Xn

by Clint Townsend

  ‘I’d suspect that they’re planning on deep storing all of that stuff. There are miles and miles of tunnels at Hutchinson. It’s a perfect location; temperature-controlled environment, no humidity, no light, it’s out of public sight, one way in and one way out. Plus, depending on what they put where, ground-penetrating radar and thermal imaging won’t be reliable after a certain depth. I think that’s where the FDA and Department of Agriculture are storing all of the seeds. There’s also an undisclosed location in the Arctic Circle. I believe that facility is submerged as well.’

  ‘You’re the mining expert; do you think that Engenechem is using Strataca as a depository to avoid radioactive fallout from an atomic bomb? Could the mine survive a direct hit from a nuclear warhead?’

  ‘I don’t know. I guess that all depends on several factors: Where exactly does the warhead strike? What is the megaton force of the bomb? Is it an aerial detonation? If so, at what altitude? All in all I’d say Strataca is a safe bet, more than any other location, as far as nonhuman collateral is concerned. Subterranean advancement of radiation would be minimal. Is this what you really believe? Engenechem is stockpiling food and supplies in a Kansas salt mine in order to survive a nuclear war they plan to initiate?’

  Armada pondered Chloe’s question and the implications of his answer. He typed the word ‘Yes’ and clicked ‘Send.’

  CHAPTER 15

  EDEN

  “That’s all changed as of right now,” Riggs said, pushing away from the conference table.

  “Changed as in permanently? Or temporarily?” Armada inquired as he watched Riggs stroll to the digital projector.

  “I probably should have said ‘altered’ instead of changed. This is what I would call a ‘minor adjustment’ on paper. But in reality, with regards to the allotment of time, this really does change our plans for the immediate future.”

  Riggs connected the projector cables to his tablet and powered it up.

  “So, are we gonna be freed up for a while?” Euclid asked. “Do we get a break or something?”

  “Yes, Wycz and White and I are all in agreement; you boys deserve a vacation.”

  The two brothers turned to face each other, smiled, and nodded their heads.

  “Your class, more than any other, deserves some downtime,” Riggs praised as he finagled with the tablet. “Not so much the Hyperion class on Arena Four, but definitely you boys and your sisters on Arena Two. Who deserves what more than the others doesn’t really matter at this point. What does matter is all eight hundred of you sissies are coming down to spend a week getting reacquainted … with me.”

  The two clones leaned back in their chairs and moaned loudly.

  “That’s no vacation!” Euclid complained.

  “No doubt!” Armada chimed in. “That’s more like a sentencing!”

  “If you girls cry real loud, I’ll make it two weeks of reconditioning instead of one.”

  “One week is enough for me,” Euclid stated.

  “We’re good with the one week,” Armada added. “But I don’t know if you can handle all eight hundred of us at one time.”

  “Well, Armada, I guess you and your sorority sisters will have to find out just how prepared we are.”

  “Ooohh!” the twins replied, wiggling their fingers at Riggs.

  “What are you trying to….” Armada began.

  Right at that moment, the projector shone a brilliant blue screen with the letters CEA, capitalized in bold white print, centered in the field of blue.

  “There we go,” Riggs commented. “Finally!”

  “You do know that I’m a computer super genius,” Armada bragged. “And if you….”

  “Shut up!” Riggs snapped, not even looking at Armada.

  “What’s ‘CEA’?” Euclid drolly asked.

  At that very instant the door to the conference room swung open, and in came Garret, followed closely by a woman.

  “Sorry we’re late,” Garret apologized, walking to the chairs nearest Riggs and the digital projector.

  “Oh, good,” the woman stated, placing her belongings on the table. “You haven’t started the presentation yet.”

  “Armada, Euclid?” Riggs called out, “I’d like to turn things over to Dr. Ashlynn Phu.”

  “Good morning,” the beautiful stranger politely said. “Boy! This tower is something else! It took me over three hours just to get in the gates, parked, and authorized for elevator access.”

  “Armada Nine,” Armada pleasantly announced, rising from his chair to shake Ashlynn’s hand.

  “Armada, so good to meet you,” she replied.

