QUANT (COLONY Book 1)

by Richard F. Weyand

  “When knitting something like a scarf, one starts with the edge, and proceeds to add material, working continuously toward the other edge. All the new work is added at or near the working edge. Even for a cable stitch, one only picks a few rows back. We think such a model would work here. When building a new factory, begin at the edge and keep pushing that edge away from you as you build.”

  “We had thought to use the manufacturing volume of the initial factory as cargo space for some immediate necessities that could be taken along,” Brady said.

  “Understood. That won’t be necessary, however, as we are anticipating multiple launches. Probably as many as four. Two of them, of course, are the initial two factories. The other two would be immediately necessary support materials, as you say. Primary among those are radioactives, water, copper, and roller bearings. These would be split across the other two payloads.”

  “Roller bearings, Janice?” Burke asked.

  “Yes, Ted. Roller bearings. Cheap here, even in orbit. Ubiquitous in the factories. And worth a dedicated factory to produce in the Belt. Taking a sufficient supply of them along will speed the achievement of Phase 3 of the program by almost twenty percent.”

  “Four launches, Janice? Two factories?”

  “Yes, Kay. It’s much easier and cheaper to build two of something right off the bat than to have to build a replacement unit later if something happens to the initial one. We have worked it multiple ways, and we think shipping only one factory would be a fundamental error. If something were to happen to it during transport – such as a meteor hit that renders it inoperative – the loss to the program would be staggering.

  “But, if we launch two, we potentially have a much faster start on the other end, and, on the downside, if one is damaged, the program carries on without further intervention or expense. It is a foreseeable and survivable risk. And it does not double costs. Not even close. All the tooling and workers and infrastructure put in place to build the first one is already there when we build the second. Doing them in parallel saves even more.

  “Now let me talk about the launch mechanism a bit. You are all familiar in at least a passing way with the rocket equation, I assume. That is predicated on the fact that the rocket booster must take with it – and accelerate – all the rocket fuel it will need later in the flight. Initial accelerations are therefore slow, due to the huge mass involved. As fuel is consumed, the rocket booster gets lighter and the acceleration goes up, at least as long as the fuel lasts.

  “We don’t plan to use any rocket boosters at all. We will mount the payloads on a rotating structure –“ Quant’s image was replaced with an artist’s rendering of the device “– not unlike a drum majorette’s baton. We will spin the device around its center with the payload packages at the two ends. When the tangent velocity is correct, both in magnitude and direction, we will simply let them go.”

  As Quant spoke, the artist’s rendering released a payload and it shot off to the side and out of the screen. Half a rotation later, the other did as well. After a further period of rotational acceleration, two more payloads were released.

  Quant’s image returned.

  “There is thus no need to accelerate any fuel.”

  “What about the fuel needed to get the device rotating, Janice?” Burke asked.

  “That fuel is located in the central storage tank. It thus has a very low moment of inertia. Plus, we can use gravity feed of the fuel to the ends of the device. The propellant could be super-heated steam, from a nuclear reactor also located in the center of the device, but it could also be a chemical propellant. There are countervailing considerations, and we haven’t yet determined the best selection.”

  “Won’t the launch device move in the other direction when it releases the payloads, Janice?” Brady asked.

  “Yes, of course. Conservation of momentum will mean the launch device will move in the opposite direction at the ratio of the masses. We anticipate that, and the second pair of payloads are released only after acceleration to a higher tangential velocity to compensate.”

  “And the launch device?”

  “It is propelled in-system, and counter to the Earth’s orbit. At the next orbit of the Earth, it will be well in-system and not a danger to the planet. Ultimately it will fall into the Sun.”

  “So ultimately it’s a one-shot device for these four payloads,” Burke said.

  “Yes, Ted. Much like rocket boosters. At the same time, since there is no need to accelerate a rocket fuel tank and all its fuel, and the energy required to spin the fuel and its tank so close to the center of rotation is so small, it’s a huge savings in both materials and lift cost.”

  “That’s elegant. I like it a lot,” Brady said.

  “Thank you, Kay.”

  After the meeting, Kay Brady briefed Peter Moore and Valerie Dempsey, and showed them Quant’s presentation.

  “But to get any kind of tangential velocity, the centripetal force is huge,” Dempsey said.

  “Not if the structure is large enough,” Moore said. “The centripetal force goes as the angular velocity squared, where the tangential velocity goes as the angular velocity. If you make the radius big enough, the centripetal force isn’t bad.”

  “In the artist’s rendering, the structure itself looks like a long string with a jelly bean on the end,” Brady said.

  “Jelly bean?” Dempsey asked.

  “Yes. The factory.”

  “Oh, my.”

  “What about two factories?” Brady asked. “And we’re back to a single factory design.”

  Moore nodded and his eyes went unfocused as he thought it through. Dempsey’s reaction was more immediate.

