by Andy Weir
“If they go too far let me know,” I said.
“What would you do?”
“Dunno. But I don’t want anyone fucking with him.”
Dale held up his glass. “Then I pity anyone who fucks with him.”
I clinked my glass against his and we both took a sip.
“Keep him happy,” I said.
“I’ll sure as hell try.”
My Harpreet Gizmo buzzed. I pulled it out to take a look. It was a message from Svoboda: “This ZAFO shit is amazing. Meet me at my lab.”
“Just a sec,” I said to Dale. I typed out a response.
“What did you find out?”
“It’d take too long to type. Besides, I want to show you what it can do.”
“Hmm,” I said.
“Problem?” Dale asked.
“A friend wants to meet. But last time I met someone it was an ambush.”
“Need backup?”
I shook my head and typed on my Gizmo. “Honey, I know what you’re after, but I’m too tired for sex right now.”
“What are you talking about?” Svoboda responded. “Oh, I see. You’re being weird to find out if I’m being coerced. No, Jazz, I’m not setting you up.”
“Just being cautious. I have an obligation at the moment. Meet at your lab tomorrow morning?”
“Sounds good. Oh and if I am being coerced in the future, I’ll work the word ‘dolphin’ into the conversation. Okay?”
“Copy,” I responded. I put the Gizmo back in my pocket.
Dale pursed his lips. “Jazz…how bad is it?”
“Well, people want to kill me, so…pretty bad.”
“Who are these people? Why do they want you dead?”
I wiped dew off my beer glass. “They’re a Brazilian crime syndicate called O Palácio. They own Sanchez Aluminum and they know I did the Sanchez harvester sabotage.”
“Shit,” Dale said. “You need a place to hide out?”
“I’m good,” I said. Then, after a few seconds, I added, “But if I need help I’ll remember your offer.”
He smiled. “Well, that’s a start, anyway.”
“Shut up and drink your beer.” I emptied my glass. “You’re two pints behind.”
“Oh, I see how it is.” He gestured to Billy. “Barkeep! Some little girl thinks she can outdrink me. We’ll need six pints—three for the gay and three for the goy.”
—
I awoke in my hidey-hole sore, groggy, and hungover. Probably hadn’t been a good idea to get wasted in the middle of all this shit, but as I’ve established, I make poor life choices.
I spent a few minutes praying for death, then I drank as much water as I could stomach and emerged from the compartment like a slug.
I ate some dry Gunk for breakfast (you taste it less that way) and wandered off to the public bathhouse on Bean Up 16. I spent the rest of the morning there soaking in a tub.
Then it was off to a middle-class clothing store on Bean Up 18. I’d been wearing my jumpsuit for three straight days. It could almost stand up on its own at this point.
Finally I was sort of human again.
I walked along the narrow corridors of Armstrong until I reached the ESA lab’s main entrance. A few scientists wandered the halls on the way to work.
Svoboda opened the door before I even had a chance to knock. “Jazz! Wait’ll you see—whoa, you look like shit.”
“Thanks.”
He produced a package of mints and poured a few into my hand. “No time to mock your alcoholism. I gotta show you this ZAFO shit. Come on!”
He led me through the entryway and into his lab. The whole place looked different. He’d dedicated the main table to ZAFO analysis and shoved everything else to the walls to make room. Various pieces of equipment (most of it a mystery to me) covered the table.
He bounced from one foot to another. “This is so awesome!”
“Okay, okay,” I said. “What’s got you in such a tizzy?”
He sat on a stool and cracked his knuckles. “First thing I did was visual examination.”
“You looked at it,” I said. “You can just say ‘I looked at it.’ ”
“By all accounts it’s a normal, single-mode fiber-optic line. The jacket, buffer, and cladding are all routine. The core fiber is eight microns across—totally normal. But I figured there’d be something special about the core, so I cut up some samples and—”
“You cut it up?” I said. “I didn’t say you could cut it up!”
