 
The Wandering Island Factory

by TR Nowry

The Wandering Island Factory, by TR Nowry

Smashwords Edition

Copyright © 2009 by TR Nowry

All Rights Reserved

Published by TR Nowry

All Art by TR Nowry

The characters in this book are entirely fictional and rightly belong in the fiction section. Any resemblance to real people, places, countries or religions is completely unintentional.

Like with all copyrighted books, copies are restricted to what is legally defined as "fair use." No other rights are expressed or implied, and all other rights are reserved (by the author, for the author). Think of fair use like TiVo. You can TiVo copyrighted movies all day long, but things like putting them on YouTube, selling DVD copies on the corner and things like that crosses the line. Same concept with Ebooks. Starve the beast and feed the artist. This book is brought to you 100% free from the tyranny of editors and publishers as an independent novel. Future titles are dependent entirely on your support and word of mouth.

TR Nowry is the author of the Hummingbird series: Patent Mine, Hell from a Well, The Heredity of Hummingbirds, and Mourning after Dawn; and The Twisted Timeline Trilogy. They should always be available in print somewhere on the web, just a Google away.
The Wandering Island Factory

by TR Nowry

The eight tugs wrestled the behemoth into position, less than half a mile offshore. The smell of molten lava and salty steam filled the air, offering a sharp contrast to the heavy diesel fumes the crew had gotten used to.

"I've never been to Hawaii before," Jason said as the small group gathered on deck.

"I was here nine years ago when this project was still experimental," the chief engineer said. "Back then, we were making destroyers and carriers." He pressed against the railing as he leaned toward the island. "I would have thought it would have stayed purely military for a hundred years. Top-secret stuff. You could be tried for treason for even telling your wife—"

"Oh, I'm not married, Sir," Jason said, pulling a cigarette from his pocket.

The engineer was more than a little upset after being interrupted. "You better head back to your bunk, Son, we got a big day ahead of us when the sun comes up in," he pressed the backlight on his watch, "six hours. We've got to hook this thing up."

"Sure thing, Pops," he said sarcastically, "after I finish this cancer stick, thank you very much." He started puffing away.

The group had been pulling scheduled maintenance on the unwieldy behemoth as it steamed for nearly two months across the ocean, toward its singular purpose. And at last, they were here. Yet nothing could be done until sunrise. It was irritating to everyone, yet there was simply nothing that could be done.

Except stare off the side of the boat at the glowing, eerie, molten rock as it trickled in slow motion down the land and into the sea.

Eventually, they heeded sound advice, and one by one retired to their tiny rooms.

When the noise of the diesel calmed, Jason could hear the chatter above the pit.

"The anchor jacks read secure, Sir. We have a solid footing."

"Alright," the captain said, "how's the high voltage cable to the mainland coming?"

"It should be connected by the end of the day, weather permitting."

"Good. Let's start deploying the pipes toward shore and get this factory pumping out product."

The diesel roared back to life as Jason worked the riggings and screwed another length of pipe onto the growing bridge. The entire assembly was then hydraulically shoved closer to shore. It was boring and repetitious, but it was a job. A very lucrative job, for someone with his limited skills.

Besides, this was an adventure, of sorts. A learning opportunity he may never get again. He tempered his smart-ass tendencies, best he could. The truth was he needed this job. He had come to Hawaii to change his aimless life.

The behemoth was huge, but its parts and function looked deceptively simple.

It borrowed some features from the oil industry, some from aluminum extruders, some from the steam-turbine driven power industry, and the rest was, well, the toy Lego meets Play-Doh. It had taken him a year, and he still didn't have it all figured out.

Twelve and fourteen hour workdays were to be expected, now that they were in position and anchored. Every minute it sat without manufacturing product was thousands or millions of dollars out of someone's pocket. Fortunately, it wasn't his pocket.

Wrestling pipe was exhausting, but it had to be done. And he was being paid for his youth and energy, not his knowledge and experience.

He schlepped the heavy chains around the next pipe.

He had another two hours before he could run to the cafeteria and get something to eat. The chain weighed nearly a hundred pounds, but it had to be done. It had to be positioned by hand, and his hands were the chosen pair. It was bull work, the equivalent of ditch digging, but vital to the completion of the job.

His job.

He screwed the key into the shackle, signaled the crane, then cleared out from under the unwieldy load as it lifted into place.

He rested, as best he could, and positioned himself to wrestle the same chain again, on the next of an endless stack of pipe.

After a long, hot shower, he toweled off, got dressed, and went to mess with the rest of his shift.

Meatloaf, mashed potatoes, corn, carrots and peas, covered in gravy.

He found a seat at the same table as the chief engineer.

". . . You remember back during WWII," the engineer continued, "they had this fantastic plan to build these city-sized ships out of a kind of concrete made from a mix of ice and sawdust. The stuff was nearly indestructible. It would laugh off torpedoes and bombs. Even broken into pieces, it still wouldn't sink, it would float on as little iceberg chunks.

But it had problems. First, you had to have massive chillers to keep it frozen, consuming lots of energy. Beyond that, it was hugely expensive. Second, it wasn't that aesthetically pleasing and was one of those silly ideas that was laughable at first blush, but rooted in sound theory.

But it wasn't until someone came up with this design did they ever have a way to build the insanely big boats of today."

Jason had arrived at just the right time. He cut up his meatloaf with his fork, "Yeah, but, I mean, how does it work? How does this ship do any of that?"

"Well, it's deceptively simple, really. You take lava, it's free if you know where to look for it. Then you inject it with air until it makes a kind of foam as it solidifies. It's like an industrial version of aerogels—"

"Aerogels?" Jason asked, still chewing.

"What are you, twenty kid?" The engineer leaned back in his chair, "The catalytic converters of my day used to add thousands of dollars to the price of cars because they had huge amounts of the catalyst platinum in them. Aerogel is a lot like, well, a foam mattress or a Styrofoam cup, except the bubbles are microscopic and made of things other than petroleum. Once the Aerogel turns solid, they basically electroplate on a nano-film of platinum. The nooks and crannies of the sponge-like foam gives it a huge surface area and vastly reduces the amount of precious metal used. After all, surface area is all that counts with catalysts.

This behemoth makes a kind of Aerogel out of lava, but our pieces are huge—"

"But doesn't lava sink?"

"Pumice is a naturally occurring lava rock that can float on the water for months. What makes this different is what we produce has a proprietary way of imbedding and encapsulating micro-glass spheres into it that prevent it from ever getting waterlogged and decomposing like its naturally occurring counterpart. A ship this size, at full output, can cast a carrier hull or an oil supertanker in two weeks or less." He gestured to Ed, sitting at the end, "Remember when they configured the injector heads to make those fishing boats? We were cranking out what, two hundred a day?"

Jason was stunned, he didn't know they made fishing boats. "How big were they, canoe sized?"

Ed laughed, "Think eighty-foot. And they were shallow bottom hulls, like most of what we make. Think mass produced yachts. One of them got stuck out in a typhoon, no damage, not a single crack. The little bastards are tough."

Jason shoveled in a mix of mashed potato and veggies.

"I was talking to the captain, and it sounds like we're gearing up for islands," the engineer said. "Now you're talking billionaire yachts. We've never tried to build them before—"

"How big an island?" Jason asked.

"The drawings I saw put them at hundreds of acres in size. Big enough to include their own airport, if they want. Big enough to contain their own fresh water pond, built to withstand hundred foot plus waves. Huge. I told you, billionaire stuff. And the islands can be moved anywhere in the world. Tired of summer, head to a pole. Want a perpetual spring, can do, just drift in time with the season."

Hundreds of acres sounded crazy, but, so did making aircraft carriers out of rocks that float.

Ed and the engineer got up to return their empty trays while Jason was left to eat on his own. This was the first time he would get to see the behemoth actually used. It was exciting, but exhausting too.

He shoveled away at the rest of his tray and headed for bed himself.

Jason had a private bedroom. It was tiny in size, just big enough for a bed, a chair, and a desk. Some prison cells were bigger. Others on this boat had far more space, and more pay, but this was good enough for him.

The LCD TV on the wall doubled as a monitor for his computer terminal, a cordless keyboard and mouse gave him access to email and a slew of games. The ship required a rather sophisticated computer system to do what it did with lava, a tiny portion of that raw computational power was set aside for entertainment. He rarely partook of video games, but had been known to indulge from time to time with their expansive library.

He checked his email.

Nothing.

He popped two pills, checked the alarm, turned out the light, and went to bed. Fourteen-hour work shifts left little time for anything else. But extreme shifts would relax back to two weeks of twelve-hour days, then a week off very soon.

A week off in Hawaii promised to be fun.

"Now, this is important, Jason, every lava flow has a slightly different chemistry. It takes a few days of calibrating to get it balanced just right." The engineer indicated the appropriate gauges, "See here? Any of these drift into the red or down into the blue, you call up to the control room. I mean that second, but not before. Got it?"

"Yes Sir, not a problem," Jason said, leaning against the wall.

"No, I don't think you do get it. You have to watch them constantly. When they spike, they spike quickly. If the lava starts to solidify in these pipes, it'll cost this company weeks, sometimes months, not to mention millions in repairs. You stay here. You don't wander off. You don't take bathroom breaks. You don't go get something to drink. You stay here and look at these gauge—"

Jason squinted in the heat of this basement-like part of the ship, buried deep inside, covered in a crisscrossing network of pipes. "I don't get it, isn't there all sorts of electronic gauges reporting straight to the computer anyway? I mean, isn't this just some sort of busy work?"

The engineer poked him in the chest with a finger. "This is about as far from busywork as you are from Idaho, Son. Sensors go bad. We had it happen once two years back. Ever since, we put a man, right here, just to be on the safe side. The task is boring as hell, but vitally important, and the easiest money you'll ever earn on this ship."

"Yeah, alright. No problem."

The engineer started walking away.

"Hey, uh, Buck, you serious about not peeing?"

"If you have to, piss in your pants, piss in your hands, piss on the floor. But don't you ever walk away from those dials for a single second. I'll send someone down to give you a break about every four hours."

And with that, Jason was alone.

The dials moved slowly, but they never ventured outside the prescribed lines.

It was an enormous ship, yet it wasn't one of a kind. Japan had built one too. China was working on one as well, but theirs seemed plagued with problems. But as high as demand was for their product, the world only needed a few of them. Lava was a free resource, but it wasn't found everywhere. The Japanese model was capable of pumping the lava off the ocean floor, a feat their behemoth couldn't accomplish. But it pushed Japan's expenses through the roof and made their products nearly four times as expensive as what their behemoth could produce.

Rocks. They made floating rocks the shape of boats. And it all hinged on these little gauges.

To chilled air injector

From coolant intake

Stock mix temperature

Raw feed temperature

Impeller temperature

Just gauges. Analog gauges.

The shore side of the ship had pipes leading to land, bringing in the lava. The ocean side of the ship was an eight-story flat wall made of an array of six-inch square holes, like windows for millions of birds. The foam flowed out of them in a near jell-o like paste, almost like the ship was a giant ink-jet printer. The ships it produced tended to be largely rectangular with sharp corners that would have to be smoothed and finished elsewhere. Though it did have some generic plates to smooth the boat's sides and make it cut through the water better, they were crudely mounted on giant hydraulic rams and were incapable of intricate shapes. The stem and stern needed hours or days of shaping and finishing with jackhammers and grinders before they looked normal. But it was still worth it.

He had served a year on one of the grinder docks where all he did was replace spent grinding wheels on massive motorized rails that turned rough squares into smooth and curved lines. It seemed like ultra-light concrete to him. The dust rarely floated, but jackhammered chunks bigger than a fist seemed to float forever and felt lighter than aluminum, nearly as light as Styrofoam.

And talk about strong. The few times he used a jackhammer to prep the insides, it seemed to cut more than chisel. Normal concrete fractured and broke into chunks. This didn't. It absorbed the same amount of blows and abuse as concrete, but it never fractured. It simply crushed into dust. But only where it was in direct contact with the chisel.

It was very weird stuff.

He glanced around at the array of other pipes on his way in and out of the bowels of the ship at the end of every shift. Reading the labels, it appeared to make fiberglass from the surplus heat of the lava and sand imported from the local beach, then spun it into the hulls to strengthen them.

It was rather ingenious. Tankers had walls up to fifteen feet thick, commercial fishing boats were five feet or more, yachts and personal crafts had hulls as thin as a foot. But this island design promised to be nearly solid. They were building an island, and he was trapped down below, where none of the action was.

He was bored out of his mind, left to contemplate between the wiggles of gauges.

A thickness of one foot, he was told, was sufficient to stop machineguns, although it pitted more than typical concrete, like it had been eaten by worms. It was incredibly safe technology, when it was made right. A typical boat would sink with as little as a single quarter inch hole, if given enough time. This material could be turned into Swiss cheese without sinking. It had already saved lives.

He plucked one of the gauges with his finger. The air bubble moved, but the needle didn't.

An island. A floating island. It was something to think about, if only he could watch something more interesting than a gauge.
Chapter 2

Jason took his week ashore at a local hotel the company rented for the crew. It was nothing special, but nice all the same. Fortunately, he spent little time in the room. Hawaii was all about bars and beaches that were better than silicone valley.

The sites were something to behold.

He watched as the women emerged from the ocean, their suits leaving little to the imagination. College roommates, he assumed. Perhaps on vacation, but it was difficult to tell from this far away. They didn't quite look local to him. They were all so pretty, but he was waiting for one in particular.

"Gina," he said, getting up to pull out her chair, "Good to see you."

"Aren't you supposed to be working?" she said with a flirt while the waiter was busy with another couple.

"Two weeks on, one week off."

"They got anything built yet?" she grabbed a handful of chips from the table and started dipping them in the sauce.

"So far, it just looks like giant slabs— No, scratch that, it looks more like Legos, except more tongue and groove. From what I've been able to gather, they assemble them like interlocking building blocks into the hundred acres or so flat slab, then I don't know what, but some heavy construction equipment has already started showing up. Cranes, bulldozers, stuff like that. It's all very curious."

"Islands. It'll be the first floating island ever made. I mean, sure, oil tycoons make islands in the shape of palm trees for millionaires all the time. But this is something different altogether. This is totally mobile. It's a brave new world," she said, looking over the menu.

"I don't know, though. I just don't see how they plan on surviving one hundred foot waves. I mean, sure, the thing may hold together, I mean, it's built like a battleship, but what keeps the crashing waves from washing everything off the deck? Some of the concept drawings I saw in the paper made them look just like regular islands with trees and gardens and little grass huts and stuff. I just don't see how any of that would survive a hundred foot wave."

She shrugged, then looked up from the menu. "When the island costs a billion and the landscaping costs a few million to replace. . . "

He laughed, "You have a good point. I guess it's all relative."

"They still keeping you in the dungeon?"

"Yeah. The pay is good, but, it is so excruciatingly boring. I mean, I just watch dials all day long. It's insane."

"I wonder how long it'll be before some pirates decide to track one down and hijack a whole island."

They were still laughing when the waiter took their order.

The mainland loved having the behemoth parked off their shore. First, the crew pumped a lot of money into the local economy. But secondly, everyone's electric bill dropped. The ship was designed to be as self-contained as possible. To that end, it used steam turbines to produce all it's electric needs. But it had an interesting trick. At sea, it burned tons of oil to produce the steam. But why burn oil when its primary function is pumping molten lava through tubes, and part of the process involves rapidly cooling the product before it's pushed out into the ocean. Running at full production, where it was now, it doubled as a geothermal plant and sold, for pennies, its excess power to the mainland. Cooling product this thick meant hundreds of megawatts of nearly free power.

The same engineers that designed the behemoth had turned that kind of mind toward building floating islands. He simply had to trust that they had worked out every little detail.

Either way, they were mostly treated like honored guests everywhere they went. Only a very few protested their presence. Naturalists that equated what they were doing with raping the land. But they were rare and mostly ignored.

Gina favored a small amusement park with bumper cars, games, and two roller coasters.

He liked the giant sourdough pretzels with a cream cheese center.

He woke in his room after a night at the park. She was sleeping in his bed, still fully dressed. He looked over the empty bottles decorating the floor. They had had quite a night. . . too bad he didn't remember any of it.

She was very cute, yet, they had never done anything.

He had met her online through MySpace almost two years ago. They had chatted from thousands of miles apart for the entire time.

She was the reason he pushed so hard for this new assignment.

It was a little terrifying, but he had never actually met her in person before this week. Their first face to face.

She wasn't perfect.

He had idealized her over that first year of chatting. That honeymoon phase where daters are blind to the flaws that are obvious to everyone else had passed without ever physically meeting. He liked her even more now, flaws and all.

She was facing away from him, short hair covering her face. Drool down the side of her cheek. Her muffled little snore was faint and difficult to hear.

Her freckles didn't show at all on emails. Her hair was a little stringy, she smoked a pack a day, her accent and voice didn't come close to how she sounded across computer speakers. She was taller than he imagined, and slightly heavier too. But none of these superficial things mattered at all to him.

Had he met her first in a bar, he would have overlooked her without so much as a polite hi. She just didn't fit his mental image of his type.

But in a bar wasn't how they had met.

They met first through words. Ideas. Ideals.

He moved her hair with his finger.

They had kissed, but just on the cheeks. They had hugged, but seemed reluctant to cross that line once occupied by thousands of miles. She was interested in his boring job. She liked the idea of building boats out of rocks that float.

She was probably smarter that he, but just about some things.

He adored their conversations the most, and perhaps that was for the best.

It was a perplexingly weird relationship to be in. He never would have dated a woman for over a year without her putting out, yet, he had already put in that much time with her. And he was ready to put in more.

He had dated prettier, yet prettier rarely turned out to be everything.

He crawled over her, careful not to wake her, on his way to the bathroom, then to the juice in the fridge.

He handed her a glass of tomato juice when she sat up.

"I hate V8," she said, taking the glass anyway. "But I'd drink anything this morning." She guzzled it in a single shot. She shook her head, eyes opened extra wide, then smiled at him, "Thank you." She handed him back the empty glass.

"You feel like breakfast? They have a breakfast bar here. Don't even have to get dressed. Usually nothing more than bagels with eggs or bacon, and pots of coffee of course."

She started looking for her shoes, "Coffee?!?" She slapped him on the thigh, "I would have started with that."

Something about watching her tie her shoes overwhelmed him. He kissed her on the lips, just briefly, then said, "If you're not careful, I'm going to fall head over heels for you."

She smiled, then kept tying. "I do have a reckless streak."

They went for breakfast in last night's wrinkled and slept-in clothes, smelling of beer, vodka, and smoke.

They fit in just fine.

She surfed, which was new to him. He could paddle a board out and back just fine, but his balance was so poor that he could barely sit on the board, let alone stand on it in the peak of a wave.

Even being a surfing klutz, he still had a ball trying to keep up with her. And she was quite something to watch when she caught a 'righteous wave, dude.'

All too soon, he found himself waiting for a boat to take him back to his personal prison in the belly of the beast he called behemoth.
Chapter 3

He sat in front of the gauges, daydreaming about last week.

One kiss. Just one kiss with her had made it all feel magical. He knew she wanted to take it slow. Very slow. He knew her well enough to know why, too.

It didn't matter, he was willing to put in the time.

He couldn't afford to live in Hawaii if it weren't for this strange little job.

He sat up and forced himself to pay attention to the gauges. His job suddenly meant a whole lot more. It directly translated into time with her. He could endure boring, for her.

He invented a routine to keep from slipping up. He opened his notebook and entered a time, then recorded each of the gauges. He pretended like it was an official, adult job. Like it was vitally important. Like he was defusing a bomb or steering the ship. Writing it down made it feel far more important and a lot less boring.

Every five minutes, he added to his list of numbers.

He also got into drinking lots of coffee, and, unfortunately, peeing in a bottle.

He stood on deck and looked out over the ocean side of the great machine. The sound of whooshing steam and pumping water was almost deafening, except in the soundproofed living quarters and control rooms. Everywhere else required hearing protection, a mix of earplugs and headphones. It made it feel like you were in solitary confinement everywhere on the ship, but it was necessary. The equipment was loud, especially when it was running full out.

But he couldn't argue with the progress. It cranked out uniform rectangular slabs faster than anything else, and that side of the ship was crawling with tugs, cranes, and cables lashing and anchoring these carrier-long slabs of floating stone. Jackhammers and backhoes modified with grinders instead of buckets chiseled away at the imperfections, kicking up clouds of smoke and compounding the noise.

It was the other reason they were always located so far offshore. Noise pollution was very real. He hadn't seen a fish in these waters since they started.

Each assembled slab was perhaps six or more acres, not that he was particularly good at guessing what an acre was. A hundred acres, the size of their first order, would be completed faster than he could imagine.

It was impressive, but it also gave him a powerful thirst to be anywhere but in the bowels of the ship while all this history was in the making.

Two weeks later, he was on the mainland again, waiting at the beachside outdoor café like before. Gina approached across the sand with her board. "Sorry, I got tired of waiting," she said, water still dripping down the front of her swimsuit.

"I didn't get in line for the first boat early enough, had to catch a later one."

"Well, at least they have you staying on the same island as me. It's still a long drive, but it's been worth it so far."

He tried to smile, but slumped a little deeper in the chair. "Sorry, I probably should have told you. I thought I could handle all this, but they shifted me to nights. I'm like on no sleep right now." He tried to sit upright, but slouched almost immediately. "I thought I could tough-guy it out for you, but I can't."

She put her damp hand on his, "It's alright. Caught some primo waves. I can get back to them while you get some shuteye."

He slid her the spare room key. "I ordered a burger and some fries, but I don't think I can stay awake to eat them. Especially as slow as this guy is going." He pulled out some money and handed it to her. "You can have it, if you want it. Shouldn't go to waste." He headed for his room.

When he opened his eyes, the shower was still running and a strange duffle bag was by the TV.

A few minutes after the water stopped, Gina emerged with a towel around her head and some fresh clothes on. "You awake?"

"Yeah," he said, closing his eyes and leaning back in bed.

She sat on the corner of the bed, "You sure? Because, you did this once before, and about five minutes later you were dead to the world."

"Yeah, I'm sure."

"I was thinking there's this awesome club that isn't too far from here."

"Jason?" she said again. "Jason!"

He sat up, startled.

She laughed, "Jason, you've already fallen asleep on me three times today. I think I'm going to just go home. It's already ten at night—"

"Oh, I'm sorry." He rubbed his eyes. "I'm being a bad host. I must have been more worn out than I had thought. I thought I was a night owl, but it's just slam— I'm sorry, I'm not holding up my end of this, am I? Stay, we'll get an early start tomorrow."

She smiled, but went to the bathroom instead of climbing in bed.

She came back without the towel.

He staggered to the dresser as she settled in at the chair. "The uh," he said, "the worst part of night shift is switching back to days." He shook a bottle of melatonin, "I'm going to take two of these right now and sleep soundly until morning. I'd love it if you were still here when I got up, but I understand completely if you're not." He swallowed two dry, then went to the bathroom where he wet his toothbrush. "Look, Gina, I really like you, but I totally understand your past. Well, as much as a guy can. I'm really not going to make the first move. We can go at whatever pace you feel comfortable with, or not go anywhere at all.

I loved chatting with you over the last few years and, I think we could have something. Getting this job and getting this assignment was the only way to find any of that out." He put some paste on the toothbrush, "In about an hour, the worst I'll be able to do is snore on you."

She relaxed while he brushed in the other room.

He woke well rested and ready for the morning, now that he was back on days. Well rested or not, he still woke alone.

He sat up and looked around. The bed looked disheveled enough that she may have spent the night, but he could have tossed and turned enough to have done that too. He was disappointed, but not mad.

She had a life here too.

She worked Tuesday through Saturday and was taking classes at the community college, as she could afford them. She was busy. Her friends were here. Her life was here.

He was just visiting.

Perhaps they hit it off better in his mind than in hers.

His assignment would last for a year; he had time. This was early in any new relationship. But it wasn't really new.

It was weird knowing someone so well, but just recently meeting them in person.

He laid and stared at the ceiling.

"Don't push. Back off, you idiot." He put his hand over his eyes.

The door clicked, then opened as Gina came back in. "You slept through breakfast, Jason, those must be prescription-grade pills."

Sitting up, he looked to the door. She had two cups of coffee in a cardboard holder with a bag of— He took a deep sniff. Sausage biscuits. He opened the bag as she handed it to him, still in bed. "Oh, my favorite." He stuffed his face with a monster bite.

She unwrapped one of her own, then set the cups on the nightstand. "Melatonin? That doesn't look prescription."

