Regolith

by Brent Reilly

  Dear Lord, she was wetter than the Rio Grande! She was as wet as he was hard. And that was why he should not feel embarrassed, for she was as inflamed as he was. He felt grateful for her replacing his embarrassment with something so much better. It felt like a wet dream, with lots of wet. He briefly contemplated another finger, but then decided to go for depth over breadth. He shifted his weight to adjust his body’s position so that his hand had the best possible angle, and then he finger-fucked her slowly, steadily, but with an increasing intensity. She shifted her weight onto him, lifting her right leg up, letting him hold her steady as her knees got weak. She opened her legs to give him full access, while grinding her pelvis higher and closer, fucking his finger as much as his finger fucked her.

  He watched, fascinated, as her eyes dilated, then she bit down hard to avoid screaming and blinked as he felt a wave of liquid wash over his hand. Her head shook and her body vibrated. Finally, a woman who didn’t fake her orgasm! He once read that 95% of women fake organism, and the rest are gay. Her fake attempt to keep quiet failed, as her groan echoed off the walls.

  At first he thought she peed on him, it was so hot, wet and heavy. Women come in squirts, not quarts. But the smell told him different. It didn’t smell at all like piss. No, this smelled like sweet fucking pussy. The good, clean stuff, not that old, nasty stuff his wife burdened him with monthly. Never before had he ever made a woman come so hard or fast, much less with her clothes still on. This was becoming a day of firsts.

  And, although he didn’t yet know it, lasts.

  As she recovered, she slowly pulled his hand out, then carefully held it up between them. She stuck out her tongue, playfully flicked it at him, then licked the tip of his middle finger, tasting her sweet juices. Giggling recklessly, she then pushed his middle finger into his mouth, all the way in, and he sucked her juices off with a smile. Fuck, it tasted good. Salty, like the skin of original Kentucky Fried Chicken, back in the days when they actually fucking fried their fucking chicken. Yet it was also more sweet and more sour than Chinese chicken. Girls are supposed to be made of sugar and spice, but many tasted like chicken and smelled like tuna. Not this girl.

  He had never been this turned on before. Ever. Cooper flew on Cloud Nine without a parachute. He hadn’t felt this alive since he lost his virginity. He had not had this much fun since his first honeymoon. Like all men, he had always wanted to fuck a supermodel nympho virgin -- 2 out of 3 wasn’t bad. He felt satisfied without feeling satiated. And he still did not even know this hottie’s name.

  This was not the first time he had cheated on his second wife. And he was under no delusion that he, in fact, just cheated on her, although he tried to stay faithful with all of his one night stands. Like most people comfortable with power, he was just good at living with things like that. It felt similar to opposing a bill that he knew would save lives, like restricting pollution or increasing healthcare access, but didn’t because powerful special interests donate so much. Any just society takes cares of its citizen’s basic needs, yet many politicians had no problem living happily in an unjust society. Hell, he even married a socialite.

  His marriages taught him that the more you open your eyes before you marry, the less you have to close them afterwards. Beauty may be in the eyes of the beholder, but ugly is universal. Woman look forward to their wedding day, but men look forward to their wedding night. Why do wives fart, but not girlfriends?

  For years he believed that marriage is what happy couples resort to in order to ruin an otherwise great relationship. He and his first wife used to make love three times a week, and fuck the other days. Sex may be a poor substitute for love, but it was better than anything else. Despite his first wife being hot, he still cheated on her, telling himself that he wanted sex routinely, but not routine sex. The only time he had one night stands was when two nights were not possible. If you’re not going to be persistent, then you might as well give up. While other men had sex with anything that moved, Cooper refused to limit his opportunities. Free love didn’t come cheap, but he could afford the price.

  It reminded him of a joke where a guy calls his wife and asks if she wants to have sex five times that night. She says yes, but asks if he can last that long. “No,” the husband replies, “but I have four friends with me.” As his college roommate once put it, “Making love is what women do when men are fucking them.”

