Terraform (an Ell Donsaii story #15)

by Laurence Dahners

  Stiffly, Carley said, “You’ll have to give the injections to yourself. You’ll be doing the experiment, not me. Understand?”

  “Yes, ma’am!” Eli said, sounding like a military guy who’d just come to attention.

  “Okay,” Carley sighed, “I’ll see if I can make you some FGF-21.” Her thoughts already started tumbling over all the potential problems. Not least of which would be using the lab’s equipment and supplies to do something ethically questionable. She knew she’d want to tell Dr. Barnes what she was doing. She hated being dishonest. Using supplies, equipment, and even her own time without permission would make her feel guilty. But, if she asked for approval, maybe Barnes’d tell her she couldn’t do it.

  Perhaps, even if Barnes secretly wanted her to do it, she wouldn’t want to know about it?

  Eli sounded puzzled, “Can’t you just buy some?”

  “Yeah, but it’s expensive. And, not approved for human use.”

  “It wouldn’t be approved if you made it either, would it?”

  “Nope. But, it’d be off the books.”

  “It’s got to be more expensive to make it yourself, doesn’t it? I mean, a big company that makes it all the time would have industrial equipment and some kind of production line, right?”

  “Yeah, that’d be cheaper. But, not if you don’t count the man-hours… or, in this case, the woman hours that went into it. All we’d have to actually pay for would be the ingredients.”

  “Oh, well then, I, I’d really appreciate it. And somehow I’ll just have to get up the gumption to give myself the injections.”

  Carley snorted, “They’ll be tiny needles. Don’t get too worried.”

  Eli disconnected. Carley turned back around to Zage. Zage had apparently left when she was taking Eli’s call because he was just returning. Probably wanted to give me my privacy, she thought. “That was Eli,” she said. “He says he’s willing to try your idea about FGF-21 injections.”

  Zage gave her a puppy-dog look, full of longing. Now that she knew what they meant, she found them a little frightening, though also endearing. He said, “I got the gist from hearing your side of the conversation.”

  Carley’s eyes drifted over to the cell-free protein synthesis equipment. “I think I’m going to have to try to ask Dr. Barnes permission,” she said. Her eyes went back to Zage, “I don’t have your courage.”

  Zage looked perplexed, “What courage?”

  “You remember. The way you just started making Gordito’s vaccine, without asking permission. It was the right thing to do and you just did it.”

  Zage shrugged, “So? You could just decide that making FGF-21 for your brother’s the right thing to do.”

  “No…” Carley said pensively. “It’s not at all clear it’s the right thing to do. It’s just a WAG that it might be the right thing to do.”

  “WAG?”

  “Wild ass guess,” Carley said, then embarrassed, put her hand over her mouth. “Sorry,” she mumbled.

  Zage gave her a grin, “I’ve heard a lot worse. Besides, it wasn’t clear that making Gordito’s vaccine was the right thing to do back then. Remember, at one point there were people who thought Gordito might be the terrorist.”

  Carley stared at him for a moment, then gave a little shrug, “You may be right. But the potential downside of not making the vaccine was pretty huge.”

  “Maybe,” Zage said. He held out a small paper bag. “This may be a solution to part of your dilemma.”

  Carley took the bag, hoping it wasn’t some strange or over-the-top offering that came from Zage’s crush. Pulling open the top, she looked inside and saw a small plastic bag of powder. Frowning, she looked up at Zage, “What’s this?”

  “FGF-21.”

  Carley’s eyes widened as she looked back in the bag. “My God! There must be grams of it there.” She considered the fact that there were only about 500 nanograms of FGF-21 in the entire blood volume of a normal person. “At nanograms per injection this has to represent hundreds of thousands of doses?”

  “Yeah,” Zage said, shrugging as if it wasn’t a big deal. “A friend of mine heard about your brother’s issue and made some up for you.”

  Carley searched his face, “A friend, huh?”

  Zage nodded blandly.

  “A certain someone didn’t fire up the CFPS over there and make it himself, did he?”

  Zage glanced at the CFPS. He turned back to Carley and shook his head.

  “Who did make it?”

  “He doesn’t want me to tell you. You know, since it’s not approved?”