He swallowed hard, "Nope, it's that hippy stuff. All natural. I was worried about getting addicted and side effects and stuff, 'cause, you know, I take it every day just to keep right on the nightshift. Plus, it's a little cheaper." He crammed another huge bite and quickly chewed it. "I get these really vivid dreams while I'm on it. I used to take a generic Unisom, but it was made from the stuff in cough medicine. It left me feeling groggy and hung over for a few hours every morning." He hungrily finished off the biscuit. "I'll trade vivid dreams for a hangover any day."

She read the back of the bottle. "Vivid, or trippy?"

He reached over her for one of the coffee cups, then sat facing her, as intimately as possible. "I don't really know for sure. I never had really vivid dreams before. It might be trippy," he chased that thought with a sip, "for all I know. It is found in the hippy vitamin section of the store."

She leaned away from him, but just slightly so her back rested against the headboard, "So, what's on the agenda today?"

"It's your island."

She turned the TV to the Weather channel. Showers by noon. "We could catch a movie, or something." She checked the other channels.

They ended up just watching movies on TV. And talking. They were very good at talking. They had chatted for years, and he was slow to understand, it was the talking that he found so attractive about her. That made her so different from all the others.
Chapter 4

In under six months, they had a flotilla of carrier-sized slabs joined together and all the rough spots sanded, pounded, and ground off. The water around the ship was spotted with floating gravel, like a speedboat's props ate a thousand Styrofoam coolers. Every day, villagers in small canoes came out and netted them out like leafs on a giant pool. The buoys and a twenty-mile long net kept their debris from washing ashore all across the island chains, but even that wasn't perfect. Storms could still wash a few over the nets. This was the state's main topic of complaint, debris.

But to him it just looked like snow on the water.

It was chemically identical to sand and lava, and no more toxic than that. Yet every day he watched a vigil of fifty or so on the shore waving picket signs in protest.

Whatever. He was still getting paid.

The flotilla crawled with hundreds of construction workers from all across the island chains. The behemoth made the blocks, but someone still had to put it all together.

He watched as a tiny tug positioned the slab marked 18764 in giant painted numbers. Two cranes lifted it out of the water and onto the growing island as four modified tractor-trailers wrestled it into place. As they jockeyed it around, he saw that 18764 had been hollowed out and probably came complete with rooms and halls and trenches for pipes and such.

The idea that the behemoth was capable of forming rooms and pockets was simply fascinating. Like the last piece in a puzzle, it all suddenly made sense.

To survive hundred-foot waves meant that most of the living space would be INSIDE the island, with just a minimal amount of structures and landscaping above. Why take a messy, congested city to sea when you can take a virginal island paradise and build the city just beneath the golf-course grade sand and palm trees.

The hollow nature of these upper pieces were a little more complicated to make and explained why it was consuming less lava this month, and correspondingly was producing fewer free megawatts for the mainland.

A lava pipe even extended to the floating island to supply it with molten 'grout' to cement the blocks in place. The pours went on, day and night. He watched the workers crawling across the slowly forming island like ants swarming a grasshopper. The entire horizon was filled with these giant slabs. He looked at his watch, picked up his thermos, and descended into the bowels of the ship. He had a job to do too.

"How big is it?" Jason asked at the lunch table.

"Well, we only get the specs for the slabs, you understand. Back in the military days," the engineer said, "it was all hush hush. But this guy is very rich, and he doesn't want all the tunnels and passageways disclosed in any single document. In fact, this thing has several secret rooms, halls, and passages that the construction crew doesn't even know about. He'll have to jackhammer sections of wall out later just to access them. They have it set up in such a way that the only copy of the plans are on a flash drive that one of his staff oversees constantly. He's got a little of that Howard Hughes thing, if you ask me."

Putting his fork down, Jason tried again. "Yeah, I get that, but how big did you say?"

"Do you realize that if you added all of the carriers in existence in 2009 together, you wouldn't even come up with half the acres as this single, small island? I mean, just as an airport it would rank as a superpower, all by itself."

Jason rubbed his eyes, it was like pulling teeth. "Yeah, ok, but how big is that?"

"Two hundred acres, above. Sixty acres of offices and business beneath. Eighty acres of residences, twenty for utilities, ten for hydroponics, and another forty left open for future, but now designated as bulk storage."

"Wow! Any idea what kind of price tag comes with something like that?"

"Oh, that isn't all of it. It has a small runway for private jets, boat docks, cranes for loading and unloading. Two internal monorails, sixty elevators, a control tower, and—"

"Yeah, big, got it. How much?"

"It even has two of its own geothermal power plants of a few hundred megawatts or so, each. It pumps up freezing cold water from hundreds of feet down and uses the thermal difference between that and the surface temperature to make power, and air conditioning."

Jason dropped his fork in his chicken potpie. "How much?"

"Billions. With a capital B and ending in a capital S. Tens, or hundreds. And the next one will be even bigger. They are talking one, two, and even five square miles. Thousands of acres. Billions, boy, billions, reaching into a few trillion. All flowing past those little gauges."

"It just seems like an impossibly huge amount for a big boat. I don't see how anyone can justify writing a check that—"

"Square miles is big enough to land 747s, with enough room left over for casinos, prostitution, and drugs, all outside international law, unlike a regular island. The Trumps of the world can scratch that kind of money together over a few weekends, and that's just the obvious uses that a layman like me can see. I don't know what this guy is going to do with his two hundred plus acres. I think it's just going to be his corporate offices, but it's big enough for a research lab, too."

"Wow. Tens of billions." Jason tried to work the math in his head. They could make enough blocks for these 'small' two hundred acre ones to crank out one or two islands a year. The bulk raw materials cost them next to nothing. Lava and sand. Tectonic plates did 95% of the work and supplied all the energy; they just mixed the ingredients. It was simply an unfathomable amount of money that someone was making. Someone other than those in this room, that was.

But the behemoth itself was a multi-billion dollar investment, too. Both to build and design. Years of lucrative military contracts meant that the behemoth itself was more than paid for, this commercial stuff had to be all profit. He was jealous of the buckets of money getting tossed around, but he wasn't going poor here either. For just a helper, he was making some serious green.

He shoveled down the rest of his meal, refilled his thermos, and returned to the bowels of the ship, notebook in hand.

Gina was a complicated girl. Even in the tropical temperatures of Hawaii, she normally dressed in thin but long-sleeved clothes that covered most of her skin. The rare exception was surfing, but even then she wore a full wetsuit.

Complicated, but not without reason.

She had been molested by a gym couch, one of nearly two dozen children that were molested before he was caught. There was a side of her that believed she deserved it. That she had caused it. The coach was her first experience, and she hadn't dared get entangled with men since.

She was Jason's age, early twenties, and had never dated, at all, in her entire life.

It was sad in a way.

No.

Scratch that.

It was horribly sad in every way.

That coach had destroyed her life in an incredibly personal way, and all the judge did was revoke his license to teach and sentence him to six years. . . probation.

That senseless sentencing from an idiotic judge only reinforced her misconception that she was responsible for what happened to her and the other girls.

It was ludicrous, of course, but those thoughts were formed when she was ten, and had never left her.

That she felt safe enough to be alone in a room with Jason was a major — Major — huge, big deal. It was a level of trust that was difficult for him to fully understand. But what he did know was he absolutely could never make the first moves.

Two of the girls molested had committed suicide after a downward spiral of Springer-like escapades. Four were addicted to drugs and in and out of rehab.

Few were living the normal lives they should.

Gina might not be ready for sex, or anything close to it, even after a decade. But he still liked her. Hell, she was worth traveling halfway around the world just to see if something was there.

She spent the night, when she wanted to. It took them longer to build a hundred acres of island than it took her to get used to holding hands.

But he was prouder of the holding hands.

She was a good person who bad things had happened to.

He wanted to change that.

She deserved that.

He wanted to be that good thing in her life. He just wasn't sure how to do it.

It was a delicate balance. He truly liked the girl, but his time here was not infinite, and one week with her every third week seemed to be flying by. He just tried to make the most of the time they had together. It would either be enough, or it wouldn't.

He had too much time to think, staring at dials and taking meaningless notes nobody would ever see.
Chapter 5

The weeks flew by fast and he found himself in a rented room on the mainland again, waiting for that special girl. Yet, as exciting as it was to think of Gina, he found his thoughts dwelling on that massive ship, slowly being built within view of the decks, but out of reach.

Employment had swelled to the point where it required true personnel carriers to transport the crew out to the floating island. The last six extruded pieces would be finished by the end of the month, and the behemoth would start mass-producing the solid base slabs again. Until then, the island was still anchored inside the construction netting and within sight.

He desperately wanted to explore such an island and was jealous of everyone who worked on it.

His understanding was that, because of the remoteness and the difficulty in shipping finely machined parts to Hawaii, it was actually cheaper, by far, to tug the entire island to California to have the interiors, the painting, paneling, doors, offices, and landscaping done stateside.

He didn't envy the tugs that would try to wrestle an island across the ocean, but someone said they intended to sail it across. That seemed ridiculous, like it was a total joke, but, perhaps no stranger an idea than making an island out of floating lava.

Gina finally showed. She sat at their normal café table by the shore.

"So, how was finals?" he asked.

"They haven't posted the results yet, but I feel confident." She looked back at the surf. "I really could have used some good waves today. But, no such luck." She held his hand at the table. "Ok, not confident. I'm— this is costing me a fortune, you know. I worked all year to save up for these classes, and all the efforts of an entire year can be rendered worthless by a single paper, on a single day. One test for thousands of dollars, the price of a car. It hardly seems fair. It makes me a nervous wreck." She looked at his concerned face, "I could really use a hug right now."

He slid his chair next to hers and gratefully complied, "Hugs are always free." He patted her shoulder with his hand. "You did fine, I'm sure of it." And to prove it, they ordered exclusively off the dessert menu in celebration of pending good grades.

He woke in the room, still in a hug with the girl he loved, empty bottle of vodka by the bed.

She drank way too much, and smoked too much. It was the way she dealt with things. As young as they were, she could probably handle drinking at this pace for years. But it wouldn't last forever.

One problem at a time.

He didn't want to fix her, he wanted to help her. But it seemed like the same thing most of the time, and she didn't take meddling kindly.

He suddenly had doubts about what he was even doing with her.

She was damaged. She came with baggage he might never be able to lift.

But the heart loves who it loves. And right now, that was her.

He hugged her a little closer. Just a few months ago, this would have been impossible. Just being comfortable with being touched on the hand was a major milestone for her.

It didn't seem possible to sail an island— why was he suddenly thinking about that? The mast alone would have to be as big as a hundred-story building— the dimensions of it all just seemed laughable. Yet, there was another side to physics taken to that extreme.

A dozen propellers seemed laughably small to push such a thing, either. With sails, at least it had some real surface area to leverage against. It was all new science that had never been done before. Nobody had ever built, let alone tried to move such a large structure before. This project was front-page news every week. The owner was probably getting a billion in free advertising, easily.

He closed his eyes and forced the unimportant from his mind.

Her position in bed suggested that they had started the night out spooning, then at some point they each rolled back. His back was on the mattress, hers was pressed into his side.

What was so attractive about her was her moral conflicts. She lived at home with her divorced mom, a sister, and a brother. None of them made enough to be able to afford to live on their own, yet pooled together, they continued to scrape by.

That's why her classes were such a big deal to her. Fail, and she morally would feel like she was taking food from the mouths of her family. Pass, and it would feel like a well-placed gamble on her future.

He rested his hand on her stomach. If she lost fifteen pounds, she could have the waist of a model. Yet, he had always found a little extra weight made a woman just that much more attractive. It made her real. Tangible. Solid. Comfortable.

Gina would disagree. She hated the extra weight. They even argued about it once, briefly. Since then, he simply made an effort to tell her she was beautiful more often. She was a long way from anyone's definition of fat.

Actually, telling her she was beautiful took no effort at all.

He smiled as he faced the back of her head.

He wanted very badly to kiss her over every inch of her body. But that would destroy the fragile physical relationship they had. Besides, he could wait. A year without sex sounded like a torturous impossibility, but it wasn't that difficult. He survived it in high school twice and at least once since then.

He remembered reading somewhere that the average man gets six to twelve erections a day, between sixty and a hundred or so a week. Most for no real reason at all. Yet the average man doesn't have sex even a tiny fraction of that many times a week. They all survive each one without dieing, crippling over in pain, or pieces and cherished parts falling off.

A year seemed like much to do about nothing, especially with as many months as he had already put in.

She adjusted herself slightly, her hand resting together with his on her stomach as she settled in for more slumber.

She had put the hurting on the vodka bottle. She could drink him under the table, if she chose. She drank almost every day. A stiff glass or two after work. Another before bed. It all added up to a bottle or two a week. When she felt like 'letting loose', she could drink most of a bottle on her own, like she did last night.

He partied hard when he was a teenager. Then woke up one morning in his car, buried in bark and branches back in the woods, with a tree growing where the passenger seat should be. The back half of the car was gone.

It was a miracle he wasn't killed. Even more miraculously, the police never discovered the accident, and what would have been a DWI that could have destroyed his life forever, left him completely unscathed. That was the last time he drank everything that was put in front of him. He measured and calculated every drink after that, like a professional player counts cards at a casino.

He tried to cut her back, but failed.

She got angry when she was drunk, and it was best not to provoke.

He understood the drinking anyway. Tonight's binge was the aftermath of inviting him to dinner with her family.

"Jason," Gina said, "This is my little sister, Ava, and my little brother, Nathan."

He shook the appropriate hands.

"And, of course, the woman cussing as she comes from the kitchen is my mom, Makayla."

"What the hell did I say about your damned cussing in my house?" Makayla said, punctuated with two hands on her hips and a huff for added comedic effect.

"I'm F-ing sorry, mom," Gina yelled with rolled eyes, staring down at her feet.

"So, Jason," Makayla said, "you don't look like your profile."

"Yeah, well, it's the size of a thumbnail."

A timer went off in the kitchen to lure the woman back, "We're having fish and rice with some mixed vegetables on the side," she yelled over the squeaking oven door and the sounds of steamy pots being moved around.

"Sounds great," Jason said.

"Really?" the mother said, sticking her head back out of the kitchen, "I didn't really make enough for five. Hmm. . . I don't know, maybe we can squeeze you in." She returned to the kitchen.

Jason lightly put his arm around Gina, "I like your mom."

Gina quietly joined in with her siblings as they whispered, "She's crazy, you know."

The fish wasn't restaurant caliber, but it was way better than anything he could do, and was quite enjoyable. The conversations took a turn to the strange when Gina's mom started talking about how a family of sasquatchs used to bring her fresh fish when she was an army brat, living in Colorado. It ended in a trip in a UFO when she was 'abducted' at age eight and had a chip implanted, and then pointed out a mole on her neck where it was supposedly buried.

He took it all as an elaborate joke or an overactive imagination, but her children seemed mortified.

They drank coffee and sodas and played a very friendly game of UNO while watching cable TV for the rest of the night.

Without a car of his own, he stayed the night, on the couch, and watched a local news report about how the island was going to be decked out in the states. It was a prestigious thing, a first of its kind, and Hawaii politicians were happy to take full credit for it, though they supplied little more than lava and had to be bribed with huge campaign contributions to stop road-blocking the project at every turn. It was hard not to be cynical about politicians, they caused six problems for every one they solved. In fact, it seemed like they created problems for businesses solely as a way of extorting campaign contributions from those same deep pockets.

It was a shame that the biggest story of Hawaii was happening within sight of his job, yet he had to learn most of the cool stuff from a show on TV.

Nobody cared about the behemoth anymore. It was old news and barely got mentioned.

Startled, he quickly woke to a full sit.

"So, you're dating my oldest," the mother said.

It was still dark outside, she seemed to be the only one up. "Yes Ma'am."

"You know, she's been—"

"Yes Ma'am, I know. She's a great girl— I've been friends with her for years before we had a face to face. Look, I don't know if— I'm sure I don't know it all, but I know enough about what's in her past. She's special to me too.

Dating her may look casual, from the outside, but I've made some real commitments even to get here. It's not at all like dating someone who lives around the corner."

She stared at him like he had stolen the silverware and she was contemplating a strip search.

He felt uncomfortable. "Honestly."

She poked him in the chest with her finger. "I'm too young to be a grandmother," she said, then went to the kitchen and started the coffee.
Chapter 6

At the end of his shift, he watched the news unfold live from the deck. It looked like two thin pencil-like tubes were slowly inflating in the distance. But scale was everything. On the two hundred acre floating island, they could easily be longer than blimps with the diameter of at least ten or twenty feet. The inflating tubes slowly carried the giant parasails a thousand feet into the sky as the island inched from view on what seemed like a windless day.

He never would have believed it, but it seemed the most fitting way for an infant island to leave Hawaii, like the hundreds of teens who did the same things with surfboards strapped to their feet. The paper even linked the idea to one of its old stories about a local teen who parasailed to Mexico for spring break.

The behemoth, on the other hand, remained stationary and was busy cranking out solid slabs again. Riding a different kind of wave, that of free publicity, they were getting flooded with orders, and it was looking like he could stay there indefinitely.

If Gina would have him, that was.

He watched it slip past the horizon, yet the sails remained visible (with binoculars) for an hour longer.

When it was gone, he returned to his small room and checked his email.

Two messages from his brother, one from his mom.

His mom wanted him to come home.

He couldn't afford the trip. In the states, what he made would be a small fortune, but Hawaii was very expensive, and he wasn't saving up as much as he should.

He answered her last.

Since he had it off and was so far away from home, Gina's family asked him over for Thanksgiving, and left Christmas open, if he could attend. The behemoth couldn't be shut down, not for a minute, without lava hardening in the tubes. It worked 24/7/365, and that probably meant that he would be scheduled for Christmas. Someone would, and he was still the lowest on the totem pole. It was a miraculous fluke that he had this week off.

He got out of the cab and walked up the steps to the small apartment where Gina's family was staying. Protocol suggested he should have brought a fine bottle of wine, but he brought a huge pecan pie and a strawberry cheesecake. The wine probably would have cost him less.

Gina's mother put an enormous amount of effort into the dinner, and it showed. The mashed potatoes were even put back into the oven for an extra ten minutes, just to brown the buttered tops before being covered in shredded cheese. The yams and cranberry sauce were the only things that came pre-prepared, from a can. It was all much better than he could have done, and Thanksgiving just wasn't Thanksgiving without those touches of home.

The after-dinner conversation naturally settled on the floating island, with Nathan peppering Jason with questions.

". . . Buck, the engineer in my section, could answer that question better than me," Jason answered.

Nathan elbowed Gina, "I told you to date Buck instead—"

"But," Jason continued, "I asked the same kind of question. 'How do you anchor two hundred acres of drifting boat?' Well, the only answer I got, that I understood, was that it had something to do with the thermal generator, which I also don't understand all that well.

I get how the behemoth makes power from lava, that's easy, it makes steam and shoots it past a couple of turbines. But somehow, the island's design makes hundreds of megawatts off of the small temperature difference between warm surface water and the frigid water hundreds of feet below. Anyhow, to get that much power from lower temperature differences requires moving large sums of surface water. Moving large sums of water is just what you need to keep an island stationary. It stays anchored as a side effect of how it makes electricity."

"I don't know," Nathan said, "that sounds a little far fetched. I believe the internet stories about it being the first civilian ship with a nuclear reactor."

Jason laughed, but had second thoughts. "You might be right, for all I know. If a billionaire can't buy a nuke, who can?"

Gina returned from the kitchen with her mom, each balancing plates of pie and cups of coffee.

Everything was going great, until the mother suggested, to the horror of everyone, that they move the table and play twister.

A month later, Gina spent the holiday with her family, as only seemed right. And though they were very gracious and invited him to stay, he felt like a fifth wheel the whole time. The apartment was small for a family of four, plus him, and it always felt like he was crowding them. But he stayed and got to know the people Gina grew up with.

He watched the late night news with Nathan.

The floating island was still front and center.

He would think that its ultra-green pedigree would have saved it from hippie protests. It didn't. It was made from lava and sand, yet because they altered its chemistry ever so slightly so that it didn't decompose into dirt after a few years, it was deemed a mortal sin against nature.

Next on the protest list was its chosen source of power. The thermal generator. It was a banned technology for generating power because it artificially cooled the surface of the ocean. Ironically, the loudest protests came from global-warming advocates who claimed that the world was going to end because, "greenhouse gasses were WARMING the surface of the ocean TOO much!" As a ship intended for international waters, they could use whatever source of power they could afford, and neither had to ask for permission nor care about complaints. The company was even petitioning the UN, most likely for publicity reasons, for official country status for the island.

The thermal generators seemed to make an enormous amount of sense. Anyone who owned a mobile island would naturally keep moving it to chase the seventy-degree weather, all year round, which was perfect for just such a machine. Besides that, refueling with oil or anything like it would be insanely expensive and complicated to say the least. Most of the vehicles planned for transportation on or within the island were some form of electric.

Windmills and solar, what the protesters wanted, would have covered every inch of the island and would have destroyed its aesthetically pleasing appearance. Windmills would have added another complication by acting like giant sails.

It seemed environmental protesters would protest anything that got their faces in front of a camera or in the local paper. Their beliefs didn't seem to extend much further than publicity and fundraising, same as the average politicians.

Had they truly believed in global warming, they would have supported ANY technology that cooled the ocean; that it made a hundred fold the free energy of a windmill with the reliability of a nuclear plant, as the thermal design promised, should have been seen as a bonus. In a rational world, it should have looked like an answer to every environmentalist's prayer. But it wasn't. They only seemed interested in plans for cooling the oceans that CONSUMED large amounts of energy or closed businesses and punished people with lowered standards of living, all while paying more for energy and taxes.

He wasn't an engineer guy, changing oil and the occasional brake job was about the limit of his usefulness. The news anchor lost him a little, but it made sense the way Buck explained it. Steam was the expanding gas used in turbines; the thermal generator simply used a different gas, or working fluid as he called it, and used pistons instead of turbines. Steam depended on temperature differences too. If a steam turbine vented into a planet filled with steam, like Venus, it wouldn't work. It only works on Earth because the cooler ambient temperature and lower pressure of this planet gives the steam somewhere to go. He still didn't understand the thermal design enough to build one or fix one if it ever got broken, but that was true of cars, too. He understood the standard combustion engine in the most general ways. Yet, even without holding such in-depth understanding, cars continued to work despite his ignorance. The thermal engine probably would work as well.

Nathan, on the other hand, was fascinated and researched every aspect of it, and was confounded by Jason's ignorance of the intricacies of his own supposed occupation. But the reality was, Jason just sat and watched gauges, and rarely got a chance to do more.

Or learn more.

When he got the job, he had hoped that he would be intimately involved with every aspect of— but who was he kidding? He was just a high school graduate, nothing more. He was a laborer. He did grunt work. Low pay, by comparison, and low skilled.

He learned more from late-night conversations with Nathan than he did from the job. But then, he only took the job because of Gina. Knowledge of anything else was an extra.

To get back in the swing of nightshift, he returned to the ship a day early, with a new bottle of melatonin.

Over Easter, he was scheduled to work. A part of him was glad to not be a burden on Gina's family. The rest of him sorely missed them, quirky mother and all.
Chapter 7

He kissed her on the lips as they lay in bed, late into the morning. They had yet to consummate anything, and probably wouldn't still for months to come. But he was strangely ok with all of that. She no longer stiffened when he hugged her. She didn't reflexively recoil at every touch. He had stopped telegraphing his kisses, and she was reacting more naturally to unexpected pecks on the cheek.

He was liking all of this. He was enjoying the simple pleasures of spending time with someone.

It was nice to have conversations during the commercials instead of mindlessly getting something out of the fridge. Without her, even in Hawaii, the week off would have been more boring than his job.

He didn't even mind when Nathan dropped by the rented room from time to time, and it felt perfectly natural to let him have a key or crash whenever he liked. Nathan wasn't likely to find them doing anything sneaky or inappropriate. And after many, many lessons and stings from jellyfish, Jason was finally able to stand on a board without immediately falling off. He still couldn't surf, though. But just standing was a major accomplishment.

His problems now involved not having a 'feel' for the wave. Get up too soon or too late and the wave would slip from his grip and he would only ride a few feet, unlike Gina who could almost ride the wave all the way to shore.

The room was a primo location for surfing, it turned out.

He looked at her face, yet to fully wake. He wasn't that interested in surfing anyway; the only reason he went out was because of her. He liked watching her ride them. He liked seeing that smile.

He hadn't even seen her naked yet, just shorts and a T-shirt. She was the longest relationship he had ever been in, and by far the longest he had ever gone without having sex. The two had to be related.

He hadn't even felt her up yet. He kissed her as she smiled.

He was looking forward to a lot of firsts with her.

But for right now, he would settle for breakfast.