  When he first got married, he could not imagine living without her, but every year improved his imagination. Love blinds, and sometimes deafens. Fortunately, a successful divorce made up for a failed marriage. A healthy divorce cured their sick marriage.

  Now, he got along better with his ex than with their ungrateful kids because he figured out how to make her happy. Women need to feel attractive, and the uglier they get, the greater the need. It’s why he still fucked her. After four short marriages, Cooper felt sorry for her. Always a bride, never a bridesmaid.

  On the other hand, his second wife Ann had never had an orgasm with him, and he tried to notice these things. Just because she didn’t excite him didn’t mean he didn’t want to excite her. And he tried. Dear Lord, he tried. An old saying predicts that women who marry for money end up working for every penny. In bed, that is how he felt. He helped her climb the mountain, but she never reached the summit. And she didn’t even have the curtsey to fake an orgasm now and then.

  Maybe it was her age. At 66, Ann was four years older, yet he felt decades younger. Men and women just age differently. Groucho Marx observed that a man is only as old as the women he feels. But, then again, he also said that he once shot an elephant in his pajamas, but what the elephant was doing in his pajamas he’ll never know.

  His affairs taught him that adultery is sex that is wrong, but not necessarily bad. You can’t buy happiness, but you can rent it for the night. He considered most people perverts, and thought the rest were just plain weird. Happiness may be fleeting, but misery feels eternal. Cooper tried masturbation, but masturbation provides relief, not satisfaction.

  His wife wanted to marry a powerful man, someone who could be socially superior to her demanding father, and he wanted to marry a rich woman, so they both got what they wanted. Wealth is the surest way to cure loneliness. His own father used to warn him that the problem with men who marry for sex and women who marry for money is that they must both wait until divorce to get what they want.

  It wasn’t until that very moment, while he watched Monique pull out his cock and quickly jack him off, that he realized that he was far happier married to Ann than he ever was with his first wife. The sex couldn’t compare, but everything else was superior. Ann made him happy. The realization jolted him, like coffee laced with Jack Daniels.

  Or, as his minister father calls it, breakfast.

  “Please tell me you speak English,” was the first coherent thing he said to her.

  “Yes, I speak English. And Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, French, and some Russian, Finnish, and German. But I don’t like German. As Voltaire said, it has too many consonants and not enough vowels,” she said in clear but heavily accented English, handing him her business card. “My name is Monique. It’s a pleasure to meet you.”

  Cooper could not help but laugh. He quickly scanned the card and learned that she was, indeed, a model, since her website had both “hotmodels” and “moniqueportfolio” in it. He instantly wondered if she had any nude pictures of herself on her website. He was just dying to see more of her.

  He knew of Voltaire from quotes like, “if God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him”, “Politics is the second oldest profession”, and, referring to Rousseau, “I may not agree with a word he says, but I will defend to the death his right to say it.”

  “Are you a friend of the family?” Cooper asked to find out where she fit into the Jackson hierarchy.

  “We are either third cousins five times removed or fifth cousins three times removed. I cannot remember.”

  He liked it that she pronounced “Los A
ngeles” in Spanish, as in “los anhelles”, as opposed to “las angaleez” like Americans do. Most cities in California had Spanish names – San Francisco, San Diego, Santa Monica, Santa Barbara, Santa Maria, etc. It was ironic that a state infamous for being secular like California would have so many of its greatest cities named after saints.

  Shaking her hand, he completed the introduction.

  “Hi, Monique. I’m Dan.”

  7

  “Don’t you wish you had a Landshark?”

  Sexy Monique posed in front of Jackson’s space-age car, turning her body to accentuate her curves. Her tan legs, flat abs, and ample boobs really caught the eye. The contrast between Cooper’s land yacht and Jackson’s plug-in fuel cell car couldn’t have been greater. But it was only when she repeated the marketing slogan that it hit him.

  “You’re the chick in the TV ads!”

  “Both of them,” she agreed, obviously pleased.