  “Euclid Eleven,” Euclid said as he, too, stood to greet the newcomer.

  “Euclid, Euclid,” Ashlynn repeated, firmly shaking his hand. “Thank you all for taking the time from your busy schedules to meet with me.”

  “Our pleasure,” Riggs replied, pulling out a chair to sit. “The floor is yours.”

  “Thank you, Riggs. Well, before we get started, I’d like to tell you about myself. I received my PhD in agriculture management from Texas A & M and my master’s in horticulture from the University of Michigan. For several years I was doing private consulting in the bioscience community, as well as conducting my own research and development projects. I was principal investigator for a few studies conducted by the National Science Foundation, and that led to my eventual involvement with Richard Stoner and Colorado State University. Mr. Stoner pioneered the idea, the study, everything … of aeroponics.”

  “Is that what ‘CEA’ is about?” Garret asked.

  “Yes, and no,” Ashlynn answered. “The acronym stands for controlled environment agriculture. Indoors, outdoors, hydroponics, aeroponics … any type of agriculture production needs to have a system of controls put in place to effectively monitor growth, ensure quality, detect pests and disease, regulate water usage and consumption, and record yields and waste. These are all primary factors for agriculture production.”

  “We’re gonna be gardeners?” Euclid asked.

  “You guys? You and Armada? Oh, no. No, no, but what Mr. Wyczthack and Dr. White plan to do is apply the skills and talents you, Armada, and the others possess, to assist in the creation of a carefully designed and engineered environment. We have devised a system for the perpetual production of organic food. The system will employ techniques of aeroponics, primarily, with nuances of hydroponics.”

  “Can you explain this, please, in a stripped-down version?” Garret pleaded.

  “Okay. Bare-boned … we’re growing plants in vertical sections without soil for a nonstop, year-round source of food. CEA.”

  “How … how does that work?” Armada probed.

  Ashlynn strode to the tablet and projector, accessed the presentation folder, and brought up an animated model of the process.

  “First, we have seedlings that we do grow in soil. Seedlings will be transplanted from the soil to aeroponic generators. It’s here the aeroponic aspect kicks in. The root system is isolated from the body, or trunk, of the plant in an enclosed box. Underneath a rigid sheet of food-grade PVC, the roots are exposed to a burst of vaporized water. Purified water, infused with liquid nutrients and ODC, is pressurized then forced through tiny, tiny holes in a valve made from special polymers. The water used, anywhere from five to fifty micrometers, is pumped in via automatic timers. We’ll be spraying, on average, once every two minutes for approximately one-and-a-half seconds.”

  “You can grow crops with no soil and that little water?” Garret sneered. “C’mon. You gotta be doing something else.”

  “Yes, really, we can,” Ashlynn proudly answered, walking briskly to the head of the table. “Here,” she said, opening a satchel. “This is an average-sized, every day Honeoye strawberry.”

  Ashlynn pulled out a plastic container, opened the lid, and held up a sample of the berries. She handed it to Garret and explained, “It’s a little bit larger than a silver half-dollar, has a pleasant aroma, and is typically an early seaso
n producer of bright-red fruit, as you can see.”

  Garret examined the berry, smelled it, and handed it to Riggs.

  “Now,” Ashlynn added, “compare that Honeoye, grown in a greenhouse, in raised beds with compost and drip irrigation, with this.”

  Smiling broadly, she opened a larger plastic container that housed one strawberry bigger than an apple.

  “That’s a strawberry?” Euclid asked amazedly. “No way!”

  “What’s the difference?” asked Armada.

  “Plenty,” said Ashlynn, handing it to Armada. “That second one? It weighs about nine ounces and was grown without the use of soil. We controlled the water dispensed to isolated, exposed and oxygenated roots, with little to no change in temperature. The cultivars were on a rigid PAR schedule, which stands for photosynthetic active radiation. It’s a range of solar radiation that goes from about four hundred to seven hundred nanometers that plants use for photosynthesis. We use LEDs on timers for that. Then there’s the daily carbon clouding … the list goes on and on. But keep this in mind these are both examples of the same strawberry varietal. There are currently more than one hundred strawberry varieties being grown and cultivated all over the planet.”

