Regolith

by Brent Reilly

  “Dan, if you like your morning so far, just wait til you see what I got waiting for you in the garage,” directing Cooper’s attention to the open door. “Just go down the ladder while I have a quick word with the girls.”

  Down the ladder? In the garage? What the fuck?

  Neither Cooper nor the girls, however, seemed eager to disentangle themselves, which pissed Jackson off. The girls began to complain, which made his bad mood grew worse as the long sleepless night caught up to him. As he finally extracted Cooper and pushed him towards the garage, he quickly rushed the girls around the corner in the opposite direction.

  Then Jackson spoke quietly in French. Monique was related to him through his Belgium mother, so they all spoke French.

  The beauty of French is that you can say anything, no matter how vulgar, and it sounded like music to someone who didn’t understand the language. “I just shat so hard I fried some neurons”, in French, can sound like, “It’s so wonderful to meet you”. So, keeping his tone light, Jackson let the girls understand his position. Jackson was not a natural at clever deception, like most politicians, but he was a master of declarative sentences.

  “You can’t fuck him,” Jackson bluntly told Monique. “At least not for another decade.”

  He then turned to Lisa or, rather, turned on Lisa. “What the fuck are you thinking? If the media picks up any hint of a sex scandal, I will lose billions. Caesar’s family, like Caesar, must remain above suspicion.”

  Monique turned cold before his eyes, and Jackson realized that he just made her feel like a prostitute. Which was not true. Monique never fucked for money. She fucked for kicks, and powerful -- usually married – men provided those kicks. Along with corporate jets, expensive presents, and exotic resorts. The reference to Julius Caesar, the biggest over-achiever of all time, who used the line to justify divorcing his third wife, also innocent of infidelity, soared over their heads.

  Lisa, used to going head-to-head with her father, grew hot. She used her left arm to gently push Monique away from her father and then stepped into the gap, protectively putting herself between them. Then, even though he towered over her, Lisa quietly fired back in French with a full artillery barrage.

  “You said we needed leverage over him, that he wasn’t flying in formation anymore. You said his campaign manager was out to use you for money while cutting off your access.

  “I know better than to jeopardize your precious plans. We’re not trying to seduce him. You wanted leverage, we now have leverage. Monique greeted him as if they were longtime lovers, giving him a big hug and kiss, while David worked the video cameras. All so that you could get the leverage over him that you have been constantly complaining about!”

  Silence filled the room like tear gas. Lisa was livid. Monique looked flush and felt like a cheap whore. But at the same time, she felt incredibly grateful to Lisa for sticking up for her. Women were usually the ones sticking it to her, not protecting her.

  Jackson looked at his daughter for what seemed like hours, feeling very stupid. She was such a better politician. Manipulating people came second nature to her. Which was just one of the many reasons he was going to miss her so much when she got married and moved away.

  He also immediately understood why she did not tell him – deniability. If things turned to shit, as they tended to do, he needed to get in front of cameras and say with a straight face that he had nothing to do with it. Which is much easier to say if it’s true.

  Another of Jackson’s many political weaknesses is that he was a lousy liar. He was getting better, as he was with evasive hair-splitting and subtle blame-shifting, but he knew that he was not a natural liar.

  Lisa watched her father shrink in front of them. His shoulders crumbled and his head grew heavy with shame. If David worked the angles and zooms right, then he now had the leverage he needed over Cooper. And he owed it to his foresightful daughter and eager-to-please cousin.

  It’s not every day you thank your half-naked teenage daughter for entrapping the next possible president of the United States with a fake sex scandal. But Jackson did so now. Barack Obama, who had a beautiful daughter Lisa’s age, probably never had this problem.

  With sad, apologetic eyes, Jackson turned to Monique, who still refused to look up at him. He then unexpectedly pushed past Lisa to wrap Monique in his world famous bear hug, while apologizing in French over and over again in her ear. He literally picked her up and twirled her around like a doll, something that he would never have done if they were alone.