  “How do you even know someone who could make a protein like this?”

  Zage shrugged, “I know you. And Dr. Barnes, Rick, and Alice.”

  “Are you saying one of them made it?”

  “Nope, not them. Really, it wasn’t made here in the lab.”

  Carley peered back into the bag, “How do we know it’s any good?”

  “You should assay it. Make sure it’s okay. And, obviously, you’ll need to sterilize it.”

  “I’ll do that,” Carley said thoughtfully, still looking in the bag. “What’s in the little box?

  “Um, I brought you some syringes too. They’re little ones like they use to inject small doses in mice and rats.”

  She gave Zage a puzzled look, “Will that be enough?”

  He shrugged, “You said it yourself. You’re going to be injecting nanogram quantities. So, yeah. These syringes’ll hold a lot more than you need. You’ll need to dilute it into a moderate volume just so you can tell how much you’re injecting. If it wasn’t for that, you could use even smaller syringes.” Carley’d pulled them out and was looking at them. Zage indicated the syringes with his chin, “They have really tiny needles. From what you were saying when he called, that’s important too.”

  Carley frowned, “Where’d you get the syringes?”

  “You can order them online. Syringes aren’t controlled like drugs are. I think that’s because they don’t want addicts sharing needles. They try to make it easy to get them.”

  Carley looked at him. She slowly said, “I’m not sure you should be spending your money on my brother’s problem.”

  Zage looked uncomfortable, “I, um, I have them on hand. I have to give myself injections.”

  Surprised, Carley said, “Are you diabetic?”

  “No. I’m, uh, injecting a different peptide.”

  Concerned, Carley asked, “What’s it for?”

  “I’m not supposed to say. Sorry. But it does mean I know how to inject myself. I could teach Eli how to inject himself… If you want…”

  ***

  This time Ell met with AJ, Rob Braun, and Ben Stavos in the ET Resources research area. AJ was shifting around, as if he was pretty excited. She grinned at him, “From the look on your face you got that five-meter port to work. Am I right?”

  AJ nodded enthusiastically. “Our data and slo-mo video showed the first one overheated and blew out near the port that vented the cold nitrogen back out of the ring. It just wasn’t cold by the time it finished its circuit around the ring. To solve it we installed entry and exit ports at multiple locations around the circumference. That way the cold nitrogen’s coming in and only traveling part way around the ring before it exits. That seems to keep the hotspots by the exit ports from getting hot. I’m feeling fairly confident that with some design optimization we’ll be able to go up to even bigger rings. In fact, we’ve already built a functioning ten-meter ring.”

  Ell led the others in a small round of applause, then leaned back and lowered an eyebrow, “You know you’re frustrating me by keeping me waiting to hear about the power requirements, don’t you? Was that lower-than-calculated demand last time real? Or not?”

  AJ’s smile got even bigger, “Like you suggested, we went back and tested the one-meter port and smaller ones on down to 20-cm. The effect gets smaller as the port gets smaller, but even in the 20-cm ports, you can see a few percent decrease from calculat
ed demand. In a one-meter port it’s down 21% and in a two-meter port it’s a 30% reduction.” He lifted an eyebrow, “Our ten-meter port only needs 122-megawatts. That’s only 49% of what we’d expect with our old-style calculations.”

  Ell gave him a high five, “If that’s true, then a ten-meter port to Mars at its average distance from Venus would only draw 378-megawatts, quite a bit less than we’d expected. The average distances to Europa and Titan for water and nitrogen would take about 438-megawatts.” She grinned, “And, remember, if we’re using bi-hemispherical ports, they’d be delivering four times as much carbon dioxide.” She turned to look at Rob and Ben, “I hope you guys know just how important AJ’s getting to be to D5R as a whole. If he hadn’t pushed me out of my rut on the difficulty of terraforming Mars, we wouldn’t have learned any of this stuff!”

  AJ gave a humble shrug, “I just got lucky. We’d have built some bigger ports eventually. At some point, someone would’ve noticed.”

  In an amused tone, Ben said, “Yeah, newlywed boy’s running us plum out of attaboys down at ETR. Next thing you know; we’re gonna have to give him a raise.”