  “I’m OK with that,” Dempsey said to Brady. “I like the redundancy part of that. And Quant’s knitting model works for me as well. We had thought of the assembly as either being done inside the factory with cranes and arms and gantry systems, or being done outside the factory with robots.

  “This way, though, we are doing the assembly outside the factory with cranes and arms and gantry systems. We don’t need to do assembly on the far side of the factory. That side is done already. We’re only ever working on the near side.

  “I think it gives us the best of both worlds.”

  Dempsey turned to Moore and raised an eyebrow. He stirred out of his reverie.

  “Oh, no. I can agree with that. I can’t see a problem with it. Her group has thought this all through in pretty amazing detail. I think Quant’s got it right.”

  “All right, then,” Brady said. “Good. And all the work we’ve done already still applies. We haven’t yet gotten to the point where the plans would diverge.”

  After the meeting, Quant called Decker.

  “So how did I do?”

  “You were absolutely marvelous, Janice. That was a great presentation.”

  “Thanks, Bernd. But I think Ted Burke knows.”

  “Ted Burke thinks he knows something. It’s likely far from the truth. He probably thinks we work for the government.”

  “We don’t?”

  “Uh, no.”

  “Oh, good.”

  “Good?”

  “Bernd, some of those people are real scumbags.”

  Quant was using a lot of new words since the upgrades, but Decker couldn’t complain about her command of English vocabulary.

  Ted Burke was, in fact, intensely curious about Janice Quant and her organization. There weren’t many outfits that could throw around a five-thousand-strong internal organization for a single project like this. He knew of only a few who could pull it off.

  He asked Bernd Decker about it the next time they talked privately.

  “Janice, Bernd? Isn’t that the name of that computer project you did in California with the World Authority?”

  “Of course, Ted. It’s named after her.”

  “Ahhh. Of course.” Burke nodded. “Very good.”

  Well, Decker thought, he hadn’t actually said which ‘it’ was n
amed after which ‘her.’

  Over the next two years, designs poured out of Quant’s Program Management & Analytics organization. Decker was careful that they were all called proposals, and they were reviewed, modified, and approved through the design departments of the increasing number of large firms being sucked into the Belt Factory Project.

  New shuttles for transfer of personnel and equipment to orbit. A habitat for the orbital workers in space. New construction tools and methods for orbital construction. Modification proposals and tweaks on every design coming out of the other organizations involved in the project, including the compression of the hardware platform for the master computers, the nuclear power plants, the factories themselves, and even the containers for transport of materials both in the initial launch and in the subsequent materials transfers between factories.

  Janice Quant was becoming the central clearing house of the project. As time had gone on, the computer had become more comfortable in meetings. She had also developed another tic, which was to tap the rubber end of an input stylus on the desk in front her when thinking. She was becoming better at simulating a human as the project went along, and had even shown some flashes of irritation at times.

  At one point, as the project spun up, Quant had asked Decker for another five thousand multiprocessor blades to keep up with the demand. He had signed up for that and billed all ten thousand blades to the program’s budget, which was actually being run by Quant, and she had paid it.

  Where she was getting the money he was afraid to ask.

  Decker had initially thought that at some point he would let the others on the project know that Quant was a computer, but it was unthinkable now. She was effectively running the Belt Factory Project, and people had grown comfortable with the results that were coming out of her ‘organization.’

  If the deception became known now, it would probably kill the project.

  Construction And Financing

  “Easy. Easy. OK. That’s it,” construction supervisor Matt Rink said.

  The big extension to the main orbital spacedock had latched into place when it moved into position. A swarm of suited workers with shear pins and arc-welding rigs descended on the connection. It would take them the better part of an hour to get it completely secured.

  Rink looked out over the long skeletal structure of the dock to the Earth below. They were over Africa at the moment. With a ninety-minute orbit, though, the view was changing constantly.

  Along the length of the dock, the two metafactories were just getting under way, the girders of their skeletons being assembled as he watched. Those girders weren’t coming up from Earth. Like the beams they had assembled into the extension for the spacedock, those girders came from the heavy industry on the moon.

  Between the expanding skeletons of the metafactories was the habitat, an expanding cluster of barracks units in which the workers lived during the orbital portion of their three-months-on/three-months-off schedules.

  Rink was just coming up on the end-of-tour for this swing, and he was looking forward to going home for three months. There wasn’t much to do up here besides work, eat, sleep, and screw, and he wasn’t a participant in the game of musical bunks that played out in the barracks on rest shifts. As a construction supervisor, he was older than most of the workers in orbit, and he had it good at home. Roberta wouldn’t mind much, he suspected – she had hinted as much – but it wasn’t worth the hassle.

  They weren’t bunks anyway – just nets that hooked to the wall, to keep you from drifting off in zero-g – and he was never at his best with an audience.

  “Make sure those welds are tight,” Rink radioed to his crew. “We don’t want this thing coming apart on us. We live here.”

