Solarpunk: Ecological and Fantastical Stories in a Sustainable World

by Fabio Fernandes

  “Saluto! Me Mera nomines petin…”

  “Hi, call me Mera,” she said in free translation. “Easier to remember than Almerinda Farias Gama, isn’t it? I’m a professor of Plasma Physics at IPEN and a member of the board of the Neogeia Electroatomical Cooperative. We have a few chronos to get there and no onboard service, so we can spend time talking about the Intirana. It’s a compound of ‘Inti’, ‘sun’ in Quechua and ‘rana’, ‘similar’, in Tupi, because it was built in cooperation with the Tauantinsuio nuclear research institute. It’s similar to the sun for generating energy through nuclear fusion, even though the process is a bit different. Instead of fusing hydrogen nuclei, or protons, in helium nuclei, here the helium comes from the fusion of nuclei of deuterium and tritium, these obtained from the bombardment of lithium atoms…”

  “And that will make the world depend more on the lithium of the Tauantinsuio,” Orwell said. “Isn’t that very comfortable for Cosmopolis, Cuzco, and the ruling party in both?”

  Interesting question, Pagu thought. The guy was eccentric, but smart. It was worthwhile to further explore this line of thought and check data related to the matter, she noted.

  “Look, friend Orwell,” Mera replied, “it’s a matter of physics before it’s politics. This method is the most viable, the only one capable of generating useful energy with the technology available today. There are experimental units that don’t use lithium, but consume more energy than they produce, or the reaction isn’t sustained by more than a niche. And lithium is not so rare. In this reactor of three thousand and four hundred megaborbas, we used one thousand four hundred tons of lithium. If it were the case of replacing the world generation of seventeen teraborbas for similar reactors, we would need five thousand reactors and seven million tons, twice as much as we use today in batteries and fuel cells. The known terrestrial reserves are more than 100 million tons, but more than eighty percent are in the kachikachi, the Tauantinsuio salt marshes, but there are also 240 million tons in the oceans. And this is not a likely scenario. In ten or twenty years, before we generate 10 percent of the world’s energy with fusion, more advanced reactors won’t need lithium anymore.”

  “Mera,” Pagu called, “I want to ask you another political question. Even assuming that lithium is not a problem and that the Tauantinsuio does not use it to pressure the Union, as it already did before…”

  “Water under the bridge…” The physicist dismissed. “And we’re about to discard the use of lithium in fuel cells.” IPEN is developing various types of superconducting coil energy cells that only need carbon nanotubes plated with nickel and cobalt… and look, we have Tauantinsuians in this line of research, not only Brazilians and Mexicans.”

  “Whatever. But even so, isn’t it a step backwards in the policy of decentralization, of making local governments more autonomous and self-reliant? I imagine that such an investment must be managed and planned by confederations.”

  Orwell looked at Pagu approvingly, and added, “In my country, the Isle of Wight, with just over one hundred square miles and one hundred thousand inhabitants, we have a community self-sufficient in energy with its wind and solar generators. Could it do the same with a nuclear fusion reactor?”

  Mera stopped to get data with her visor and think of the answer.

  “Hmm, no,” she answered. “Today it’s not practical to build much smaller units than the Intirana, because it’s difficult to control a reaction with a temperature of eighty million thermograms. The investment of sixty million credits would be within reach of a state or a small country, but it has to be planned as part of a continental network.”

  “Then the communities will become more dependent on the confederations!” Orwell concluded.

  “For now, yes, they will. But imagine a plant like this near the island. The energy goes to twenty millis per gigajuma, the same cost as wind power, or half the cost of solar power. If the island dismantles its generators and starts buying electricity from the reactor, it will save on average and free up space for reforestation, tourism, whatever you want. The Intirana is equivalent to four thousand quarters of solar panels or thirty thousand of wind farms. If I lived there, that would be my choice, as it was the people of this region.”

  “Why ‘for now’?” Pagu intervened.

