Lux 5 interstellar lux a.., p.14
LUX-5: Interstellar (LUX and the New TECH), page 14
Chapter 7
Population Pressures
The captured Americans got access, like the rest of the colony, to the videos from the surrendered soldiers. These videos were without sound but viewers watching grimaced and jerked back at the savage animal attacks. The video of the lightning strikes and the subsequent stampede made everyone surprised any were left alive.
All the wounded were stabilized, and the colony prepared to send the captured home. Most wanted to go but twenty-three of them said they’d like to stay if they’d be treated like immigrants. Twelve of these wanted to travel to Earth and arrange for their families to come. Lux talked to them.
“I understand you twelve want to stay if your family were here too. I can arrange for you to talk with them and have one of the Mars Embassies to help them arrange everything,” Lux said.
“I wouldn’t trust you setting up everything without talking with them,” one man said.
“Okay. We’ll do that,” Lux said.
“Do what? How can we call them? We’re lightyears away from them,” the man said.
“So. Just because your government can’t do it doesn’t mean we can’t. I did invent all this tech no matter what your government told you. I even helped manufacture most of that tech the US uses. Bet they didn’t mention that either,” Lux said.
“They didn’t mention that. They said you stole the tech they invented,” the man said. “I’m beginning to see a pattern here. They lied to us a lot. How do we do this?”
“You, tell me the contact information and we place a call routed through Mars to one of our embassies in Fiji, Panama, or Switzerland. We’d use regular call services from there. They have to get to one of the embassies, but we get them the rest of the way here free of charge,” Lux explained. “Those wanting to contact their families should come with me. I’d suggest you tell them not to let anyone know they are planning to immigrate, or the government might want to stop them.”
◆◆◆
Olivia Martinez got a call from an unlisted number, and she yelled in the phone, “No. I don’t want any insurance and I don’t want to buy any supplements and I don’t want to sell my house. Take me off your solicitation list!”
“Olive. It’s me, Noah. Don’t hang up. This is long-long distance call from Sirius System. Sell the place and go to the Mars embassy in Panama – yes there is a Mars embassy there. I want you to pack Liam up and head here. Sell everything at a yard sale and you don’t need any money. This place is wild with very little restrictions. Turn on your video. Hi, baby. God, I’ve missed you. They give you and Liam a ride to Mars and then it’s three days or so to Green,” Noah Martinez said to his stunned wife. “They actually want families here.”
“What about the military? You’re not going to reenlist? I thought the Space Force was your dream,” she asked.
“This is way beyond Space Force baby. This is the real deal. I can’t talk a lot about it, but I’ll send you an orientation packet. Put any money you make from selling the house into an investment account at a big bank in your name so you can have access to money in case you need it in the future. The education here will be better than anything Liam can get in Santa Fe high schools. I need you baby. I’ll call weekly if I can and you let me know how you’re doing and if you need help from the embassy with paperwork or anything. Gotta go, babe. Talk soon. Love you,” Noah said.
“Bye, darling. Love you too,” Olivia said and sat there stunned. She knew he was going to that planet because he had gotten her a message in spite of the fact that it was top secret.
Other calls didn’t go so well as the people called didn’t believe their spouse or didn’t think it was real. Some thought it was a DeepFake video and a cruel joke. A couple of weeks later the Ore-IV was loaded with returnees from the captured soldiers, a few disgruntled immigrants, and Marines on rotation from Mars. The ship was jammed but everyone was in a good mood. The ship would go directly to Panama unload and pick up any families. No digital storage devices allowed the captured soldiers to show the planet, but all were allowed to talk with their families.
The news and social media were awash in the story of the returned prisoners because video recordings of the prisoners explaining how they had been ordered to kill and take over existing colony were played. The Russian civilians explained how their military had colluded with the Russian military to take over the planet and split it north and south. There were some beautiful scenes of the landscapes of Green with herds of animals and beautiful oceans and rivers and mountains. The media outside the Panama embassy was huge and they focused on the Ore-IV landing and disgorging the volume of American soldiers.
There were calls that the Space Force soldiers involved were traitors, and they weren’t recognized as prisoners of war because this wasn’t a declared war against Mars or Green. There were calls for total war against Mars and Green. There was a United Nations resolution proposed to sanction Mars for attacking Earth ships but that was vetoed by the Security Council. There didn’t seem to be much traction to attack Green but there were efforts to fund expeditions to ‘exploit’ the resources without agreement with anyone on the moon. Same old same old.
◆◆◆
Planning The New City
The new immigrants were screened through the AIs and housing was bulging at the seams. Prissy came walking jauntily into Lux and Igor’s workshop. Lux grinned hugely.
“Hi, gorgeous lady,” he said as she sauntered up and kissed him on the cheek. “Where have you disappeared to the last couple of weeks? I’ve hardly seen you around.”
“Hello,” she said with a twinkle in her eye. “I’ve been busy.”
“Morning Captain Hunnicutt,” Igor said.
She nodded at Igor. “I solved y’all’s problem.”
Lux was taken aback a bit. “How’s that?”
“Planning the colony expansion. You know. The planning to handle the planning,” she said.
