The Gambit with Perfection (The Phantom of the Earth Book 2) (37 page)

Precept 1: Serve Beimeni. Live forever.

Precept 2: Suffering is questioning. Questioning is destructive. Destruction is never inevitable.

Precept 3: Jealousy is treachery. Treachery is culpable. Culpability is never questioned.

Precept 4: Abuse or misuse of official insignia of the commonwealth is forbidden.

Precept 5: Citizen heirs of the chancellor are a blessing. They are also property of the Office of the Chancellor. All pregnancies must be reported to the nearest medical facility and all citizens must be registered with the government at the time of birth, prior to development.

Precept 6: Excursions to the surface of the Earth are forbidden unless sanctioned by the Office of the Chancellor.

Precept 7: Citizens should be honored to serve their chancellor, including in the Lower Level.

Precept 8: The Harpoon Auction shall serve as the primary arbiter of commonwealth function.

Precept 9: Exile to the Lower Level is not immutable, unless as determined by the Harpoon Auction or the Office of the Judiciary.

Precept 10: No Beimenian in the upper territories shall be permitted to the Lower Level, unless as determined by the Harpoon Auction or the Offices of the Judiciary or the Chancellor.

Precept 11: The Judiciary shall act in stewardship of the chancellor and in the best interest of the citizenry.

Precept 12: The chancellor shall be the ultimate arbiter in matters that involve the Office of the Judiciary.

Precept 13: To speak against the chancellor is to speak against the Twin Gods of the Cosmos.

Precept 14: Unauthorized exposure to forsaken and foreign lands is forbidden.

Precept 15: A commonwealth mission is honorable. Beimenians who fail to uphold such missions are dishonorable.

Precept 16: Unlimited expansion throughout Earth is the right of all Beimenians. Construction privileges shall be granted via the Department of Communications and Commonwealth Relations.

Precept 17: Ownership of weapons, including but not limited to pulse rifles, pulse guns, and pulse grenades, is forbidden.

Precept 18: Beimenians shall live in harmony, serve, and live together. Everyone belongs to each other.

Precept 19: Fountain Square access shall be granted for service and conversion or as designated by the Office of the Chancellor.

Precept 20: Private ownership of apartment units is encouraged. Private ownership of goods and services is especially encouraged.

Precept 21: Abundant celebrations are encouraged by the Office of the Chancellor.

Precept 22: All images, thoughts, messages, and other neural impulses held within the cerebral network are the property of the Department of Communications and Commonwealth Relations.

Precept 23: The Beimeni monetary unit, the benari, henceforth is defined as coins manufactured by the official mint, comprised of a proprietary blend of silver, gold, and platinum.

Precept 24: The Departments of Peace and Communications shall ensure tranquility and harmony within the borders of Beimeni under the authority of the Office of the Chancellor.

Precept 25: The Department of Space shall ensure technological advancement for departure from the commonwealth and safe passage to foreign or hostile lands, including, but not limited to, the Earth’s surface.

Precept 26: The Research & Development Department is tasked with providing all the resources Beimenians require for survival.

Precept 27: The people of Beimeni have the right to freely elect territorial representatives to serve as ministers within the Office of the Chancellor.

Precept 28: The people of Beimeni have the right to bring any and all complaints to the Office of the Judiciary.

Precept 29: Criminal acts with a possible sentencing to the Lower Level shall be arbitrated by the Department of Peace and the Office of the Judiciary at the discretion of the Office of the Chancellor.

Precept 30: A chancellor’s rule is infinite as determined by the Twin Gods of the Cosmos and the Beimenian people. In the event of death or incapacitation, and until an election can be arranged, the prime minister of Beimeni shall assume leadership. Beneath the prime minister, the rule of the free peoples of Beimeni shall fall to the supreme scientist tasked with Reassortment.