  “We’re going to be strawberry farmers?” Euclid asked, unassured.

  “No, you’re not going to be farmers,” Ashlynn answered with a giggle. “But you will build us a farm.”

  “Ashlynn,” Riggs chimed in, “what kind of space and volume of produce are we looking at? I mean, how much space for how much food?”

  “Typically,” Ashlynn began, “we’d plant the strawberry cultivars in a row, about eight inches apart, or in a raised bed, on one-foot centers. Now, because of aeroponics, what once took an acre of land to grow we can now produce in vertical sections. With the timers, pumps, liquid nutrients, and temperature and UV controlled, we can harvest year-round in a fifty-foot tall column of shallow, five-foot-by-five-foot boxes.”

  “Do you have any of the blueprints for the ‘farm’?” Armada inquired.

  “Sure, sure,” Ashlynn replied, walking back to the tablet and projector.

  “Now,” she said, “please realize that Dr. Wyczthack and Dr. White have been working with the staff at NASA, Hanoi, General Dynamics, Ames, me, the NSF, DOA, and others on this project for quite some time.”

  The CEA image was quickly replaced with that of what appeared to be an aircraft carrier.

  “We’re building that?” Euclid asked, already intimidated by the size of the ship.

  “Whoa!” Garret grunted.

  “What are the overall exterior dimensions?” Armada asked, intrigued with the craft.

  “Let me double-check,” Ashlynn answered, glancing at her notes and specifications. “Twelve hundred feet long, sixty feet wide, and nearly seventy feet deep.”

  “What?” Euclid exclaimed.

  “Has everybody gone just plain, flat-out crazy?” Garret asked, rising from his seat.

  “I know, I know,” Ashlynn confessed, shaking her head. “Just the sight of it is daunting.”

  “Everyone calm down,” Riggs gently ordered, walking towards the screen. “Give the woman a chance to explain.”

  “Thank you, Riggs,” Ashlynn gracefully stated.

  “Twelve hundred feet long?” Euclid repeated, as he, too, rose from his chair and stepped closer to the screen.

  “What kind of timetable are you shooting for?” Armada inquired, standing up.

  “With the assistance we received from NASA, the folks in Newport, MIT, UC Davis, Monsanto, JPL, and SpaceEx, we concurred that, with proper and exacting prefabrication, Dr. Wyczthack can have his Eden in roughly … one year.”

  The small gaggle of men stood outside the image on the screen and stared in awe and amazement, but felt somewhat overwhelmed by the sheer size of the orbital greenhouse.

  “By my estimations,” Armada began, “that thing would give you more than five million cubic feet of vertical gardening space.”

  “You’re absolutely right,” Ashlynn commented. “We plan to use the additional 40,000 cubic feet for storage, water, and air filtration systems, and….”

  “What about pollination, photosynthesis, and all that?” Euclid asked.

  “Well, not every plant responds to sunlight in the same manner,” Ashlynn stated. “Some need very little, some require direct sunlight all day … that goes back to what I was saying about PAR and the range of….”

  “How do you intend to fertilize?” Riggs interrupted. “Five million cubic feet of differing plant species will take a fair amount of time to pollenate by hand.”

  “We’ll be incorporating both hands on and the use of bees for purposes of pollination,” Ashlynn politely answered.

  “Bees?” Garret repeated. “How can bees fly in zero gravity?”

  “Actually,” she began, “honeybees have shown to be quite adaptive to an environment free of gravity. If given a surface to cling to and oxygen and carbon dioxide, they can be very productive. We’ve created artificial wind conditions in which the bees can be fully functional. There will be massive fans on all four sides of Eden. The air intake will be located all along the floor base, like baseboard molding in an office. The air will be dispensed in varying velocities, elevations and directions, thereby simulating their natural habitat.”

  “Where will the bees be housed and how many do you plan to introduce to the garden?” Armada inquired.

  “For the bees,” Ashlynn responded, pointing to the diagram, “we’ll bring in at least a hundred thousand and divide them into two colonies, one at either end of the garden. The hives will be encased in a Plexiglas shell that has a continuous source of filtered air. The shell looks kind of like an upside down bell with a long, four-inch diameter tube sticking out of the bottom for the bees to enter and exit the hives. This is ideal for their protection when we gas the garden.”