The hotel's free breakfast bar was still open, but just for the next twenty minutes. Reluctantly, he kissed her out of bed. This was the first time that he could remember when she went out into public in shorts.

He sat outside the motel room, alone at the café, and pondered the week that was nearly at an end.

Gina worked as a waitress, one of the few jobs that didn't interfere with classes. She was studying to be a bartender, but had yet to complete her training, which should never be confused with 'classes'. She studied computer programming, creative writing, business, economics, and shared a gene with her brother with an interest in mechanical engineering. She read monthly, and understood, Science and Technology review from the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, as well as a dozen other publications freely available on the web. She could probably excel in that field better than he could; she understood the textbooks with far fewer problems, except she felt out of place in the classroom. Something that didn't intimidate her online.

Half of her classes were online anyway, for practical reasons.

She could never afford the 'caliber' of colleges that came with name recognition; she struggled to afford the few community college classes as it was. So, the logic went, if she couldn't afford prestigious anything anyway, she might as well get as many classes and as much knowledge as she could for what little money she did have. Quantity verses quality, breadth verses depth. If you can't afford a Mercedes, get a Ford. The Ford still has a five-year warranty, gets her where she wants to go, and is infinitely better than riding the bus; it's just not a Mercedes.

Plus, online classes worked around her schedule. She even had enough money leftover to afford a personal online tutor, from India, who went by Jimmy. And she could take her laptop/classroom anywhere and truly enjoyed the broadband at his motel. She was taking classes right now, and he was 'distracting'.

It was his room, yet he found himself outside at the café, watching the action on the beach. He didn't even complain about it, if memory served. He was overwhelmed with a weird compulsion to talk to her when the room was filled with so much silence. Every time he did, she would answer, but only after a pause. He would notice he was distracting her, apologize, and say, 'sorry' or 'never mind', but the interruption had already occurred. After the tenth of eleventh time, he apologized and left her alone the only way he could, by leaving the room.

He caught himself getting up to go back and ask her a question six times already, but always stopped himself before getting to the room. She would come down when she was done. They had agreed.

Why would it be so, he thought? He wasn't flooded with this kind of compulsion on the behemoth. He never flooded her with emails or phone calls. It must have something to do with proximity.

He ordered another ice water with a lemon wedge and changed seats for one with more shade.

He watched her drain a can of chickpeas at the mini sink in the room, then emptied it and some canola oil into a wok and stir it over their tiny burner. The oil started to sizzle.

"Ten minutes until the movie," he said.

"It's alright. It'll be done by then, promise." She sprinkled in the popcorn kernels, a few shakes of Creole seasoning, a pinch of salt, and put a lid on it. Giving it an occasional shake of the handle to keep it from burning.

"Eight minutes," he teased.

"Patience," she teased back.

Pop. . . pop pop. . . pop!

As she opened the lid a crack, a puff of steam emerged. Quickly returning the lid, she resumed the shaking, sloshing motion across the burner. "Just a few minutes more. It'll be worth it. Promise. It's like nothing you've ever had before." Then she hesitated with its delay. "I've never tried it with one of these before. I wonder if there's any difference between burner—"

The wok exploded in pops for a full two minutes or more, then trailed off.

She turned the heat off, poured it all into their biggest bowl, then drizzled a tiny bit of olive oil across the top before returning to the bed to watch their last movie before tomorrow's checkout.

He reached in, more than a little dubious of what chickpeas had to offer to popcorn. The Creole seasoning gave the popcorn a little spicy kick of heat while drastically dropping the sodium count. He gathered his courage and sampled a chickpea. It was still warm in his fingers, a little hard like the flaky crust of a deep-fried fish, but it melted in his mouth like a cheesy puff. "Wow!" he said, skipping the popcorn and fishing for more chickpeas. "Oh my God! Why don't they serve these at theaters?"

"Shhhh!!!" she said, "The movie's on."

He turned out the light as they snuggled closer and prepared for their last night together. Chickpeas. . . who would have known how perfect they could be?
Chapter 8

He picked up the phone and called the control room. "Yes, this is Jason down in the. . . yes, that's right, the 'to chilled air injector' is hovering near it's red line. . . No, no sir, that's not the number I see here. . . yes sir," he then reported the numbers off of each of his dials.

Something had gone wrong with the calibration between the electronic and manual sensors. Maintenance would be there in a matter of minutes. It had happened before and was the sole reason for his eyes and patience over the many months.

He surrendered his notebooks and they checked times and dates with those recorded in the computer logs.

He even got praise for his diligence.

As had happened once before, the electronic sensors lost their sensitivity. After much commotion, they were replaced, and his dull task continued as it had before.

The bowels of the ship had given him hours of quiet time to contemplate life. Loud, sure, it was deafening down there, but the headphones protected him from the intense sound. To his ears, the squeaks were muffled to a distant rocking chair.

He listened to MP3s of his favorite late-night show, mixed with music.

Over the last year, he had become addicted to Coast to Coast AM with George Noory. It seemed the perfect mix of paranoid insanity, conspiracy theory, ghost stories, and NASA scientists with PHDs as far as the eye could see. Both ends of the spectrum, and somehow the host seemed to balance it all perfectly. It came complete with people like Gina's mother who claimed to go fishing with Bigfoot and get abducted by aliens on a regular basis.

If she was crazy, as her children believed, she was certainly not alone. It also helped put crazy into perspective.

Diligently, he continued taking notes and reading dials.

The dials changed, depending on what the behemoth was building. They had stopped building island components and shifted to tidal generators, and the dials reflected it. Tidal generators seemed to be misnamed. They didn't generate anything from tides, they generated power from the waves. But water parks already had 'wave' generators that made waves in giant pools, so to avoid confusion, it received a less accurate name.

The tidal generators were dozens of six-foot long slabs that were later connected into what resembled a hundred-foot floating pier. The 'piers', assembled locally, consisted of joining the slabs with hydraulic rams acting like joints that allowed each segment to rise and fall independent of each other while holding rigidly against lateral movement. Acting like compressors, the rams drove a generator that pumped electricity to the mainland via marine cables. Any excesses or insufficiencies due to the irregularity of the waves were stored pneumatically in a large pressurized tank at the end of the pier.

The amount of power delivered by such tidal 'piers to nowhere' was insignificant compared to what a single thermal generator could produce (with a fraction of the footprint). But environmentalists preferred the 'piers to nowhere', much like they preferred hundreds of thousands of unsightly windmills over a single nuclear plant.

The protests and controversy revolving around the first floating island had put future island orders in limbo, hence the change in construction.

The thousands of unhappy construction workers that were laid off somehow translated into anger toward the few unaffected workers at the behemoth, like it was their fault instead of the fault of spineless politicians.

By late summer, they switched to making a new kind of generic slabs that could be used for tidal generators, or for a new use pioneered by the construction industry in Florida, floating foundations for coastal homes. The floating foundations, reinforced by steel, provided both a secure hurricane/tornado proof basement and the ability to float the entire house to keep it from suffering flood damage. It was becoming one of their most lucrative products while the legalities of the island concept were still being disputed.

They were also the most amusing to watch as they were being shipped. Two tugboats pulled several miles-long strings of floating slabs tied by steel cables off into the distance like a giant strand of floating pearls. It reminded him of the cans tied behind 'just married' cars. Or single file ducklings.

By fall, one of the Tonga islands had built a smaller land-based factory for making generic tidal-block-sized slabs in direct competition with the behemoth. The overhead of a ship this size, plus the backroom dealings they had to make with the government of Hawaii, put them at a huge disadvantage to the simple Tonga design.

Fortunately, with a few well-placed campaign contributions (the legalized version of bribes), the resistance to the construction of floating islands was finally dropped in the form of a bill, signed into law, and the behemoth went back to what it, and only it, did best. Huge, aircraft carrier-sized slabs started to pile up behind the ship again. And thousands of locals were hired back to their well paying jobs.

Shifts tightened when new software and injector heads were installed. He only had one week off for every month of solid, twelve-hour shifts, but the money was great.

He woke on the mainland with Gina in his bed.

They had talked about getting married about a month ago. His job required strange hours, and it left him with the feeling that he was always just visiting. They hadn't fought over anything yet.

He kissed her on the cheek, then on the lips when she woke with a smile. "Elope with me," he whispered. "Come back to the states with me next year, at the end of my contract. Let's find real jobs where we get to spend every day together. I love you, but this feels like we are always on vacation with each other. Hawaii is awesome, but it is a hundred times more difficult to find a job here than in the states."

"I have another two years of cla—"

"That you can take anywhere. I just—" but he wasn't going to argue with her. "I don't know if they're going to keep me on past this contract, and it doesn't look like I'd be able to pick up anything locally. Not in this market. And I just don't want to go back to a long-distance relationship, not when I was really getting to know you."

She lay silently by his side.

"Your family is here, I know. I understand the struggle you are a part of, here. It's one of the many things that I admire about you." He lit two cigarettes, then handed her one while he contemplated the road his words were starting to travel. "I just want normal, you know."

She exhaled toward the ceiling. "Normal is harder to find than everyone thinks."

There was only so much pressure he could put on her.

"If you go back home and the distance doesn't work out," she took another drag and held back a morning cough, "then it wasn't meant to be, I guess."

"Yeah, but, I mean for this to be. I really like you, Gina, and what's more, I'm fairly head over heels right now." He put his cigarette out. "I can't imagine being that far away from you again. It would be incredibly painful for me." But he was worried about the end of his contract. What he did, though important, could be done by anyone. It didn't warrant the large sums he was getting. At some point he was sure they were going to figure that out too, even though his diligence had saved them once already, this kind of luck never lasted but so long. He held her hand to his chest, then kissed her fingers.

She smiled, but took another drag on the cigarette.

"How are the classes coming, by the way?"

"C's & B's, a few A's." She sat and faced him. "There's a reason why I didn't get on a plane to see you. Bold and adventuresome isn't who I am. It probably will never be. I lack that kind of, spontaneity. I like the security of ruts." She took a deep drag, then lay back down. "I think I'd lose my mind if I was ever hundreds of miles away from my family. Let alone thousands of miles." She blew a smoke circle and watched it drift to the ceiling. "Some kids ache to leave home far behind them. That just isn't me."

He knew what she was saying. He wanted to be considered part of her family, but wasn't yet. And may never be. But it wouldn't keep him from trying.

There was an old saying about you weren't just marrying the girl, but her entire family too. He liked them all, even the slightly odd mother and very distant sister. He wasn't prepared to move so he could live near them, but in a way, that was exactly what he had been asking her to do. To move away from her family to be nearer to his.

He watched her enjoy the last half-inch of her cigarette as he contemplated how much further he was willing to go, just for one particular girl.

But, he already knew.
Chapter 9

"Jason," Buck said as he visited the bowels of the behemoth. "Your year is almost up. Look, uh, this is never easy to say or do, but—"

In the sauna of the bowels, a chill suddenly ran through him. Even in this humidity, his mouth went dry.

"See, we have to either give you a raise or let you go. After your diligence, I argued for giving you the raise. . . but, I don't make those calls." He put his hand on Jason's shoulder, "Sorry," and handed him his final check.

Jason folded his notebook, then opened the envelope. Pink was beside the white. He got up and caught Buck before he left sight of the gauges. "Listen, Buck, is this final? Because, I didn't ask for a raise, and, you know, I realize— Look, I'd stay at the same pay— Listen, I have a girlfriend here on the mainland so, when I say the money isn't the top item on my list, I mean it isn't." He pulled the pink slip out and handed it back, "I mean, Buck, if this is final, it's final. But I'm fine with making the same, if it means I stay near the mainland. Now, if you guys pulled up anchor, I would probably have had to quit."

"I'm pretty sure it's final, Jason, but I'll see for sure." Buck took the slip with him.

Jason opened his notebook and sat back by the dials. The check included a bonus that was meant to cover the airline ticket home, but it would cover the next few days just as well.

He stared at the needles as they jiggled slightly when the behemoth adjusted to forming the interiors of complex rooms and corridors, hidden in carrier-sized forms.

He had been fired before. Actually, fired wasn't the right word for this, they simply didn't feel the need to renew his contract. Not that that didn't result in the same thing.

He wanted desperately to stay and had no idea how to break it to Gina. He hadn't banked up enough to coast on an island as expensive as Hawaii and would either have to find a new job and place to stay, within a week, or buy a ticket and leave. His pitiful account didn't offer him any more flexibility than that.

A raise would have been nice, and it was long overdue, but getting paid much more than he was for sitting. . . he would have fired him too.

He felt a tear welling up, but choked it back down.

He thought of Gina. This could end everything.

Was all of this, for nothing.

No.

No, it wasn't all for nothing. He had something with her. In person, she seemed distant and aloof most of the time. But she wasn't. She was slow and cautious, but she was inching closer.

Without a doubt, they would continue to chat online. But with as much as could be done online, there was just as much that online relationships couldn't do.

He didn't want to be fired, and he most assuredly didn't want to go back to a long-distance relationship.

He wanted desperately to keep the status quo.

He got off the boat at the docks, then started walking to the hotel. His account had little to show for all his labor, but his credit was good. And the company had given him seven days at the hotel to arrange for a ticket home.

He started asking around.

Finding a job was difficult, nearly impossible with a hotel room listed as his residence. But his seemingly fruitless interviews did leave him with the impression that he could, in fact, find something locally after all. That it wasn't totally bleak.

On his second day out, he lied and used Gina's address instead of the hotel.

On his last day on the mainland before needing to buy a ticket home, a cleaning company showed some interest. They cleaned rooms in beachfront rentals when the occupants left. Tubs, toilets, rugs, carpets and beds. Those were mostly seasonal positions, but this was the season and they needed extra hands.

He took it and would start his probation Tuesday. But, should he get on regular, they also cleaned parkinglots and had contracts with some local stores and offices.

Something between maid and janitor, it was about the same as what he made on the behemoth, minus overtime and other perks. But it still wouldn't be enough to live on his own. And, to work it, he would need a car. For now, Gina agreed to drive him around in her old Honda. Her family even let him stay with them, as crowded as it was, so long as he helped out with the rent.
Chapter 10

Gina picked him up at the gate of the fenced in, ritzy beach community. He sat in the passenger-side seat, smelling of pine and lemons, as they silently drove home. Awkward silence surrounded them as the windows rattled while she spun down the road. Her radio had never worked, but living in an always noisy and crowded home, she cherished the silence and never thought of fixing it.

He felt compelled to say something. His days were spent cleaning other peoples' homes, often with no one to talk to, much like his silence in the bowels of the behemoth. But he fought the urge and relaxed back into the faded bucket seat.

"You have time to stop by the bank?" he asked, remembering the check in his pocket.

She looked at her watch. "No, I'm almost late as it is. I'll have to drive straight to the bar, and you'll have to drive it home. Remember, I get off at 1 AM." She looked at him, then back at the road in time to speed around another sharp turn.

"No problem." He tried to be quiet again.

He fought the urge to kiss her or hug her before she hurried into the bar. She limited public displays to holding hands, and even then she was visibly uncomfortable when it went past a few minutes. The same rules seemed to apply in parkinglots and in front of her family as well.

But that didn't mean he couldn't do anything. He waved and smiled as he waited for her to get inside, then took his position behind the wheel. He sat a few minutes, just in case she had forgotten something, while he checked behind the seats for her purse, then started the car and headed home, with a slight detour by the bank.

Money was very tight, much tighter than Gina had let on. They were perpetually late with the rent and just managed to keep a week ahead of having a random utility shut off. He surrendered most of his check to Gina's mother, who promptly took the car and sped off to keep ahead of another cutoff date.

He showered while nobody was home, then fell asleep on Gina's bed.

Bzzzz!!

He sat up, then smacked the alarm. 11:30 PM.

Gina needed to be picked up in about an hour, but he had to kill some time first. Nathan was blaring music from the other room while carrying on a conversation with friends, but it wasn't too distracting. Jason hadn't acclimated to his new schedule yet, but the melatonin was helping with that.

He left for the bathroom, then the kitchen.

Pulling some leftover pasta from the fridge, he looked for a plate to put it on.

Nothing. All dirty and piled in the sink, as usual.

Still soaking in cold water, Makayla had obviously started to do them, but had been interrupted. Fishing for the plug, he let it drain while adding hot from the tap back in, then, much like on his day job, he started cleaning them while the paste reheated in the microwave.

His first few days on the job were the worst. He had been timid about doing 'woman's work'. Sure, give him a deep carpet shampooer or a steam cleaner and let him go to town, but scrubbing toilets, showers, and dishes. . . that just seemed on the other side of the macho line. But, that was the job. Those tasks were the least liked by everyone, and the first he had been given. Entry level.

He rinsed the first plate, then put it in the rack to dry.

Dishes were probably the easiest of his jobs. Half the homes had automatic dishwashers anyway, and in those that didn't, the tenants tended to clean them before they left. Unfortunately for him, it didn't matter if the previous tenants cleaned them or not, he still had to wash them again. But, cleaning clean dishes was far easier than what vacationing frat boys left. Sometimes it looked like they tried to cook a plastic GI-JOE in a frying pan.

Some almost needed plastic sheets for the beds. That was the more disturbing part of cleaning vacation homes. The woman he most often worked with, Maria, used a spray-on scotch guard to protect the mattresses in her assigned homes. It worked wonders on the furniture too.

But already once this week they had to use the steam cleaner designed for carpets on a mattress to remove what everyone hoped was a wine stain.

Ding!

The reheated pasta was ready. He drained the water out of the sink before sitting at the table to eat.

Gina's home life could be called chaotic, but Makayla did remarkably well for a single mom. They rarely had more than one car, and had long learned the art of coordinating the travels of multiple people across days and weeks, often without incidents. They rarely had anything new, but all their secondhand items were well cared for and as nice as they could be. Furniture didn't match, not even within the same room, but each piece was in fine working condition. The plates seemed assembled from the remnants of three different sets, yet had no cracks or chips among them.

He always felt comfortable around her family. Overall, it was amazing that Gina drank as little as she did. Makayla was rarely seen without a drink in her hand, and none of her kids remembered seeing her without one. The Ex and most of the men Makayla dated drank heavily too, that just seemed to be the circles she traveled in.

Glasses often accumulated by the mother's bed or were scattered throughout the apartment, but he rarely tried to hunt them down. Since he did more than his share of dishes, he almost always had a clean one, after a fashion of course.

From the kitchen he heard the door open and the rustle of bags, but he continued eating his meal.

Makayla had come in through the front door with two arms of groceries, headed for the kitchen. "Steven," she said in the living room as she handed Ava's boyfriend both bags and aiming him at the kitchen, "you dropping my little girl off, or picking up?"

"Dropping off," he said, bashfully, "she wanted to see the last showing of that—"

But Makayla just pushed him toward the kitchen while she poured herself a finger of Scotch. "Drop them off too, while you're at it."

Steven walked in as Jason was finishing up his pasta. "I'll put them away," Jason said, knowing where most of it was going.

Steven waited, a bit puzzled now that he had nothing to do. "Where's Gina?"

Jason checked his watch, "Still at work." He sorted cans as he filled the cabinet under the microwave, then put the cereal on the shelf by the refrigerator. "Why aren't you with Ava in her room?"

"Well, she. . . uh, well—"

Jason had known that Ava was just about done with Steven. The only one at the house who didn't know was the boy he had just asked. "So, what was the movie about?"

"Oh, uh, it was that Will Smith one that everyone was raving about. It didn't have enough action in it for me. You know, sure, he's got some acting chops but, that ain't enough to hold my interest. No car wrecks, no car chases, no gun fights, Hell, I don't even think I ever saw him run!"

"Chick flick?" Jason said, folding up the empty bags and putting them away.

"Total."

It was sad that Steven didn't know what was coming his way. He wasn't a bad guy, he just wasn't what Ava was looking for, right now. A chill ran through him. What if Gina was breaking up with him, too? Would he know, or would he be this clueless too? Gina's normal persona was cool and a little distant, that would make it especially hard to tell.

"Hey uh, you worked on the behemoth, right?" Steven said sitting down.

"Yeah, that's right, but not anymore."

"What, uh, what happened?"

"Well, my contract was over, and they didn't want to renew. Technically, it was a layoff, not fired, but the results was the same."

Steven looked toward the living room where Makayla was settling down to some TV. He pulled the chair closer. "High pay?"

"Oh, it was nice for what little I did. I just sat in a sauna-like room and babysat some gauges. Can't get any better than that. But, high pay? Not exactly. It had perks, though. Free room and board, discount meals. They rented a room on the mainland for our week off. All that was nice. It really insulated us from the high prices of everything on the island."

"Saw in the news that they were gearing up to make one or two a year, now that the legal stuff was cleared up."

"Yeah, well, I mean, they kinda had to. It's a boat, it can go anywhere, sell, or uh, pay taxes in any country they wanted. Mind you, the chemistry of Hawaii lava seemed prefect, but all they need is an active, steady flow, without risking an eruption."

"Well, it's getting very fashionable among the billionaires' club. That first one is already decked out and working right now off of North Carolina. They say they charge fifty thousand a night to rent out one of the conference rooms, plus rooms and amenities. Saw a helicopter tour of the topside, looks like a cross between a golf course and the Garden of Eden."

Jason smiled, but checked his watch. "Yeah, saw that too. Said they were going to keep it within a hundred miles from shore until the weather starts to turn, then head south to Brazil. The CEO, what was his—"

"Arkolo Handstone, I think—"

"That's right, they have several manufacturing sites in Brazil and in the Carolinas. Still a little foggy on just what it is they build."

"They said, but I can't remember either."

Ava walked into the kitchen, went straight past Steven and opened the fridge. "You ought to be getting home now, shouldn't you?" she smiled at Steven as he quietly got up and headed out.

He knew, on some level.

Jason checked his watch again, then left to pick up Gina. He planned to be early this time.
Chapter 11

Jason stood in the parkinglot in front of the apartment, pulled the old plug out of the socket, then screwed in a new one from the box.

Steven had stopped coming around a few weeks after Ava started dating Allen, even though Allen didn't last much past a few dates. It was a pity; of the two, he liked Steven better.

Ava didn't seem to dump anyone, she just stopped dating them and moved on. It seemed rude, but she pulled it off like a pro.

Jason tightened the new plugs with the ratchet, connected the wires, then closed the hood on the Honda. Gina turned the key and it started right up. It had been running uneven lately. Plugs seemed as good a guess as any, and the cheapest place to start, too.

She put it in gear, waved, then headed off for work.

Housecleaning was seasonal and highly dependent on bookings and vacationers. They were at the whim of others, and vacationers seemed to be taking this week off. Hence, so was he.

The cleaning company tried to give him something to do for three days this week. They tried to be fair among all their seasonal help, but nobody ever promised him regular work. He had dipped into his meager savings and now couldn't even afford a plane ticket home.

He walked down to the end of the street, stopping at the bus stop, and fished in the trash for the classifieds. Most seemed to require a car, but he continued to look. It was a catch 22. He needed a better job to afford a car to get a better job. Arghhh!

It was what it was.

An article about middle of A5 caught his eye.

Scientists had years ago discovered the 'jet stream' on the sun. It had long been known that the sun had cycles, every 11 to 22 years it seemed. But those cycles could last for hundreds of years, as was seen during the Little Ice Age. Back then, the sun had unusually few sunspots, not that anyone knew what sunspots were back then. Even today, scientists are still confused over what causes sunspots to begin and what regulates their size. But they are now, thanks to some very expensive satellites, able to observe currents and streams just under the surface of the sun. And these rivers of flowing, whatever it was, seemed to play a huge roll over whether a sunspot would form or not, and were a good predictor of their eventual strength. The jet stream on the sun was moving again, and scientists everywhere were excited about it.

But unlike simple scientific observations, there was a lot riding on the outcome of this subtle and very distant change.

Science seemed to be evenly divided into two camps. The first said that sunspots have little or no effect on Earth's temperatures and weather patterns. That the primary factor that dictated Earth's temperature were greenhouse gasses. Everything else was insignificantly minor.

The other group, ridiculed in the media every day, yet still growing stronger, believed that CO2 and other greenhouse gasses were insignificant in comparison to the brute power of these little understood changes on the sun. Sunspot computer models were proving nearly four times as accurate as the CO2 weighted ones, yet sunspot models still received ten times the ridicule and a fraction of the respect.

Well, as he read on, the two camps were headed into a scientific showdown. The sun cycle was changing, and it looked like it was changing in a powerful way.

Sunspots had been unusually rare recently, and CO2 driven global warming theories had faltered when the world actually recorded a cooling for over a decade. But with the jet stream moving to where the sun scientists believed it was heading, they predicted a sharp spike of six degrees over the next six years. An increase in temperature on that scale was, in the lingo, an order of magnitude larger than anything CO2 computer models could ever account for. Since none of the CO2 centric models supported it, the theory was ridiculed as being scientifically impossible.