  “Because when we can use muon-catalyzed fusion, we’ll be dealing with much lower temperatures and scales. But we need to know more. Oh, look, from here you can see the Intirana …”

  Tina and Pagu looked out the window. They could see a horseshoe-shaped complex: a large circular building in the center, reminiscent of an enormous gasometer or water tank, surrounded on one side by a semicircular pond and on the other by something that looked like a rectangular industrial complex. A little beyond, one could see the lake of the hydroelectric plant of Xingó.

  “The cylindrical building is the fusion unit. You’ll see later how it works. The two small buildings next to the reactor are engineering and support. There are cooling towers over here, then the deuterium-tritium pellet plant, and over there the steam turbines and the electric power substations. Let’s stop at Coaracytaba, stretch out our legs, wait for the rest of the group and have a coffee before visiting the plant.”

  “I like your style,” Pagu greeted Orwell when he stepped down from the machine.

  “Freedom is the right to tell people what they don’t want to hear.” He smiled. “And journalism is publishing what some don’t want to see published. The rest is propaganda.”

  The flags of the Union, Neogeia, Brazil, and the state of Palmares decorated the entrance. They were taken to the lobby of the inn next to the heliport, where a variegated breakfast awaited them. To keep Tina and Orwell at the table, Pagu took a glass of juice and asked the robot for tapioca, all the while glancing discreetly at Guira and Anaide.

  “You really are going to tell me you don’t have a pint in this joint?” Orwell grunted as he looked at the mugs for a draft of the machine.

  “And what the cazzo is a pint?” Tina asked in line, eager to get hers. The hall was well ventilated, but not refrigerated and they were feeling hot.

  “Blimey! Born in Europe and you don’t even know what a pint is! A pint is half a quart. Must I teach you the ABCs?”

  “I never heard of it,” Pagu said as she consulted Porandutepé with her visor.

  “A liter and half a liter, is what you have,” Tina insisted. “These are the mugs in front of you.”

  “I like pints. I could very well have a pint. We didn’t have this ‘liter’ garbage when I was a lad.”

  “You sound like you were young at the time we climbed trees,” Tina complained, though she was probably a few years older than him.

  Pagu laughed and Orwell blushed. But he poured himself a mug and sat with them.

  “I could very well have a pint. Half a liter isn’t enough, doesn’t quench my thirst. And a liter is a lot, makes my bladder work.”

  “I checked the visor,” Pagu said. “The old English pint was equivalent to 568 milliliters, 13.6 percent more. Does it make such a difference to you?”

  “Of course not!” Tina intervened. “It’s an English anarchist rompicoglioni thing.” Almost everyone adhered to the international system since the end of the World War, but the State of England clung to its old ways and it was only eight years ago that the government of Secretary Ilych imposed decimal standardization and the right hand of traffic to the whole Eurasian and North-Colombian Confederation. In England, antique watches and measurements are the hallmark of radical chics like this stronzo!”

  “It’s not ideology,” Orwell replied. “Ancient measures are natural, adapted to human needs by history. For example, if I say that my height is six feet three inches, you will intuitively perceive what I mean.”

  Pagu looked at him in astonishment, and Tina laughed.

  “No, I don’t understand,” she admitted. “I had to consult Porandutepé to convert this into 19 modules to get a sense.”

  “You’ve bee
n using the decimal system for two hundred years!” he protested. “You have adapted to the system, instead of using a system adapted to the people.”

  Then the second wave of journalists arrived. A man with a characteristic single eyebrow came to greet Pagu, accompanied by a tall, blue-eyed blond man.

  “Hey, Juca! Tina Modotti and George Orwell, journalists from Eurasia…” Pagu introduced them. “This is Monteiro Lobato, Brazilian representative in the Council of the Union and member of the Commission of Science…did Raul come too, Juca?”

  “A pleasure to meet you, call me Juca, please. Yes, he came on the first commissioner’s convertiplane, but since there was no room for me there, I came with the reporters to keep company with this wise German with whom I was discussing ideas. Dr. Werner Heisenberg, from CERN, a sort of Eurasian IPEN.”

  “The TGCH of CERN in Geneva is the second largest particle accelerator in the world after the Pevatron of Palmares,” Tina said proudly.

  Pagu checked the data: The Très Grand Collisionneur de Hadrons accelerated particles to three hundred trillion electron-Veigas, the Pevatron a quadrillion. After, he would ask Guira to explain exactly what that meant. If he still wanted to work with her, that is.

