Terraform (an Ell Donsaii story #15)

by Laurence Dahners

  “Yeah, but the main thing Gordito does is work out the three-dimensional structure of proteins from their sequences. The fact that they could use it to come up with antigens for vaccination was initially kind of a sidebar until they realized how important it could be in the crisis.”

  Vanessa snorted, “Pretty important sidebar if you ask me. But you can’t tell me that you asked Gordito for help with this. The website wasn’t even open back then.”

  “No, but Gordito had a precursor site open back then. One that was just focused on protein structure. They hadn’t gotten into vaccines. I asked it for help working out the structure of a peptide that’d bind to part of the receptor site, thus blocking the HA-36 ligand from attaching without activating the receptor itself.”

  “So,” Vanessa said slowly, “what you’re telling me… is that whoever runs Gordito probably has a claim to the peptide we’re trying to patent. In fact, they may own the whole thing.”

  “No,” Zage said emphatically. “No, I told them the peptide works great and asked them if they wanted credit. They said they didn’t. They’re set up as a kind of scientific charity, you know?”

  “They’re not a charity. They charge money for working out the 3-D structure of molecules.”

  “They only charge to keep from getting inundated with submissions requesting the structure of every known sequence…” Zage paused. When Vanessa seemed doubtful, he offered proof of the contention. “If you’ll look at the website, you’ll see they donate all the money from the charges to Doctors Without Borders.”

  Vanessa was surprised to hear that and decided she’d look it up. Nonetheless, she said “Charity or not, they could still have a claim on the peptide. Besides, they might change their mind about wanting credit or ownership. The University’s not going to be happy about this.”

  “Could you submit a query to Gordito? You could confirm they’re the ones who actually designed the peptide and ask them if Gordito wants co-authorship or intends to make a claim on future revenues.”

  “Future revenues,” Vanessa thought, it’s so hard to believe this’s coming from a five-year-old. “Okay, I’ll check with the Gordito site before I tell Dr. Turner and the technology office. The tech office is probably going to want some kind of legal documentation too.”

  “Um, don’t forget that Gordito… That the Gordito group wants to remain anonymous. It could be a problem getting a signature or anything like that.”

  Chapter One

  NOAA, Silver Springs, Maryland— Today the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration verified their data confirms a significant and sustained reduction in atmospheric CO2. Victoria Gaudet, the Undersecretary of Commerce for Oceans and Atmosphere says it’s too early to determine whether this reduction in atmospheric carbon dioxide’s responsible for the lower average temperatures recorded in the past two years. “However,” she said, “evidence does indicate that the lower CO2 levels are due to reductions in the burning of fossil fuels. This reduction can readily be attributed, at least in part, to a marked shift in power generation from fossil fuels toward heat differential engines powered by ETR’s parabolic mirrors near the sun…”

  ***

  Jillian sat back and stared at the timeline she’d been reconstructing. When she’d gotten home from her coffee with the detective she’d realized there was a large flaw in Barton’s claim that Ell Donsaii had a child.

  Donsaii’d never been pregnant.

  It was impossible to imagine that someone as much in the public eye as Donsaii could’ve been pregnant and had a baby without it being all over the news. Donsaii’d been news story number one since she’d burst onto the scene by stopping Olympic terrorists at age seventeen. A quick search of “Donsaii” and “pregnant” had turned up some tabloid journalism but nothing reputable.

  So, for a few days, Jillian had tried to ignore what Barton had said as ludicrous. But the niggling question of why Barton would’ve said it kept bothering her. It wasn’t as if he’d been trying to impress her. In fact, he seemed genuinely appalled to have said it. He certainly didn’t act like he wanted her to publicize his claim.

  Now, she’d spent hours constructing this timeline. It was confronting her with what now seemed obvious in retrospect.

  Over a period from three and a half years ago, to six and a half years ago, President Stockton had made Ell Donsaii a persona non grata. As a result, Donsaii’d hidden somewhere.

  Somewhere completely out of the public view.

