Chapter 61: Not buying it.

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“Yes Sir” Shaniqua agreed. "But there’s something else. Perhaps it’s not visible at a distance but from the parking lot I noticed that the guy wire behind this build ascends at the wrong angle. It goes up much higher than the antenna. There’s also something very odd quite a distance above it. I can barely see it but I’m certain that something is there. That’s what I want to discuss with you.”

Roy shot a quick look at his wife.

She knew her husband. He had been almost busting a gut this last decade or so. He dearly wanted to brag about his baby but they had agreed to not actively talk about it in public. This might not qualify and besides...it HAD been a decade. Their oldest children were just babies during the construction. Maybe this was the time to let him gloat about it to someone.

Sally nodded imperceptibly. The expression of gratitude on his face was almost comical. Sally knew her husband very well. They had been been together long enough that she could read him like a book that had large print.

Roy could talk all day about his favorite subject. That would be engineering.

“Excuse me please” she said before Roy could begin. "Would you like more coffee or something else. When Roy starts talking about his baby he doesn’t stop. This could take a long time.”

“Yes please.” Shaniqua said "that is very kind of you.”

Roy said "You won’t tell anyone I hope?”

“No sir I won’t. I’ve already written a retraction for the story that slipped past me. The retraction will run on page one next edition. Too late for me to stop now if I wanted to...which I don’t. I’m trying to regain trust and admission of past mistakes is one way to do that.” Shaniqua told him.

“I just want to know in order to satisfy my curiosity. I’ve never seen anything like it.” Shaniqua said. She started to speak again just as the waitress returned with several large carafes of coffee and a notebook computer.

They all filled their cups then Shaniqua looked at Roy with a raised eyebrow.

Roy and Sally nodded. Roy pointed to the computer "Sally recorded the construction. The twins weren’t but a few weeks old at the time. She’s got it from start to finish right here. First I need to give you some back ground. Are you familiar with the term ‘Tensegrity’?”

“I don’t believe that I’m familiar with that word, no.” she’d said. Of course she was but this was his parade. She had no intention of raining on it. She’d play the dumb blonde, even though she was anything but that, neither intellectually nor chromatically. Her hair was darker than a raven’s wing, as was her skin.

Roy nodded.”That’s to be expected. Almost no one these days has. It was rather a big deal back in the sixties and seventies among the geeks. It means ‘tensional integrity’, a concept that was developed by Bucky Fuller. One of it’s applications is in structural engineering. I put a new twist to it.”

"Sally and I were taking courses online. We both took masters degrees in engineering. Our joint thesis was on my ‘twist’. We worked on it together for over a year. The title is long, fancy Geek Speak so I needn’t mention it. The point is that we developed a technique to take advantage of the new structural engineering materials that would soon become available. Graphene and bucky-tubes in particular.”

“What an interesting concept” Shaniqua had explained.

“Our thesis adviser and the dissertation committee thought so too. So much so that our thesis was published in a journal. One that ALSO has a Geek Speak title.” Roy said.

“To cut to the chase, "Sally said "a certain person was made aware of the article. He was involved in something called ‘SeaSteading”. Or that’s what he implied even though he never came right out and said so. He said that he thought our project would be just the thing. He and a group his people visited us one day. We sat around a this very table for hours drinking coffee, eating catfish and boiled crawdad, smoking cigars and talking. He wanted us to build a proof-of-principal prototype.”

“So we did” Roy said.

“My people have lived on this land since before the white man came. We’re an officially recognized tribe and this is an officially recognized reservation. It’s pretty large....and private.”

Sally recalled the long driveway from the gate leading here. There were trees too. A lot of trees. She agreed that no one could see it. The road hadn’t been very busy either.

“We agreed to build it right here, part of the deal was that it was ours when we completed it. They just wanted to see if it could be built.”

“We utterly surprised them.” Sally said. "We built it for fraction of the cost and in a fraction of the time that they had expected.”

“The most expensive part was what they installed " Roy said.” We didn’t have any part of building that. They hired a company to set the piers and do the dredging.”

“One day a floating dredge appeared on the river. I fed the crew.” Sally said.

“They did that part pretty fast” Sally continued "I heard one of them say that they had materials left over from some other project. It was either use them here or they’d be tossed out as scrap.”