  Monique finally looked up at the huge man holding her, the same guy who melted an eight year old’s grief, and found him smiling apologetically. She still was unsure how to feel. It suddenly dawned on her that she needed to convince David to carefully edit the video to omit the finger fucking and beating Cooper off. Otherwise, she would never feel comfortable in his house again. It horrified her to imagine what his family would think of her, much less her own status-conscious family in Europe.

  She knew that he would keep holding her until she forgave him, so she hid her shame and smiled back.

  Jackson quickly let her go to turn on his daughter, tickling her sides, which he knew she hated. Which was why he did it. Lisa fought back, her anger dissipating. Then Monique turned on Jackson and tickled him, something that she never would have dared before. Soon all three of them were on the living room marble floor, laughing until David triumphantly walked in, a smile on his face and a DVD disk held high in his hand.

  13

  Jackson was off-balanced and Cooper could not be more pleased. This would make his job so much easier. With Jackson’s back now to him, Cooper casually put Monique’s business card in his jacket pocket as he walked to the garage. He planned on checking out her pictures on this website. He often checked out porn online, Googling “gay facials”, “cuckold”, or “cum snowballs” to get his fix. He wondered if she had nudes. If so, with so many image hosting services (like photobucket.com, flickr.com, imageshack.us, smugmug.com, allyoucanupload.com, picturetrail.com, mac.com, webshots.com, and editgrid.com), he would find them.

  Hmmmmmmm. Today may not turn out so bad after all.

  Unclear why Jackson wanted to meet him in the garage, Cooper’s jaw dropped when he opened the door and saw a hole in the floor. And instead of two cars, Jackson had filled the entire garage with boxes. Cooper walked over to the hole and found an aluminum ladder leading to a big hole in the ground.

  A basement? In Arizona? He didn’t know anyone in Arizona who had a basement. At least in Texas they had hurricanes, tornados, and Texans.

  He quickly stepped down the ladder into what looked like a tornado shelter. Or a panic room. Or the beginning of a really bad horror flick.

  As soon as his head got below ground, he saw two metallic boxes in a hole the size of a garage, with used tires squeezed between them, around them, beneath them, and on top. Both were partially open like shipping containers.

  Eager to discover Jackson’s secret panic rooms, Cooper followed an electrical extension cord down the long ladder. One of the metal rooms was half full of pressurized gas canisters, five-gallon water bottles, and boxes of food.

  He immediately entered the empty one and saw a laptop sitting on a foldable card table at the other end. It had the stale air of a tomb. Nothing hung on the walls or ceiling except battery-operated lights and fans that stick via suction cups. No heating or air condition vents.

  He knew what it was, of course. A shed. Cooper was in a fucking shed. Under the garage of the former governor of Arizona.

  “Why didn’t I think of that?” he asked himself.

  The problem with Jackson building his fish farms in the middle of the Pacific was having to import literally all the building materials: metal, wood, glass, gravel, sand, and cement (which humidity dries quickly). So, instead of building actual buildings, he bought large refurbished WWII-era cargo ships. But these rust buckets developed ever larger leaks and wouldn’t float forever.

  Jackso
n needed to replace them. Yet anything on the sea made of steel eventually rusted, so he hired material scientists who just recently discovered how to make the world’s thickest amorphous metal by mixing large atoms with small ones.

  Their first product was very simple in order to work out the wrinkles of the tricky manufacturing process: a warehouse made out of eight very large pieces -- four walls, three floors, and a roof -- that could be easily snapped together onsite like legos. With a special salt-resistant sealant, they became air and watertight. String a bunch of them together over huge air-filled tubes, and he had a bunch of floating warehouses in the middle of the ocean.