“I give up on understanding females. Would you explain that to us? We’re stuck being clueless males,” Lux said.
“I’ve been working with the AIs to plan the New City. You may have noticed I’ve absconded with 150 of the robots and most of the Russian military vehicles and the heavy machinery. I’ve also been running the additive manufacturing equipment non-stop. We need ten times the feedstock for the 3D printers in metal and plastic,” Prissy said.
“What have you been up to?” Lux asked focusing on her and saw she was wearing a lifter. She seemed to be briming with excitement as she placed a lifter on the floor.
“I’ve been having the AIs compete with each other to design our new city near the lake about ten kilometers from here. We’ve been watching what you two have come up with too and incorporating that into what we’re planning,” she said.
“Our AIs know a lot about construction, but don’t you think humans should plan what we want? You know about those vacant (ghost) cities the Chinese built during some of the easy credit periods. They were totally vacant and are only now being partially filled. There were 64 million unoccupied dwellings. We don’t want that,” Lux said.
“Exactly. I didn’t want to build anything we didn’t need so the AIs needed to learn about what humans need so I told them about games that taught that. There is tons of insight built into different games so I had them get the source code from a lot of popular new and old games. We downloaded it through the Mars embassies on Earth – we hacked a lot of companies, and a lot of that stuff is better protected than the banks. That’s kind of a low bar though,” Prissy said.
“Which ones?” Lux asked. “I played some of them years ago.”
“Me too,” Igor said. “Yes. Serbia had simulation games too. Don’t imagine that America was the only place with simulation games – those are worldwide.”
Prissy laughed. “I concentrated on some of the better rated games that had insights even if the graphics were poor. “You’ve heard of SimCity and all its spinoffs later games. Those have been around since before the turn of the century, way back in 2000 and before. They learned a lot from that and started changing their designs. Then I added the Anno series: Anno 1800, Anno 2070, and Anno 2205. There is room for expansion and upgrades. They deal with upgrades. The citizens’ happiness is displayed by citizens traveling around the city. The citizens abandon the buildings and leave the area. The 2205 lets them build cities on the moon or the polar regions. The graphics are pretty good.”
“That would certainly give some insights. What else did you have them do?” Lux asked intrigued.
“I had them work with Aven Colony. It is a game which involves building a growing colony on alien worlds,” she explained. “It’s simplistic but you have to solve problem like infections and asteroid strikes. Then I got them to use The Colonists and Surviving Mars because the first one uses robots and the second use drones respectively. I had them absorb a few more before I had them do anything for real.”
Lux crossed his arms across his chest. “What do you mean before you had them do something for real? What have you done?”
“Done. Done! Now you’re making me mad. I started building the new city,” she said with her arms crossed tightly across her chest now too.
“Anna. Show me your plan for that new development,” Lux said.
“No,” Anna said. “It’s a surprise and I promised Prissy, I wouldn’t show you and none of my sisters will either.”
Lux was floored. Anna had never refused to do anything within her power. He was at a loss for words.
Prissy leaned over and picked up the lifter harness and handed it to Lux. Prissy mumbled something into her comm. Robert and Rodney stepped in also wearing lifter harnesses.
“I take it we’re going to see the new development?” Lux said.
“Yes…to see what I’ve done,” Prissy said with a sniff and an upturned chin as she walked out.
◆◆◆
An Engaging Tour
The four of them headed out to the new development. Lux wondered what Prissy had gotten into by doing construction already before he had approved it. He was a little offended that she had started work before he had told her to do so but they were having a housing crunch that would only get worse. He was having second thoughts about being mad at her. She had pricked his ego he thought. That was it…punctured that swelled head of his. Humph, he should be happy. Be happy with whatever she shows you, he thought.
Good grief he thought as he saw the size of the land that was being developed. There were vehicles pushing plow blades and the Pod had a weird emitter attachment on the front that was floating over the surface and making a hard road surface with roadway marking embedded as it floated along. Lux insisted that they go down to a section of the fully finished roadway. He pointed down and flew down to the surface.
He bent over and it was concrete – sort of concrete. It felt like some of the stuff he had produced in the lab, but it had lines painted on it – no – embedded into the surface. This had bike lanes painted on it. Wow! This must be a residential section he thought and saw where roughed in sewer and waterlines had already been run to every lot on the street. He turned to Prissy as he saw her land beside him while Rodney and Robert stayed a few meters up in an overwatch position lest they be surprised by animal denizens.
“You are using the designs that Igor and I have been designing. It works…wait. Won’t you have to dig up the road to hook up…oh!” he said finally getting a direct hit. “You’ve laid out basic infrastructure that we can just hook into when we expand. Wow! …and you’re testing the construction techniques we’ve been designing,” Lux said amazed. “Show me everything. Are you testing different building styles?”
Prissy pranced forward. “Come on, silly. Did it hurt your little feelings that we started ahead of you?” She grinned and flew ahead.
Lux raced up beside Prissy, but it was hard to hear over the wind noise. She pointed down to another section of the cleared land. He recognized the designs immediately and they landed near the circular concrete. “A water treatment plant designed to be expanded to handle a lot. How many users?”