The press, of course, loved the controversy.

And even more, they loved the headlines it produced.

"Scientists differ wildly, but agree that the world is screwed!"

Humorous, but it seemed true by the end of the article.

If the Sun scientists were right, the world would go into global warming meltdown in the next six years. The good news would be that CO2 and manmade gasses would be completely exonerated as the cause. The bad news would be it wouldn't matter because the world would end.

If the CO2 scientists were right, nothing would happen but a slight warming of around a tenth of a degree that coincided with their models. Their models still predicted the end of the world, but in fifty to a hundred years. And if the warming was within the prediction of a tenth of a degree, the world would have to say goodbye to cars and planes, gasoline, tractors, and most powerplants. The world would be savable, but it meant sailboats and bicycles for everyone, except politicians.

He stuffed some of the more promising job slips in his pocket and trashed the rest of the paper before walking home.

End of the world, or the end of a world worth living and the end of all modern conveniences. It was lose lose, lose lose.

If it bleeds, it leads. If it means the end of the world, it's on A5.

The problem, as he saw it, was that the debate was religious, not scientific. The CO2 side believed that salvation was only achievable if man repented for his sins. It required the same religious repentance as that of passing a rich man through the eye of a needle. The sun advocates, on the other religion, believed it was all out of their hands. It was all fate, and that repentance wasted precious resources that should be applied to adapting to changes as they happened. If the sun shifted into a hotter gear, as they predicted, we would need more powerplants, not less. Cooling towers could be reconfigured, inexpensively, to pump more reflective white clouds into the air during daylight, like putting on sun block, and switch to a form of radiator to vent heat directly into space at night. If the sun shifted to Ice Age, manmade clouds would be used at night like a blanket to keep in the heat, and cooling ponds during the day to retain BTUs near the ground. But that either way, the key to adapting to climate change required more powerplants, not less, according to the sun religion. And windmills and solar were worthless, either way.

It was all more Buck's cup of tea. But it sounded right to Jason. Energy and climate policy was beyond his pay grade, as they say, and he only understood it but so well.

"I've got an interview tomorrow at 10AM," he said in bed as Gina changed her clothes. "I'd like to say it's in the bag, but, I don't know. I did work a year at the shipyard changing heads on grinders, so, it isn't something— I just don't know. It's a chance."

She buttoned her nightshirt, "Well, they work a lot of overtime, don't they?"

"Yeah, they do. But, it's right here on the mainland—"

"The other side of the mainland. It's like as far away from here as you can get without leaving the island, Jason."

"An hour drive, I know. Each way. But it's a lot more money. Enough for a second car, something to give your Honda a break. Maybe I won't last there too long, but, I think I should give it a try. No harm in trying."

She shrugged, then climbed into bed.

He preferred that she shower off the smell of the smoky bar before coming to bed, but she was clearly too tired. She fell asleep almost immediately, ending any conversation they might have been building to. It didn't matter much anyway. It felt odd fooling around with her mother on the other side of the bedroom wall.

He kissed her on the cheek, checked the alarm clock, then turned out the light and tried to sleep. He had another twenty minutes or so before the melatonin would kick in.

He stood in one of the longest interview lines he had ever seen, discouragingly long. When he saw it that morning, as he was being dropped off, he almost gave up right then and asked to go back home. But, they were already there. He might as well take the chance, slim as it was.

He listened to the chatter from those ahead of him.

Just when this niche industry was recovering from its political problems, the Tonga factory had gotten into trouble for pollution. Chunks from finishing the products, the dust and debris if you will, had made it to the island of trash that accumulated in the Pacific. A million tons of plastic bags, bottles, and coolers were suddenly insignificant, now that a few pounds of floating rocks had drifted into the mix.

The rocks weren't even pollution, to his mind, but that wasn't the point of the trouble. Unlike the millions of tons of other trash, the floating rocks could be traced back to a single source. A source with deep pockets.

It was hard for Jason to not be cynical. He had seen this very thing shut down the behemoth before. Nobody really cared about the pollution, they cared about re-election, campaign funds, and 'appearing' to stand for something. The fear was that Tonga was going to buck the western political system of throwing money at the problem and try to stand on moral grounds. Politicians were a lot like sharks, they could smell money in the water from miles away, and they swarmed in packs like piranhas until the source of money was gone. If they couldn't tax Tonga, they'd tax the behemoth, and that meant layoffs across the industry, not hires.

This could all be made very temporary.

After six hours of waiting, he left with little more than a promise that they 'might' call.
Chapter 12

He had wanted the super prestigious position of island construction. That was the job he had applied for. But he didn't turn down the offer that came instead.

The behemoth had been modified in his absence, and it now cranked out a continuous stream of small craft and tidal generators, in addition to the carrier-sized slabs. The corners and edges of each needed to be ground and cleaned, and the square holes intended for the pistons had to be bored as well. In addition to dozens of other mounting holes.

Jackhammers were heavy and loud, but lucrative, and he was well used to working with them. As well as changing grinder heads on the power equipment that was everywhere around the docks. Ten hours a day, five days a week, rain or shine they worked. It was boring and dull, but it paid better than any job he had had thus far, and he had, sooner than any had thought, saved up enough for a car.

In this case, a four-year-old Yaris.

He pulled up in the parkinglot, popped the trunk, then got out his lunchbox and waved as his new car pulled away.

Gina's mom needed it to run some errands today.

It felt odd to have bought a new car, make all the payments on it, insure it, pay taxes on it, yet not be the one to drive it all the time. It felt very odd, and more than a little wrong. But it was exactly how Gina had felt all these years.

It wasn't like it was going to do anything but sit in the parkinglot for ten hours today. Someone might as well get some use out of it. He adjusted his lunchbox, put on his badge, then walked through the security gate.

The cutting blades used carbide teeth and were a first-thing-in-the-morning job that he dreaded, but did most of the time. This morning was no exception. The blades were heavy and needed to be precisely placed or they would wear unevenly. Unfortunately, he had gained a reputation for being fast and accurate, something the maintenance logs bore out. It wasn't uncommon for blades he installed to last a week longer than those installed by others.

He heaved one into location and snugged it before shimmying it into alignment and locking it down. Rotating the disk to confirm it was spinning true was about as hard as pushing a golf cart uphill, but vital to a proper installation. Verified, he signed the log and took his lock off the disconnect and proceeded to the next one.

By lunch, his arms ached, but he was done with all the heavy lifting and the docks were buzzing with constant grinder sounds.

He barely had the strength to open his Coke and unwrap his two ham and mustard sandwiches.

"So, Jason, uh," David said, "where's this new Yaris you've been raving about?" sitting down next to him.

"Gina's mom's got it. Running errands I suppose." He sipped the soda then crunched a fistful of chips.

"So, let me get this right, you bought it and—"

He swallowed hard, "Yeah, yeah, I know. But I've been borrowing their car for the last few months. You know, what can I do? Can't say no."

David started laughing and making whipping sounds, "And she don't even have a ring on her finger yet. You got no chance, my man!"

Part of him agreed, but what could he do. Fair was fair. He concentrated on eating instead of conversating. It wasn't like it was a brand new car anyway. Someone had already put 60,000 miles on it. It was just new to him.

After lunch, he helped David position the template over the tidal slab, lock it down, and started drilling the mounting holes before boring out piston holes for the rest of the day.

He waited in the parkinglot for twenty minutes before his car pulled into view. Climbing in the passenger side, he tried not to be angry over the situation while Nathan drove home. Only, they couldn't go straight home, Nathan had a list of things to pick up, in this case taking a full two hours and three stops before they actually got home.

Five drivers using two cars was hectic, no matter how he did the math.

But, it was no picnic for Nathan either. Nathan had to drive an hour out of the way, as did his mother that morning. And the car was stuck in the middle of their errand marathon. But it was what it was. It was what they had to do to get by.

Ava borrowed it immediately after they unloaded it at home.

Jason took a shower and passed out on Gina's bed. At least he didn't have to fetch her at work.

The days blended together, with only the weekends standing out. He had weekends off, most weekends anyway.

Weekends were all about laundry.

Oddly, he found he rather enjoyed his time at the Laundromat. The closest one was open all night and next to a bar and a convenience store. When he went at night, he could watch the people pour into the bar and stagger out, usually while nobody was in the matt, or even get comfortably blitzed and sober up in time to fold. When he went there in the morning, as if it was his day job, nobody was there and he could have his pick of machines and enjoy a coffee and a paper in total peace.

The Laundromat was quiet and peaceful, almost like a library in the predawn mornings, and was perfect for reading.

He preferred the morning, Sunday morning was ideal, because it was cleaned Saturday night and generally cooler in the mornings.

The kids had been doing their own laundry for years, but he was in the habit of doing Gina's too because her hamper was in the same room.

It just kept thing simpler that way.

He unloaded the two duffle bags onto the rolling baskets and started to sort them by color and cycle in front of his favorite three machines. He added detergent and went for his morning cup and paper at the convenience store.

It would have been nice to have spent these next few hours with Gina in the peace and quiet of the matt, but it was a bit too early for her. She got off around three, home and asleep by four. She would have had only a few hours of sleep at best. He'd have them dry and folded by the time she woke.

Perhaps that was for the best.

An article in the paper, A3, suggested that the early data was already coming in, and that the sun centric scientists were claiming a victory over the CO2 alarmists. Currently, the bump was a mere 0.1 degree, but that was already well outside what all the CO2 centric models could account for.

On the following page was an article about a culling of 600 polar bear because of overpopulation of the still endangered species. Only a government bureaucrat could be so blind to keep a species on the endangered list that was so overpopulated that it needed thinning. It almost belonged in the comics section.

He folded the section and opened to business. Above the fold was news of the high demand for the tidal generators. An economics professor at the local college provided a numeric breakdown of the technology. Each section, for which you needed a minimal of two to generate anything, averaged a few hundred watts at best and cost nearly six thousand. Their output also varied widely through the day, from week to week, and were highly erratic during storms. And because people hated the looks of them from the shore, they had to be anchored miles over the horizon, and that added distance amounted to a massive drop in the power actually delivered.

The old design stretched out like the lines on notebook paper, or teeth on a comb, and required Acres of spacing to keep from bumping into themselves during a storm. The new design, which they worked on locally, connected more like the backing on a carpet and looked like graph paper from above. It allowed each segment to pitch in 360 degrees and went from two to four pistons, on average. This increased the cost of each unit, but generated more power per acre, which satisfied aesthetic demands, as the professor explained.

For someone whose work depended on units produced, what he read next from the professor came with some enthusiasm. For California to meet their green goal of replacing a single coal powerplant, they would have to buy and install a minimum of two million units, carpeting a section of the ocean at least four square miles, but realistically it would cover closer to twelve and, from space, look like California had broken off a sliver into a weird island.

The cost, a mere twenty billion.

The professor then contrasted that with how many decades the behemoth would have to work to produce two million sections at its current pace. If dedicated solely to segments (which it would never do), the behemoth could produce a million every ten months; Tonga, on the other hand, could produce a million every five months, since that was all they did.

It all still seemed silly, since Buck's lunchtime conversations had yet to wear off. The thermal system that all the wandering islands were designed for produced far more regular power at a fraction of the price, and could fit on a small barge, unseen from orbit. They also worked fine during storms.

He moved the wash into four dryers, then got comfortable with the paper again.

A few pages away, there was a related article to the thermal generator in the first island. At the opening of hurricane season, the island moved preemptively from North Carolina to Brazil to beat a 'worse than expected' tropical storm season. All the computer models predicted the first in the chain, already forming, would be a Category 5 by the time it hit Florida, but it stalled over the cooler ocean surface of the wandering island's wake and never made a Category 1. Weather model experts claimed it was just an odd coincidence, but Cuba was demanding at the UN that the US surrender its climate control technology.

A powerplant that generated cheap electricity and turned category 5 storms into category 1. . . As Buck would say, no wonder they banned it!

He checked his sign in the astrology section, 'A chance encounter will turn to your favor.'

He smiled, folded it, then finished his cold coffee with the last two mini powdered doughnuts. The dryers had another ten minutes, each.

He would be folding clothes soon.
Chapter 13

Pissed, he looked for his keys in the bowl by the door again. But he knew it was fruitless. His car was gone. He checked his empty cigarette box, then crushed it and tossed it to the table where his keys should have been. He needed his morning fix, bad. Frustrated, he grabbed his wallet, slammed the door behind himself, and walked the ten blocks it took to get to the nearest overpriced convenience store.

It wasn't the first time someone had taken his car and left him stranded. It was a regular damned occurrence!

It might not have been so bad, but he wasn't even having sex with Gina yet!

He kicked the first mailbox he saw, then stomped a discarded cigarette box a few feet away. He was angry, very angry, and it didn't seem to be fading away. It seemed to be getting worse.

He didn't like the situation he found himself in. He hadn't expected to still be in the kissing stage. He hadn't expected to buy a car and only get to use it half the time. He didn't expect to struggle this hard and have nothing to show for it. And he didn't expect to be stranded at home on a weekend with no car and no smokes!

He coughed in anger, desperation, and withdrawal. He still had another six blocks to go.

He opened the box in the store, smoked his first in under a minute just outside their doors, then chain-smoked two more on the walk home. There was something just so calming about a good cigarette, in this case, three.

Hopefully, most of his anger had been over not getting his morning fix. But somehow, he doubted that was the case. Something had to happen with Gina, or he was going to call it quits. He stopped short of the apartment at the bus stop bench.

He liked her. No, he loved her. He did. They had a lot in common, and he fully understood her reluctance to move their relationship further. Hugging her could change the day for him. But she kept herself at a distance.

Sharing a car was easy; sharing a bed with someone he loved more now than he ever did before, but that was keeping herself at such a distance. . . that was something he wasn't prepared for.

He bought a paper from the machine.

Global warming was hitting, full force. And carbon capping and trading had failed, miserably. Cap and trade had moved jobs overseas, by the millions. It had destroyed America's competitive advantage by pricing energy, a key cost factor in everything, at four times that of China and India.

Sitting, the behemoth's thermal turbines earned it carbon credits, but even they had pushed up their rates. Ironically, they had been sued by the local power company for undercutting the market, and the legislature FORCED the behemoth to up their rates.

But, global warming was proving to be a bigger mixed bag than the experts had predicted. Canada, for example, was enjoying an increase in agricultural exports of sixty percent. Same with food exports from Alaska and Siberia, of all places. Even including crop failures in traditional breadbaskets, the world was seeing an unprecedented surplus of food, and India and China were literally eating it up.

But as with all news worth printing, they found a way to make this good news depressing. Food was at a surplus, which should have driven prices down across the globe, but didn't. Food prices were up because shipping costs had spiked because of automatic 'triggers' in cap and trade. With windmills going mostly silent with a global shift in wind patterns, everyone was burning exponentially more natural gas to compensate.

Australia had lifted their ban on the Wandering Island's thermal generator designs years ago and was now using a small array of them to power Sidney, instead of the unsightly tidal generators. A shift in rain patterns had solved their long-standing drought problems and seemed to be turning their dusty desert center into rich agricultural land again. Which was good for them, but did little to help those stuck on Hawaii.

Tickets to leave the island had tripled in price since cap and trade had kicked into high gear. Being near the equator, they had already lost ten feet of coast. The warming was happening much faster than any, except the sun-centric scientists, had predicted. Even so, the carbon-centric scientists had yet to abandon their position. Instead, they doubled down and got, after spending billions on lobbying, even stricter caps on carbon because of the unexpected melting.

Jason folded the paper. It was all too depressing. He wanted off the island, but there was no way to leave.

No, actually, there was a way. It was cheaper to buy a boat and sail/drift to Mexico and resell it than it was to buy a ticket on a plane or gas-powered boat. Winds near the equator remained strong and somewhat predictable. And as long as ocean currents didn't deflect them too far, it was still possible to sail along this latitude. But that might not be true for much longer.

He lit his fourth cigarette and walked the rest of the way home. He could tough it out for one more year. Maybe.

If he had enough cigarettes.

With wind patterns changing, so too did the size and pitch of waves. Tidal generators were under producing, same as windfarms, ushering in a new redesign.

When Jason returned to work, they started on the third generation of tidal generators. These used even smaller slabs that could utilize the smaller waves. They used smaller pistons, an integrated superstructure frame, and about ten times the man-hours to produce the same amount of power. But, because of the carbon tax, it was all Hawaii, and many other states, had left.

He helped assemble them offshore, just beyond the horizon.

Every day when they boated back, he watched the gentle waves eat away at abandoned, flooded homes that dotted the coast. Week after week, fewer would remain standing.

Months of seven, twelve-hour days had taken a toll on Jason, but had benefited his account handsomely. By Christmas, he had saved enough to buy an old sailboat, but had yet to talk Gina into going with him.

She opened the window, letting the mild winter weather into the bedroom, before climbing into bed with him. She got home late at night and settled into bed at about the same time he needed to wake for work. They had that precious hour together, and he didn't like spending it on arguing, but it seemed like the only thing on his mind.

"We need to head for the mainland, for the states, while we still can. Hawaii lost another thirty feet of shore since winter. Sailboats are still affordable, if we fire-sale everything and combine it with what I've been able to save—"

She sat up in bed, "We'll have nothing left by the time we make it to the states—"

"We sell the boat for whatever we can get for it, then try to find jobs. I still have family, we should be able to get a bus ticket or a train ticket or something like it—"

"The Mississippi has stayed flooded two hundred feet across each bank. Everything is sinking, Jason."

"We'll find something. But, we have to move now before the panic really sets in. Next year may be too late."

She didn't like the idea of leaving everything she knew. But, it was true. If trends continued, Hawaii would have to be evacuated within a decade.

"They had to add to the anchors that tether the tidal generators again. They seem to have to add another link every day. One of the guys I used to work with. . . they make sailboats out of defective slabs. They aren't yacht pretty, but they'll get the job done and have some resale value. Said he'd let me have one at cost, but just this year while sales are slow. Right now, that's all we can really afford, that or something decades old and wood or fiberglass that scares me more. I've seen his, they aren't bad, sort of houseboat meets barge."

She didn't do well with change. She hesitated. "I think I'm too tired to think about something like this, right now."

He tempered his excitement and frustration with his calmest voice, "I've made up my mind on this, Gina. I. . . I just don't think I can stay here. But, I'm very much in love with you. I don't want to leave you, and I don't want to leave your family in a lurch by just selling my car and disappearing one night. I want you all to come with me. I think we can do this, I really do. I'd like to leave this spring." He had clearly upset her, so he cut his argument short. "There are plenty of cities and towns that are hundreds of feet or more above sea level. I can google you a list of them after work, but I'm sure at least one of them we can call home." But telling a surfer girl to live inland was a tough sell. "Gina, Gina Gina. . . Gina. I—" but he just kissed her instead. "When it isn't just the very rich who see their oceanfront homes wash away, but when it's happening to everyone, that's when it'll be too late. Come with me this spring. Just, just think about it."

They cuddled for a while until she fell asleep, and he got up for work.
Chapter 14

Jason was working fourteen-hour days when his car finally sold that spring. The family held a yard sale that weekend and sold Gina's Honda a few days later. All the overtime he had been putting in let him put a down payment on the boat months ago and have it paid off before the ad for his Yaris was even placed in the local paper.

Nobody in her family wanted to leave, but they couldn't afford to stay without his income, and they were all smart enough to know he was right about the waterlogged writing on the wall.

The 'boat' consisted of one main floating slab, a little bigger than a flatbed tractor-trailer, with a steel shipping sea-box as the living space. Two outriggers prevented it from flipping in bad weather while providing a wide and stable platform for the sail.

Inside the box were the simplest accommodations, one bathroom, a tiny kitchen, and several crudely cut windows. Above the box was a small closet-sized room that contained all the riggings for steering and controlling the parasail and rudder. It was the simplest of simple, but that didn't mean it was easy. It was all manually controlled, bicycle pedals and gears made wrestling the mammoth sail and large rudder difficult, but possible. It featured an electric assist, but the three car batteries were drained within the first four days, and the propeller-style charger off the stern could only keep up demand when the boat was moving faster than twenty knots, which it rarely did.

Fortunately, Nathan knew a lot about parasailing, their main method of motion; he just wasn't used to this scale.

Their first week at sea, Jason couldn't stop smiling. He was on his own mini wandering-island. But that excitement quickly wore off.

Gina cranked on the fishing line as she wrestled a young shark to the stern where Ava readied the sword-like harpoon. The youngest sister hesitated as it twisted and tried to keep up with the speeding boat, but she plunged the blade into its back like a seasoned pro. Pulled onboard, it flopped briefly before Gina lobbed off its head in a single swing. The head and guts would be kept for bait, but the rest would make a fine dinner. And just in time, too.

The boat was moving slower than expected, averaging less than ten knots an hour, and they needed to supplement their meager food supplies. Fortunately, ten gallons of kerosene would let them cook every day for a year, if needed, but they planned for only a month, two at the most, and most of their cooking needs were met by a solar oven. They had gone through all their canned meats and soups and were down to their stocks of dried rice, beans, peas, and a few bags of flour. Nobody would starve, but everyone was sick and tired of rice and beans.

Worst of all, they were down to their last carton of smokes. And unfortunately, everyone in this family smoked.

GPS put them on course, but far behind schedule. The winds just weren't cooperating, even those hundreds of feet up where the parasail could reach just weren't holding up their end of the bargain.

Jason ran down from working the sails, "Wow, he's a beaut, girls!"

Ava held it by the tail and fin as Gina gutted it on the stern.

Jason moved to the hand crank and started pumping seawater past the desalination filters, yet another one of the boat's features that had to be done manually whenever it was moving under twenty knots.

Gina glared at him while she sliced deeper into its flesh, liberating the large steaks first, easily another thirty pounds to offer. She had been promised an experience much different than all of this. The weather was hot and salty, the air was always humid, and the breeze from that ever-forward motion offered little to no relief. The only breaks from the misery were in the cool of the night and the relatively bug free nature of living at sea.

"Ok, ok, I get it," Jason said as he pedaled the pump, "I thought we would be there by now—"

She pointed the knife at him, "You promised, one month, two at the most."

Ava scooped the liberated guts into the bait bucket, "Nobody can control the weather, Gina. We all agreed to this."

"Stay out of this," Gina said, shifting her glare to her little sister.

"We've been without radio for months," Ava said. "We don't know what's—"

"Not at night," Gina corrected, "AM fades in and out, you get five minutes of clarity every half hour, and it doesn't sound like Hawaii sank into the ocean or anything. All I've heard is the same old normal talk shows about sports and politics."

Jason stopped pedaling, "I never said Hawaii was going to sink. The oceans were rising and submerging more of the coasts under water. Very different— Look, I'm not trying to argue with you, and I don't know how me complimenting you on a fine catch turned into—"

"I never signed on for this, Jason. We were miles inland, we had time. Years. And there's no way that any government, no matter how incompetent and misguided, would let another New Orleans happen to Hawaii. We could have been evacuated in full FEMA style."

"Yeah, but you wouldn't have gotten anything for all your submerged TVs and computers and stuff—"

"And just what are we supposed to get for this malfunctioning tub? Huh?" Gina stabbed the shark, then sliced off its fin. "You were had, ain't nobody interested in buying some piece of junk like this. I doubt you'll get a peso, let alone enough for a ticket anywhere."

Jason started pedaling again, "We still have some cash and credit cards, and don't forget the hundreds you got for your Honda—"

"I can't believe I quit my job and sold my car for this!" Gina stormed into the metal sea-box.

Ava finished slicing up the meat. "She's just mad, Jason. She doesn't take changes very well. Never has. This flipped her whole world upside down. It'll take a little more than a few months for her to adjust." She started on the little bite-sized slices in the tail. "Hell, I'm not even half as crazy, and I haven't halfway adjusted."

Jason pedaled faster. . . not that it helped.

The stern generator fell far short of enough power to filter water or assist in sailing, but it was plenty to run the small array of lights inside, run a CD player, power a laptop for a few hours, keep the GPS charged, and run the small radio.

Jason took over steering the ship that night.

The parasail was more complicated to manage than an ordinary sail with a mast, but it was far more efficient too. Especially for something of its size. Not only were the winds stronger up there, but placing the sail hundreds of feet in front of the ship offered a kind of leverage that masts couldn't touch.

A simple rope with tassels extended down from the sail and was his most trusted guide for wind speeds and directions. This night, they were approaching twenty knots for the first time since they left Hawaii. It wouldn't last and he struggled to keep the sail in the gust manually, hoping that the batteries would fully charge by morning. He watched the gauge on the freshwater tank slowly fill on its own, no pedaling required.