  It’d been as if she’d moved to Antarctica. If she’d been pregnant and had a baby during that period, no one in the media would’ve known about it. Donsaii’d have had to have people caring for her, delivering the baby and helping her hide. Those people would’ve known about it, but perhaps they constituted a small enough group that they might’ve been able to keep it a secret?

  ***

  Ell and Mark Amundsen walked out onto the main floor at D5R. Now that he’d taken over as CEO, Amundsen had been making rounds with her whenever she toured the facilities. She usually toured the facilities at D5R’s original research building more than once a day. She liked to get out and around, to see and be seen, and, most importantly, to learn what her people were doing. Amundsen thought the way her visits kept a finger on the company’s pulse, as well as her frequent suggestions on various projects made major contributions to D5R’s success. Mark rarely had much to contribute, but he felt that going around with her was improving his understanding of D5R’s multiple missions.

  Ell didn’t care much about the business aspects of her company. After all, that’s what she’d hired Amundsen for. Her own interests lay almost entirely with the research end of things. Since the research was almost entirely carried out at the D5R facility, that’s where she focused her attention. She occasionally also visited the production facilities of the various subsidiaries. She almost always took Mark with her when she visited them.

  Their first trip away from D5R itself had been to the highly secured Portal Technology facilities. First to the industrial center where ports were manufactured. They also visited the extensive tunnel system that Portal Tech had melted underground. The tunnels were where PT’s ports were linked, powered, and monitored. The underground locations made them much less susceptible to attack, invasion, or natural disaster. Because ports were now vital for many critical processes around the world, systems had been set up to allow critical ports—where failure’d be disastrous—to be operated in a redundant fashion. For instance, air supplies, electrical power, fueling ports, and even power driveshafts were set up in a fashion that would allow a second port to quickly take over if one failed. Such “spare” ports were supported by widely separated underground facilities in case of terrorist attack or natural disaster.

  They’d visited Allosci where Mark got to meet Gary and Viveka Pace, the inventors of so many of the carbon allotrope manufacturing processes. They’d even—to Amundsen’s great delight—taken one of the space planes up to the orbital habitat where graphene was made.

  Ostensibly, they’d been there to inspect the new, extra-large habitat created by joining four of the hundred-foot modules together lengthwise. Dr. Pace hoped to begin manufacturing graphene in 110-meter-wide sheets. So far, they’d been having a lot of problems with defects in the big sheets. During their visit, Ell had a number of ideas they could try for preventing the defects.

  Despite knowing Ell for years, Mark had felt surprised to hear her proposing possible solutions to the man who was widely acknowledged to be the world’s expert on graphene manufacture. But then he’d reflected that Donsaii’s genius seemed to have few limits. Certainly, Pace had seemed grateful for her ideas.

  Although Mark had really enjoyed actually going up into space to see graphene manufacture, he’d also been there to see the habitats that were overseen by ET Resources. The visit to ETR’s facilities down on Earth had let him see the “waldo farm” where thousands of waldo drivers rode their controllers. Those controllers were used to run
waldoes on Mars, the Moon, various asteroid mining enterprises, and even some that were exploring the depths of the ocean.

  During their tour, they’d visited the facility where exploration rockets were manufactured. He turned to Ell and asked, “Which are the ones that go to other solar systems?”

  She’d shaken her head and said, “Let’s talk about that later.”

  When they were alone later, Amundsen learned that the interstellar rockets were manufactured at D5R’s research facility, only there, and only right before they were launched. She told him, “That whole process’s so secret that I’m the only one who understands all the parts that’re necessary. Emma and Roger help me with some parts of it, but even they don’t know how all of it works.”

  “You don’t think your CEO should know what’s going on with that?” he asked in surprise.

  She’d shrugged. “Sorry, no,” she’d surprised him by saying. “You don’t have a need to know and that tech’s… exceedingly dangerous.” He understood that, like most technologies, ports made new weapons possible. The interstellar ports must make some additional weapons feasible, he thought. Her attempts to keep that tech secret are laudable but probably doomed to failure.