  “It doesn’t matter,” Heisenberg said. “The good thing about being a theoretical physicist is working with data from all over the world without asking about the particles homeland. I came here to discuss an enlargement of IPEN’s muon accelerator to test a crucial point in my theory.”

  “At what cost?” Orwell asked, just finishing the beer mug.

  “About forty million credits, divided between the Neogeia and the Union of Nations…”

  “Some milis would come out of my pocket, then. I suppose I have the right to ask what it is for.”

  “Well, to extend the knowledge of the functioning of branes and the universe…”

  “What if I think I know enough already and ask you for some practical use?”

  “I can’t foresee all the developments in theoretical physics in advance, but I set an example to the Commission. If I am right, we can create force fields with many interesting properties. We could control fusion reactions more potent than that of deuterium-tritium, such as the CNO cycle, which generates almost twice the energy per atom of helium and in nature occurs in the hottest stars…”

  “After the Intirana we would have a Sirius-mirim!” Juca tried to explain.

  “…and in addition we could create magnetic fields with a diameter greater than that of the Moon to draw hydrogen out of space and use it as fused material in a manned spacecraft.”

  That left Pagu confused. Oh, if Guira were with her instead of talking to that little bitch! She would understand what that meant and ask the right questions.

  “Of course, after Mars the Union needs another bill of five billion to justify even more centralization!” Orwell protested. “For what? To plant the red flag on an asteroid?”

  Juca laughed heartily.

  “Not an asteroid or even half an asteroid, Mr. Orwell! Climb higher!”

  “Saturn?” asked Tina.

  “Higher!”

  “Uranus, Neptune?” Pagu ventured.

  “Up, girl!”

  The three journalists looked at each other, flabbergasted. To go beyond Neptune? Juca approached Orwell and said with a dramatic expression:

  “I’m talking about Alpha Centauri, Mr. Orwell! To reach the stars until the end of the century with the Heisenberg station! And it will not cost more than a trillion…”

  “A trillion? Credits?” Orwell protested. “You are crazy! There will be a revolution!”

  “Nothing will happen! The Intirana will break the limits of the environment and the production of energy that are chaining us down! Fusion and nanotubes will be tomorrow what oil and iron were a century ago, and it would be absurd not to use them to wake up the sleeping human genius! In twenty years the economy will more than double, in thirty years, triple or quadruple, so building the ship will cost less than one percent of the world product for ten years…”

  At that moment, Mera asked for attention, for she would begin to explain the Intirana in detail. Then she projected in the middle of the hall a holo of the spherical chamber that was the heart of the plant, the lonq’owasi, as the Tauantinsuian engineers who built it, then cut it in the middle, to show the interior.

  “The chamber sits inside a vacuum chamber, but inside it has xenon to absorb ions and radiation produced by the meltdown. Double walls, spaced a meter apart. In this space we have fused lithium, maintained at 900 thermograms. One day it will have to be dismantled and isolated, but its radioactivity will be harmless in just a hundred years, while the waste from a fission plant remains dangerous for more than a hundred thousand. In addition to absorbing the heat that will be used in thermoelectric generation, lithium captures neutrons that transform some of its atoms into helium and tritium, which is processed in the pellet factory along with the deuterium from the heavy water produced at the Piranhas plant. The deuterium of a liter of sea water contains energy equivalent to the burning of five hundred liters of alcohol or a thousand of liquid hydrogen…”

  She showed the factory and explained how it produced more than one million deuterium-frozen tritium pellets per day. She followed the row of pellets to the lonq’owasi, where they were fired, one at a time, to the center of the chamber and there bombarded on all sides by hundreds of açaratãs, coherent infrared beams that served as fuse for the fusion reaction—direct descendants, she explained, of the doodsstraal that had claimed Marshal Xavier nearly a hundred years ago. The pellet exploded like a supernova, disappearing and followed by another. There were 384 açaratãs around the chamber, each with a power of one hundred kilojoules, and the merging of each pellet produced two gigajumas, the equivalent of two hundred dynamite sticks.

