CHAPTER 25
“Jewelll?” Jason said warningly, examining the home. “Should I check for three bears?”
“Do you like it?” Jewel asked hopefully.
“I . . . ” Jason said. “How? I’ve been checking out the progress in the drone footage.”
“I sort of was . . . editing,” Jewel said carefully. “It’s a surprise. For your birthday. You do remember it’s your birthday, right?”
“I . . . ” Jason said again. “How?”
“I started by talking with Mr. Kranhouse, helping him out with the IP on using flexmet to work with wood,” Jewel said, burbling. “Then I realized you would probably need housing at the salmon camp. I had to purchase a few items, they were cheap, I promise, total of fifty credits, and I got Gil to go along with the surprise. Is it okay?”
“I . . . love it?” Jason said finally. “Thank you?”
“You’re welcome,” Jewel said. “It really didn’t add a whole bunch of work time to the bots. I couldn’t have hidden it from you if it did.”
“Which, again, means the construction industry is in for a shock,” Jason said. It was still raining in the area so he pulled on his jacket and hat and grabbed his rifle before opening the door and heading for the house.
There was a portico overhang on the front door which was heavy wood and carved with a figure of Cthulhu. It had a brass door knocker hanging from its central tentacles. The door had a normal front door latch and Jason opened it and stepped into his new home away from the compartment.
There was a short foyer with pegs for jackets and a bench. He took off his hat, and coat, hanging them both along with his gun belt then sat down and took off his boots. No reason to tramp mud around a nice, clean new house.
The floors were polished wood while the walls were wood paneling and plaster with inset shelves for books or knickknacks. The fireplace was made from rough stone with mortar. The stones at the base were a type he didn’t recognize. There was no fire set up or firewood because it was getting into summer and the days didn’t really call for it. But it would be nice in fall and winter.
The light from the window on the polished wood gave it a warm, homey feel. There were curtains on the windows. It smelled like sawdust.
The curtains he didn’t recognize. Paintings on the walls he did. The furniture he did. Real Earth furnishings.
“How’d you get Tim to drop my couch and sofa?” Jason asked, looking at the worn furniture. “Not to mention my Ray Harm prints.”
“We had a drop going to the bay and had Herman come over and pick up one conex,” Jewel replied. “At night so you wouldn’t notice.”
“You are a sneaky little tramp,” Jason said. “I love it.”
“Can I show you around?” Jewel asked.
The dining room table wasn’t his. It appeared to be local manufacture, all wood for one thing. So were the expertly carved and formed chairs. Both appeared to be made from maple.
“Is that . . . ?” Jason asked, examining it.
“Mr. Kranhouse wanted to experiment,” Jewel said. “He made that in less than a day. He offered it as a birthday gift and with thanks for getting him wood again.”
Jason got down on his hands and knees to look under the table. Sure enough, there was the symbol of Withywindle, a willow tree over a small stream, carved into the underside. Mr. Kranhouse always carved his company’s symbol into the underside of his work.
Off the dining room, there was a small but well-appointed kitchen with hot and cold running water, cabinets and a wooden counter. There were even standard Earth faucets. Moen.
“One of the costs was a heating element for the manifold,” Jewel said. “Faucets and shower heads for the kitchen and the bathrooms. Things like that. The hinges are all flex and so are the toilets, sorry. I know you’re getting tired of flex everywhere but . . . ”
“It’s fantastic,” Jason said, looking at the sink. It was wooden. “Is this going to work?”
“Yes,” Jewel said. “It’s an Earth design that was rarely used. Think of it as the reverse of a wooden canoe. It may not last long but it will last until we can get one of rock or metal.”
Wood-lined pantry, still unstocked, with plenty of shelf space.
“The pantry has several flexmet items in it,” Jewel said. “And it’s a stasis pantry. It’s basically two coffins on the floor, flex behind all the walls and shelves, and two coffins on top. The combination, with a little tweaking, creates a stasis zone over the whole room. It turns on when you shut the door. But it looks like just a normal pantry.”
“Remind me to find stuff to stock it,” Jason said. There was already a basket of wild mushrooms, but it needed more.
Both beds upstairs were wood, a king and a queen. They had a rougher look than the dining room table and he suspected they were made by the bots. They did, however, have inner spring mattresses.
“Where’d the mattresses come from?” Jason asked.
“Those are yours,” Jewel said. “But the beds are new. Do you like them?”
“Love ’em,” Jason said, nodding. The rest of the furniture was from his house in Loganville.
There was a half bath downstairs with a full bath upstairs, both having smoothly finished wooden cabinets, sinks, and counters. The full bath’s shower was stone lined.