  Cooper now couldn’t believe he didn’t recognize her earlier, with the sexy accent and husky voice. Jackson plastered her face in dozens of car magazines. This plug-in fuel cell luxury sports car was spreading in Hollywood like a celebrity sex tape. Jackson intended to roll out other plug-in fuel cell versions, like an SUV, a van, mid and full size four-doors, as well as a light and heavy pickup truck, when other factories came on line. What Jackson didn’t have were cheap versions.

  Cooper looked past the hottie to evaluate the car once more.

  Instead of two seats side-by-side, the Landshark featured the driver’s seat alone, then two seats in the middle, with another lone seat in the back, all nestled in a NASCAR-inspired body wrap called a “pod”. The 1+2+1 tandem seating configuration made it longer and narrower to optimize its aerodynamics, along with a clean underbody, a tapered front, and minimally-exposed wheels and rear-view mirrors. The amorphous metal body took off several hundred pounds, allowing the propulsion system to be smaller, lighter, and cheaper. The super-light frame made it all work.

  The front had a wraparound windscreen without a conventional hood, so the driver, who sat just a few feet from the front bumper, had a unobstructed 180 degree view. The damn thing didn’t even have a steering wheel or gas pedals, instead using hand controls. Driving it was the equivalent of streaking nude at the Academy Awards -- people couldn’t help but notice you.

  The bizarre story of how Jackson even became a niche automaker itself pissed Cooper off. Billion dollar opportunities just fell into his fucking lap. Jackson wisely co-opted Cooper’s investment banker wife to invest tens of millions in Jackson Motors, so he knew the story all too well:

  Jackson made his first fortune fish farming in the Pacific, a thousand miles from the Mexican coast. Fossil fuels poison fish, so necessity forced him to maximize use of clean energy – solar, wind, and tidal. In addition to thousands of solar panels and windmills, he used the temperature difference between deep sea water and surface water to help power the pumps that brought up nutrients from a mile deep. Concentrated solar thermal – using the heat from satellite dish-shaped mirrors to split water to get hydrogen – provided his primary fuel. Then clean hydrogen turbines propelled his boats and ships, and hydrogen fuel cells powered his onboard electronics.

  The problem with clean energy is it was not always there when he needed it. Jackson required stable power. Worst still, relatively little electricity can be stored in even the biggest industrial batteries. Batteries not only have problems with extreme temperatures, but don’t react well to humidity and salty air. Plus, not only do industrial batteries cost millions each, but they have limited capacity, don’t scale up well, and wear out quickly.

  Scaling up batteries has been tried. The batteries used by utilities are the size of double-decker buses. Utilities need storage because they lose whatever electricity they don’t immediately transmit -- about 7% on average. The grid in Fairbanks, Alaska, has the world’s biggest battery backup, a 40-megawatt nickel-cadmium system. The Japanese have developed a sodium-sulfur model that can store five megawatts, while other big users of stored electricity resorted to flywheels.

  So Jackson turned to ultracapacitors in the 1980’s, which store less energy per weight or size, but have none of the other drawbacks. A capacitor does not damage battery memory caused by partial discharging and has no reduction in capacity with each recharge, so they literally never wear out. Unlike batteries, they hold the same charge the millionth time as the first time. They have an electrical field that stores energy, allowing them to recharge millions of times without loss of capacity. Because capacitors have no wear-and-tear problem, they become cheaper the longer they last and the more they are used.

  So Jackson invested in ultracapacitor companies that focused on nanotechnology to add more surface area by replacing porous carbon with tiny nanotubes, which have five times the ion-collecting surface area; and graphene, which is a layer of carbon atoms in a particular pattern. He eventually merged them to make the best ultracapacitors in the world.

  Ultracapacitors could not compete with what batteries could do best, but they could do what batteries could not: store a lot of energy over millions of recharges. A battery can power a laptop, but ultracapacitors could power the laptop manufacturing plant. As Jackson expanded to fifteen deep sea fish farms, he needed thousands of bigger, better ultracapacitors to store his solar and wind energy for the night shift.