“Yeah, I don’t care.” He tapped one of the devices on the lab table. “I used this baby to check the core’s index of refraction. That’s a pretty important stat for fiber optic.”
I picked up a five-centimeter snippet of ZAFO from the table. “And you found something weird?”
“Nope,” he said. “It’s 1.458. A little higher than fiber optics usually are, but only by a tiny bit.”
I sighed. “Svoboda, can you skip over the ways it’s normal and just tell me what you found?”
“All right, all right.” He reached over to a handheld device and picked it up. “This baby is how I cracked the mystery.”
“I know you want me to ask what that is, but honestly I don’t—”
“It’s an optical loss test set! OLTS for short. It tells you how much attenuation a fiber-optic cable has. Attenuation is the amount of light that gets lost to heat during transmission.”
“I know what attenuation is,” I said. But it really didn’t matter. Once Svoboda got going there was no stopping him. I’ve never known anyone who loved his work as much as that guy.
He set the OLTS back on the table. “Now, a typical attenuation for a high-end cable is around 0.4 decibels per kilometer. Guess what ZAFO’s attenuation is.”
“No.”
“Go on. Guess.”
“Just tell me.”
“It’s zero. Fucking. Zero!” He formed a circle with his arms. “Zeeeroooo!”
I sat on the stool next to him. “So…no light gets lost in transmission? At all?”
“Right! Well, at least, as far as I can tell. The precision of my OLTS is 0.001 decibels per kilometer.”
I looked at the ZAFO snippet in my hands. “It has to have some attenuation, though, right? I mean, it can’t actually be zero.”
He shrugged. “Superconductors have zero resistance to electrical current. Why can’t there be a material with zero resistance to light?”
“ZAFO…” I rolled the word around in my mouth. “Zero-attenuation fiber optic?”
“Oh!” He smacked his forehead. “Of course!”
“What’s it made of?”
He spun to a wall-mounted machine. “That’s where my spectrometer came in!” He stroked it gently. “I call her Nora.”
“And what did Nora have to say?”
“The core’s mostly glass. No big surprise there, most fiber-optic cores are. But there were also trace amounts of tantalum, lithium, and germanium.”
“Why are they in there?”
“Hell if I know.”
I rubbed my eyes. “Okay, so why is it so exciting? You can use less energy to transmit data?”
“Oh, it’s way more awesome than that,” he said. “Normal fiber-optic lines can only be fifteen kilometers long. After that, the signal’s just too weak to continue. So you need repeaters. They read the signal and retransmit it. But repeaters cost money, they have to be powered, and they’re complicated. Oh, and they slow down the transmission too.”
“So with ZAFO you don’t need repeaters.”
“Right!” he said. “Earth has huge data cables. They run across entire continents, under the oceans, all over the world. Just think of how much simpler it would be without all those repeaters mucking shit up. Oh! And it would have very few transmission errors. That means more bandwidth. This shit is fantastic!”
“Great. But is it worth killing over?”
“Well…” he said. “I suppose every telecom company will want to upgrade. How much do you
think the entire planet Earth’s communication network is worth? Because that’s roughly how much money ZAFO is going to make its owners. Yeah. That’s probably murderin’ money.”
I pinched my chin. The more I thought about it the less I liked it. Then, the pieces all fell into place. “Oh! Goddammit!”
“Whoa,” said Svoboda. “Who shit in your Rice Krispies?”
“This isn’t about aluminum at all!” I stood from the stool. “Thanks, Svobo. I owe you one.”
“What?” he said. “What do you mean it’s not about aluminum? Then what’s it about?”
But I already had a head of steam going. “Stay strange, Svobo. I’ll be in touch.”
—
The administrator’s office used to be in Armstrong Bubble because that was the only bubble. But once Armstrong became all loud noises and machinery, she relocated. Nowadays she worked out of a small, one-room office on Conrad Up 19.