“Is this soapstone?” Jason said, running his hands over it. “From Olzon?”
“Yes,” Jewel said. “I used up most of the outcrop but there have been others found by survey and harvest teams . . . ”
“That’s . . . okay,” Jason said. “Great. Love the shower.”
The fixtures were, again, Earth manufacture. Somebody had had a complete Delta shower set they were probably going to install “any day now.” Either they or someone else had had a rain showerhead in their personal stuff.
There was a small anteroom off the main bath whose door had a half-moon carved in it. The toilet was flexmet.
“While there were some toilets on the market, the flexmet toilet can be a bidet toilet,” Jewel said hesitatingly, as if she wasn’t sure he liked it.
“Jewel,” Jason said, trying to figure out how to calm the AI. “You have once again lived up to your name. This is lovely. Wonderful. I love it and I’m overwhelmed by your gift. Does that cover it? I really, really like it.”
“Oh, good,” Jewel said excitedly. “I was worried about sneaking around behind your back, but . . . ”
“You wanted it to be a surprise and it was,” Jason said. “Power?”
“Battery room,” Jewel said. “Fully charged.”
Jason flopped down in his junk-store recliner and lifted the footrest.
“Ah . . . ” Jason said, shaking his head again and looking around. “Plaster?” he asked quizzically. That had just occurred to him. He couldn’t imagine somebody having that much plaster just sitting around in their house. Okay, maybe a plaster worker?
“One of the survey and harvest teams found gypsum,” Jewel said. “I had to have that lifted to the station and back down. Bots ground it up, mixed and smoothed. Tim approved it.”
“Tim approved it?” Jason said. “Tim? Approved lift? Get me that penny pincher!”
One of the concessions to modernity in the house was a large flexscreen over the fireplace. Tim’s face appeared, grinning.
“Like your house?” Tim asked.
“You approved mining gypsum for plaster?” Jason asked. “And lifting it to the station and back down?”
“It was on the way,” Tim said, shrugging. “If it had required a separate round trip I wouldn’t have. Jewel was really excited, though. Looks nice.”
“It’s fantastic,” Jason said, shaking his head again. “So, I set up Withywindle . . . ”
“Mr. Kranhouse is working with our designer on Brandywine,” Tim said. “Which is going well.”
“We could probably make these in kits,” Jason mused. “Precut everything and bring it to your homestead. Jewel, is that possible?”
“Very,” Jewel said.
“That’s another potential business,” Jason said. “When people want houses on the surface.”
“There’s pressure for that,” Tim said, nodding. “But the shipping situation is still bugged and while most people would like to see the sun and blue skies again, they’re less sanguine about giant bears and crocodiles.”
“Yeah,” Jason said. “Speaking of which: Do we have the thousand pack?”
“We do,” Tim said. “Scheduled to arrive tomorrow at about zero six hundred. Ready to catch some salmon?”
“As soon as we’ve got the gear,” Jason said. “Work starts tomorrow. In the meantime, I’m going to settle in and enjoy my house for the night.”
“Enjoy away,” Tim said. “And happy birthday.”
“Thanks,” Jason said as Tim cut the connection. “Do not let me forget Tim’s birthday.”
“I won’t,” Jewel said.
* * *
He wasn’t used to sleeping on his own mattress. It wasn’t a great mattress but it had been a long time since he’d slept on anything but flexmet or the ground.
The combination of sleeping in a bed and the excitement of getting started on the salmon run had him up half the night tossing and turning. So he was bleary eyed when Jewel awakened him for the cargo drop.
The thousand pack was a massive ship. That he was partial owner of one approximately ten times its size was suddenly real and relevant.
“Got the drop down?” Jason asked. “We need them along the river.”
“Your tractors are supposed to assist, yes?” the driver asked. He had a Slavic accent.
“Yes,” Jason said, yawning. Purple Lightning was not the greatest morning pick-me-up. “Let’s deploy.”
It took about fifteen minutes to get all the containers down and spread out. As the massive ship disappeared into the clouds, it was time to get to work.
The plan had already been worked out with some changes from the shrimp harvest. All of the obstructions on the river had been removed from the area by the bots using their tractor beams and a post had been sunk about two hundred meters out from the bluffs, a half a kilometer downriver.
An Alfred carried a thick line of flexmet down to the post and attached it, then the flex opened out into a wide mesh net. Too wide to stop salmon. It wasn’t time to start bringing in the salmon yet. The flex already had steel weights in it and it deployed to the bottom without incident.
Other posts had been driven into the river bottom to form the beginnings of the funnel and the last portion was tied off to a post driven in opposite the midstream post with the entire net forming a V.