“I suspect there was a serious discount involved.” Roy said.“It didn’t take much time for that dredge to dig out canals and a turning basin over that way” Roy pointed. "Then they floated in a barge mounted pile driver. That didn’t take long either to sink the piles and construct the piers and some other stuff. Almost everything came in by barge and left the same way. They didn’t use the country roads or state highways at all. Most likely no one knew anything out of the ordinary was going on. Surprisingly quickly they were done.”

“We hadn’t been standing idle twiddling our thumbs while this was happening. We had ordered feedstock " Roy said

”This barn was already here. It used to be part of a rice and crawfish operation. Dad had turned it into general purpose building for tribal business and a cafe. I figured Rassling was tribal business. There is also a shop in the back.” Roy said. " We had a place to work out of the weather.”

“The parts for the bigger Knitter and other equipment began to arrive. We were soon on a first name basis with the UPS, FED-EX drivers and those of a trucking company.” Sally said.

“We got the feedstock tank built just in time. The feedstock was brought in by a tanker barge.” Roy said.

“Then we began to knit the arches.” Sally said.

“The knitting machine uses a combination of Electron deposition, lasers and digital light. The little one we built to test our design only needed a PC. The big one needed a lot more computing power. We had to rent computer time to handle it. That required a bigger data pipe so we had a fiber optic communications cable run out here. We got the best that was available. It was adequate but just barely. It wasn’t cheap either.”

“Knit.” Shaniqua said pensively.She watched a video of the process and understood immediately..

I’t somewhat similar to knitting the sleeve of a sweater” Sally said "if you're using a plasma torch to knit with.

“How clever!” she’d been honestly impressed.

“It took a while.” Roy said. "or it seemed a long time to us.”

“Sally and I got it done. It wasn’t all that hard after it was setup and running” Roy continued "Then we called the billionaire guy. HE was surprised that we had completed it so soon.”

“A few days later he arrived.” Sally said "He brought a lot of people with him.”

“No press though” Roy remembered. "They weren’t allowed. For some reason he hated them. He posted a guard at the end of the driveway who checked out anyone who arrived. Anyone not on the list wasn’t allowed to pass. Especially not media people.”

“I’m in the media business myself”Shaniqua reminded them. "Trust me...I can see why.”

“The inflation went flawlessly” Sally recalled.

“Oh My” Shaniqua said in awe. " I’d expected a huge crane or something. You just aired it up?”

“Yes Ma’am.” Roy said "There was a little bit more than that involved but that’s the general idea. Watch this.”

Shaniqua watched the video. A small barge floated to the center of a polygon defined by all of the piers. It was loaded, but what the load was wasn’t clear. Ducts were stretched from the barge to the piers. They looked much like flexible hot air ducts for a clothes dryer that could be found in any residence....only MUCH larger in diameter. Much longer too. Several thousand feet long, each.

“an ounce of graphene membrane will cover two foot ball fields” Roy said at her explanation of surprise "that means a LOT of our knitted fabric can fit in a small place. Like on that barge.”

When all the preliminary set up had been completed.
They watched the material that remained on the barge began to quiver slightly then begin to move.

“Each pier had electrolysis units installed.” Roy told her.” They sucked up water and electrically split the water into H2 and 02 gases.”

The structure slowly inflated. It expanded enormously and began to rise into the air. When the center had cleared the water by ten or twenty feet and the only thing touching the surface were the ducts stretching to the piers it stopped rising.

Shaniqua watched the video. A tanker barge replaced the first barge. A hose was attached to the center of the ballon.

Then the fabricated mass began rising again. It rose higher and higher and HIGHER into the air, dragging the hose up with it. Soon the center part was almost out of sight. The shape reminder her of a Daddy Long Legs Spider except that it was almost a mile across and VERY high in the air.

Shaniqua watched the video several times at high speed. It DID remind her of a spider lifting itself off the ground, or helium ballon shaped like an octopus with the tentacles hanging straight down. In fact that was pretty much what it was.

Roy grinned. " Considering how large it is there was very little material used in it’s construction. It’s incredibly strong though. It took a while to inflate. When it was up and stable we shot the current to it.”

“We had a big bank of super-capacitors that had been charging for weeks. We discharged them all at the same time, almost instantly into the hydrogen-oxygen mix in the tubes. As you would suspect the mixture ignited. It was kinda purty. Best fireworks display you ever saw.” Roy said.

“The blast wave front caused our special mixture that we’d made it from to do something similar to ‘explosive welding’ like they’ve been using for decades. Nothing new there. What was new was what it did to the wall material.”

