality of 3% child mortality, 53% mortality in working adults, and an astonishing 98% fatality for people over 65.

While most of the world suffered from the milder B strain, the A strain ripped south down the east coast of Africa and east as far as Pakistan, moving faster than the world's ability to contain the epidemic. A dozen years later, most of the territories afflicted by the A strain had still not recovered from their descents into anarchy and feudalism. There was small comfort in the fact that surviving either strain provided immunity against the other.

Megan reached over and held Alvaro's hand. He opened his eyes and turned to her and said, "You know, I've been to several different cities in the West African Union. There's a universal belief there that the Israelis were developing the Satan Bug in some secret bio-weapons lab in Tel Aviv, and it somehow escaped."

Megan grimaced and muttered, "They think that, huh? Why am I not surprised? It's so easy to blame the victim, especially when the victim is already dead."

"No proof of course, but the belief has evolved into absolute truth. It's even a crime to suggest otherwise."

Megan stretched her arms and shrugged.

"You have no idea Megan how the plague changed us. We used to be a magnet for Europe's elite. You could buy a citizenship for two million euros, and tens of thousands of people did. Madeira was a safe, isolated haven for the world's elite. We were fabulously rich and incredibly crowded, heavily dependent on imported food."

"And then the plague came. Most of the new citizens from Europe were in the retired population. In a month they all but disappeared. And they left their tangible wealth behind, jewels, bullion, registered works of art. By Madeiran law, it all became the property of the State."

He paused for a moment, reliving the memories. "I was eleven years old. I remember lying in bed, burning up with fever. My mom and dad were both caring for me for a while. Their fevers weren't so bad. And then there was a long day when I lay in bed alone. I drank all the water they left me. Finally I felt so dehydrated, I forced myself out of bed near sunset... I found their bodies..." Alvaro gave out a long sighing breath.

Megan leaned over and gently kissed him. "I can't imagine how horrible it must have been."

"That very night, I had a most amazing dream. The whole core of singularity mechanics was laid out before me, all the key principles. I woke in a daze and realized I had to write everything down before it all disappeared. Then I collapsed. I recovered slowly over the next several days, nursing myself back to health. I went back to my notes. I couldn't believe what I had written. It was a fugue of genius. Honestly Megan, I don't think I ever could have developed singularity mechanics without those notes. The principles are so counterintuitive, energy densities that pull rather than push. There's so much subtlety in the equations."

He got up and stretched. "After the plague, the surviving members of government were fanatic about making Madeira isolated and self-sufficient. We already had the Gamesa wind turbines from Spain, but the summers were turning hotter and drier. That's our key growing season. We needed more fresh water for irrigation. I developed Golem as an undergrad at Madeira University. It was my senior thesis project. The government immediately classified my work. In principle, I could produce more power than Madeira could ever use. But in practice..."

"Yes? What was stopping you?"

"My understanding was too specialized. With the approval of the government, I started writing papers on the impact of my theories on cosmology. I was hoping stir up some interest that would guide my future research."

"And then you accepted at Princeton. Weren't you afraid revealing everything?"

"The practical impact is so non-obvious, that really wasn't much of a concern. My thesis readers were very old men. Their only thought was the cosmology. And with their help, I learned everything I needed to do to build G1 and G2. And in 2043, I learned how to expand the dark spheres by a factor of five. Our top three generators have radii of 161, 162, and 163 light milliseconds, right at the limit of what we're capable of."

"The jet! The jet is running on dark energy, isn't it?"

"Very good Megan! And Discovery too, but that's not what I was talking about. How did you guess about the jet?"

"Oh, a lot of clues. It pained you to talk about its performance. It was whisper quiet in the air. And you mentioned its fuselage is made out of carbon nano-tube mesh. That's also the receptor for you dark energy resonance, isn't it?"

Alvaro smiled at her in open admiration. "Exactly right. The jet has a 75 millisecond sphere that can transfer more than ten times the engine thrust directly into the fuselage. We can exert a pull equivalent to lifting 90,000 kilograms."