The rest of the morning was spent trying to figure out the best way to get the salmon, as undamaged as possible, out of the river and into the conexes.
Various ways worked well enough, but “well enough” wasn’t what he was going for.
During lunch he had an idea and tested it.
The conexes were virtually invulnerable to anything, especially water, so he simply submerged a conex into the river. Holding it in place was a bit of a trial but by lowering the sides he had water flowing into it. The salmon, following their instinct to follow flowing water, headed into the conex. The problem was getting them into the cases.
He finally had a system where the salmon would swim into the cases. He opened up the downstream side of the conex as well as having the cases, which were nose to tail, open up their front and rear and connect their flexmet walls to form a tunnel. The upstream side of the conex was a screen of waterholes. The cases created tunnels for the fish, packed in by the V of the nets, to swim upstream, following their instincts. The front-most cases of the conex only had small holes the salmon couldn’t fit through. As the salmon reached the barrier, they had difficulty turning around and were trapped. Salmon would pack themselves into the cases. Once the AI sensed the cases were full, a tunnel would close up. Fish would then try to find another path. And so, the conex filled.
Once that happened, the conex would close up and start to rise. It didn’t have enough power by itself to lift the full mass out of the water but could with the help of a couple of Alfreds. During the lift portion, the cases and the sides of the conex would open up holes for the water to drain out. As it drained, the cases would go back to stasis and once the water was mostly drained the conex would close up and go to stasis. Finally, a single Alfred could carry it to the “full” area of the complex.
Job complete.
Jason had had to occasionally open up the nets to let the mass of salmon through. When he repeated the system, faster this time, the salmon still built up too much. The river was so thick with fish it looked as if it was boiling. He opened up the main nets to let some through and then opened up side openings on the funnel.
“How long to fill a conex?” Jason asked.
“Ten minutes, more or less,” Jewel said. “Probably get faster.”
“Math?” Jason said. “Carry the three . . . ”
“Six conexes per hour,” Jewel said. “One hundred sixty-seven hours. Divided by twenty-four, seven days. A week for a thousand-pack pickup.”
“Or a half a week with two conexes,” Jason said. “There’s enough fish that we could run two conexes.”
“We could,” Jewel said.
“Hell, we could run ten but I’m not going to get that greedy.”
Jason kept the net shortened while they worked on a two-conex system. With the shorter net, it took longer to fill both conexes but when they had the system down, he completed the net again and waited for a couple of cycles. By adjusting the funnel to switch back and forth they had an almost continuous rhythm with a conex lifting out of the water and onto the filled area every five minutes.
“Twelve conexes per hour,” Jewel said. “Three and a half days for a pickup at this rate.”
“We’ll see if the rate keeps up for a day,” Jason said. Setting up the perfect system had taken all day, and the birds were singing their evening calls.
Bears were in evidence on the far bank, diving into the river to hunt for salmon. The bluffs on this side probably kept them away. Sea eagles, similar to bald eagles but with a red head like a woodpecker instead of white, were squabbling over salmon with them. Jason even saw a tiger in the water hunting the fish.
Everything ate salmon. He knew what he was having for dinner.
* * *
Cade hid in the playground equipment. By day, children came out to hurry down the slide, bounce on the bridge, and dawdle on the treehouse-like platform. By night, the area was quiet, and the playground equipment gave him a place where he could hide and keep an eye on the largest group of his planting beds.
He crouched at the top of the equipment, where both an enclosed slide and a fireman’s pole headed for the ground. The waist-high wall kept him hidden, as long as he crouched.
It was his third night on watch. He was waiting for vandals.
Someone kept messing with his garden. Specifically, with this one, which made the whole thing feel personal. He’d debated taking a gun out of stasis for this, but he thought that if he accidentally shot a hole in the space station wall, Mabel would leave him, even if the robot or alien overlords didn’t make him walk the plank.
He leaned on the plastic wall of his watchtower. Resting on his knees in the warm, quiet darkness, he caught himself drifting in and out. He shook his head, trying to keep himself awake.
And then he saw the vandal.
The man staggered in from a secondary entrance. The corridor on the other side of that door led to a street with two bars on it, and the vandal walked as if he was an enthusiastic customer. He wobbled from step to step, but he lunged and reeled toward a cluster of four of Cade’s beds.
Cade waited, wishing he could see the man’s face, or the details of the clothing. In the near-total darkness, the vandal was just a silhouette.
The man fell on a bed of cabbage. He tore through with methodical speed, ripping up one head after the other and tossing them aside. At the same time, he kicked with his feet as if wading into surf, sending up sprays of loose dirt and fertilizer.