  Making a large building out of smaller pieces would make transport easier, but weaken it structurally. Jackson needed buildings that would not collapse in the worst’s storms, which meant each wall and roof be made in one single piece. Just like a table made of one piece of oak is stronger than one made of several pieces glued together, so too was one wall forged at the same time structurally superior to many.

  Since the ground floor weighed the most, its weight determined the size of the warehouse. Jackson had long used a civilian version of the Russian Hind M-24 helicopter because its seven titanium rotors gave it the greatest lifting capacity of any helicopter in the world -- twelve metric tons. So they made a twelve ton floor, which determined the size of the warehouse. Because amorphous metal is so light and strong, a twelve ton floor turned out to be the size of a high school gym.

  The warehouses solved several problems. They offered great shelter, storage, and housing, while they protected his aircraft from the salty, humid air. Yet their roofs, coated with organic solar and fitted with twelve residential windmills, generated lots of electricity. Even better, to transport them he could stack hundreds of them like a pile of paper on one ship. Shipping their equivalent in steel, cement, sand, gravel, and wood would have cost several times as much and taken several times as long. Stringing two lines of warehouses back to back solved his storage problems.

  When he pumped nutrient-rich seawater from a mile-deep current, it spread out on the surface like buckshot from a shotgun. So he anchored his warehouses in three or more lines on top of thousands of the world’s largest inner tubes. His larger fish swam in nets between these lines, and large cages secured to the warehouse platforms confined the smaller fish. Securely anchored, Jackson now had a three-story-tall water break which minimized storm damage to the rest of his fish nets. In all, these warehouses gave him a very long floating island in the middle of nowhere. His largest three lines were even visible to the naked eye from orbit. On Google Earth it looked like Mother Nature was giving humanity the finger.

  It was genius!

  Well, if he thought of it thirty years ago, it would have been genius. Now it was just painfully obvious.

  Jackson applied another, diamond-hard layer of amorphous metal via high velocity oxygen spray to the outer walls of the warehouse to sell to the military, also adding gun slits on the third floor and remote-operated cameras at all four corners. A spy blimp tied to the roof would monitor their area. With obstacles to prevent suicide bombers driving speeding vehicles, it was as invulnerable as a tank. Inside, the first floor had enough room to accommodate a dozen vehicles, while troops slept on the second floor and recreated on the third floor.

  Jackson’s public relations team went city to city, lending paintball weapons to 1200 volunteers who formed a circle just outside of range, then attacked from all sides. Inside, Jackson’s 12 shooters used the paintball equivalent of heavy machine guns, mowing the civilians down like fish in a barrel. Jackson’s team never even had to expose themselves, and walked out afterwards inevitably paint-free, having defeated one hundred times their number. This story was especially powerful when recounted afterwards by a local paint-soiled TV reporter, still high on adrenaline, who attacked with 1199 others. What a fucking rush.

  It was not hard to imagine hundreds of these perched on strategic passage ways, hilltops, and mountain ridges along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, each remote-operating attack drones to monitor their designated area. These armored buildings could shelter armored vehicles that intercept potential enemies, drop off Ranger teams, or pick up a malfunctioning Predator drone. One helicopter company could support a couple dozen stand-alone armored buildings on the Afghan side of the border. If America wants to stop thousands of Taliban and Al Qaeda from crossing the border, this covered the most territory at the least cost.

  President McCain loved the idea and placed a big order, only to have President Palin try to renege on it later.

  After experimenting with several versions, Wal-Mart made all of their new buildings out of amorphous metal designed specifically for their stores, super stores, and neighborhood markets. Wal-Mart could finish a 200,000 square foot superstore in a fraction of the time and half of the $35,000 million it used to cost them. They not only put organic solar on the roofs and outer walls, but on top of their huge parking lots, with micro wind turbines on the roofs in windy locations. Most of these stores produced more electricity than they used, becoming micro power plants. Which interested Home Depot and others.

  Business was good. Really good.