“Anna says this would easily handle up to two million people,” Prissy explained. “We have graduated volume sizes to start, and we scale up as the need arises. We’re on a higher elevation than the city but we pump water running from the lake up into that reservoir with the meter thick concrete shell. The lake water is pretty pure and doesn’t have all the forever chemicals like on Earth, so we don’t need much treatment to filter it and kill the bacteria. We would add fluoride in monitored levels to prevent tooth decay.”
“You have the water mains already made, don’t you?” Lux guessed. “You made most of them from the concrete designs we just finished, didn’t you? I bet you used the pervious concrete on large areas, with high porosity to allow water from precipitation to pass directly through to reduce runoff. You used quicklime with the underground concrete channels and pipes, didn’t you? We used some in our testing weeks ago and it was self-healing when cracks formed,” Lux said.
“Yep,” Prissy said. “Anna was proud of getting that to work. That piping will last 1,000 years like Roman concrete.”
“Sewage treatment plant downwind of the city?” Lux asked.
“Yes and no,” Prissy answered. “We have a small one designed and built but we decided on a design change that would change how we handle sewage and garbage. Guess?”
“Guess? Did you decide to use plasma arc waste disposal to turn the garbage into high purity hydrogen and precipitate out the metals and ceramics. That’s pretty complicated. What did you do with the human waste products? Those are pretty complicated,” Lux said.
“That was all Anna’s work because she thinks in the box – get it,” Prissy said with a grin at her pun. “She isn’t hung up on how we’ve dung it in the past…she’s not human…no stigma,” Prissy laughed at her pun again. “Anna designed a compact disintegrator and a hydrogen storage device that temporarily stores the hydrogen produced and sends it through a meter to central storage. Each producer gets a small credit from the waste they produce, and the output lines are much less costly to manufacture, install, and maintain.”
“What has been dung in the past?” Lux said with a grin. Robert laughed and that set Rodney off. Both their bodyguards laughed.
“Let go see the demonstration builds. I had the robots build several example homes, apartments, stores, restaurants, and a spaceport plus government buildings. Let’s look at an example farm. It’s pretty far out there so everyone keep your eyes open for predators,” Prissy said.
They flew to the outskirts of the new city and landed near an ultramodern ranch home and barn built out of concrete and glass. The barn looked large and sturdy and looked like a classic barn.
“How did you make the glass? We were struggling with finding sand to make it. We had enough of the chemical additives or could make them easily. Are the fences made out of wood? Oh! I see you’ve made them wood textured,” Lux said. “How in the world did you put together all this in a month?”
“Anna, Annette, and Amy plus all the robots. We had 200 robots working at night and drones to drive away predators. They don’t rest. They don’t complain. Having two hundred robots is like having more than 600 humans. They don’t take smoke breaks, coffee breaks, lunch or personal days. No one takes sick days. If you timed humans, you’d only get 80% effort of their time at the very best. Anna and the AIs could easily run hundreds at once. The robots are stronger and faster than humans too,” Prissy said.
“Did all the construction work out? We weren’t sure about some of the techniques we were planning,” Lux asked.
“Oh, hell no,” Prissy said. “We had walls collapse. Glass with bubbles. Glass that cracked. Waste disposals that disintegrated the holding tanks or that blew up. We learned a lot from our failures. We built all our demo buildings for the ads we’ll use to entice immigrants to come here. We will let them pick the designs they want, and we’ll deliver the supplies. They won’t get teams of robots though – we’ll have them stay in some temporary housing and spend months building or supervising their builds. We’ll train them but just giving them finished buildings in many cases would leave them abandoned soon afterward. They wouldn’t have an investment of their time. They have to make it their home, or restaurant, or business, or job.”
“That’s smart. I wondered how we’d do that,” Lux said. “They get 200 Hectares of land (almost 500 acres). Residential homes get a little over 4,000 square meters (about one acre) of land. Apartments in the city are two bedrooms or larger. Restaurants are small, seating eighty patrons. We will have to manage our logistics so the supply of foods and resources can keep businesses stocked. We will have to deal with tourists like we did on Mars, but we won’t have to teach them not to run out of air. We’ll just need to teach them not to be eaten.”
They started to take off and Lux heard Robert say, “Hey, boss. Take a look at what we’re seeing.” Robert was pointing toward the west.
“What is it?” Lux said and looked to where Robert was pointing. “What is that, Prissy?”
“That’s going to be the spaceport,” Prissy explained. “We only have the concrete pad to support the ships currently, but it’s built to take any size and load we’ve conceived. We haven’t built the hangars or the terminal. The road to the city is complete however because we got that road building attachment worked out. Let’s just fly over it because there’s a lot more to see in the city.”
They flew over the area designated for the spaceport and it was huge. “Good grief. How long did this take you to pave?” Robert asked.
“We did this in a day using the Pod with the attachment. Once it turned on – Anna could adjust colors for all lines and depth. This was done fast because it set up to drain with no standing water to accumulate. It will also handle extreme temperature changes and heavy compressive weights,” Prissy explained. “Let’s go to one of the four-bedroom homes. This way…” she said and sped off with the three of them flying behind.