  He thought he should at least know what kinds of weapons they were talking about. But Ell didn’t.

  Ell took Amundsen along on at least one of those daily trips around the facilities. Since the fourth and smallest subsidiary of D5R, Quantum Biomed, was still located in the D5R research building, Amundsen actually saw it much more frequently than the bigger subsidiaries.

  When their rounds got down to the Quantum Biomed area, Ell seemed surprised to see AJ Richards sitting with Roger and Emma. Ell said, “Hey AJ, what’re you doing down here with the geeks?”

  AJ was widely recognized to be a rising star down at ETR’s research facility, but Amundsen also wondered why he’d be down in the biomedical section.

  “Um,” AJ began, seeming a little flustered. He glanced at Roger who simply looked expectantly back at him. “I’ve been talking to Dr. Emmerit here—”

  Roger interrupted with a snort and looked appealingly at Ell, “Can you get him to call me Roger? I haven’t had any luck.”

  AJ drew a long breath and continued, “I’ve been talking to Roger about Mars terraforming.”

  Ell looked at Roger, “I didn’t know you’d taken an interest in terraforming?”

  Roger said, “He’s just being polite. He thinks that since I came up with the original deep space heat and cold sources to power electrical generation, he’s got to talk his ideas over with me.”

  Ell turned her gaze on AJ. “So, what’s your idea?”

  “Well,” AJ stood up, apparently tired of craning his neck to look up at Ell. He looked nervous, “I’ve been told that one of your concerns about using ports to transfer CO2 from Venus, water from Europa and nitrogen from Titan has to do with the amount of power it takes to run big ports?”

  Ell nodded, “Yeah, by calculation, about 600-megawatts for a port ten-meters in diameter. We’ve never made one that big, so we don’t know for sure, but if the calculation’s correct, you could power 600,000 homes for that. That’s a good-sized city.”

  AJ winced, “But, we do know how to generate that kind of power.”

  Ell said, “Yes, but if we wanted to raise Mars’ air pressure to about seventy-five percent of Earth’s—about the pressure you’d see at 8000 feet of altitude—we’d need to move 312 times 1016 kilograms of CO2, water and nitrogen. Even at the flow rates we could expect before pressures started to equalize, that’d take over 600,000 years if we used a ten-meter port. Sixty-years if we built ten-thousand ten-meter ports and the power generation capacity to run them.”

  “I’ve run the numbers,” AJ said. He glanced over Ell’s shoulder where Carter DeWitt was walking up. “and I came up with something close to what you’re getting. I don’t pretend to have the entire answer, I just wanted to be sure we were considering the fact that the CO2 coming from Venus would be at a temperature of 465 degrees Celsius or 870 degrees Fahrenheit. If you mixed it with the water coming from Europa, the heat from the CO2 would generate steam without having to build any more near solar parabolic heaters or deep space heat sinks.”

  Ell’s eyes widened a little, “Oh, that’s a great idea.”

  Carter said, “Sorry I’m late. I’m only here to support the contention that AJ’s a lot smarter than he looks.”

  However, Ell’s eyes had narrowed on AJ. “If we mix Venusian CO2 with Europan water, we’re going to have some problems with the sulfur dioxide in the atmosphere of Venus, aren’t we? It’s supposed to be 150 parts per million, right?”

  Carter nodded, “Those were the figures obtained from the upper atmosphere. But sulfur dioxide’s an important component of upper cloud layers. As you might imagine, we’ve got a lot better data on the Venusian atmosphere now. We’ve been using ground-level ports to fill the domes on Mars and the SO2 concentration down at ground level’s closer to fifteen parts per million.”

  Ell looked fascinated, “That’s still toxic though, right?”

  “Yeah, but one of the ways to get the sulfur dioxide out of air is to mix it with water where it forms a weak acid. The water coming from Europa has an excess of calcium and it’s mildly basic. This means the calcium and the sulfur should precipitate out as calcium sulfite, AKA limestone.”

  “Whoa, that’s awesome. Good thinking!” Ell said with a big grin. “Have we solved all the problems then? Is it time to start building some ten-meter ports?”