The following is the transcript of Supreme Scientist Jeremiah Selendia’s guest lecture to a Harpoon class in 233 AR. Though its central topic was underground terraforming and engineering, the lecture also covered subjects such as the Reassortment Atmospheric Anomaly, the Death Wave, the Reassortment Strain, Livelle city-state, the Beimeni zone, and the Age of Masimovian, among others. It was required reading for Harpoon candidates and knowledge of the points covered in the lecture was tested during the first half multiple choice section of the exams until Jeremiah’s demotion from Project Reassortment in 283 AR. The transcript is stored in Marstone’s Database and is considered classified government property.

To thoroughly understand the process by which we terraformed the Beimeni zone of the underground, a brief overview of the circumstances that led to its necessity is required. The Reassortment Atmospheric Anomaly and resultant Death Wave concluded the Second Hundred Years’ War fought between the Eastern and Western Hegemonies. The paucity of data that survived in Livelle Laboratory after the zeropoint attack at the end of the war suggests the Reassortment Strain may have escaped containment from Hengill Laboratory, built 200 meters below the surface of Iceland. From there we suspect it mutated in unexpected ways, transforming into the modern killer of transhumans. We also believe the end must have been swift, and terrifying, based on our own experience with it: no transhuman has survived exposure to it.

The lone survivors of the extinction event organized a civilization within the contained and sustained Livelle Laboratory some 50 meters below Antelope Canyon. Noriel Livelle, the chief administrator for the lab, proposed the formation of a new government, consisting of a democratically-elected chancellor and 10 ministers (for 10 districts) to rule over a new city-state. The city-state would include the centrally located laboratory and its surrounding village with a population of about 15,000—the presumed last of the transhuman race.

Noriel Livelle was elected the first chancellor in a landslide victory; with the approval of the ministry, he named the new city-state after himself. He and the ministry requested a group of scientists known as the Elders—transhumans highly skilled with the zeropoint field—to formulate a strategy to protect Livellans from structural collapses and Reassortment breaches. The Elders created strategic expedition (strike) teams with a separate mission from the Livelle Guard, which protected the central government apparatus and provided security throughout the city-state.

The strike teams were instead given complete autonomy under a designated strike team commander, with the understanding their sole mission was to respond to structural collapses and Reassortment breaches in Livelle. The Elders suspected either the strain was designed to diffuse into the Earth—presumably to disrupt or kill scientists who worked in subterranean synbio labs—or did so by other means because they’d lost contact with the Western Hegemony, including the underground facilities. So the first volunteers for the strike teams understood their mission was a suicidal one; no biomat suit could then protect transhumans from Reassortment exposure in the shallower parts of the underground or upon the surface.

Concurrent with the creation of the strike teams, the chancellor called on his confidant, Ruslan Masimovian, to form the Reassortment research team to focus on developing Reassortment-resistant biomats and a cure. Masimo, as Ruslan was known, first sought to unfreeze the League of Scientists—the 340 scientists frozen near absolute zero as required by the initiation of Operation Preservation—who many believed could hold the key to immunity to the Reassortment Strain. (Some even suspected they could have Reassortment-resistant genes.)

Masimo killed five scientists before he realized the methodologies outlined by the league for awakenings would not work; neither he, nor anyone else, could find a way to repair the cells fast enough to revive the scientists held in stasis. Chancellor Livelle ordered the remaining 335 scientists be stored in a special containment chamber called the Cryo Room within the city-state’s Science District, at the lowermost level of the laboratory, which lay beneath the village.

Existing synbio labs merged and new labs formed, combining with new and existing consortiums (including mechanical, nuclear, biological, civil, materials, computer, electrical, and zeropoint field engineers, among others) focused on obtaining energy and producing synisms, raw materials, and sustenance to ensure humanity’s survival in the underground. Livelle’s sophisticated power plant had been built prior to the extinction event, and became the basis for the design of power plants used throughout the Great Commonwealth of Beimeni.