  AJ looked embarrassed and deflected the conversation away from himself. “If my calculations are right, a 100-meter port’d draw about 23% of the calculated need and a 500-meter port’d draw 11%. That 100-meter baby’d draw one quarter the power to deliver four times as much volume… sixteen times the efficiency.”

  Ell turned wide eyes on Rob and Ben. “You can’t say he doesn’t have ambition!”

  AJ put up his hands in surrender, “I give. I give. I just want to point out that 159 bi-hemispherical hundred-meter ports could give Mars a breathable atmosphere in twenty years.” His stunned audience of three said nothing, so he filled in with, “Well, and, of course, there’d need to be a lot of photosynthesis going on to convert the CO2 and water into oxygen…”

  After a few moments of silence, Ell said, “If your numbers are right, those 159 enormous ports are going to be drawing 2.81 tera-watts…”

  AJ shrugged, “Earth’s using 25 tera-watts at present. It’s not impossible. And if you build 500-meter ports you could do it for half that.”

  El laughed delightedly. Eyes twinkling merrily, she said, “I’m hoping you have a funding solution too? At 10 dollars per megawatt-hour, the power alone’s going to cost $674,400 a day. Over 20 years, that’s nearly $5 trillion!”

  AJ shook his head, looking mulish. “That’s not an engineering problem. But I’d point out that ETR’s solar ports have dropped the price of power below ten dollars per megawatt hour and it’s still going down. Besides, we’d be making our own power.”

  All three of them laughed at this one. Rob turned to Ell and Ben, “I’d say he’s pretty committed to this project… As long as he doesn’t have to pay for it.” He turned back to AJ, “Don’t forget, before we can make our own power, we have to buy turbines and generators. It’s the capital investment that makes solar power cost money, the energy’s actually free.”

  AJ brightened. “I forgot to tell you I found a 35-megawatt steam turbine,” he said enthusiastically. “All its components’ll fit through our new five-meter port and they can be assembled on Mars by waldoes.”

  Ell said, “So, by your new numbers, that’d be enough power to run a two-meter port from Venus, Europa or Titan to Mars.”

  “Or,” AJ said enthusiastically, “we could run 4 one-meter ports, two on Titan, one on Europa, and one on Venus. Kind of a test run to check that all our guesstimated numbers are in fact reasonable.”

  Ell’s eyes twinkled, “I’ll bet that 35-megawatt steam turbine’s going to put you over your $10-million budget, right?”

  “Um, yeah,” AJ said, looking chagrined, “the turbine’s $150 million.” He gave her a hopeful glance.

  Ell smiled, “I’ll talk to Amundsen, but I’d imagine you’ll get your money.” She shook her head, “We’ve got to keep you happy so you’ll keep coming up with all these… ideas.”

  ***

  Jillian had her car pull in and parallel park down the street from the Montessori school’s entrance. A quick glance out the back window showed there was a clear line of sight to the drop-off circle where the kids’d be getting out of their cars. She worked with her AI to aim and focus the telephoto sitting on the back deck of the car. With a little effort, she got it lined up so it covered the entire area where the kids might be getting out of vehicles. She positioned her screen so she’d notice when the kids started to arrive.

  Ready, she picked up her coffee.

  At least this plan leaves me the rest of the day to do some honest reporting. Something about doing it left a bad taste in her mouth though. This was the fourth school she’d watched. She was only doing the hoity-toity private schools in the area since she figured Donsaii wouldn’t send her kid to a public school. But, there were enough high-end schools in the area for her little project to take weeks unless she struck it rich right away.

  Once the kids started arriving, she’d focus her attention on the screen, marking any of them she thought might resemble Donsaii in any way for intense close-up review of the recording. So far, she hadn’t seen a child she thought might be Donsaii’s.

  At first, she’d been hoping to be able to look for Donsaii herself in the car, but it seemed like most of the kids were just dropped off by their car’s AI. Jillian figured that probably a parent came with the kids for a while at the beginning of the school year, but by now the kids had had a couple of months to get used to just getting dropped off by their car.