  “Gas?” Euclid asked, “What gas?”

  “Every twenty-four hours we’ll implement what we call ‘Carbon Clouding.’ I mentioned it earlier,” Ashlynn answered, stepping to the table for her strawberry samples. “After all personnel have been cleared from the area, we inject carbon dioxide gas into the garden for an exposure period of no more than twenty minutes. After the gas has been circulated, it’ll be pumped out. The air then passes through the filtration system, we test the oxygen levels and, if all goes accordingly, the staff can resume their duties.”

  Ashlynn held up the small strawberry and said, “Remember, guys, dirt and no gas,” then held up the large, nine-ounce version. “And this is with gas, but no dirt. You oughta see our peaches!”

  “You’re gonna grow peaches?” Garret shockingly asked.

  “Oh, yeah!” Ashlynn excitedly answered, placing the berries on the table. “Our record for peaches is one pound, five ounces.”

  “How are you gonna grow mature, fruit-bearing trees?” Riggs asked. “Correct me if I’m wrong, but don’t fruit trees occupy a large footprint and consume a lot of water?”

  Ashlynn started walking towards the projector as she responded, “Normally, my answer would be yes and yes. However, in this case, I’d be wrong.”

  After several taps of her fingers on the tablet, the screen switched pictures. What was a monstrous, metal monolith seconds before now looked like closely hung, horizontal rows of vines.

  “What’s that?” Garret laughingly asked.

  “That, gentlemen, is a peach tree,” Ashlynn proudly replied.

  “Shut up!” Euclid snapped. “That’s a peach tree?”

  “Yes, Euclid, that is a peach tree.”

  “What happened to it?”

  “Yeah!” Garret jumped in. “Where are all the branches? Why isn’t it shaped like a tree?”

  “It’s undergone espalier modification,” Ashlynn answered.

  “A Spaniel?” Euclid tried to repeat.

  “Espalier. Espalier,” Ashlynn restated. “It’s a French term, and a form of trunk and branch pruning and training. With this sy
stem of growing, we can take a tree that is typically fifteen to thirty feet tall with a twenty-five-foot diameter, and yield the same amount of fruit, sometimes more, while reducing the overall height and footprint by as much as eighty to eighty-five percent.”

  “What kind of trees will you be growing and how many of each?” Armada asked.

  “If I remember correctly, we’ll have an orchard consisting of over one thousand trees,” Ashlynn stated, tapping on the tablet screen, then began naming off the different varietals from her list, “We’ll be growing several varieties of peach, apple, and cherry, along with plum, nectarine, apricot, orange, persimmon, lime, lemon, grapefruit, pear, tangerine, olive, pomegranate, plumcot, mango, quince, and passion fruit.”

  “How are you gonna fit all that in Eden?” Garret asked.

  “Gentlemen,” Ashlynn addressed the group, “what Doctors Wyczthack and White want, and what I absolutely and desperately need, is for you and the rest of your company to bring this project to completion by, or before, the deadline date. We’re on a tight schedule with very little wiggle room, and I can’t even begin to explain to you how vital this….”

  “Pardon me for interrupting,” Riggs said, “but other than reasons for experimentation and testing, why are we constructing this … greenhouse, on such a grand scale?”

  “I agree,” Armada joined in. “Who are we building all of this for?”

  Ashlynn bit her lower lip, concentrating on her words, then said, “It’s not so much a question of ‘who’ is going to benefit from Eden. It’s more of a question as to ‘who and when.’”

  CHAPTER 16

  SPUD

  “Dis apsur!” Ri Su-yong blasted in his best broken English. “We contin to be deny assess to SUBOS! The Democatic People’s Republic of Kowea ha given genously to US. Fo decade we offu suppot and money to build towa. Kowea wi not….”

  “Will the minister please refrain from making comments until he is recognized?” said Chairman Patterson with a pound of his gavel.

  “We wi not be sirent whi Engenechem secetry build….”