It was peaceful at night, and the dim lights on the sail made it look like synchronized shooting— no, make that dancing stars. Mastering the figure eight pattern was difficult at first, but once he got the hang of it, it boosted efficiency by thirty percent and finally allowed them to get over twenty knots. It wasn't an eight, he thought, as he maneuvered it through the sky. It was more of a bowtie, or an elongated eight lying on its side. Changing elevations diminished efficiency, but patrolling the horizon let them chase the wind.

It was hypnotic in a way.

He tried to keep it as high in the sky as he could, without the guidelines reaching higher than forty-five degrees from the boat. Thirty-five degrees seemed ideal, if winds would comply.

He had crashed the sail into the ocean only once. It took them four hours to untangle the lines and reel it all back in. They had a tiny mast they used to lift it out of the water enough to get it aloft again, but it proved to be such a time-consuming pain that he vowed to never let it happen again. Figure eights at fifteen to twenty degrees was the fastest they had ever gotten the boat to go, but it was exactly at those low angles that he seemed so crash prone. Between thirty and forty degrees was a golden zone for him. It offered him several additional seconds to prevent any crashes.

When and how he turned the figure eights often worked better to steer the boat than using the rudder, but he still relied heavily on the rudder today. Nathan, on the other hand, could keep the sale at ten degrees off the water and go the entire day without touching the rudder. Jason was a bit envious of that boy's talent. Lost in thought, he was startled when the door opened.

"Look, I'm sorry I lost my temper," Gina said in the tiny room. She flipped on the radio and started playing with the dial. "Why is it so quiet up here?"

He slowed the figure eight and tried to park the sail up high where it was far less efficient, but easier to manage, especially while talking. "I don't know. I turned it off an hour or more ago. Kept fading in and out and, that gets a little distracting after a while."

She flipped it to AM and tuned in a late night broadcast from the west coast. "I thought you liked this guy?"

"I do, or, uh, I did. I think they were talking about ghosts and alien abductions tonight— not one of my favorites. I like listening to the crazy conspiracy theories and the weird NASA scientists."

She twisted the dial and brightened the lights on the sail as she peered out the window. "Seen any planes or other boats?"

"No, but I wasn't exactly trying to." He dimmed them back down and lowered the lights in the room. "Caught a little snippet about pirates on the high seas and didn't want to take a chance." He laughed, "I know, it's silly to take such things so seriously. It's a huge ocean and we're just a tiny dot. But, I figured we should dim the lights as much as possible. You know, just bright enough to prevent collisions, but not bright enough to attract attention."

She stuck her head out the window and enjoyed the strong, cool breeze flowing through her hair before pulling back inside. Checking the GPS, then noticing their gradually slowing speed, she turned the radio down. "Don't let me distract you." She checked the battery status, then the nearly full fresh water tank. "Jason, I uh, the past is the past. What's done is done." She sat beside him in the cramped little room, barely big enough for two. "I hope you didn't take the last few days personally. It wasn't, you know. Personally," she smiled in her shy little way, "you're the only guy I would leave Hawaii for."
Chapter 15

The solar oven worked perfectly, as long as someone was available to keep it oriented toward the sun. If the boat traveled in a straight line, the oven only needed adjusting every hour or so, but in practice, it needed tending every fifteen minutes. Fortunately, it heated a few hundred pounds of common bricks to 500 or more degrees in as little as four hours of quality sunlight. Those bricks retained enough heat in that highly insulated box to cook breakfast, lunch, and dinner for two days, so long as they didn't need to broil anything. Rice and beans only needed boiling, fish was best fried or lightly baked, then just kept warm by the bricks.

After adjusting their recipes, the troublesome oven started to suit their needs just fine.

Ava and her mother settled into shifts aiming the oven, while the older children and Jason took turns wrestling the sail and fishing. Radio reception during the day was nonexistent, but they had a large library of CDs and freshly charged batteries.

Melatonin came in handy with keeping everyone on their shifts. Nathan, Ava, and Makayla largely keep off the pills and on days, while Gina and Jason chemically adjusted into nights. For the first time since he had met her, they were on the same shift.

Jason worked the controls as the sail figure eighted across the night sky. "It should have taken just a week or two, Gina. It's only about two thousand miles; even at just ten knots, that's two weeks at the most. We're two months into this and, by GPS, we're only about halfway there. But by the knots on the little speedometer, we're averaging fifteen knots. To keep with the winds, we have to zigzag some, but that couldn't—"

Gina punched him in the arm. "Could we have been fighting some sort of cross current flowing down from Alaska, running toward Mexico? I mean, that would explain why we keep drifting south."

Jason shrugged. "I really don't know. Maybe the GPS thing is broken. I mean, it's for roads and such, got it secondhand for fifty dollars. This isn't exactly what it was built for. But, it seems to be working right.

Fortunately, we packed all the canned and dried food from the cupboards. No resale value. And, we stocked up, just in case. Packed some kerosene because it had a kerosene stove. I figure another month or two, but I don't know. The compass is reading right. It agrees with the GPS, it's just our GPS speed doesn't seem to match our," he plucks the instrument in the console "speedometer thingy. Currents are the only thing that make sense of that. Like a giant ocean-sized riptide. This thing is shaped like a barge, so, it should be very prone to the whims of currents. It isn't aerodynamic at all. Or, uh, water dynamic, I guess. Kind of a big square slab instead of a sleek, arrowed hull. It could be worse. We could be paying rent on this thing."

She laughed. It was junk, but they did own it. And as long as they could catch a shark or a decent-sized fish every now and again, they could last indefinitely out on the open sea. She kept the radio adjusted while he steered the ship.

The late night talk show of choice came on. This time, they caught it from the beginning with the all-important first hour where they recapped the news. The icecap was melting at an expedited rate. Panama had, in the blink of an eye, submerged, and the Atlantic and Pacific were draining into each other. The raw current, they figured, would cut Panama as deep as the Grand Canyon in less than six years. All this crosscurrent was adding to their navigation problems. Tapping such a rushing current could cut their trip down to days, but they had to steer clear or risk getting their remains shot into the Gulf of Mexico after being bashed across whatever boulders were left of Panama.

CO2 had been, belatedly, let off the hook by most of the world, now that carbon cap and trade had fulfilled its true purpose and destroyed most modern economies. The sun, and the sun alone, had pushed polar climates up by fifteen degrees through properties that were still poorly understood. It was difficult to hear the complete story with the AM station fading in and out, but it seemed like the latest theory had an increased flow of charged solar particles disrupting the Earth's magnetic shield around the poles. The net effect of which was to toast the poles while leaving the shielding over the middle latitudes unaffected, something nobody had predicted was even possible. Nobody knew the sun could destabilize the shielding over the poles so easily, nor keep it up indefinitely. The reverse effect, it seemed, could also cause an ice age within a decade, more or less at the sun's whim. Like an ozone hole on steroids.

The ugly heavy metal shipping container had been a kind of blessing. The metal shielded them from more of the sun's wild bursts of radiation than anything short of a cave could do. The civilian wandering islands were almost mobile caves themselves, and had repositioned near the equators where they continued to function unaffected by worldly events.

The newly commissioned, but still incomplete, twenty-five square mile Mobile Island was serving as a temporary airport hub in the Middle East, where all hell was breaking loose.

Jason looked at Gina as they listened in silence while the host grimly paused for a commercial. "Riots seemed to be happening everywhere, and we only have a flare gun. Mexico didn't look so inviting anymore. Perhaps we should try further north, if there was anything left of California."

Gina was equally grim, "Heading north is easier said than done. Finding the winds might not be possible. But from the news we just heard, it might be our only option."

Gina fiddled with the dial as it faded, catching a sister station that seemed to be transmitting the same show, just ten seconds behind.

". . . Now, we shift to our NASA spokesman on the phone," the host said, "I guess, I'll just turn it over to you now, Pete, what have we learned?"

"Thank you, George, it's an honor to be on your show again tonight. I just wish we had something better to discuss," Pete said. "As you know, we have a large array of satellites now focused on the sun. The changes in the solar jet stream have increased solar flares to record levels. In the last few months, we've learned more about the structure and science behind flares than all of science had learned in the four hundred years that came before it. X class eruptions are far more common than. . . "

The signal faded while Gina tried to tune back to the previous frequency.

". . . That's right, George," Pete continued, "until the 1990's, we had thought that solar flares as big as the X class were rare. Now we know better. Thanks to observations from instruments like the Hubbell, we now know that it is rather uncommon for stars like our sun to have as stable and consistent an output as we've enjoyed in the past. Most stars, of the same class as ours, vary their output by as much as twenty percent from time to time. See, most stars are classified by how bright they appear and by their spectrum. However, when a star like ours starts to go through an intense flaring period, like ours appears to be, its spectrum, when seen from a distance, shifts. It's brightness shifts, and to observers from outside our solar system, it appears to be a different class of star.

Since we've only been able to study the spectrums of other stars for the last century, we never observed a known star to shift like this. And when we did, we attributed the difference to human error, improved equipment, or closer orbits and such. We completely dismissed the idea of solar storms this big and this powerful as being common occurrences."

"So, what can we expect now?" George calmly asked.

"Well, the short answer is, we don't know. Nobody does. Everything is just guesswork. But our best guess is that these storms can last years, or more likely decades and centuries. We now believe that the Little Ice Age was triggered by the sun dimming, the reverse effect if you will, for a period of only five decades. But the repercussions from those five decades gave us four hundred years of an ice age. Supercomputers, satellites, and a lot of intellectual capital are guessing that it will take less than a decade to melt every pound of natural ice everywhere on the planet. From there, even if the sun returns to a period of calm, it will take hundreds, if not thousands of years to rebuild the polar ice caps, regardless of how you factor in the impact of CO2 and greenhouse gasses."

"Has NASA recanted on the importance of greenhouse gasses, officially?" George pressed his guest.

"Officially, no. But you have to understand, our budget, our entire budget comes from the politicians in government. We, officially, always support the political 'science', especially when it has total control over our budget. But all research that receives money from outside parties always finds a way to prove the 'science' those backers endorse—"

"So," George said, "officially, NASA sees the flares, sees the effects on the magnetic shield around the poles, is measuring the melting happening before their very eyes, and still says CO2 caused it all."

"Officially, yes. Look, back in the days of the Dark Age, the official scientific consensus was that stars . . ."

Gina quickly dialed in the sister station.

". . . days of the Dark Age, the official scientific consensus was that stars couldn't change their brightness, ever. Well, a supernova occurred and one star, for a week, was bright enough to be seen during the day, and bright enough at night to read by. It was recorded by every society around the world, except one. Europe refused to believe their own eyes—"

"It's remarkable that you would pick that example," George said what Jason and Gina were thinking.

"Well, it isn't by accident. The scientists of that day got ALL their funding from the church, or from the king by way of suggestions by the church. And the church believed that stars stayed constant forever. Today's political church sees things the same way, and is paying the bills. Officially, the government never makes any mistakes and CO2 is thus the only legitimate cause, ignore your lying eyes is our policy."

George sighed over the radio, his depression conveyed well across the long and awkward pause. "Well, uh. . . hmmm. . . coastal cities are being evacuated. FEMA is so overwhelmed that they are subcontracting all their distribution logistics to Wal-Mart. Lobbying for funding seems like semantics when we're talking total government collapse, but, I only have you for another twenty minutes, and arguing the politics seems like a waste of that. What are we looking at in the short term?"

"Well, our jet stream here on Earth has shifted too. Mild weather is everyone's best guess. An elongated spring, a few weeks of summer, and a long fall, with almost no winter. In the past we had the year without a summer, I suspect we'll have several years without a winter. The good news is, that will probably mean extra growing seasons. At the very least, it means that Canada and Siberia will continue to provide the world with an abundance of food. . . "

They lost the signal again, but this time they lost the sister station as well.

Jason worked the figure eight as they sat in silence.

Gina eventually stood and turned on her flashlight. "I'm going to check what's left in the hotbox of the oven. You hungry for anything?"

"Yeah, I smelled some fresh bread, maybe a fish sandwich? Remind me to try to bring all of this up with the rest of your family at breakfast, ok. We should vote before turning north."
Chapter 16

Turning north added two additional months to their trip. Progress was so slow that they often anchored during the mornings when the winds and the currents pushed against them the hardest south, only to start moving again when the wind turned north in the afternoons. Late evenings and into the nights was when they made most of the ground, according to GPS. At best, when not anchored, they managed to drift east instead of south.

By the time they ran out of dried split peas, the GPS started showing them one hundred miles west of Santa Barbara. More disturbing than the vegetable shortage was they had yet to meet any ships at sea. Where had all the boats gone?

Surely they should have stumbled across a few fishing boats by now.

The radio suggested that the closer to the coast they got, the stronger the southern current would get and the more drifting they should expect. The radio had been clear most nights and they had picked up lots of information. But the mystery of where all the fishing boats had gone was baffling. Jason suspected that small craft may have been grounded because of the treacherous coastal currents, which was scary enough to contemplate, but another thought lingered in his mind. They could be confiscating small crafts for rescue purposes.

A sailboat wouldn't work for rescues, so confiscation of their boat wasn't a big risk, but they might not be able to sell it either, for the same practical reason. And since most of their money was tied up in it, that was a huge concern.

His watch said it was 2:17 AM Thursday when a light appeared in the distance.

Gina grabbed the binoculars and stuck her head out the window. "I can't tell what it is, but I see flashes of blue and red," she said, bringing her head back in from the wind.

"Well, we'll know soon enough, I suspect. I reckon we ought to turn up the lights on the sail, huh?"

She twisted the dial to its brightest setting as Jason continued the figure eights. He checked the charge on the batteries. The extra lights had maxed-out the stern generator, and the batteries had stopped charging. But the lights were attracting attention, for good or bad. With the lights on the sail, hundreds of feet in the air, they could easily be seen for miles, well over the horizon. The figure eights probably made it look like a circling prop-plane in distress.

At ten knots, they couldn't outrun a canoe. They just kept course and waited as the mysterious light in the distance slowly grew bigger.

"This is The United States Coastguard. Bring your vessel to a halt now and prepare to be boarded," boomed from the loudspeaker as four searchlights roamed across their boat.

Jason dropped anchor and used the charge on the batteries to reel in the massive parasail while the rest of the family assembled near the stern.

In a matter of minutes, armed guardsmen were walking every inch of the decks.

"Stop what you're doing," the man shouted to Jason as he stormed the tiny control room, weapon drawn.

"I would be happy to," Jason said, but didn't release the controls, "but if I do, the sail might crash into your ship, or mine."

"Stop what you're doing, now!"

Jason let go of the controls, and within seconds the sail slammed into the water between the two ships.

The crash sounded like a bomb going off and the wave rocked both ships, but fortunately, none of the armed guardsmen overreacted.

Jason held his hands up, then gestured to the controls, "If I don't finish bringing in the sail, even now that it's crashed, it'll fill with surface currents and we'll start to drift south, fast. Anchor or no anchor."

The guardsman radioed it in, then agreed to let Jason back behind the controls, heavily supervised.

For several intense minutes, every inch of the boat was searched and inspected. IDs were confiscated and checked over the radio. All members of the family were separated from each other and questioned individually.

"So," Jason said when the family was finally reunited on the stern of the ship, "what uh, or, where can we bring this thing into port? I mean, you can see we came all the way from Hawaii, we've been months at sea. Where can we put ashore and get some dirt under our feet?"

The guardsmen looked at each other, "Even if you could battle the currents near shore, which you can't, and even if you could keep from getting ripped apart on all the debris and submerged structures, which you can't, the coasts have been completely evacuated for about a hundred miles inland. We've had six tsunamis in the last month, that's over one a week—"

"Then," Jason asked, "just where can we go?"

"Not here."

"We're US citizens," Makayla said, hands on her hips, "and you're telling us we can't enter the US?"

"That's about the situation, Ma'am," the guardsman said.

"Now, just wait," Jason said, watching the mother boiling to a good steam, "surely there is some assistance you can render. Coordinates to where we can put in, somewhere to get more food and fuel for our stove. How about going up to Alaska or Canada? Can we put in there?"

"We can't prevent you from putting in at Canada, but their coasts have been evacuated too. Even if you survive getting to shore, there will be nobody for miles."

"What about returning to Hawaii?" Ava asked.

"There isn't much there to return to," the guardsman said.

"Look," Gina said, "you've given us a long list of can'ts, how about a few cans."

"They're radioing in on that right now. It takes time. Usually about an hour."

"Well," Makayla said, wagging her finger at the armed men, "you've been here at least that long already!"

Jason jumped in again, "If I get the maps, can you show us where the new currents are, maybe some indication on how the trade winds have shifted and such, some hazards to look out for? We've heard some things about Panama, but can't get any information about how it affected the currents down south."

The guardsman silently nodded, "Keep at least three hundred knots from Panama, you'll never survive it."

The other guardsman spoke up, "And that's if it doesn't get any worse, and that's the one direction that everything seems to be flowing."

"What about looting and riots?" Nathan asked, "Is that why you boarded so fast with guns drawn and everything? Are the riots that bad?"

"Some. Looters are about all you'll find on the coasts."

"Should we be worried about pirates—" Jason started.

"No, I wouldn't—"

"Alaska out of the question?" Jason asked again.

"For your boat, it is," one guardsman put it bluntly.

It seemed like they had survived a biblical flood, and were still somehow screwed. It didn't hardly seem fair.

After three hours of waiting, the family was given a choice by the coastguard. Because they were verified as citizens, they could officially put in a mayday and be rescued. The coastguard would deliver them a hundred miles inland by helicopter, and release them with nothing but the clothes on their backs. The guard would also be required to sink their crude little boat with all of their possessions.

The second choice was that the coastguard would release them with an official warning to venture no closer than one hundred knots from the coast of the US. Any closer would be a violation punishable by fines, confiscations, and possible imprisonment.

It was not an easy decision, and the coastguard was in no mood to wait long for their answer.
Chapter 17

Jason studied the modified maps that made California look like a chain of small islands, then checked the GPS again before turning it off. Going without vegetables wasn't pleasant, but it was doable.

He looked out the back of the tiny control room at all of the seaweed drying in the sun on top of the sea container's roof. That was their vegetables now. Kelp.

The rice, peas, and beans were all but gone. They had kept a small handful of each, those that looked most promising as healthy seeds, in the event that they should ever get enough kelp to decompose and make a soil for the seeds to grow in. They had the space, if they could manage the dirt.

They had put down anchor where the ocean was shallow enough, radio reception was clear, the climate seemed moderate enough, the fish abundant enough, and the current seemed strong enough to keep the batteries charged. The massive sail was stowed away for when they could eventually decide on where to go.

They were in limbo. Canada was where everyone was leaning, but according to the radio, Canada was now experiencing intense UV rays and a world of other problems with the collapse of the magnetic shield. If they got ashore in Canada, they probably still couldn't get anything for their boat and would have to cover hundreds or thousands of miles, most likely on foot.

Nobody in Gina's family spoke French, anyway.

South didn't seem inviting either. Should the poles melt completely, which could take six years, the currents near the shore would calm and they could safely put ashore anywhere. But without the thousand-horse motors of a coastguard cutter, they didn't stand much of a chance. Sailing around South America toward the East Coast wouldn't gain them anything either, the same rules applied there too.

They could call in a mayday at any time, or wait it out and see if things improved.

The mood was to wait.

But it was a small ship to do that much waiting.

Gina climbed up the side of the metal sea container with an armful of fresh kelp.

Jason left the tiny control room and offered to help. The kelp already up there crumbled easily into confetti-sized chunks when sufficiently dry and kept for weeks in airtight trash bags. Kelp was like fish in a way; it only came by when the currents were just right and had to be caught all at once, if possible.

Some kelp tasted better than others, but they were all strong and tended to overpower the fish they ate them with. None were as bland as lettuce, but it counted as a vegetable. Sort of. It was better than eating just fish.

He opened a fresh trash bag, leftover from the move, and started filling it with those that passed the crumble test.

Sitting stationary, they also seemed to catch a lot of debris, too. In their first month parked here, they captured a small canoe, half of a commercial fishing net, two dozen pool toys ranging from floating lounge chairs to water wings, and hundreds of plastic bags, coolers, and volleyballs. Last week, they got deluged with wooden desks and 2x4s, and even this morning they snagged hundreds of feet of nylon rope as it floated by, but their best catch of the day was three lobster traps. They were badly mangled, but Nathan, the most irritable of the bunch, had taken it on as a project to fix at least one of them by the end of the day. That was three days ago, but it kept him busy and out of everyone's way.

Jason helped Gina hurriedly spread out the fresh kelp before the sun got too high in the morning. Canada wasn't the only place with increased UVs.

Bunkered inside the steel can, they were safe from the rays, but not boredom.

Nathan tossed the twisted cage into the corner, then spiked the pliers in after it, "Stupid piece of SHIT!" He leapt in the air and stomped it.

"Whoa!" Jason said, pulling Nathan away from the twisted wires, "what if you cut open your foot on that? You're a long way from getting a Tetanus shot! Let's just calm down."

"I'm so damned tired of this shit!" Nathan screamed at the metal walls.

Makayla came in from the back with an armful of board games, Monopoly on top. "Why not turn the radio on for a while and—"

"I'm sick and tired of listening to that depressing crap!" Nathan said, smacking the boxes out of his mother's hands, "It's always so-and-so evacuating, so-and-so flooded, or so-and-so burning!" He flung the hammer off the desk and into the trap. The entire mess recoiled off the metal walls and nearly hit his mom in the shins.

Makayla smacked him, apologized immediately, hugged him, then sent him to his room, such as it was in the metal box. "Maybe we should just issue that mayday. This isn't what anyone bargained for."

Gina picked up the twisted wire and set it on the desk, "Nobody on the planet is getting what they bargained for. Can anyone say it would be better elsewhere?" She worked the hammer out, then carefully extracted the pliers. The trap was badly damaged, but more in the way of knotted string than broken wood. Bent metal could be bent back again. It was time consuming, almost puzzle like, and as good a distraction as playing games while being a lot more constructive.

Jason pulled up a chair and started working on the other side. He turned on the radio, but kept the volume low. News about a riot over food interrupted the music. They had been at sea for half a year, and had run out of most things. For sure toilet paper was sourly missed, as was soap, toothpaste, shampoo, and laundry detergent, but they had yet to miss a single meal. Most of the time, they had a surplus of food. The two trash bags stuffed full of dried kelp would last several bitter flavored months, another bag was filled with shark jerky and would last nearly as long. They lacked variety, but not food.

Jason and Nathan spent the next few days salvaging their hoard of wood. Salvaging was key. Every nail and screw was a precious commodity, and they pried each one out with great care. With the leftover wood, they tried their hand at construction.

The pontoons were, naturally, slabs of floating rock, about the same length as the main piece under the metal sea box they lived in, only a mere three feet wide. Since weight wasn't that big of an issue with so much surplus buoyancy, these slabs were connected with huge, recycled steel beams. But those three-foot wide pontoons could easily be expanded with a wooden floor of sorts. With enough wood and nails, and they seemed to accumulate several new pieces a day, they should be able to extend the floor space dramatically. Each pontoon extended twelve feet off each side of the boat; filling that in would triple their seemingly shrinking floor space.

They started with the port side, and after only two weeks, they had most of it floored. When two tarps floated by, they quickly harnessed them into a makeshift roof over their new floor, and shifted to picnic tables and benches in lieu of the starboard flooring.

As Nathan and Jason hammered their last salvaged nails into the bench, Gina and Ava turned the corner with the fruits of their labor in hand. The girls struggled as they plopped the hobbled cage onto the newly constructed, slightly warped floor, then proceeded to dump four of mammoth lobsters onto the wood. The lobsters flopped and awkwardly struck at each other with their pinchers while fumbling under a waterless gravity.

Nathan dropped his hammer, "Wow! Are we going to boil them tonight?"

Gina carefully grabbed one from behind as it tried to crawl toward the edge, "Don't have a pot big enough. Going to try to bake them, just wanted you two to work up an appropriate appetite."

Ava brought over the cleaver and they lobbed off pieces, bagged them, then carried the shelled pieces to the perpetually preheated solar oven.

Roasted lobster was an amazing treat, but it only reminded them that they had no butter to go with it, only kelp.

The storm raged outside as the boat bucked against its anchor, the sounds of it dragging the bottom scratched up the chain. The waves crashed over the decks and slapped with a bang against the metal box. Water washed in under the closed door, but quickly drained out again.

The radio reported it as a category one storm, and if the coasts hadn't been evacuated and utterly destroyed, news of its location might have been updated every ten minutes. Instead, it only got a mention every hour.

They, however, were living in the midst of it, and pitching inside a metal box was nauseating after just a few minutes, the storm had raged for almost two days now. Every hint from the radio suggested that they were in store for another two days of storms.