Yup, you heard me. The administrator of Artemis—the most important and powerful person on the moon, who could literally have any location rent-free—chose to work in the bluest of blue-collar areas. If I were Ngugi, I’d have a huge office overlooking the Aldrin Arcade. And it would have a wet bar and leather chairs and other cool powerful-people stuff.
And a personal assistant. A beefy yet gentle guy who called me “boss” all the time. Yeah.
Ngugi didn’t have any of that. She didn’t even have a secretary. Just a sign on her office door that read ADMINISTRATOR FIDELIS NGUGI.
To be fair, it’s not like she was president of the United States. She was, effectively, the mayor of a small town.
I pressed the doorbell and heard a simple buzz emanate from the room beyond.
“Come in,” came Ngugi’s voice.
I opened the door. Her office was even less fancy than I’d expected. Spartan, even. A few shelves with family photos jutted out of raw aluminum walls. Her sheet-metal desk looked like something from the 1950s. She did at least have a proper office chair—her one concession to personal comfort. When I’m seventy years old I’ll probably want a nice chair too.
She typed away on a laptop. The older generations still preferred them to Gizmos or speech-interface devices. She somehow carried grace and aplomb even while hunched over at her desk. She wore casual clothes and, as always, her traditional dhuku headscarf. She finished typing a sentence, then smiled at me.
“Jasmine! Wonderful to see you, dear. Please, have a seat.”
“Yea-thank-yes. I’ll…sit.” I settled into one of the two empty chairs facing her desk.
She clasped her hands and leaned forward. “I’ve been so worried about you, dear. What can I do to help?”
“I have a question about economics.”
She raised her eyebrows. “Economics? Well, I do have some knowledge in that area.”
Understatement of the century. This woman had transformed Kenya into the center of the global space industry. She deserved a Nobel Prize. Two, really. One for Economics and another for Peace.
“What do you know about Earth’s telecom industry?” I asked.
“That’s a broad topic, dear. Can you be more specific?”
“What’s it worth, you think? Like, what kind of revenues do they pull down?”
She laughed. “I could only hazard a guess. But the entire global industry? Somewhere in the five-to-six-trillion-dollar-per-year range.”
“Holy shit! Er…pardon my language, ma’am.”
“Not a problem, Jasmine. You’ve always been colorful.”
“How do they make so much?”
“They have a huge customer base. Every phone line, every internet connection, every TV cable subscription…they all create revenue for the industry—either directly from the customer or indirectly through advertising.”
I looked down at the floor. I had to take a moment.
“Jasmine?”
“Sorry. Kind of tired—well, to be honest, I’m hungover.”
She smiled. “You’re young. You’ll recover soon, I’m sure.”
“Let’s say someone invented a better mousetrap,” I said. “A really awesome fiber-optic cable. One that reduced costs, increased bandwidth, and improved reliability.”
She leaned back in her chair. “If the price point were comparable to existing cables, it would be a huge boon. And the manufacturer of that product would be swimming in money, of course.”
“Yeah,” I said. “And let’s say the prototype of this new fiber optic was created in a specially made satellite in low-Earth orbit. One with a centrifuge aboard. What would that tell you?”
She looked puzzled. “This is a very odd discussion, Jasmine. What’s going on?”
I drummed my fingers on my leg. “See, to me that means it can’t be created in Earth’s gravity. It’s the only reason to make a custom satellite.”
She nodded. “That sounds reasonable. I take it something like this is in the works?”
I pressed on. “But the satellite has a centrifuge. So they do need some force. It’s just that Earth’s gravity is too high. But what if the moon’s gravity were low enough for whatever process they’re using?”
“This is an oddly specific hypothetical, dear.”
“Humor me.”
She put her hand on her chin. “Then obviously they could manufacture it here.”
“So, in your expert opinion, where’s a better place to manufacture this imaginary product: low-Earth orbit or Artemis?”
“Artemis,” she said. “No question. We have skilled workers, an industrial base, a transport infrastructure, and shipping to and from Earth.”
“Yeah.” I nodded. “That’s kind of what I thought.”