  Slow-motion animation accelerated to the actual rhythm. The stars that turned on and off became a shimmering sun, and it was impossible to see the pellets, fired with the speed of a three-round revolver bullet, the cadence of a World War machine gun.

  Then the people around began to scream, the holo faded and Pagu realized that real bullets were flying through the lobby. She threw herself beneath the table, not understanding, hearing explosions and smelling the acrid scent of a gas that stunned her and burned in her eyes and lungs. The attackers did not bother with this, they must have used some filter or antidote.

  “You are under arrest, in the name of the future!” A bald man in a black uniform and gray mustache, who appeared out of nowhere, shouted in a megaphone in Portuguese with an Italian accent. “The old order dies here!”

  “I can’t believe it! L’imbecille Marinetti!” Tina growled through her teeth as tears streamed down her nose.

  “Who?” Pagu whispered.

  “An Italian writer who glorifies war in his fucking books and has created a fucking Futurist Party. He gave lectures in New Amsterdam last year. Another anarchist pazzo!”

  “Hell, no!” Orwell protested softly. “That fucking bastard is not ours!”

  “Achtung! Stand up, hands behind your neck!” A German with a mustache and a mad look shouted, wielding an obsolete but not at all harmless submachine gun.

  Pagu obeyed and looked around. Several men in black uniforms, armed and nervous.

  “Hail Marinetti, here are two famous ones!” the German shouted. “Tina and Pagu!”

  “Bravo, Corporal Hitler! Put the handcuffs on them; this time these spokespeople of the system will have to hear the truth next to their bosses! Captain Mussolini!” He turned to a bald man who seemed to be the second in command. “Bring them here, they’ll hear me better!”

  Left with no alternative, Pagu let herself be arrested and driven, and, terrified, saw another group of men in black, led by a small, demented man, bring First Commissioner Luxemburg, President Cândido and some members of his entourage, also handcuffed.

  “Bravo, Lieutenant Franco! He brought us the grand prize!”

  Ma
rinetti started to speak, both to his men and to the prisoners, throwing gestures, making faces, and striking poses, but nevertheless making his delusion more understandable:

  “Finally mythology and the mystical ideal are overcome! We are about to witness the birth of the Centaur and soon we will see the first Angels fly! You will have to shake the doors of life to experience its joys and locks! Behold, on earth, the very first dawn! There is no match for the brightness of the red sword of the sun that fights for the first time in our millennial darkness! Let us come out of wisdom like one who breaks a hideous shell, and throw ourselves, like fruits spiced with pride, into the immense and twisted mouth of the wind! Let us give ourselves as pasture to the Unknown, not out of desperation, but only to fill the depths of the Absurd! We want to sing the love of danger, the habit of energy and temerity, we want to exalt the aggressive movement, the feverish insomnia, the step of running, the somersault, the slap and the punch. There is no beauty except in the struggle. No work that is not a violent assault can be a masterpiece. We stand upon the extreme promontory of centuries! Why look back, if we want to break into the mysterious doors of the Impossible? Time and Space died yesterday! We already live in the absolute, because we have already created the eternal omnipresent speed! We want to glorify war, the only hygiene in the world, militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of libertarians, the beautiful ideas for which one dies and the contempt for women! We want to destroy museums, libraries, academies, and fight against moralism, feminism, and all opportunistic and utilitarian villainy!”

  He stopped to hear the applause and cries of Hail! of his men, but a thin, mustachioed sentry took the break for a warning, extending his right arm:

  “Hail, Marinetti!” He had no foreign accent. “I saw a weird little thing fly through the window, it could be a Union spy robot!”

  “Grazie, Sergeant Salgado! Let it record our manifesto for posterity! But we must hurry, to take the Intirana by assault before they can retaliate, comrades! With these hostages, they will not dare shoot! I already gave the message: they must evacuate the area in a radius of twenty blocks and we have to find the doors open, otherwise everybody will die! Mussolini, let’s take Tina, Pagu, Luxemburg and Cândido. Choose two more expendable ones if we need to kill someone to get them to trade. Pound, Heidegger, lock the rest into the guesthouse. More than six hostages will only disrupt us.”