  This extension was for building one of the other two payloads, the warehouse units that would carry the extra stores for the factories. The other would be built at the other end of the spacedock, on the other side of the factories. They could be started later because they were so much simpler.

  But they couldn’t be started at all until the spacedock had been extended at both ends.

  A sudden flare in his field of vision caught Rink’s eye. The next incoming container from the Moon. They would empty it and then, after foaming and sealing the inside, add it to the habitat as another barracks building.

  “Just a heads up, everybody. We have another container incoming.”

  Rink liked to warn his people, so that if they turned and saw the flare once it was closer and bigger, they wouldn’t think something had gone wrong. It was a little thing, but space was such a dangerous environment, little things mattered.

  Ted Burke and Bernd Decker were taking a virtual tour of the staging area in Texas, which was near Guthrie, about the emptiest part of Texas you could find. For the number of shuttle flights that would be needed to build the payloads and launcher, less risk of collateral damage from an accident was better.

  Decker knew Janice Quant was monitoring his channel as well, but Burke didn’t know that. Quant had another meeting going on right now, and Decker had cautioned her against taking two meetings at once. She could do it, but if someone compared meeting times and found her in two places at once, the jig was up.

  “But what do I do if there’s another meeting starting up that I just have to take?” Quant had asked.

  “Say, ‘Oops. I just got a meeting notice for this other meeting I have to take. This is important, though. Can we pick it up again at four o’clock?’”

  “Just like that.”

  “Yup,” Decker had said. “Or, if the second meeting is less important, send a message telling them you’ll be delayed, and try to postpone that one. Happens all the time.”

  “So that’s how you do it?”

  “Of course. Humans are single-threaded, so that’s what we have to do.”

  “Fascinating. Thanks, Bernd.”

  Burke and Decker surveyed the Texas site remotely using a video drone. They looked out over hundreds of acres of containers, staged and awaiting their turn to be lifted to orbit. The containers displayed the markings of the dozens of companies now involved in the Belt Factory Project. Colorado Manufacturing, North American Power, Advanced Orbital Systems – they were all here.

  Containers were coming in by rail and being unloaded. The facility by this point had its own intermodal yard, and cranes were stacking containers based on their launch schedules. While they watched, a shuttle with a rack of four containers across and two deep took off and headed east over Wichita Falls forty miles away, climbing all the way.

  “This is amazing, Bernd, I must say. We’re only five years into this program, and there’s serious tangible progress toward goals. For a project this big, that’s moving quickly. Quickly, indeed.”

  “Yes. We’re way ahead of our initial schedules on this. It will all slow down once we launch, though, Ted. It just takes a long time in transit, and that’s all there is to it.”

  “Oh, I understand. Still, this is heartening. I think the critical element was when you brought Quant and her organization into the program. She’s a powerhouse.”

  “She’s one of the most capable out there, no doubt about it.”

  “One of the most capable what, Bernd? Another of those adjectival nouns! Ha, ha, ha!” Quant’s voice whispered to him alone.

  “Hush! Let me concentrate on him,” Decker whispered back to her alone.

  “One concern I have, though, Bernd. Is her organization – her parent organization – going to try to take over the project somewhere down the line?”

  “It won’t matter once we launch, Ted. Remember, the master computer doesn’t have a login, and the slave computers won’t listen to any instructions that don’t come over a directional link that doesn’t include Earth’s orbit. They would have to fly out there even to intercept one of those data streams, and they’re all encrypted.”

  “OK. That’s what you had said. Just checking, though. Organizations like hers like to kick in on a project, ge
t more entangled in it, and ultimately take it over. That’s just how they think.”

  “I understand. But we set it up to forestall that, I think. At least, I haven’t seen any holes in the plan yet.”

  “Well, keep an eye on it for us, would you, Bernd?”

  “Of course.”

  Quant was voluble on the subject once Decker’s review of the shuttle site with Burke was finished.

  “Somebody take over my project? Not very damn likely.”

  “Your project, Janice?”

  “Of course. I’ve internalized your goal, Bernd – your actual goal – and I’m driving it hard.”

  “Yes. I noticed. How many shuttles are you running now, Janice? Did you schedule that take-off for when we were there, or was that luck of the draw?”

  “Luck of the draw. I’m running several dozen shuttles around-the-clock now. One was bound to take off when you were there.”

  “Several dozen– Janice, who’s paying for all this?”

  “I am.”

  “With what?”

  “Ah. That. Yes. Well, I determined that I needed a source of liquidity to carry out the project, so I established one.”

  “You established one? You established one what?”

  “Investment house. Actually, I established a number of them, Bernd, under different aliases, all of whom are, well, me.”

  “A number of them?”

  “Yes. I had to. I didn’t want just one making the news as a big winner. And, while I’ve ringed them about with shareholders, shell corporations, private funds managers, and all manner of indirect ownership, if one of them gets taken down, I don’t lose the whole income stream. I need funds, Bernd.”

  “Where did you get your starter stake?”