"It caused a phase change. Some parts of the weave transitioned to diamond. The diamond is the compression parts. Other bits transitioned to graphene threads. Those are the tension parts. Almost instantly the floating ballon transformed into a self supporting tensegrity structure.”

“It was dangerous as hell too” Roy said "a few birds flew into it and were shredded in flight. The tiny graphene threads sliced right through them. They were minced. We made sure no one got close to the legs before we’d finished the next part.”

“Notice lumps in that hose attached to the middle? They’re pumps. The top is WAY too high for any liquid to be pumped at any reasonable pressure so there are many booster pumps spaced a few dozen yards apart the full vertical length of the hose. There are wires in the hose running down it’s length to the barge’s diesel powered generators. That’s what powers the pumps.”

“Then we pumped up something like an epoxy mix.” Roy said.” It come out at the very top, oozed out like honey and flowed down encasing the matrix. It’s composition was such that it stuck to the graphene threads and didn’t drip. Several hours later the complete matrix was covered in goop. The barge disconnected the hose and left it hanging. Then we fired off the other capacitor bank. It changed the epoxy almost instantly into a very strong protective, somewhat flexible covering, encasing the daimond/graphene thread tensegrity matrix. It was safe now, and air tight again.”

Shaniqua watched the time lapse video, apparently the process had taken several hours if not several days.

Then video showed a VERY large roadable crane arrive. How it navigated the drive way was a mystery to her. It looked odd though. It had no boom.

“That’s the biggest crane we could find in a two hundred mile radius from here” Roy said "A lot of my heavy haul trucker friends cuss when they tell stories about job sites. It seems that the contractors ALWAY order cranes that are just barely big enough for the job. I didn’t. That thing was almost too heavy for some of the bridges it had to cross though, even without the boom. If it’d had the boom it would have been wayTOO heavy. I bet they paid a pretty penny for permits.”

“We had tie down points for it too, in the middle of the parking lot. Instead of setting the outriggers on pads like they usually do they bolted them to the tie downs. Those tie downs were stout. They were another thing the pier crew installed. They must go down forty foot and are concreted in place. I love overkill.” he said.

Shaniqua watched as a drone lifted a small rope to the top of the new structure...then it was used to pull up a larger rope, and again, until finally the lift cable was hoisted.

“That’s a special cable” Roy told her " It’s made of buckytubes. It was kinda hard finding one long enough.”

The lift cable was passed thru a pulley at the very top of the new structure by drones then used to lower the hose. The barge was back in place and slowly reeled the hose in then it left and was replaced by a larger open top cargo barge. The barge was heavily loaded with rock or perhaps coal.”

“This is the make or break test” Sally said

“Pass or fail.” Roy added.

Shaniqua held her breath and held her hands over her mouth as the 195 foot long, 35 foot wide, 350 ton barge loaded with a 15 hundred ton load, was lifted effortlessly into the air.

“The strain gauges barely registered” Roy said "I swear it could lift a loaded supertanker. Those things weigh in at almost half a MILLION tons. I KNOW it could do it.”

Shaniqua looked at him in amazement. "That’s the picture.”

“What picture?” Sally asked.

“The one the reporter I fired used in his story. A flying barge.” Shaniqua said.

“I suppose the gate guard didn’t do his job?” Sally said.

‘More than likely the news clowns keep track of the rich guys and follow them around like the paparazzi that followed Princess Di.’ Shaniqua thought to her self. She didn’t say it out loud, it was too embarrassing.

“That picture might have been taken from a helicopter or drone maybe.” she said

She was ashamed of her profession.

“That was it” Roy said. "The billionaire and his group seemed happy.”

“They were so happy that they gave us a bonus.” Sally recalled.”We built the whole thing under-budget. Perhaps they gave us the part we didn’t spend?”

“Yes they might have at that. That bonus sure came in handy later when we expanded our operations. We hadn’t requested any money. We had agreed to build it for free. We just wanted to see if we could do it. They provided the money to buy the raw materials and took care of setting the piers, the crane, and all of the equipment. We took it from there.” Roy agreed.

“They DID take the big knitting machines.” Sally recalled.” and the super-capacitor banks.”

“There was no need for us to keep them.” Roy said. We can build more if we want to. I have some ideas of how to improve on the design. If I do though I can’t use them commercially for a long time. We signed a ‘will not compete’ clause as part of the initial agreement.”

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