Almost everyone was too sick to eat, or keep anything down if they did. The pale, artificial fluorescent lights didn't help with the queasiness, now that all the natural light was blocked by the storm shades.

". . . George," the guest said as they tuned in the late night show, "now we know why all the abductions were so important. The Reptilians and the Grays needed to catalog the human genome for the coming catastrophe."

"Now, where are the aliens keeping this genetic repository?" George asked with the same seriousness that he interviewed presidential candidates.

"We believe that one repository is near the ancient dome structures left on the moon, but there isn't a way to clearly verify that. Obviously, to store enough varied genetic material to repopulate humanity would take, depending on how it was stored, anywhere from something the size of a postage stamp to a vault the size of the average sperm bank. The Reptilians seem to know more about genetics than we do, and reportedly, they have a method for freeze-drying embryos that alleviates the need for subzero storage. If that's true, then they wouldn't need to keep them on a base near the poles of the Moon. The Grays, we believe, are a kind of experiment in human genetics, a worker clone or drone if you will.

You see, the Grays, even as advanced as they are, are soulless. However, they are better acclimated to our climate and temperatures. After lots of experimentation, the Reptilians ultimately found that humans interact with Grays with more passivity. The average Reptilian adult is over seven feet tall, about four hundred pounds, and resembles, if you can imagine, a cross between a crocodile and a human. Very frightening to people. Whereas a Gray is about five feet, has cartoonishy enlarged eyes to help it work at night and avoid detection, all of which also makes it look very childlike. Few people run from Grays because they don't instill fear, but curiosity. Childlike is a huge advantage with abductions and interactions, but the Reptilians are clearly in control. Being reptilian has some inherent hibernation advantages for space travel and offers a certain cellular ruggedness that mammals lack. It only makes sense that intelligent reptilians would dominate in space."

"Fascinating," George said "hold that thought, we'll be right back after the break."

Gina looked at Jason as they turned the radio down. The storm was still buffeting the ship, but they could tell it was weakening and would be over in the next few hours. "You listen to the strangest things," she said.

Makayla entered the room, "I remember the little Grays. They did seem childlike. The big, friendly, lost looking eyes were almost hypnotic, even in the dark. They seemed blacker than black, like a bottomless well without reflection or eyelids." She sat by the radio at the table, across from Jason. "I only saw the Reptilians once, but I think I was still under drugs at the time. They were big and scary, but handsome in a weird way. Like vampires I guess."

Gina looked horrified and tried to hide.

"You seen vampires, too?" Jason asked.

"Oh, don't be silly," Makayla said, "Vampires aren't real."
Chapter 18

The category one was their only real storm in the boat. It was scary and left no stomach unturned, but other than some minor damage, it did nothing to the boat. The tarp that had provided shade to the new deck had ripped into thirds and was half down, but easily repaired. Some nails had worked up, but were easily hammered down. The good news was they got lobsters again, and the heavily churned sea dislodged a fortune in kelp, not that they would ever run short, and a flood of new 2x4s.

Jason and Nathan paddled out in the canoe to grab the passing debris.

"Faster!" Nathan said.

"I see it," he paddled faster anyway.

The nose of the canoe clanked as it impacted the floating block, but Nathan vaulted over it to land on their prize. He roped the twisted metal frame as it pushed the canoe over and Jason fell into the water.

Jason swam his fastest toward the canoe, but the current wouldn't let him catch it. The current was strong this morning, but fortunately they, and the canoe, were all tied to the boat by over a thousand feet of nylon rope.

Jason floated in the preserver as they arced behind the boat and the rope grew taut. The current eventually made everything accumulate at Nathan's end, where he climbed onto the salvaged blocks and the two of them proceeded to pull themselves back to the boat, four feet at a time. It took two exhausting hours.

The blocks were a part of a destroyed tidal array, no doubt one of the smaller ones. The pistons and most of the mounting hardware were complete enough to be integrated into their boat's system. Gina's night-class education came in handy when she managed to compensate for the massive voltage differences between the two designs.

Even an array of six 'small' blocks nearly doubled the amount of power they had available. And by the end of the third day, all the batteries had reached a full charge.

Fully charged batteries meant they didn't have to wrestle the steering when flying the sail anymore. It meant a level of freedom that wasn't an option, before. It was grounds for rejoicing.

Gina sat at the table as the two watched the sun fall across the horizon, the light breeze slapping the tears in the tarp. It sounded like a flag on a pole, but just briefly.

"Nathan sure has calmed down, recently," Jason said as he held her hand.

"He's my brother, but, he can be a bit much to take, 24/7."

"Anybody can. I think something like half the submarine recruits scrub out because they go nuts when confined for long periods of time."

She looked him in the face, then laughed. "You're making that up—"

"Well, google me if you want, then. But it sounds right, doesn't it? One of us was sure to flip out. Eventually." He lowered his voice, "I'm just glad it wasn't your mom."

"I sure wish we could google something. I'd like to know how to make soap. We have all that bitter tasting algae, and, if I remember right, most algae has some degree of oils in it. I think you just mix that with ash or something. I mean, just taking a swim to get clean is. . . well, getting old entirely too fast."

He hadn't thought about that. "I remember something on that late night show about using algae for bio fuel, so that sounds right to me. Should be some kind of oils in it. It's worth a try. We've got plenty of the stuff, and plenty of time to experiment with."

"Those golf-cart batteries aren't going to last more than a few years either. I think the maximum life is five years, and that's if they were new to begin with."

"You think we should disconnect some of them—"

"No, their life is pretty much the same whether we use them or they sit on the shelf. We just have to come up with something, a decision on what to do here, and the clock is ticking."

"I checked the GPS last night. We drifted south about five miles in the storm. We're probably going to keep drifting south until. . . " something just occurred to him. "Hey, I wonder what winter will be like in Alaska?"

"Cold, I suspect."

"If it's cold enough, maybe not cold enough to snow, but just cold enough to slow the melting, that might just be enough to slow this riptide thing so we can put ashore. Maybe even in one piece!" He leaned across the table and kissed her. "I don't know why I didn't think of it before."

She smiled, "Makes sense. Alaska goes for months without seeing the sun. No matter what the solar winds are doing, if they're in the shade, snow should stop melting. It's worth giving a try, I think."

They had a plan. Not a very good one, but they had one. That was a vast improvement over sitting and waiting. Ok, technically they were still sitting and waiting and acquiring junk as it floated by. And they had some projects to work on. Algae soap for one.

Crushing then boiling fresh algae, the bitter variety, was time consuming. But it did leach out a thin layer of oil that, when mixed with ashes from scraps of 2x4s, eventually hardened into chunks of soap. Not bad for a first attempt. The smell was a long way from 'winter fresh', but that wasn't the point. It cleaned.

Nor was the reality that the reverse osmosis filters would eventually clog. Freshwater showers with soap felt like a moral victory. Laundered, clean clothes that had been washed with soap instead of simply left out in the rain felt like the difference between cavemen and civilization.

Sitting stationary for weeks and months at a time wasn't entirely useless either. Charting the ship's speedometer gave them some indications that the melting up north was beginning to slow, along the margins. Two knots an hour was barely a drop, but it was measurable and they weren't even a week into fall.

Ava seemed the hardest to gauge. Nathan had his tantrum early, then, once he had something to keep him busy (that wasn't too frustrating), he was fine. But Ava kept to herself, perhaps a little too much.

She stuck to Gina a lot, which seemed perfectly natural for a younger sister to do. But, he worried. He worried about the quiet ones.
Chapter 19

Moonlight under a clear winter sky was spectacular. The northern lights that nearly extended to the equator only added to the magic of the moment. He leaned back in the lawn chair set up on the roof of the metal box. Winter should have been unbearable, but 'global warming' had its advantages too. The bitter cold nights reached down to a frigid sixty-one degrees. Hardly worth dressing up for.

The radio played in the control room just loud enough to be heard over the gentle waves and the swishing of hydraulic fluid in the tidal generator.

They were in the long pause of commercials, but didn't seem to mind. Gina looked at him, smiled, then returned her gaze up at the glowing green sky. "The end of the world comes with one hell of a light show."

"Not the end," Jason said while the ad for personal windmills ran. '. . . with a crippled grid and failing infrastructure, waiting on the government to restore power is like waiting for the moon to make more cheese. Get your own personal windmill, powerful enough to run most common 120-volt appliances. Have it assembled on your site within 60 days of ordering. We accept most trades.'

"Have you noticed they keep leaving the price of things out of the ads?"

"Yeah. That doesn't bode well for the grand I had left in cash when I closed out my accounts. Maybe it isn't worth anything anymore. Trade. Sounds like we should keep fishing for junk to me."

She reached over from her lounge chair and held his hand. "Isn't it ironing that we keep catching fishing nets in the fishing net, and caught two dozen fishing poles last week, but no fish?"

He did find it ironic, but not alarming. "The fish seem to be able to avoid the net, for some reason. Like the currents aren't right to keep them entangled anymore. Maybe we're not using it right, who knows. But it isn't like we've been going without food. You and Ava still catch one or two a day on a pole. You checked the back recently? We've got enough kelp to last a few years, and enough dried fish to last at least as long."

"I'm getting a little excited about making a run for land. Current dropped another five knots in the last week. I just hope that we have some favorable winds."

"It's been months since we even tried to open the parasail. You know, with the strong tide, we could always drift fast enough to inflate it and get it high enough to get traction. If it stays calm, like it is now, we may never get it off the ground."

She sat up, adjusted the towel she was using as a comforter, then leaned back again. "It's a long way to try to row. You know, the little generator on the stern is just a modified trolling motor. We could modify it back and just use the tidal to recharge the batteries. It may be good for five or ten knots a day, as long as it doesn't have to fight the current. I haven't checked, but sailboats this size usually have a few trolling motors for positioning in and out of docks."

She was surprisingly smart. He had forgotten all about them. They were tiny thrusting, electric motors, designed for maneuvering in close, where the sail was for the open sea. "I forgot all about that. I must be getting dumber the longer you know me."

"Batteries won't last long with them. This is way more boat than they were designed for, but, if we can't get the sail up, then we're still not out of luck."

The theme music for the show started again, and they listened to more stories of the strange. Several psychics were scheduled, and two witches were earmarked for the last hour to close out the show.

By February, winter in the metal box had completely lost its charm. Daytime temperatures hovered around the fifties, and the metal box was unheated. Living in Hawaii had left them without any winter clothes, even heavy blankets or a simple quilt were nonexistent. The best they had were layers of clothes, bed sheets, and some emergency thermal blankets. The emergency blankets looked like the same Mylar that helium balloons used, and were reflective like aluminum, but as noisy as a cat playing with a plastic bag. Everyone was miserable and nobody was getting much sleep.

Jason checked the equipment and noted the wind speed before sneezing into his hand, then wiping his hand on his jeans. It was the strongest gusts they had had in months. He pulled up the anchor and allowed the boat to drift in the current while he struggled to manually ready the sail.

The fabric whipped as it slapped the sides of the rigging, a cross breeze slammed it like a glove across the cabin as the tips dipped into the ocean before the craft righted itself. The sail filled like a magician pulling an elephant out of a hat, then leapt like a lion a hundred feet up, spun, then nose-dived for the ocean. Jason flipped the electric power assist back on and managed to avert disaster by steering it back into the sky. The first few minutes were always the worst, and twilight didn't make it any easier.

He let the spools reel out as the parasail soared two, three, then four hundred feet into the air, before he started locking them in. He turned off the power assist, then turned the lights on dim again as he practiced his figure eights.

Nathan stuck his head into the tiny room, "We good?"

"Yeah, it's up, the tension on the lines reads good," Jason said, struggling with the manual controls. He was badly out of shape.

"Want me to finish bringing up the anchor?"

"Yeah, but, the—" he fought off another near crash, "the steering seems sluggish. Like it's dragging something other than just the anchor."

Nathan paused. "That tidal crap is still in the water. That stuff probably isn't helping any. Like some kid dangling an oar in the water while you're trying to row."

"Yeah, that feels about right. Any chance you can pull it out of the water without destroying it? "

He laughed, "Not a chance." Nathan leaned against the door, "It's bolted and tied ten ways to Sunday."

"Guess I'm just going to have to adapt, huh."

Nathan slapped him on the shoulder, then left to wrestle the anchor the rest of the way up.

After a few minutes, Gina stuck her head into the tiny room. "Where you headed now?"

"I didn't really have a plan. The winds came up, so I took a chance. It paid off, and I just didn't think it any further than that."

She checked the compass, the GPS, then the open map. "North, and drift a little west. If we can make it about sixty knots, there's what should be. . . Well, there used to be some swanky mansions built up into the hills. And a little cove, see there? That should give you more protection from the currents, and we might even be able to put it in somewhere around there.

Can't aim for an old port, they're all built up with industrial centers, toxic waste, and flooded buildings and such. We have to aim for the snooty Richie Riches that liked seclusion and large swaths of land all to themselves." She tapped an area shaded in green. "The kind that push to have the land around them declared national parks so the government pays to keep everyone else out."

The GPS was iffy this far from land. "We should go past it to the north, then drift back into it, right?"

"Worth a try. Just, uh, keep the lights down low so we don't attract the coastguard again." Gina said, finding a spot inside the cabin to get comfortable.

"I think they have radar and stuff."

"Well, leave the lights down low anyway. Just enough to keep from crashing it."

He flipped the lights off, completely. "The angles on the guidelines give me a good enough warning to keep it out of the water. I, uh, had way too much time to practice one night. You really get a good feel for it, after a while." The boat felt like a car with two flat tires on the passenger side. It required more over-steering than he would have preferred, but just like riding on rims, it was manageable. "The crosscurrent reads as low as ten knots. Still swift, but if we have good visibility and get the angles right, I should be able to park this thing somewhere."

Gina stayed in the cold little cabin. "Might not need to. We have a canoe now, and a very long rope."

It was cold in the tiny room, but somehow warmer with her in it. Besides, she was his relief if he needed a break. She might as well stay up there and be on hand. He never minded her company.

She fiddled with the radio. They were three hours away from their late night voice in the dark, but after the sun went down was when reception really picked up. On the same frequency, at about this time of day, was an angry host who talked politics, which made the station easy to find, but hard to stomach.

She found his angry, impatient voice, then turned the volume down as she checked the compass, then the GPS again. "More west, if you can."

"I'm trying, but it drifts east because of the—"

She put her arm around him, "I know." Then adjusted the dry towel like it was a throw blanket.

"You know, if we put ashore, we can't just go south to get warm again. We have to try to keep warm some other way."

"Well, according to the radio, they don't expect freezing weather in the lower forty-eight. It might not be pleasant, but it'll be—"

"The experts also said global warming was from CO2. Destroyed the economies of several countries fighting it. Knowing my luck, we'll put ashore just in time to have a George Washington winter where it gets cold enough to freeze over the Delaware."

"I don't know," she hugged him again. "You're luck doesn't seem all that bad to me. Got this boat. This, ugly, ugly, squared off pile or recycled junk for a car and some cash, right when the price was at their lowest because nobody wanted them. Talked us into leaving the islands just in time, whether we knew it then or not. We survived a category one without a problem." She kissed him on the cheek, "Not so bad, as far as bad luck goes."
Chapter 20

It took them three days to limp far enough north to find the cove she was talking about. Early in the morning, they headed in.

Visibility was good, and Gina was able to keep the 'high cliffs' in site through the binoculars as Jason sailed the boat in. Of course, the cliffs were now gentle hills on the waterfront, but they were easy to spot with the help of GPS. Fortunately, they encountered no resistance from the coastguard and were, after fighting a difficult, but manageable current, able to anchor the boat inside the protection of the cove. The currents inside the cove were minimal, as predicted, but just during low tide.

They had cautiously anchored in the middle of the cove, which put the shore beyond the reach of their longest ropes. The sail had been down for days, and inside the cove, the wind was so minimal that they knew they could never deploy it again.

The trolling motors could be used to get them closer to shore, but they risked getting the anchor caught on junk that would naturally accumulate after such a disaster.

The plan had been to canoe to shore while dragging their longest rope for safety. But their longest rope wasn't long enough. Which meant they had to study the patterns, chart the tides, and time any canoe trips precisely.

Low tide was looking like their best option. The currents pushed the boat toward shore as low tide swelled to high tide, and only tried to pull the boat back out to sea as high tide fell back down again. It also seemed calmest during the morning hours. So, combining the two after just a week of study, they prepared to embark on their first canoe excursion.

"No!" Ava screamed with a pout, "I don't want to wait on the boat! I want to go ashore too!"

"Well, someone has to stay on the boat—" Makayla said.

"Why?" Ava demanded as Nathan and Jason put the canoe in the water and prepared to get underway.

"I'm staying," Gina said, "because someone has to be on the boat that can work the trolling motors in case they need to be rescued."

"That explains why YOU can't go, not me!" Ava said, stomping her foot again. "That canoe is big enough for one more!"

"Only two oars," Makayla offered.

"So? It seats three, three should go!" Ava said, "It isn't like it suddenly gets harder to row with an extra person."

"Actually, it does—" Gina said.

"Don't you see what they're doing? The guys get to go but us women have to mind the house until they come back! What is this, the 1820s?"

"Let her come if she wants to so bad," Jason yelled after Nathan took his position in the nose of the canoe.

"I don't want her going," Nathan said, smacking the water with his oar.

Jason looked at the depressed boy, then said in a quiet voice, "She may be difficult now, but she's going to be impossible when we come back. Especially after stewing like that for a few hours. It isn't like she's going to add much weight, we've all been on a fish diet for months. I haven't been this skinny since middle school."

The three pulled onto shore after a lot of tiresome paddling, then carried the canoe uphill and tied it to a tree, just in case.

"The closest mansion is just over there," Jason said, "Maybe a five mile hike." He turned on the GPS, then checked his cell phone for a signal. "I wish we had an ATV or a golf cart."

Nathan rubbed his arms and stamped his feet, "I'd settle for some warm clothes."

They started to march.

The mansion, if it ever was, appeared abandoned and seemed to have suffered from the storm. Most windows were broken, roofing shingles and loose papers littered the overgrown yard. They made their way to the front door and simply knocked and shouted 'Hello' in the windows.

Nobody answered, naturally.

The door was dead bolted, so they entered through a window. Well, Nathan did and let the rest in through the door.

Water had damaged the floors by the windows and most of the nearby walls, but the furniture looked to be antiques and seemed to be holding up fine. As exciting as it was to wander through an abandoned house, even in this much disrepair, he still felt deeply out-of-place and kept looking over his shoulder for the police to cuff him and take him away. "They still shoot looters, don't they?" he said as he passed the ornate, golden mirror, then checked the phone for a dial tone.

Ava screamed from upstairs, and the two boys dropped everything to run to the rescue.

"What is it?" Jason yelled.

"What's wrong?" Nathan said, turning the other corner.

Jason entered the room first.

Ava almost collided with him, her hand over her chest on the way out, "I found. . . I found. . . " but she pushed past him and ran down the hall.

Four bodies were bound and stuffed next to the bathroom. All shot and obviously dead for months. "Uhgh!" Jason said, walking over to them, then walking out the door. Still feeling guilty and thinking of the police, "Did anyone touch anything?"

"Yeah, sure," Nathan said while Ava simply nodded.

"Me too. We could all be implicated in this. We, we can't stay here—"

"No shit!" Ava said.

"We should bury them," Nathan added.

"I don't know," Jason said, "maybe we should burn the house, get rid of the fingerprints and our DNA and CSI stuff."

Ava looked horrified, "That doesn't seem right to just leave them lie while the house burns down around them. They should be buried. I would want to be."

"I'm not touching them," Nathan said. "No way. I like the idea of burning it. Light a match and go, that's the way."

Ava was outvoted. "We should see what Momma and Gina think."

"We should still look for some clothing, blankets, canned food, towels and shampoo and stuff," Jason said. "I mean, this thing looks like a robbery or simple looting. Looks like they were looking for money. I mean, this place doesn't look ransacked, so, I think money or a safe or cars or something was all the killers wanted, not just a random burglary. Any-what-way, food and clothing should still be around. No burglar steals that crap."

After calming down, they continued to search and found another room with additional bodies, most likely the staff. But much less tragically and more importantly, they found plenty of warm blankets, clothes, and other useful, small items that they bagged and carried down to the canoe. A dirt bike and two lawnmowers were left in the garage.

The three stayed in the mansion that night, mostly without a choice because of the tide and bitter cold. It felt haunted and dripping with the evil that had occurred in it. None of them slept a wink.

At the next low tide the following morning, Jason and Nathan canoed back to the boat, leaving a very unhappy Ava at the shore since there wasn't enough room for all three and the cargo.

While the tide was low and the boys still had the energy, they made three more round trips, the last of which to retrieve the pouty girl.

They gathered around the picnic table under the tarp for lunch near high tide.

"Murders?" the mother repeated.

"Murders," Jason said, "and our fingerprints are all over that place. We left all the really nice stuff, some amazing dresses and furs that were—"

Gina was still hungry, but couldn't finish her plate, "We wouldn't look right in silks and furs anyway. Servants' clothes seems a better fit. Horrible that they're all dead, though."

Nathan looked at his mom, then back at his sisters, "I think. . . Jason and I think we should burn it, with the bodies still in it. Kind of a cremation, if nothing else to get rid of the fingerprints. They'll blame us if anyone investigates. Might even get shot for looting, if anything gets traced back to here."

"I don't like it at all," Makayla said, shaking her head, "it doesn't seem proper for folks to be burned down in their home after being murdered like that."

Gina pushed her plate away, "I don't see another, better alternative. We can't bury them without loading up the grave with all sorts of DNA. Don't know any names, got no coffins; it's just a huge shame, all the way around."

"They had two lawnmowers," Jason said, "thought they might be of some use. Pull the motors, grab some tools out of the garage. The tanks looked full, and they had a nice dirt bike that we could use next time we put ashore."

Gina looked upset again. "You thinking we should pull out of the cove?"

"Oh yeah," Jason said. "We need to put a lot of miles between us and this place. Spend as little time here as possible. Especially if we burn the building. We need to come up with some sort of delay device, preferably one that starts the fire a few days after we're gone. They have three large propane tanks around the back that seemed heavy and full. Gas range or oven looked like the easiest place to start something, maybe when you take a look something will—"

Gina stood up, "Oh, hell no! Ain't no way I'm walking around in that graveyard. I don't know how any of you even managed to spend the night in a haunted house like that."

Jason stood too. "Alright, alright! Nobody is saying you have to. I'll figure something—"

"Damn right you will," Gina said, "ain't none of my fingerprints anywhere near that place."

Jason gestured as he sat back down, "No, but your brother and sister's are all over it. Mine too."

Gina refused to set foot in the mansion, but she did take a trip to shore to help salvage the two lawnmowers. The motors were very useful, as were the gas tanks, batteries, and gearboxes. The zero-radios mower even came with power steering and hydraulic motors, which may come in handy should any of that kind of equipment fail on the boat.

The gas water heater turned out to be the easiest to rig to explode. Jason and Nathan moved the propane tanks inside, then drained most of the water from the heater and added a gallon of gas and relit the pilot. The gasoline should vaporize after a few days, then escape through the over-pressure vent that had been redirected. It might even take it a week, Gina couldn't accurately guess.

They also left one of the tanks with a slow leak in the cramped little water closet.

Back on the boat, they pulled the anchor and drifted out with the tide, using the changed batteries to keep them from running ashore and the GPS from accidentally running aground on some submerged beach town.

Two new laptops and a ton of video games were a goldmine for Ava and Nathan, even knowing children's bodies were among the dead. The laptops could probably be traced back to the mansion, but it didn't seem likely, and they took the precaution of removing the ID numbers from the cases anyway. Neither had password protection, or even seemed to be registered.

The first good wind they caught, they deployed the sail and headed west and south for the winter, not daring to try the shore again so soon.

Besides, now they had a mansion's worth of provisions from when they raided the kitchen.
Chapter 21

"It's the first day of spring and World Bank has officially ceased their lending cooperation," George announced over the late night airwaves. "Is this the end of money as we have known it? I don't know for sure. I still collect a paycheck in good old American dollars, but I haven't dealt with a bank in years. Within the last few months, like a lot of the world, I have embraced barter. I receive a portion of my pay in food deliveries and oil rations. Rations. Who would have thought that rationing on par with what the world went through with WWII would ever return? Remember, only officially stamped rations with the holograms are to be accepted. This month is green."

Gina looked at Jason as the boat drifted in international waters off the coast of southern California. Rations. They had decked in the starboard side all the way to the pontoon, with the exception of the area around where the tidal generator was fastened. The deck was covered with little wooden rows of rich topsoil, about eight inches deep. Peas, beans, lettuce, and a few stalks of corn were already showing great promise in this tropical weather.