All power plants, with the exception of solar panels, hydroelectric, and wind turbines, are the same: water is converted to steam in a boiler (or pressure vessel), the steam is used to spin a turbine, the turbine spins a generator that produces electricity, and the waste steam is condensed back into water before being redirected back into the boiler. The only difference between various types of power plants is the fuel that heats the boiler, which includes nuclear, coal, oil, or natural gas, among other sources.

Engineers designed a pressure vessel that sat in a pool of magma. The magma transferred its heat to the vessel, which boiled the water. As a result, the magma cooled and became denser than the hotter magma beneath it. The cool magma sank, was warmed by the Earth, then rose and was cooled by the boiler, and the process repeated. The idea was to create a current within the magma called
natural convection
; it was the driving force behind Livelle’s power plant design. The problem: magma didn’t exist naturally near Livelle Laboratory.

The Western Hegemony had to devise a methodology to create magma based on the understanding of the way heat is spread inside the Earth. To wit, the flow of heat (i.e., heat flux with units of W/m
²
or watts per square meter) out of the Earth is roughly 87 milliwatts (mW) per square meter (m
²
), averaged over the entire surface. It is driven by the fact that deep Earth is hot, and it becomes hotter with increasing depth. The change of temperature with depth is sometimes called the
geothermal gradient
, or
geotherm
. It differs for the oceanic and continental regions. (Livellans had concluded to burrow beneath the oceans would prove too difficult, logistically, biologically, and technologically, so the discussion that follows is concerned solely with the continental region.)

There are three sources of heat inside the Earth. One is “primordial” heat, or the heat left over from accretion and core formation; another is heating caused by the decay of long-lived radioactive isotopes. The relative contributions from the two sources are uncertain, but the latter probably predominates and may contribute as much as 75 percent of the total heat. The third source is tidal friction resulting from the gravitational attraction of the moon. As the moon and Earth orbit each other, both bodies bulge out slightly toward their near and opposite sides. This gives rise to the ocean tides, but there are similar, albeit barely discernible, tides in the solid part of Earth. This constant “breathing” causes friction in solid Earth and may contribute up to 10 percent of the planet’s internal heat.

Radioactive heat comes mostly from decay of the elements uranium, thorium, and potassium. These elements are highly concentrated in the granitic part of the continental crust, which is why granites generate much more heat than other rocks. Despite its comparatively high radioactivity, the continental crust produces only a small fraction of Earth’s total heat, simply because it constitutes only a small fraction of the mass of Earth. Rather, about 80 percent of the heat comes from the mantle and core, and this heat emerges along the midocean ridges, transported there by the convective upwelling of the mantle. The deeper a rock is within the Earth, the hotter and denser it is. A general, though not uniformly applicable, rule for geotherm is that for each kilometer (km) in depth, the temperature increases by about 25 degrees Celsius (C).

Understanding these concepts, Western Hegemony engineers had built heat vents from where the continental crust meets the mantle to a pressure vessel 4,000 meters beneath the surface of the Earth. The vents concentrated the heat generated by the deep Earth, and connected to a pool of minerals surrounding the pressure vessel; the heat vents kept the minerals melted at 1200 degrees C.

The vessel was similar in design to a boiling water reactor (BWR), which is a type of nuclear reactor. A BWR design was chosen because nuclear reactors undergo more extreme conditions than a typical boiler at a fossil fuel plant. Livelle’s vessel was shaped like a pill, a long cylinder capped by domes at either end made of an alloy with a melting point of 1480 degrees C; one half sat in the magma and the other half did not. The height (h) and radius (r) of the vessel were found by calculating the required surface area for the magma to contact the vessel in order to boil the water at the proper rate to sustain the operation of the plant; in this case, the height was 200 m and the radius was 70.4 m.

The submerged half of the vessel required insulation. The thermal conductivity (k) of the insulation and the thickness (L) of the pressure vessel required a simple heat transfer analysis. For six inches of insulation, the thermal conductivity was k = 3.76 W/(mK) where W equals watts and mK equals meters x Kelvin; thus, the maximum allowable thickness of the vessel was L = 0.562 meters.