  Once he won election as governor of Arizona in 2002, he bought out the other investors and took the company private. Then he gave the company a statewide contract, millions in state tax credits to build a local factory, and marketed to other states, utilities, and big corporations, with all profits reinvested into making bigger and better ultracapacitors.

  The ability to store large amounts of electricity gave new life to solar and wind farms – thousands of them grouped together. Factories that used a hell of a lot of energy like utilities, automakers and steelmakers could now cover their parking lots and buildings with his cheap organic solar. The ability to store large amounts of electricity helped him sell more solar and wind products. Utility companies became his biggest clients because they lose whatever electricity they don’t use, in addition to the 6% on average that they lose in transmission.

  So Jackson dominated another global industry, replacing backups in large buildings, factories, and utilities.

  Cooper gave him his due props.

  But then a Chinese automaker came calling, wanting to know if he could mass-produce them small, light, and cheap enough to power a car. Toyota’s hybrid Prius has been around a dozen years. Chrysler was making a pure electric car, the Dodge Circuit EV roadster. Tesla had the all-electric $100,000 roadster that used thousands of small lithium-ion batteries. Fisker Automotive had a $87,500 plug-in sedan called the Karma. GM hoped to mass produce their Chevy Volt plug-in electric, even though the Volt’s 200-lithium-cell battery pack cost $16,000.

  Unfortunately, plug-ins kill batteries by fully depleting them. So battery-powered electrics and hybrids are great for those who never need to drive them far. Like, say, on golf courses.

  For example, GM’s Volt needs a 10-year, 150,000 mile warranty in order to get the coveted California Air Resources Board credit. Drivers need range, but those who drive it too far deplete it, which means it won’t last either 10 years or 150,000 miles. So battery-powered electric cars cannot be driven too far without being recharged, yet every recharge reduces their life span. What they couldn’t do is have a powerful battery that would last a long time. And no automaker wanted to pay $16,000 for a 400 pound battery that they could not guarantee to last 150,000 miles.

  Enter the fucking Chinese.

  Jackson had just opened a next-gen ultracapacitor factory near his other clean energy and home construction companies in Shenzhen, just north of Hong Kong on the mainland, and the second busiest Chinese port after Shanghai. Shenzhen-based auto newcomer BYD (“Build Your Dreams”) started mass-producing a plug-in electric sedan in China in 2008, right after billionaire investor
Warren Buffet bought a 10% share of BYD for $1.8 billion HKD (Hong Kong dollars). It used an electric motor and a 67-horsepower, 1-liter gasoline engine for a combined output of 168 hp. But they couldn’t get a battery that lasted long enough on a charge or live long enough with frequent recharging. Plus ultracapacitors are better at releasing electricity (for fast acceleration) and collecting electricity (with regenerative braking).

  So they asked Jackson if he could make an ultracapacitor that could replace the car battery. After intense study, the short answer turned out to be “no”. Not without redesigning the entire fucking car. Staring at a huge opportunity, Jackson hired auto designers to completely re-design the modern fucking car.

  The trick was the lightest possible car frame and recharging the ultracapacitor as often as possible, even in small amounts. The solution turned out to be coating the outer car body with organic solar. Organic solar cells are made from pentacene -- sheets made of rings of hydrogen and carbon that occur naturally. Since engineers do not have to chemically manufacture them in the complicated process required for silicon panels, the organic cells are far less expensive, but less efficient – 6% compared to 22%. They look and feel like 35 mm rolls of film. However, unlike silicon, organic solar cells are weather and scratch resistant, hold paint well, “bounce” back from small dents, and the ultrathin reels can be “painted” seamlessly onto virtually any flat surface, including windows. Adding organic solar cells to the car body added just a hundred dollars to the production cost, but saved that much in fuel every year.

  A car body painted with organic solar could literally recharge itself while sitting in the driveway, the office parking lot, or while driving in bumper-to-bumper traffic. After all, the average car is parked 96% of the time. Solar constantly recharging the ultracapacitor meant smaller, lighter, cheaper ultracapacitors, fuel cells, and fuel tanks, which reduced production costs.