  Blackly, she thought, Hanging around schools is one place where there’s an advantage to being a woman. Less likely someone’s going to decide I’m a pedophile and call the cops…

  ***

  Carley spoke to her AI, “Call Eli.” Jekyll or Hyde? she asked herself as she wondered whether she’d reach the nice, sober brother, or the drunken jerk.

  Eli answered, “Hey Carley.”

  Even though it’d only been two words, Carley thought he sounded sober. “Hey, brother. You straight?”

  “Yeah.” Then, uncharacteristically, he confessed, “But I really want a drink. So, you’d probably better stay away from me tonight.”

  “Oh,” Carley said, thinking. “Would you… You want to try an injection? It’d just be a small test dose, but if it affected how much you wanted to drink, that’d be good news.”

  Sounding irritable, Eli said, “I thought you had to make the stuff. Sounded to me like that was going to take weeks.”

  “Turns out a friend already had some. All I had to do was test it to make sure it was pure, then sterilize it.”

  “Okay, I’ll be over to your place in about twenty minutes.”

  “No hurry, it’ll take me longer than that to get there.”

  Carley’s AI said, “Eli had already disconnected.”

  Crap, Carley thought. She didn’t want to arrive at her apartment with an irritable Eli already there. “Send him a message that I won’t be there for 25 to 30 minutes.”

  She got busy mixing up a test dose and drawing it into the syringe.

  Zage came out from behind his bench and said, “Shall I come with you? So I could show Eli how to do the injection?”

  Carley didn’t think that was a good idea. She tried to talk him out of it, but he was persistent and persuasive.

  ~~~

  As Carley entered the apartment complex, she slid her hand into her pocket and pulled out her little canister of pepper-spray, holding it hidden in her palm.

  She walked wide around the corner that Eli’d been hiding behind the other time.

  However, this time he was sitting beside her door in one of the pool chairs. Eli looked fidgety. Another guy sat beside him. “Hey Eli,” Carley said, slowing and keeping to a cheerful tone, “who’s this?”

  Eli nodded at the guy. “Buddy of mine. Name of Ray.”

  Ray was a big guy with a scraggly beard. He got up, smiling in an odd fashion. Carley had the impression he was trying to k
eep his lips covering some missing front teeth. He waved in Carley’s direction, saying, “Wow, I had no idea your sister was so pretty.” He glanced at Eli, “You been holding out on me, Brother.”

  Carley stopped. Lowering herself to one knee beside Zage, she whispered, “I don’t like this. You need to get out of here.”

  Zage held concerned eyes on Ray and Eli. “Let’s both get out of here.”

  Carley looked up to see that Ray and Eli were ambling her direction. Eli was speaking quietly and urgently to Ray, but Ray just kept his eyes on her. When Eli ran down, Ray said, “Come on, Brother. You shouldn’t be ashamed of your friends. Introduce me to your sister.”

  “I already did,” Eli said in a surly manner.

  Zage tugged on Carley’s hand, pulling her away from the two men, but she thought about how long it’d take her car to get back to the apartment complex entrance. She decided walking away from them wouldn’t help. She’d rather be there at the apartment complex where someone might respond if she started screaming. She flipped the safety off her pepper spray.

  Ray looked at Zage and said, “Who’s the little man?” He shifted his gaze to Carley, “Your son?”

  Eli responded, “He’s some kind of child genius. Works in her lab.”

  Ray leaned down and reached out a hand for Zage to shake. Zage did, but Ray immediately said, “Hey little man. A limp handshake like that won’t get you anywhere in this old world. You need to give my hand a real squeeze.”

  They shook again, this time Ray seemed satisfied. He stood back up and gathered Carley in a hug, not bothered by the fact that she seemed unwilling and held her arms folded up between her chest and his. “It’s good to meet my brother’s sister,” he said, kissing the top of her head.

  Carley thought he smelled bad. She really wanted to get away from both of them. Putting on a bright tone, she said, “So, Eli, you ready to try one of the injections?”

  “Sure,” he said, though he didn’t really sound like he wanted to.

  Zage said, “I came along because I have to give myself these kinds of injections all the time. I can give myself one to show you how it’s done, then you can do your own.”