When he reached the end of the planting bed, he stepped into the adjacent bed. He turned, pointing his back toward Cade, aiming to devastate the second bed by charging the opposite direction.
Cade slid down the fireman’s pole to the bed of rubber chips at the bottom. He didn’t bother to muffle the sound of his drop, or the sound of his boots. The vandal heard him coming and straightened, and then Cade planted a kick in his backside. He spun, off-balance, putting up his fists, and Cade punched him in the jaw.
The vandal sat down.
“Son of a bitch,” Cade muttered. “You’re gonna put all the soil right back where you found it. You’re lucky I don’t make you eat the fertilizer. Dummy, take a look at his face and get a picture.”
Cade held up his phone and turned on his headlamp, illuminating the vandal, sitting on his backside in the dirt.
“It’s your son, Sam,” Dummy said in its sexless voice.
“Go on, Dad,” Sam said. His voice was hard. “Hit me again. What would John Wayne do, after all?”
“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” Cade asked.
“What the hell do you think I’m doing?” Sam shot back.
Cade had no words.
“That’s right, Dad,” Sam said, “I’m doing nothing.”
Rather than beat his son, Cade growled without words and stomped away.
* * *
The next morning Jason looked at the process again. He’d had some thoughts overnight about it. It was efficient, but not efficient enough. There was a reason he was a good logistics guy and this was really just logistics in his opinion. Most efficient way to move the most material in the least time.
Two Alfreds were necessary to lift one of the containers onto the dock to drain, so he had to keep at least two on that job. And Herman was supplying power to everything, so he was sort of locked in.
Bottom line, he needed more bots. But he wasn’t going to ask for anything. He’d figure it out.
He started by having two of the Alfreds get to work extending the dock along the shoreline, upstream from the current construction. He added pilings out from the dock as well, starting with one to help stabilize the conex that was in the water. Five more of those as well as the extended dock.
Flexmet was necessary for the connections between the dock and the pilings as well as pontoons to support the dock. He’d added flotation when he’d decided to just use the conexes for traps; their weight when they first hit the dock was massive.
He briefly broke Herman away from supplying power to line up some empty conexes. He determined that it was possible to use flex to extend the tunnels made of cases from conex to conex.
It took all day for the bots to finish the pier while he strode nervously around the compound. It should work . . .
* * *
The next day with the pier complete, long enough to handle five conexes at a time, he had the bots lower five preconnected conexes end to end.
Each was connected to the midstream pilings as well as the pilings for the dock. Flexmet in fine nets was connected between the mass of cases and the walls and ceilings of the conexes. More flexmet was connected between the cases of one conex to the next in line, creating a continuous fish tunnel five conexes long. The upstream conex was set up in the same manner as the single conex they’d been using to that point, with a wide mesh to let water flow into the cases.
Last, the case tunnels were hooked up to the fish trap nets.
Jason couldn’t actually see the fish filling the conexes but Jewel had learned to use the impact sensation of the flexmet of the cases to determine when they were full. As the lead case filled, first the cases were closed and put in stasis, then the entire conex was closed and lifted from the water, detaching the flexmet connecting to the previous conex which became the lead. The conex drained on the pier then was lifted up to join the full conexes waiting for lift.
There were some bobbles. Some of the salmon were cut in half when things closed. Some escaped. But in time they had a five-conex system working efficiently.
He let that run for two hours.
“How long now?” Jason asked.
“We’re going to need the thousand pack tomorrow,” Jewel said after a moment. “Morning. And we’ll have to suspend operations or get a new set of conexes by . . . zero one thirty or thereabouts. We’ll fill a thousand pack in a twenty-five-hour period, more or less. One day.”
“Down from seven,” Jason said. “Send that data to Tim.”
* * *
“A thousand pack a day?” Tim asked, incredulous. “A day.”
“Who’s the best, Tim?” Jason asked, grinning. “It’s just logistics the way I look at it. The most efficient way to get the material loaded in the least time. Is that too much salmon?”
“There’s five hundred million people in this system,” Tim said. “And they all eat fish. We’ve been advertising the salmon run. There’s demand. For what we’ll be getting for it, we can afford to store any if it saturates the market. But . . . a thousand pack a day?” He shook his head and chuffed like a silverback gorilla.
“Who’s the best?” Jason said.
“You’re the best, buddy,” Tim admitted.
“And this isn’t the only river that is having a run,” Jason pointed out. “Now that the system is designed . . . ”
“Maddie, tell Larry his job just got more complicated,” Tim said. “And get me Kevin. We’re going to need several teams . . . ”
“And now I’ve worked myself out of a job,” Jason said. “Again.”
“I’m sure you’re going to create more headaches for me, Kevin and Larry before you know it.”