  AJ’s eyes dropped and he reached up to rub the back of his neck, “Well, no. We’d be generating the steam on Mars and we don’t have any steam turbines there.”

  Ell barked a laugh, “And that’s a huge problem, right? Don’t big power turbines weigh hundreds of tons?

  AJ nodded, “Yes, it’s a huge problem, but I was thinking that…” he trailed off.

  Ell tipped her head, “What?” she said, in a gently chiding tone.

  “Isn’t it time we started scaling up? Shouldn’t we be trying to figure out how big we can actually build ports? It seems to me there’d be a lot of use for… for industrially-sized ports.” He paused, as if for comment, but everyone seemed to be digesting this idea, so he continued, “To the best of my knowledge, the biggest port we’ve built so far’s been less than a meter in diameter. It seems to me that we should be making some two-meter, five-meter, and eventually, ten-meter diameter ports. If for no other reason, then just to work out the kinks. We ought to at least find out whether it’s possible to build them that big and what their power consumption actually is. If we had a ten-meter diameter port, then we’d actually be able to move things like big steam turbines to Mars… and elsewhere.”

  AJ trailed off uncertainly, then abruptly gained resolve, “I just think we should be thinking bigger!”

  There was a moment of silence. Amundsen felt a little bit appalled by the fact that AJ sounded like he was scolding Ell. But Ell stepped forward and threw her arms around him. Holding him tightly despite his flabbergasted look, she said over his shoulder, “You’re damned right we should! Thank you. Thank you for pointing out how small minded I’ve been.” She stepped back, holding him by the shoulders and looking him in the eye, “You ready to take this project on? Be its champion and driving force? Get Portal Tech to build you bigger ports so you can try them out? Find a company to build you turbines you can send to Mars in pieces small enough to fit through a thirty-three-foot hole?”

  It took Amundsen a moment to realize that the “thirty-three-foot hole” Ell spoke of was a ten-meter port. He hadn’t ever translated ten-meters into dimensions he was familiar with. Now he felt stunned to realize that ten-meters was so big.

  AJ looked stunned. His voice came out a little bit wavery, but he said, “If I’ve got your permission, hell yes!”

  “You’ve got it. Go get ‘em.” She glanced at Carter DeWitt and her eyes twinkled, “You’ll also need to find a waldo driver who�
��s good enough to remotely assemble your turbine.”

  Eliciting a grin from Ell, Carter knocked his heels together and said, “Right here ma’am.”

  “Um, how much can I spend?” AJ asked tentatively.

  “Tell me when you’re about to go over ten million.” She lowered an eyebrow and, using an ominous tone, said, “Don’t forget, there’re bean counters under every rock, watching every move you make.”

  Carter slapped his speechless friend on the back, “Stop looking like someone just dumped a load of bricks on you. I told you she’s a sweetheart.”

  ~~~

  Once everyone had finished congratulating AJ, he and Carter started back down to the ETR research area. Ell sat down across from Roger and Emma. She patted a chair for Amundsen while asking her friends, “What’s new with you two?”

  Roger replied with a query of his own, “How much more difficult are curved ports? Like you make for the ocular contacts?”

  “Not difficult at all. Any port can be curved. It just takes a few changes in the electronics.” She shrugged, “And those changes in the electronics are pretty minor. Have you thought of other uses for them?”

  “How about if we sprayed a ring of buckyballs onto the surface of a graphene balloon so we had a port we could deflate and inflate?”

  Ell stared at him wide-eyed for a moment, then briefly got the unfocused look Roger’d seen her get when she was doing math in her head. She spun to look after AJ and Carter, but they were gone. She waved a hand after them and said, “I’ll talk to them later.” Turning back to Roger, she said, “That’s a genius idea. It should only take a percent or two more power than a flat port but it’ll have twice the surface area.” She tilted her head quizzically, “If you had to ask me if the ports were more difficult to build…” she trailed off thoughtfully, “how’d you know they’d have all that extra surface area for almost the same power?”