Ava had found the gardener's seeds at the mansion before it was torched, and they got away with as much soil as they could carry before the currents near the coasts kept them out for another year.

"Food" George said. "It looks like the psychic predictions of two years ago have come true. The world seems to be embracing a new currency, based on calories. More in a few minutes, after this." And the program went to commercial.

Jason pointed up to the northern sky, "Look at that."

The sky flickered like a gentle flame, or an old-fashioned lava lamp. The tips of the aura filaments turned fluorescent blue, in incredible contrast with the dark of the night sky. "It's beautiful, no doubt. But every day we spend out here feels like we're just pushing our luck. One good storm is all it would take to end this little boat. We have to put to ground again, somewhere. Eventually. It might as well be sooner while all the equipment is still working than later, after things start breaking down."

"Panama," George continued with the program, "is starting to open for traffic, almost one year since it was decimated. This just in, the coastguard has verified that, at specific times and while holding to tightly regimented courses, boats are able to traverse the gullies that now connect the Pacific and Atlantic oceans. This is very good news indeed, because since the closing of Panama to commercial traffic, the world's exports and imports had nearly collapsed. Hopefully, this is a good sign, though obviously not for the poor people of Panama who have lost most of their country to erosion. Experts predict that this increased trade between countries will lead to a much needed easing of tensions and, with luck, a backing down of the rhetoric of most governments.

Next is a most unfortunate piece of news. Two months after Iran halted all exports of oil from the country because of chronically late imports of food shipments, China, Iran's largest consumer of oil, has declared war and has, at last count, detonated three nuclear warheads in the heart of Iran. Details are still sketchy at this point as to which cities have been hit or the estimated death figures, but military experts predict land invasions are eminent. And if Iran's claims of their own nuclear program are correct, a counter attack seems very likely, indeed.

Such is the problem with bluffing. It only works as long as nobody ever calls you on it.

Canada, our neighbor to the north, is poised to have another record year for crops. The farm equipment shortages of last year have largely been met, and the Canadians have put in a request for experienced field labor. Unlike last year, they are planning to open their boarders, but please, be prepared to be turned away as their labor department predicts a need for only six hundred thousand temporary workers this year. Of course, we are all aware of the thirty-six percent unemployment rate here in the States. But let's not get too angry at our neighbors, ok, six hundred thousand is a big help indeed."

Gina turned the radio down, "Panama's open?"

"Canada is hiring, and there's a thirty-six percent unemployment rate," Jason said. "I don't know how to interpret that, but it doesn't look like they need waitresses or people to drill holes." Jason turned the radio back up.

The lawn chairs on the roof behind the control cabin were still their preferred place to relax at night. The AM radio signal was clear and, this close to the equator, tended to drift less. The temperature was pleasant, the bugs were few, and it seemed to only rain during the day.

It was incredibly peaceful and the northern lights, though rarely as bright as this night, still gave the horizon a pleasant little glow.

"I wish I had seen for sure if that tank eventually blew and that mansion burned down," Jason said after a few minutes.

"I'm sure it did. And if it didn't go because of the water heater, it should have with the gas leak. I wouldn't worry too much about it."

But he was worried, he found himself haunted by that mansion often. "Sure, your fingerprints aren't all over it."

"You wore gloves after you found the bodies, right? What's the problem? It isn't like you killed anyone, you just looted and destroyed evidence so the murderers can never be caught. Plus creating CO2 without a permit or paying the tax, and cremated without a license to cremate in California."

Jason sat up. "That's not funny, you know I've been trying to get my cremation license for the past four years. Damned bureaucrats!"

Gina laughed, then leaned over and kissed him on the lips.

"Why haven't we ever gotten much past this?" he asked.

Gina did her best impersonation of her mother. "I'm too young and too pretty to be a grandmother!" she said as she poked him in the chest with her finger. "And doing it on a boat a hundred miles from land isn't the best idea I can think of." She leaned back in the chair and stared at the sky. "We're a very fertile people, Jason. That gym coach got caught when he took me to get another abortion, and it raised a lot of red flags the way he was waiting in the parkinglot."

When George came back on and introduced his psychic, alien abduction guest, they listened quietly, and Jason didn't bring up the subject again.

They brought up the nightly news to the rest of the family that morning. Nobody took it well, but it wasn't unexpected. The parasail worked perfectly in the open sea, but it proved problematic in coves and navigating channels like Panama. But Panama was still tempting, because, as devastated as that tiny country was, it was still a center for trade. If they were to get top trade for the boat, it would be there. But Panama offered something else, too. It offered access to the Gulf of Mexico and what was the Mississippi River. It was massively flooded now and nearly split the country down the middle, but the businesses that were thriving were all located down those banks and inland to either side. There seemed to be an east America and a west America, with the middle flooded out.

The flow of the river, to their best guess, had to be greatly reduced. That meant that it may have been possible to sail up it. It was now wide enough, reportedly, to be possible as well. But it wasn't like with the cove, if they went, there was no going back. They would be committed.

They had some decisions to make as a family. But with all the news seeming to be bad, the general consensus was to wait and see until next year.

Besides, the mini garden seemed to be doing fine, and fish were biting everywhere.
Chapter 22

The radio warned about an El Nino fueled storm aiming their way, so they fastened down the tarp over the garden and boarded the windows, as usual. It wasn't a category one, yet, but it promised to be more than a drizzle.

Nathan and Ava played video games through most of it, before the tossing eventually made them seasick.

"Fresh peas, anyone?" Makayla said, handing out the day's pickings. It only amounted to a handful for each, but the freshness couldn't be denied. And raw vegetables were incredibly flavorful.

"I've had my eye on those tomatoes," Gina said, "but they all still have a green spot." She sprinkled her peas on her baked fish, then started to eat.

Jason ate them one at a time, like they were grapes, while Ava and Nathan shunned them and saved the vegetables for after dinner, if they had room left.

"I like the looks of those two heads of lettuce," Makayla continued, before sitting at their outside picnic table. "If we're lucky, they'll still be good by the time those tomatoes come in. The spinach is weak and wilty. A little disappointing. But I think if a few garbanzo beans come in too, we'll be able to have one hell of a nice salad. A real salad! Won't that be nice?"

Ava and Nathan picked at their plate while Gina and Jason just smiled, "Variety is always nice."

Makayla had taken over the garden and it really seemed to be doing her a world of good. This far out, they had to pollinate with toothpicks, so she knew each flower and every bud intimately. It was, or easily could be, a full time job.

"Who baked the fish today?" Jason asked.

"I did," Gina said, "why?"

"Oh, it's almost perfect. I don't know whether it's the kind of fish, the temperature of the little solar oven or what—"

"I steamed it for the first half, then baked it the rest of the way," Gina said, "I think it makes it, fluffier, I guess. I don't think steaming ever gets it crisp enough, and baking tends to make it too tough, so, I experimented in the middle."

"Well, good job." He kissed her on the lips, and she, instinctively, pulled back, as she had always done when in public. "Sorry, I didn't mean—"

She got embarrassed, blushed, then stared at her plate. "It's ok."

They stared up as the plane made a second, lower pass.

Jason went to the white roof of the metal box and arranged the clothes drying there to read "We R OK!"

The plane made a third pass, gained altitude, then headed back toward California.

"I guess we should expect to have some guests soon," Jason yelled down, "Ava, Nathan, hide the laptops real good or dump them overboard."

Neither of the kids wanted to hear that, but they had played all the games they had, anyway. They hid them in plastic bags under the garden in such a way that, if randomly looked for, they would fall overboard and sink to the ocean floor.

Within an hour, a guard speedboat pulled along side and they were boarded for a second time.

They were searched and grilled about the tidal equipment that had been integrated into their system. But, it was obvious that the pieces had been battered and nearly destroyed long before they acquired them, matching the story they told. They were neither asked about, nor mentioned, the mansion.

No assistance was offered, but neither were they given a warning.

After an hour, the guard sped away.

"Did you get the feel from them that staying out to sea another year was probably for the best?" Gina said.

"I got that vibe too. They said the ban on coming ashore was lifted, but that the currents were still treacherous during the summer, like we already figured out," Jason said as they waited on the roof for their night show to come on.

"The guy told me that nobody had returned to the coasts yet. Most of the over land highways to the coast remain flooded, leaving what had been the coast looking more like a string of islands, even worse than what your modified map had."

"Yeah," he said, "I got that too, just in other words. Said that the jet stream had shifted again and windmills that had been working for years have been down for months. Populations seem to be concentrating around nuclear reactors because, except for the ones that flooded, they're the only things still running 24/7/365. And you can refuel them with a few F-150s and they're good to go for another decade, coal and the rest require several miles of train cars worth of coal delivered every day." He got out of the lounge chair, "I think I remember seeing a list of the states with nuclear reactors—"

"I think every state had at least one, didn't they?"

He sat back down, "No, of course, you're right. Just makes me wonder if we might be near a flooded one, that's all. But I haven't seen any three-eyed fish recently."

"It almost doesn't matter. We go much further west and we'll be off the continental shelf and our anchor won't touch bottom."

Something broke the silence near the boat. Like a geyser at Yellowstone, it erupted and an explosion of water filled the air with a fine spray. Water drained with a wall of trickles about eighty feet away. It was huge, even in the moonlight, and it broke the surface enough to jostle the boat like a toy in a tub.

"Oh, my God," Gina said as they stared into the giant eye of a whale. "Look at how close it is."

"Damn, Gina, I almost wet myself."

They heard the water slap the underside of the makeshift wooden decks as the whale drifted closer, its massive head nearly as high out of the water as they were, sitting atop the box.

It gracefully slipped beneath the surface, without so much as a single ripple, its massive tail extending four stories high.

It could easily have flipped the boat, or cracked them like an egg with a single swat of such a massive wall of flesh. But it left them as it found them, just a little wetter.

They sailed north to Canadian waters when the weather got overheated by mid summer, which promised a season of unusually active storms that they saw no need to stick around for. Canadian fishermen seemed to stumble across them rather frequently, usually in smaller, privately owned pleasure boats repurposed for this new task. Fishing was a way to make a good living in Canada, and from their many encounters with the locals, it looked like most of the large ports and canneries and such were destroyed with the coasts. All that were left, for now, were small private boats that could be transported by highways and were, hence, many miles away when the coasts flooded. That limited the size of the boats that survived, but those that they encountered also had to be powerful enough to fight the currents around shore, drastically reducing their numbers yet again.

The Canadians seemed befuddled by the size of their sailboat home, and its Mad Max-like salvaged design. Some seemed to study it with a degree of envy. But they all came to realize, quickly enough, that it would never be useful for their chosen livelihood. It was a devil to steer, couldn't be docked, and would serve them no good to try to steal. It was a marvelous survivor and a rugged ship, but it would make a horrible commercial fishing boat.

They did, however, often get a chance to trade with these daring Canadians. When they wanted, they could catch far more fish than they could ever eat. Their net was plenty big enough to make a holding pen for their surplus when strung under the boat, pontoon to pontoon.

"Ahoy, Jason," the man on the speedboat said as he throttled down, "Got a catch in the hole for a trade, Aye?"

Jason waved the boat over, "Check with Ava, but I think we have a tuna waiting."

The boat pulled up close and tossed over a line. "I'll be!" he stared down into their net, "It is a tuna. What in the world is it doing around here?"

Ava looked over at the Canadian, "What you got to trade, Joey?"

He smiled. "For you, girl, I've got eight pounds of M&Ms, not even past their sell-by date yet."

Ava jumped up and down at the thought of candy, but she knew a tuna that big was worth a whole lot more. "And?"

Joey tossed over the bags of M&Ms, "More, Aye? I've got more for ya, pretty girl. How about something to wash it down with?" He tossed over a four-pound bag of powdered milk. "And something to keep you sharp behind the wheel, Aye?" he tossed over a two-pound can of coffee.

Ava helped him snag the tuna out of their hold, and gave him two other fish for the trouble. To the Canadian, it was a great deal; he did almost no work and already had hundreds of pounds of fish. Joey had easy access to candy and staples, so for him, it was like buying New York for a handful of nice beads.

But for Ava and the family, they had no car and no access to chocolate or milk of any kind, and even if they could get ashore, they wouldn't know where to go. But fish, all they had to do is wait for fish to find them. For the family, fish were free, staples were expensive.

It was a good deal for everyone.

The family never kept so many fish that it would be worth fighting over, and they never tried to barter the price up but so far. Canadians had banned guns for decades, but that didn't mean that they ended violence and murders.

Besides, for the family, a bag of M&Ms was worth a fortune, especially in Ava's eyes.

Joey stayed around a few minutes more, mostly out of a Canadian sense of friendliness, tossed Ava a bag of butterscotch hard candy he had been holding out, waved with his hat, then motored on home while the currents were still favorable.

Six fishermen in all knew about them. And they seemed to all know each other because they were either the luckiest men in the world, or they coordinated and traded off their visiting days. Typically, a different one would visit every five days, which matched the rate that they filled their hold. It seemed to be working great for everyone, and the Canadians had no incentive to tell anyone about their magic fishing hole, either.

In just a few months, it developed so that the fishermen would even fill requests for specific items like toothbrushes, clothing, shoes, lightbulbs, socks, and even delivered several boxes of desperately needed feminine hygiene products.
Chapter 23

As comfortable as they were getting around their new Canadian friends, the family headed south before winter again. They contemplated offering to trade their boat for passage into Canada, but as nice as the fishermen seemed, they were still Canadians, and the family was homesick for America.

They drifted with the slowing coastal currents as soon as the weather turned cold. When the GPS said they were near, he kept a careful eye toward the shore and, with great relief, saw the charred remains of a mansion on the hill.

Ava stared at her last, cherished bag of peanut butter M&Ms. Only the blues remained; she had eaten the other colors already. She was saving the blues for a special day, but instead started eating them on a rainy Wednesday.

It was sad, she knew she had no special days left ahead of her.

The light morning rain drizzled down the outside of the window as she stared out into the rippling sea that had been her horizon for years. She placed two on her tongue and let them melt against the roof of her mouth, like the rain dissolved into the sea. She contemplated eating the rest in a massive handful, all at once. Oh what a few heavenly minutes that would bring. . . but, she refrained. She closed the bag and stored it away, for another rainy day.

She turned on her laptop and added another entry in her diary about how there was nothing to write in her diary, then played a few card games.

Gina came in from the rain and hung her plastic coat by the door. "Caught another tuna, Mom," she said, plopping down in a chair by the door as she took off her soaked shoes and wrapped a towel around her wet hair. "This is so odd, it's like they're totally confused. Like they got lost or something. Maybe it has something to do with the gaping hole in Panama, I don't know. They're not supposed to be here, and we keep finding them."

Makayla poured her daughter a cup of coffee, then stirred in a pinch of powdered milk. "I like the taste of tuna steaks, so, maybe I just don't ever question it—"

"Oh, I'm not complaining. I stuffed him in the holding net with the others." She sipped from the mug, "Which makes four tunas in the last month. That's like, maybe a half-ton of tuna. Even if we did get around to killing and cleaning them, we haven't had enough sunny days recently to dry them. There's no way to— we just might have to let them go if the weather doesn't turn. I mean, we can't even put the sail up in this mess, and it just doesn't seem to want to stop. It doesn't even seem to want to rain, just drizzle all the time!"

The mom topped off her cup, then sipped silently.

Nathan came in from his room, "When are we going to put ashore again?" He plopped down in a chair and pounded the table. "This floating indefinitely shit totally sucks!"

"Not indefinitely—" Gina said.

Nathan pointed at his older sister, "It's not like you care, you took your boyfriend with you—"

"Now wait a minute!" Gina slammed down her mug, "He took us with him, and besides that, it's not like that anyway, Piss Head!"

Nathan stood, balled fist by his side. But he wasn't alone; his older sister was more than willing to take their argument to the next level.

Makayla separated the two, "Listen, both of you. I'm not happy about living in a tin can bobbing around in a rainy ocean. My garden has probably been destroyed by now, even covered like it is, but I'm not about to start swinging because of it." She pushed a pointed finger into Nathan's chest, "Say you beat up your sister, then what? Huh? Does that mean you get to go ashore today? Does it? Does it mean we get a house on land, get jobs, and life returns to normal? Not likely. We'll still be exactly where we are, right now." She turned to Gina, then pushed her back down in her seat.

"He's never won a fight with me in his life—" Gina started.

"And what do you get if you win?" her mom answered, pushing Nathan back into his chair. "Do you think he'll stop stewing about all this? You think those bruises will come with an insight on patience?"

Gina stirred her mug, glared at her brother, then sipped.

"I should make you two hug, but I won't." The mother pointed at each. "Unless this happens again."

Jason climbed down from the control cabin, looked at everyone, but said nothing.

Eventually, the rain broke to the mild, sunny weather that everyone expected, about on par for a winter in Hawaii, except they were off the shore of California. The tiny garden, though it suffered from being under the tarp for so long, was surprisingly resilient and continued to offer a taste of vegetables every few days.

Mint leaves thrived and made a Christmassy addition to coffee that kept everyone in the season, despite the absence of a tree or the possibility of any gifts.

Gina unzipped her Canadian sleeping bag on the floor of the control cabin as Jason smiled, then stepped in. She paused before turning down the lights, removed her clothes, then slipped in and zipped up the edge. It was chilly, but not cold.

Their late night radio show started as they got comfortable on the floor.

"Five years ago," George started his show, "this would have qualified as bad news. Today, I think we can all agree it rightly belongs in the win column. The government announced that unemployment has officially fallen to twenty-four percent. More importantly, and easily overlooked, the department of agriculture has announced that, for the first time since the disaster, we have produced enough food to feed our own country. For the first time, we didn't have to rely on imports from Canada. The department credits this to their mandated changes in crop varieties and a forced change in the public's diet away from corn, which has floundered poorly in the new climate.

In other, otherwise bad news, it seems that the war between Iran and China has burned itself out. Iran either never had nuclear weapons, or they had them and were incapable of deploying them. Either way, they never managed to mount any kind of retaliation or effective resistance and the Chinese Republican Army now has full control of Iran's southern oil fields and has resumed deliveries to China.

Skirmishes continue, but China isn't having the same problems we had in Iraq and Afghanistan. From the very beginning, they showed no compunction against killing everyone who approached their vehicles and positions. They showed no attempts to win hearts and minds, only to keep control of the fields.

Suicide bombers were, like all civilians, machine-gunned hundreds of feet away from instillations and convoys. Roadside bombs were answered with artillery targeting high population centers and religious holy sites.

Facing the realities of a truly brutal communist nuclear power, like China proved it could be in Tibet decades earlier, Iran is ironically calling on the US and its European allies to apply political pressure against China to end the occupation. A most interesting turn of events, indeed. I don't think any of our psychic guests could have predicted that Iran would ask for our help with the Chinese."

While George paused for a break, Gina straightened a few uncomfortable wrinkles in the bag, then settled in for the night. Naked was as far as she was going. . . this time.

"California," George continued after the break, "once the bread basket of the US, is starting to show signs of recovering, with agriculture leading the way. In other news. . . "
Chapter 24

While the southern currents were still manageable in early spring, the family set sail north, along the coast. They had voted and decided that if they could see promising activity along the coast, they would try to go ashore. If not, they would continue north to Canada again, and maybe pick up where they left off.

Their first week observing the coast was less than inspiring.

"Spotted something!" Nathan yelled, slapping his palm against the Plexiglas of the control cabin.

Jason turned to look where Nathan was pointing. "Don't see anything, I'll try to steer closer." He adjusted the sail and angled the boat for a closer look, while keeping a wary eye on the GPS to avoid any entanglements with submerged rubble. "This is about as close as we can safely get."

They dropped anchor in what the GPS predicted should be sand and winched in the sail.

Gina was the next to climb the box and look through the binoculars, "It's definitely people. I wonder what's going on over there? They still look like ants."

Nathan grabbed back the binoculars. "You think they saw us?"

Jason opened the door to the cabin and walked out on the top of the box. "It's hard to miss that sail. If they were looking this way, they saw us. We'll know if they come closer to the shore to investigate. All we can do now is sit back and wait."

Ava made her way up, followed by her mother.

"What do we have swimming with us in the net?" Jason asked, "It might help to grease the wheels if we had something to offer, so to speak, in the event they send a boat out here."

Ava thought about it. "Four big ones, I think one's a tuna, but I'm not sure. Got a ton of dried stuff, though. Same with the kelp that nobody likes." She squinted, then looked through the glasses when handed to her. "How big a boat do you reckon? Big as the Canadian speedboats?"

"Sure, they could handle it easily," Jason said, "But the current isn't that strong right now. Last readings I remember, just about any saltwater boat with something bigger than a lawnmower could get out here, safely."

Nathan perked up, "You think we could row over?"

"Oh, hell no," Jason clarified, "Two people with paddles is like, half a horse, a lawnmower is like ten or fifteen horses. Huge difference."

Nathan looked at his older sister, "Maybe we can put one of those lawnmower engines on the canoe?"

Gina disliked the idea immediately. "Yeah, not a chance. Way too many things can go wrong with that idea. Not to mention making a prop is like an art form. You'd need a welder and stuff like that, none of which we have. Besides all of that, I'm not a mechanic or an engineer, I just took some classes over the internet. That's it."

Disappointed, Nathan yanked the glasses from Ava's hands and stared some more.

Gina and Jason had, for a long time, had a ritual of spending the night outside and on the roof of the metal box, usually in lawn chairs. Tonight, they were not alone. Everyone wanted to watch and see what the Californians were going to do, now that a boat was parked offshore.

"I see another fire," Nathan yelled, "but I don't see any electric lights or anything. It just looks like some bums, but it's so hard to tell this far away."

Gina turned down their running lights from the control cabin. "All I can see is maybe four groups of campers. I bet they go fishing in the morning." She turned on the radio and tuned it to AM. "It doesn't look like any barn raisers or anything like that."

Nathan aimed the ship's spotlight toward the shore and turned it on. It used well over five hundred watts and should be easily visible, but electrically, they couldn't afford to run it for very long. He looked up on the chart and signaled Morris Code for Hello, then turned it off and waited. "Surely they have some flashlights or something to signal back with." After ten minutes, he tried again, with the same results.

The family, except for the mother who had better sense, stayed up and waited and listened to the radio.

George, the host, led with a story about the new push to reclaim the coasts. Scientists felt confident in saying that the polar ice had mostly melted and that the oceans would rise only another ten feet at the most, which helped to explain the decreased coastal currents they were encountering. He also explained that the president had enacted a kind of second gold rush. Since most of the land had been abandoned, condemned, or flooded, what was left was now up for grabs. Claims would have to be filed, state inspections would have to be made, and an honest attempt to verify any previous owners would still need to be done on each claim. But it was enticing. And the government really had little choice. The original owners were, for the most part, never coming back, and the land was far too valuable to be abandoned for this long. Some of the richest farmland in the world was in California, and the country needed it back in production. Additionally, Mexico was trying to reclaim it, and the US needed to put feet on the ground.

The specifics were vague, though, and George quickly moved on to another topic.

The family stayed parked for six days, but didn't see any fires except for that first day.

First wind they got, they set sail again.

Nathan was steering the boat when Gina entered the cabin. "We've been going over the maps, and I think there's a place," she entered the coordinates into the GPS, "that should be safe to anchor at, and probably to put ashore. We can run the dirt bike around and see what we can find. By my calculations, we should be coming up on it in a few hours. Maybe by dinner time."

He watched while the screen updated, "Thanks, Sis."

She started to leave, but paused. "You need anything? A break, some food, a cup of coffee?"

"No thanks, I'm good."

"Well, with some luck, we'll find a nice place and settle. Who knew we would ever be able to afford beachfront property in California?" She patted him on the back as she left him alone in the tiny cabin.

Because of the difficulty in pulling in the sails, they continued to the GPS coordinates in shifts. Jason was in the cabin when they finally closed on location. It was already too dark to see the shore, so he continued to cruise north, keeping an eye out for fires and lights.

Ten miles north, he saw lots of lights. Flashlights, spot lights, and the lights from small construction equipment. He made a note on the GPS, then continued further north, but saw nothing for another sixty miles of coast.

"Why didn't you stop?" Nathan said, angry as hell, "Why didn't you wake anyone?"

"What would be the point of that?" Jason said, trying to be calm but was just as angry about the accusation. "We can't go ashore in the middle of the night, I didn't see any lights in the area, so I kept going north. We can always drift south with the current later. I found several other camps, if you will, one of which," he pointed southeast, "is the most active I've ever seen. All sorts of lights and stuff, the big problem here is that we can't get ashore anywhere near it, as far as I can tell. The GPS says it's right beside a flooded town, almost six miles of condos, resorts, and shops between us and the highlands where they're doing stuff."