  Then, in October, Jackson’s father shat on his parade by showing him laser ranger software that gave a greater than 50-50 chance that some asteroid fragments would strike Earth. Or, more likely, water, since water covers 70% of the Earth’s surface. Water covers so much of Earth’s surface that a random meteorite had a 3-to-1 probability of hitting water versus land. Throw in lakes, rivers, glaciers, and the frozen poles and as little as 20% of “Earth’s” surface is actually “earth”. Naming the planet “Water” would have been more accurate.

  In light of the new danger, Jackson now looked at his warehouse-hangers and saw a bomb shelter the size of a high school gym. Well, with space rocks raining down unpredictably around the world, you can’t have too many of those. He therefore triple-shifted production of the hangers, converted all of his amorphous metal plants to make them, and paid the five factories in China that were making his car frames to instead make asteroid shelters for the rest of the year. Even with the right equipment and technical expertise, changing products quickly was fucking expensive. Still, knowing that millions of lives could be saved, Jackson paid eight other companies that had amorphous metal facilities to churn out his shelters for him. Virtually overnight, Jackson monopolized global bulk amorphous metal production.

  Now, instead of a few hundred, he could now make several thousand shelters before Judgment Day.

  Except most of these other factories were too small to make hangers the size of a gym. So Jackson had the smaller factories make asteroid shelters the exact size of a 20 foot shipping container, which conveniently fit in most garages. Or, in his case, under the garage. He wanted to make millions of them, but they needed to serve a purpose after Judgment Day. Although it was not a shipping container, it could be used as one, even though amorphous metal costs several times as much as steel. But calling it a shipping container would only confuse people.

  So critics called it a shed.

  But instead of snapping together several pieces, they molded the entire shed at once to maximize its structural integrity. These smaller asteroid shelters could be easily blown away if not well secured. However, every American garage sits on a thick concrete and steel foundation. Every shed came with four amorphous metal poles. Owners simply used a jackhammer to drill four holes a meter into the garage floor, place the poles that fit into each corner of the shed, then pour concrete into the four holes.

  His “asteroid shelters”, as he cleverly renamed them, were extremely heat resistant, could withstand all but the largest falling rocks, and had no glass. Properly secured to solid bedrock among hilltops, even tidal waves would just wash over them. In short, nothing could protect people better. Given the growing worldwide hysteria, and his monopoly on amorphous metal asteroid shelters, Jackson became world famous.

  And rich. Because people who
believe the world will end are willing to spend whatever it takes to survive.

  Everyone naturally wanted them, as every mayor, congressman, and governor quickly found out. Democrats championed a special $100 billion appropriations to buy or build asteroid shelters (not necessarily Jackson’s). Republicans fought it all the way, from committee to conference, which really pissed off a terrified public.

  Large companies and foreign governments got most of them, bidding up the price to obscene levels. Before September, Jackson sold mega-hangers to Wal-Mart for as little as $15 million each. Now, individual purchases went for $50 million and large orders for over $100 million. The larger the order the higher the price because time and supply were so limited. CEOs thought nothing of spending their shareholder’s money to protect themselves, their families, and their operations. Governors had little choice but to act like they were doing everything possible to protect their constituents. And foreign governments spent whatever it took. Everyone lobbied Jackson -- governors, CEOs, hedge fund managers, billionaires, celebrities, heads of foreign states, -- and anyone who could do it in person did so. Jackson never knew he had so many friends.

  Like most governors, Cooper bought as many hangers as he could. He didn’t even mind that Jackson made him bid just like everyone else. What he did mind was Jackson making another fucking fortune. And not with porn, guns, drugs, stocks, or gambling. No, Jackson was making bank selling fucking warehouses! He could call them anything he wanted to, but they were just metallic barns for Christ’s sake. Which made Cooper all the more determined to not enrich him any more.

  Not one single fucking dollar.

  Especially since Jackson organized a well provisioned and well defended “survival camp” in northern Canada where he rented the sheds for a million bucks apiece.