“This sounds very promising, Jasmine. Have you been offered a chance to invest? Is that why you’re here? If this invention is real, it’s definitely worth putting money into.”
I wiped my brow. Conrad Up 19 was always a comfortable 22 degrees Celsius, but I was sweating nonetheless.
I looked her in the eyes. “You know what’s strange? You didn’t mention radio or satellites.”
She cocked her head. “I’m sorry, dear. What?”
“When you talked about the telecom industry. You mentioned internet, phone, and TV. But you didn’t bring up radio or satellites.”
“Those are certainly parts of it as well.”
“Yeah,” I said. “But you didn’t mention them. In fact, you only talked about the parts of the industry that rely on fiber optics.”
She shrugged. “Well, we’re talking about fiber optics, so that’s only natural.”
“Except I hadn’t brought up fiber optics yet.”
“You must have.”
I shook my head. “I’ve got a very good memory.”
She narrowed her eyes slightly.
I pulled a knife from my boot holster and held it at the ready. “How did O Palácio find my Gizmo?”
She pulled a gun from under the desk. “Because I told them where it was.”
“A gun?!” I said. “How did a gun get into the city?! I never smuggle weapons!”
“I’ve always appreciated that,” she said. “You don’t have to keep your hands up. You do, however, have to drop that knife.”
I did as I was instructed. The knife floated down to the floor.
She kept the gun pointed at me. “May I ask, how did you come to suspect me?”
“Process of elimination,” I said. “Rudy proved he wasn’t selling me out. You’re the only other person with access to my Gizmo location info.”
“Reasonable,” she said. “But I’m not as sinister as you think.”
“Uh-huh.” I gave her a dubious look. “But you know all about ZAFO, right?”
“Yes.”
“And you’re going to make a shitload of money off of it?”
She scowled. “Do you really think so little of me? I won’t make a single slug.”
“But…then…why…?”
She settled back into her chair and relaxed her grip on
the gun. “You were right about the gravity. ZAFO is a crystalline quartzlike structure that only forms at 0.216 g’s. It’s impossible to make on Earth, but they can make it here with a centrifuge. You’re such an intelligent girl, Jasmine. If only you’d apply yourself.”
“If this is turning into a ‘You have so much potential’ lecture, just shoot me instead, okay?”
She smiled. She could be grandmotherly even while holding a gun. Like she’d give me a butterscotch candy before putting a hole in my head. “Do you know how Artemis makes its money?”
“Tourism.”
“No.”
I blinked. “What?”
“We don’t make enough from tourism. It’s a large part of our economy, yes, but not enough.”
“But the economy works,” I said. “Tourists buy stuff from local companies, companies pay employees, employees buy food and pay rent, and so on. And we’re still here, so it must be working, right? What am I missing?”
“Immigration,” she said. “When people move to Artemis, they bring their life savings with them. Then they spend it here. As long as our population kept growing that was fine, but now we’ve plateaued.”
She angled the gun away from me. She still had a good grip on it, but at least she wouldn’t kill me by mistake if she sneezed. “The whole system has become an unintentional Ponzi scheme. And we’re just cresting the top of the curve now.”
For the first time, my attention was torn away from the gun. “Is…are we…is this whole city going bankrupt?”
“Yes, if we don’t take action,” she said. “But ZAFO is our savior. The telecom industry will want to upgrade, and ZAFO can only be cheaply made here. There’ll be a huge production boom. Factories will open, people will move here for jobs, and everyone will prosper.” She looked up wistfully. “We’ll finally have an export economy.”
“Glass,” I said. “This has always been about glass, right?”
“Yes, dear,” Ngugi said. “ZAFO is an amazing material, but like all fiber optics, it’s mostly glass. And glass is just silicon and oxygen, both of which are created by aluminum smelting.”
She ran her hand along the sheet aluminum desk. “Interesting how economics works, isn’t it? Within a year, aluminum will be a by-product of the silicon industry. And that aluminum will be handy too. We’ll have a lot of construction to handle the growth we’re about to have.”