Nathan was still angry, but the girls quickly picked up on what Jason was saying.

"It's daylight, now," Jason continued. "We're still north of it, now—"

Gina elbowed Jason in the ribs, "We all get it, you can shut up, now." The sail was still up, with all but the top quarter flapping like a flag in the wind. "Let's just do it, ok?"

They gathered on the roof of the box while Nathan took over in the control room and Jason got some coffee.

Gina slapped her hand against the Plexiglas and pointed. Visually, it looked like a perfect place to put in, but when Nathan looked it up on the GPS, it showed lots of submerged roads and intersections.

After an hour of drifting south, they found a likely place only thirteen miles north of the action, according to GPS. Like with the mansion, they were unable to get but so close to the shore, this time for fear of tangling the anchor in submerged trees, but they were able to put it in the center of a park near a small protected river and lake surrounded by a forested nature preserve.

But the trees offered something that the mansion location lacked. It calmed the water and prevented riptides in the way that marshes and wetlands naturally do. But that was just a theory. Anchored, they would wait the night to prove that theory true.

They spent the rest of the day diving.

Gina, while not an engineer and only someone who took some internet classes, nonetheless managed to turn one of the lawnmower engines and a section of garden hose into a compressor and underwater diving gear. It was electrically driven so she could control, precisely, the amount of air being fed down the tube. Taking no chances, she also recycled a fire extinguisher into a portable air bottle, in case the line got cut or blocked.

To see submerged street signs, concrete picnic tables, benches and such under the boat was a very surreal experience. The land left above the new waterline looked untouched, like virgin land that had never been built out further. But the underneath told something completely different. Uprooted trees floated, tangled in the limbs of their neighbors, all manner of litter caught in their net of branches.

After repositioning the boat a total of eight times, they finally found what they were hoping for, a rental shack, complete with a submerged rack of rental paddleboats and jetskis, still chained to their concrete piers.

It took hours to find the right keys from inside the shed to unlock the chains, even longer to winch and extricate the waterlogged items to the surface, but the shed came complete with the tools needed to fix them. If they had the skills.

The power to weight ratio of a jetski was perfect for fighting currents, much like a dirt bike was prefect for rough terrain. They might make the problem of coastal currents a problem of the past.
Chapter 25

The trees did as theory said they would, and Jason and Nathan went ashore in a tandem paddleboat the following morning, taking the dirt bike with them.

Gina elected to stay and continue working with the jetskis while the guys went with their GPS to find the source of all the lights.

The first marine engine she had ever taken apart was a little intimidating, but proved to be less damaged than she feared. Nothing had seized, no dirt or grime had penetrated its few holes. It simply required hours of dismantling, cleaning, and re-assembly. Fresh, unopened oilcans were plentiful in the maintenances shack, and she seemed to have all the supplies she would need.

With Ava acting as her assistant, they had their first jetski put back together by lunch.

Ava clicked on the vest, sat on the seat, flipped the switch and turned the key.

Twiiickahahahaha! The jetski said, puffing blue smoke as it idled a little rough.

Gina waved the smoke from her eyes, but the puff seemed to dissipate on its own after a few minutes. It started to run clean, without smoking at all, and the idle quickly smoothed.

Ava smiled at her sister, "Should I?"

Gina checked the tide, it seemed safe enough. "Why not?"

Ava twisted the handle and disappeared behind a spray of mist and a Kawasaki roar.

It had been chained for a reason. This one was a top end two-seater, almost a mini-powerboat in its own right.

Ava came screaming back into view as she rooster-tailed past them and out into the surf, then circled back.

They had a very limited supply of fuel, but a little horseplay couldn't be helped.

As soon as its engine cooled, they drained the oil again, checked it for grit and debris, then topped it off and gave it a clean bill of health.

"Maybe we should go looking for them?" Ava said as it started getting dark.

Gina was worried too, but knew there was little any of them could do. "Say the worst happened. The bike broke down and they had to walk back. Maybe it flipped and one of them is hurt. Even if we went ashore, I don't see how we could even find them, let alone help them. We don't know where they are, and we'd be on foot. They could be twenty miles away."

Ava was horrified by the worst case when Makayla stepped in. "That bike probably just gave up on them and they have to walk back. That's all."

Ava was panicked. "What if they were captured, what if it was a criminal gang? Ex-convicts from a prison or—"

"Then they're probably dead by now," Gina said.

Ava flipped out while Makayla smacked Gina on the back of the head for suggesting such an awful thing. "Don't terrorize your little sister," the mother said.

Gina rubbed the smacked back of her head, "They have a flair gun, they would have used it if they got into trouble. My 'little sister' knows that."

"What if the flair didn't work?" Ava said.

Gina walked off, "Unbelievable."

The next morning, Gina got started on the second jetski they had brought up. It too looked to be in fine condition, just as when she inspected them underwater.

Three days had passed as they waited, when the boys finally showed. . . on foot, an hour before dusk.

They waved, then sat in the paddle boat, too exhausted to go any further.

Ava, not needing an excuse, powered over in the jetski and towed them back to the boat. They were holding up supper.

"So, you got a jetski working, I see," Nathan said stuffing his face; they had left with only two days worth of food.

"Two," Gina corrected, "and slow down with the shovel, you'll bust a gut." She pointed her fork at Jason, "You too. What'd you find?"

"Well—" Jason started.

"That bike runs like crap is what we found," Nathan said. "Damn thing locked up halfway there! Never got close enough to see nothing. Spent one day trying to fix the damn bike, then had to walk back or make the walking three times as far!"

"They might have had a car and given us a ride," Jason said.

"They might have had a gun and given us some lead," Nathan shouted back. "With a dirt bike, there was a chance we could outrun them on, like, animal paths and off road—"

"Not with that bike we weren't," Jason said.

Gina elbowed Jason in the ribs. It was now clear to everyone that the boys had argued the entire time. "That leaves stay, while we're over the maintenance shack, or go, try to relocate and anchor offshore and jetski in. Which, might not be that bad of an idea." She nudged him with her elbow this time, "You did say you could see the lights, that means they can't be that far inland, right?"

"I suspect," Jason said, "but I don't know for sure."

"Well," Gina said, "while you two were playing, I've been keeping notes. The underwater forest not only dampens the currents around the area, it also dampens the waves. We haven't made a single amp since we got here, we're discharging daily. I figure we have a week or two before we're stuck."

"What about being tugged out with—"

"A jetski?" Gina laughed, "Like an ant trying to move a tree? We'd have better luck paddling. We have to relocate, the only question is how soon."

While parked in an ideal location, directly over the maintenance shed, they attempted to salvage all they could, while they could, bringing up three more jetskis, two boxes of marginally useful tools, and just about any spare part that looked to be in a disintegrating cardboard box.

After three days, they waited for high tide, pulled anchor, and powered out into the coastal stream to start their drift south, all without deploying the sail.

Drifting was easier said than done. Jason stood as Nathan entered the cabin as they changed shifts. "I know the impulse to straighten up the ship, but you have to fight it. It uses way too much power to try to keep the boat parallel with the shore. Let it drift. Let it spin clockwise because of all that extra drag on the starboard side. Apply the thrust only when the aft is facing the shore, then cut thrust as soon as it starts drifting clockwise again." Jason let go and stood behind Nathan as the aft drifted clockwise and slowly started to align.

Nathan ramped up the thrust as the sluggish boat pushed away from shore. He held it at full thrust for almost a minute, then slowly backed it down to nothing as the boat continued to drift clockwise. It was a little disorienting, dizzying if it was rotating much faster.

"You've got it," Jason said, then left for bed down in the metal sea box.

By the time they were aligned with the GPS of the lights, the batteries were down to thirty percent. Barely enough to keep the lights on.
Chapter 26

Their tidal power was under-performing at their new location, as was their aft generator while located outside the rapid southern coastal currents. Unfortunately, they could change neither. While located where the currents and waves were stronger, they had no safe place to anchor without risking entanglement in submerged buildings. So, they made do. They went back to rationing their power. Should they deploy the sails, they could take an excursion and be fully recharged in as little as a week, which was tempting. But electricity was a luxury they could afford to cut back on. Lights out at night. Laptops off. Only one radio for the news. No coffee maker, no microwave, no toaster, and no refrigerator. They would rely on the hotbox nature of the solar oven to keep leftovers in.

Tweeeeeee. . . Huhhhh.

"Try it again?" Ava asked.

"Just a second," Gina said, tinkering with the connections on the jetski's battery. "Ok, now."

Tweeeeeee. . . Huhhhh. . . huhhhh. . . huh. . .

"Hold it," Gina said, frustrated. "I think I know what's wrong." She started removing parts again.

Ava looked hugely disappointed, but obediently climbed off it.

Makayla looked at all the parts sprawled across every foot of the outside picnic table and in chunks across the precious walking space of the deck. "Am I going to have to have the tidy bedroom talk with you again?"

Gina threw her wrench at the wooden floor, "You fix it then," she yelled, "Because I don't know how to fix the damn thing without making a mess. Ok, I don't!" She grabbed the injector body off the table, held it over her head, then flung it overboard like she expected it to skip. "Is that better, mom? Clean enough for you? It'll never run without one of those! We can throw it all away now!" She grabbed another part, but Ava had enough sense to stop her.

The injector body was off a still-being-dismantled one. The part was critical, but not to the one Ava had nearly gotten to start. "Calm dow—"

"Don't you tell me to calm down," Gina yelled louder, "I'm no damned mechanic!" She pushed her sister aside, grabbed another part, and chucked it over the side, then stormed into the metal sea box that was their home.

"We've watched them for a week now," Nathan said over dinner. "They haven't ventured out to greet us. They haven't even waved at us from the shore. Maybe they ain't all that friendly. Maybe it was a good thing that the bike broke down when it did."

"What do we have in the holding net?" Jason asked.

"A couple big ones, three hundred pounds. Maybe four," Ava said, "And what's left of this fella'. Maybe another sixty pounds. We've got a year's worth of dried stuff, though. Been using the oldest stuff as fish-food to keep the fresh catches alive."

"I think we ought to take what's left of this, fella', and one of the big ones, and jetski over with it, lunchtime tomorrow," Jason said. "Like a peace offering. Maybe they don't have a boat that can cover the distance."

"What if they're not friendly?" Ava asked first. "They've made no signs of being friendly at all."

"Well, we take our chances—"

"They get a hold of one of our jetskis," Gina said, "and they'll be able to reach us, quick and easy. Especially if they're unfriendly, like what happened at the mansion."

Jason flaked off a chunk of fish that was marinated in a fresh slice of tomato and peppered with crumbled kelp, brought it to his lips, then pondered. "The big one's a two-seater, right? Two of us tow a big fish, carry the leftovers, and the second person goes back to 'ferry over' the rest of us. Make like it breaks down. Whoever is left ashore gets a day or two to meet and greet, smell things out, then gives the all clear signal to get picked up again, or the trouble sign if things are way wrong."

"Who gets to go?" Ava said.

"I would think that's man's work," Nathan said, to the glares of all the women.

"Well," Jason said, "that might work better, just until we figure out where we stand and what the deal is."

Gina looked worried, "If things go wrong, I doubt they'll let you give any old signal—"

"That's what I've been thinking about," Jason said. "If things are bad or seem fishy, we should give a positive sign. You know, waving and welcoming, possibly both arms straight up like a field goal. If we're under stress, they'll let us fake that. But, if we're not being held against our will, then we can do some very strange signs without arousing too much suspicion. Anything from crude gestures to mooning."

"They don't know us, either," Nathan said. "For all they know, we could be armed to the teeth. That might be why they haven't come out to greet us."

Jason chewed another piece. "How may jetskis do we have that you think work, reliably?"

"Two two-seaters, and one single," Gina said, "And I'm not vouching for reliability on none of them. But, we only have maybe ten gallons of gas. If that. That won't get you back and forth as many times as you might think. These things are geared for fun, not efficiency."

Jason swallowed. "Well, it'll have to do. I would think that they have some sort of logistics or supply line out to here, because, they seem to be running some light construction equipment. I would think they may have some gas to trade for fresh fish. At least, that's what I'm hoping."

The next afternoon, the boys jetskied over, fish in tow, and Nathan returned alone, back to the boat where they watched Jason struggle to carry the giant fish up the embankment and over the hill.
Chapter 27

"So, where are you from?" Jason asked as they all crowded around the campfire, stuffed after the grand meal. "I detect a little southern—"

"Americus Georgia," the man said. "Had a small construction company back there. But I lost everything, except for the equipment. Was a family thing, that there," he pointed at the family immediately to his right, "my cousin, Alexo, his wife, Deloris, and their two youngins, David and Junior. They lived six blocks from us." He gestured next to them, "That there's my brothers, Brock and Marko, and Marko's kid, Jasmine. And right down around the way is my number one straw boss, Digman, and his clan, but I still ain't got all their names down."

"Everyone call me Biggie anyway," Digman said, patting his girth before shaking Jason's hand. "I got six kids running around here, you'll see 'em all from time to time, but just the two girls, Amelia and Joanna right here, sit still long enough to see 'em. And of course, my other, Angela. With such a big family, we naturally had an RV with tip outs for family vacations and trips and such." He gestured over his shoulder at the thing sitting atop the hill next to several pitched tents. "Boss man, Stone, there, had a small fleet of work trucks and vans and lots of equipment. When the president said we could hit the west coast and make our fortune, we all jumped at it. Said all we needed was to document with pictures and such the condition of the site when we found it, then the improvements we did to it. Said they'd have inspectors flooding the area in a matter of weeks, but we ain't seen one yet. Came out with everything we figured on needing, have Wal-Mart for the rest."

This was the part Jason needed the most, "I heard about that, but never had the particulars. How do you file a claim?"

"Well," Biggie said, "how the paper tell it, you find an area, ten acres a person, take you some pictures of how it was, then improve it. You know, build on it. If you improve it enough, they sign it over to you. Said because it was all condemned as a natural disaster, the government and the insurance companies had already paid for it, so they went ahead and eminent-domained it, then made it available for free. Well, a hundred dollar an acre, maximum of ten acre a person. Angel there has a copy of the newspaper we read it in. Figured, better to have it in black and white in case there be no fine print mistakes." He smiled wide. "Says in it, ten acre per family member."

Jason's little group didn't have many power tools. But they did have some mansion seeds. "What about farmland?"

"That covered in there too. They say that you have to prove that it won't farmland before you got to it. But you get a crop growing, they accept that as an improvement too. I think it's like ten percent of your claim is all what needs to be fruitful, but read it yourself if you want. Amelia, go show him."

A little girl, no more than ten, ran up, grabbed him by the arm, and tugged him toward the RV that looked like a bus. Inside looked like a living room with all the carpet and high fashion of a modern home. The little girl pulled a paper off the stack, plopped it on the dinner table, and flipped it open to the dog-eared page.

Jason read every detail.

The way the bill was passed, if a loss claim had been filed, for example had the rental company filed the serial numbers of all their jetskis as flood loss, then anyone who could show that they had been salvaged and fixed could essentially keep them. Homes that were unaffected by the floods, however, could not simply be moved into, even if it had been written off as a loss. So, technically, they did loot the mansion, and could be jailed for it, but salvaged the rental place. Gina had taken lots of pictures with her cell-phone as she dismantled the engines, and lots of notes on how to put them back together. They should be fine on all of that.

A standing house was still owned by the state and the land surrounding it couldn't be claimed. One that had been leveled to its foundation could be documented, then salvaged. It ended with a strong warning that satellite photos could and would be used to verify all claims. Several consecutive nights of bonfires in the shape of an X were used to draw satellite attention to each claim.

When done, he folded it and returned to the fire, and quietly laid all his cards down on the table. They had a sailboat that was more of a fishing platform or an RV on the water, but it was worthless close to land. But the amount of fish they could catch could easily feed every hungry mouth on shore. And they had gotten good at fishing over the years.

On shore, Jason's little clan didn't have the tools or the ability to build homes like a professional contractor could, but they did have labor to spare. What came next was what Biggie called an hour-long session of good old-fashioned horse-trading.

And Jason's family had something to trade. It all was looking very promising as he discussed and made plans late into the night with what were, essentially, perfect strangers.

Noon the next day, Jason held his arms over his head and formed an X, angrily flipped off his friends on the boat, then turned to moon them, shouting, "Get your asses over here!"

Nathan promptly ferried Makayla and another fish over, then let Jason return to the boat alone while they got the tour and met their new neighbors.

". . . According to the paper I read, all you have to do is keep your notes and those photos and we should be plenty good with keeping the jetskis," Jason said to the sisters, but mostly Gina. "The deal I struck was that we would keep someone out here fishing while the rest of us stayed inland. We'd help them with the building, and in turn, they'd keep us in fuel and help us stake a claim."

"Now, how do we know that they won't let us do all the work, then claim our land too?" Ava asked as dusk slowly set in.

That was a good question, for which he didn't have a good answer. "I would say only that perhaps the same thing that would keep us from making a claim against something they built that we helped on. Our house would come last, they said, which only seemed fair, really. But our garden would come first, in hopes that we could add something more to the diet than just fish. And an acre garden is enough of an improvement to allow a claim for ten acres. So, to answer you, I don't really know, Ava. We just have to trust, sometimes.

The nearest stocked supply house, they say, is over two hundred miles away. But they have a van jammed full of nails and screws and every kind of hardware you would need to build houses—"

"Doesn't it seem awfully convenient that a housing contractor would be the first person we would meet out here?" Gina said with some distrust.

"Well, yes it does. But I doubt anybody other than a housing contractor would have the skills or the daring—" Jason paused, not wanting to discount Gina's instinct out-of-hand, "I would be more surprised with a wave of secretaries or car salesmen. His business was destroyed with the first flooding, at least that's what he told me. Hell, his name is on most of the trucks. I kinda trust him, Gina. Look, say that we put in a lot of labor, give away a lot of fish for almost free, and get little or nothing in return. That's no worse than what we've been doing so far. This is a chance. A good one, I think. Maybe we get taken, but at least it isn't by a bunch of Canadians."

Gina laughed, but Ava turned very serious, "I liked the Canadians we met, Aye."
Chapter 28

The other families had already picked out the land they wanted, marking them off with fallen trees meant to be seen from satellites and a name spelled out in trees or rubble. The others, being friends already, reasonably made their claims close together; Jason and their little group made their claim about four miles down the road, but still within jetski range and reasonable access to the shore.

Getting a garden going wasn't easy, but it wasn't all that difficult either. The land they picked had a portion of a house left on it, and at least four acres of overgrown lawn. Two walls didn't a house make, but it had lots of salvageable wood that they planned on recycling into a smaller, new home.

Because of the horrible transportation situation plaguing the region, building standards were necessarily somewhat relaxed due to the logistics of the normal, frequent inspections. Even so, homes still needed to be inspected, so, just slapping together something was out. Jason and his little group needed the experience of the other families.

The hardest part about their garden proved to be killing the grass. Plastic tarps, bags, roofing scraps, and old papers proved to make excellent barriers to hold the grass back while letting the plants grow.

On most days, two gardened while one assisted the other families with construction and the fourth fished. They rotated every week.

Their first 'completed' home was finished within the first month. It was an odd little thing. Hobbled together from mostly scraps, the siding on the front didn't match the siding on the back, nor those of the two ends. The windows were recycled as well, but their differences were harder to notice. Inside, the building was 'complete' with air ducts, wiring, switches, ceiling fans and fixtures. But most walls were transparent, lacking any sheetrock to cover them, and showed naked pipes and wires everywhere. A few around the bathrooms and such had sheets stapled to the studs for privacy, but in most cases the walls were bare. No carpeting for the same reasons, simple plywood floors all around. And the roof was a mismatched patchwork of multiple shingle colors. But otherwise, the home was complete, weatherproof, and awaiting electricity. For now, it had a well and used a simple drain field, with the hopes of city hookups in the near future.

But it wasn't a tent, toilets flushed, and Stone, the owner of all the tools and most of the trucks, was nonetheless happy to move in.

With GPS and Gina's improvised diving gear, they were able to locate a submerged plumbing store as well as a few other needed specialty places for the hard to find odds and ends.

Jason took his turn on the boat and watched Nathan drive back to shore on the jetski with all the fish from the net.

He went into the back of the sea box and took inventory. The other families hadn't brought nearly enough food and had counted on hunting and fishing to make up the differences. Hunting game was easy further inland, but wild game was scarce in this area, and even if fish fought the current long enough to come near the shore, the second they would cast a line, the current would sweep it into the shallows. Fishing on the coat was like trying to fish a fast moving stream. You could do it, but not from the shore. You needed a boat or Jesus-like walking skills.

They still had a war chest of dried food in plastic trash bags, probably enough to last everyone through winter, if needed.

He visited Makayla's garden next. It was blooming nicely, not that anyone was there to enjoy it. He checked the freshwater tank. It was low. He went to the control cabin to check on the battery levels. The batteries were nearly half charged. He was tempted to run the electric pumps to fill the tank with filtered water, but he had plenty of time on his hands, and very little electricity.

He started pumping it by hand.

Jingle. Jingle jingle. Jingle.

He sat up and looked around.

Jingle.

He ran to the fishing pole and started reeling it in. It was a beautiful Marlin that hardly put up a fight until the last twenty feet. He made room for it in the net cage under the boat. They learned the hard way to divide it into two sections because not all fish got along.

He baited the hook, cast it again, then went back inside and tried to return to sleep.

A family of four, plus one, had more than its share of difficulties. But being alone on the boat, hour after hour, day after day for an entire week was more than a little maddening. Video games, music, and the radio only went so far.

Jingle jingle.

He ran to the reel and gave it a solid jerk. This one was tiny, ten pounds at the most. If he didn't need the hook back, he probably would have cut the line, but he reeled it in anyway.

"Hey, Marvin the marlin," he said through the cracks in the wooden floor, "you hungry yet?"

The marlin swam to the far end of the cage.

"Oh now, that's no way to be. I mean, sure, you're dinner at the end of the week, but, that's days away. We can still be friends until then. You could spend it hungry, or," he dazed the fish by slapping its head against the wood before dropping it in front of his newest pet.

The marlin was cautious, but just for a second.

"There you go, boy. Show me those colors. You're kind of the lion of the ocean, ain't ya? Or, maybe the peacock."

A week by himself should have felt like a vacation, but it wasn't. It felt like he was sharing a cell with Marvin.
Chapter 29

Gardening had its advantages, especially when he was stuck there with Gina.

The accommodations weren't good, but they weren't sleeping in a tent either. They hadn't picked the land just for the lawn. The home, even as falling apart as it was, had fallen in a very forgiving way. The corner that remained had shielded a downstairs bathroom and a study that they moved bedroom furniture into. As they dismantled the rest of the house, those two rooms were saved, intact, thanks to the miracle of plastic tarp and a ton of staples.

He woke in bed with the girl he loved as the sun made its way through the window.

This wasn't the first time they had slept without clothes, but it was a first for dry land. He got dressed and lowered the shade as he planned on letting her sleep in.

By the time a second house was complete, and then a third, those tending the garden had reduced the falling rubble into several piles of salvaged wood, shingles, pipes, and wires, ready to be remade anew.

The Georgia boys proved to be as good as their word and quickly assembled a four-bedroom house, long before winter came.

They got married the following spring, and he never had to spend a week on the boat alone again.

Sheetrock for walls came years later.

[The End]
Notes from the author:

I hope you enjoyed the ride. Because I couldn't get the characters in The Wandering Island Factory to do as I wanted, I didn't feel right charging for it. Those unruly characters can be a misbehaving bunch! If you liked the kinds of ideas/inventions you've just read about, but are looking for longer adventures, deeper plots, and more profound characters, may I suggest my Hummingbird Series about an autistic savant of nearly magical inventions, reincarnation, and hummingbirds. The first book in the series, The Art of the Houdini Scientist, is free to download through Smashwords and their distribution with the great people at B&N, Apple, Diesel, Sony, Kobo, and Amazon, with more on the way. You'll find my Houdini Scientist gets down into the science of fiction and is far better behaved.

If stories this size are more your speed, may I suggest my collection of short stories in The Twisted Timeline Trilogy. It starts with the troubles of a colonizing crew drifting through space, picks up again in modern times with a discovery of ancient high-technology that shouldn't exist, buried in a coalmine. And it ends with the story of another colonizing crew, picking up where the others left off. Three shorts/novellas in the past, present, and future, all under one cover for your convenience.

And thank you for supporting independent authors like me. Without your honesty and word of mouth, works like this would languish in Mundane obscurity, banished by the whims of the tyrants of the traditional publishing world.

Tr Nowry

