They were coming up on a steel gate with a short stretch of fencing on either side to prevent casual drive-arounds. The gate was closed, but Riley wasn’t slowing down. As they got within a hundred yards, it opened automatically, revealing a new stretch of paved roadway beyond. A white SUV labeled SECURITY stood near the gate with two uniformed Indians inside—both had call-outs over their heads.
Riley exchanged waves with them, and there was a slight bump as they passed through the gate and onto pavement. Then the road was smooth—and suddenly quiet.
“The Daemon financed this.” Sebeck turned to her. “Didn’t it?”
“The Daemon’s economy is powered by darknet credits, Sergeant. Imaginary credits are all that money is.”
“But there’s a theft at the heart of it.”
She thought about it and nodded slightly. “Yes, the darknet economy was seeded by real world wealth. Wealth that was questionable in origin to begin with. Here, it’s being invested in people and projects that have begun to return value—not in dollars, but in things of intrinsic human worth. Energy, information, food, shelter.”
“But originally from theft.”
“That could be said of a lot of things that are now admired.”
The van followed a ruler-straight line through a series of ongoing construction projects—stark, windowless buildings, pipes, electrical lines, all of them leading toward the large tank being constructed in the distance, a couple of miles away still. It was enormous. They passed pickup trucks and minibuses moving workers—more than a few with D-Space call-outs above them bearing the mark of the Two-Rivers faction.
“So what’s this ‘real project’ you mentioned—that water tank?”
“It’s not a water tank. It’s a fifty-megawatt power station that will generate enough electricity to supply a hundred thousand homes. What you’re looking at is just the first three hundred feet. When it’s done, it will stand sixteen hundred feet tall and two hundred sixty feet in diameter.”
Sebeck whistled and peered through the windshield.
Riley gestured with one hand, and suddenly a completed, life-sized three-dimensional wire model of the proposed tower sprang into being in D-Space miles from them—rising sixteen hundred feet into the air in glowing spectral lines.
In spite of himself Sebeck smiled and turned toward Riley. “That’s incredible.” He looked back at the tower as parts of it began to animate, showing red arrows representing wind currents flowing in at the base and up through the tower’s shaft and out the top.
Riley aimed her finger, and a glowing pointer that must have been thirty feet across appeared miles away in the fabric of D-Space. She pointed at the heliostat array closer to them. “The problem with parabolic mirror stations is that they don’t produce much energy on cloudy days, and none at night.”
Her massive pointer moved to the base of the 3-D tower model, only a fifth of which was completed in reality. A sloping base surrounded the wire model as though it were a trumpet placed horn-down in the soil. “This design uses a transparent canopy to superheat air with solar radiation—energy that gets through cloud cover. The canopy is eight feet off the ground at the perimeter and slopes up to sixty feet above ground where it connects to the tower base. As the air heats, it rises, creating a wind that proceeds up the tower—which is lined with wind turbines.”
“So it creates its own wind.”
She nodded. “Even at night.” She pointed at what looked to be rectangular cisterns arrayed at intervals around the perimeter of the canopy. “Covered saltwater ponds gather heat energy during the day and release it at night—continuing the wind cycle.”
Sebeck didn’t know what to think. There was no dismissing the scale and ambition of this—but what was it for? “Why do you need so much electrical power?”
“To transform our environment. To power equipment, micro-manufacturing plants, chemical and material reactions. This tower—and other solar installations—will provide clean, sustainable energy and freshwater from the elemental building blocks of matter.”
Sebeck gave her a doubtful look.
She laughed. “It’s not my design, Sergeant. I’m not an engineer. What I do here is work with people—helping to define goals and needs of the community.”
“Seriously. How do you know this is not complete bullshit?”
“The design has existed for decades. The technology has been proven. My technical familiarity comes from dealing with the darknet engineers and architects handling the construction. I make it a point to understand, so I can convey the information to our people. This is a big deal for us.”
“No doubt. But, Riley, if this was economically feasible, don’t you think everyone would be doing it? Besides, I thought the Laguna nation already had water.”
“At present, yes, but darknet communities are founded on long-term thinking. In coming decades we anticipate water stress due to climate change and depleted aquifers. Sustainable water independence increases our darknet resilience score.”
He gazed upon all the construction. “But doing all this to irrigate fields can’t be anything close to cost-effective.”
“Water isn’t the product, Sergeant. Water is the waste.” In D-Space she pointed to highlight a line of small buildings being constructed down a road leading off to their right. “Those will be reverse-hydrolysis fuel cell stations. They’ll consume hydrogen to produce heat and electricity—leaving behind freshwater as the only waste product. We can produce a third of a liter of freshwater with every kilowatt-hour of electricity produced from hydrogen.”
“But where in the hell do you get hydrogen?”
She aimed her pointer at the surrounding valley walls. “From the crystalline structures of igneous rock. This whole region has vast quantities of it. Millions of years ago this volcanic rock picked up water vapor when it crystallized from magma. That means it contains molecular hydrogen. When crushed into a powder, it seeps hydrogen at room temperature through its fracture surfaces for hundreds of hours—no liquid water required. We use some of the electrical energy from the power tower to crush this rock”—her pointer moved onto the lofty power tower—“and the rock removal helps to create energy-efficient shelter in the cliff-faces—much like our ancestors had. But that’s just one aspect of the project. We’ll also use solar energy to reverse combustion.”
On his confused look, she moved the pointer. “Here . . .” The dot touched on a series of virtual buildings around the base of the virtual tower. “These CR5 units will use solar power to chemically reenergize carbon dioxide into carbon monoxide and oxygen. It’s done by heating cobalt ferrite rings with a solar furnace. At high temperature the rings release oxygen. When they’re rotated back into the presence of carbon dioxide, the cobalt ferrite snatches oxygen from the CO2 as it cools, leaving behind carbon monoxide—which, when we combine it with our hydrogen source, can be used to synthesize liquid hydrocarbon fuels such as methanol. Methanol is portable energy that’s easy to work with, transport, and store. The hydrocarbons can also produce polymers for plastics and other products. Likewise, it sequesters carbon out of the atmosphere—making it carbon negative. It just requires energy, Sergeant—and solar energy is something my people have plenty of.”
Sebeck was speechless.
“What did you think we were building out here, a casino?”
“But what you’re describing—creating water and pulling liquid fuel out of the air—”
“The sun is what made life on Earth possible to begin with. Oil is just ancient solar energy stored in hydrocarbons. The CR5 technology was developed nearby in Sandia National Labs. It stands for ‘Counter Rotating Ring Receiver Reactor Recuperators.’ The details are available to anyone on the darknet, if you’re really interested.”