The Descent into the Maelstrom (The Phantom of the Earth Book 4) (49 page)

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.

Using a safety factor of three (standard for engineering), the maximum allowable pressure (P) within the vessel (a plane stress analysis problem) was determined to be P = 526 kPa where kPa equals kilopascals. This is relative pressure, meaning it was 526 kPa more than the pressure in the nearby earth.

The power plant included four turbines, which spun a main shaft that led directly to an electric generator. Leftover steam entered a container with a pipe of cold water, obtained from a nearby lake upon the surface, and ran through a condenser (i.e., a heat exchanger). The steam condensed upon contact with the colder pipe and collected at the bottom of the container, leaving via a pipe to return to the boiler. (A pump was used in Livelle’s power plant to get the water from the condenser to the boiler, but later iterations of this power plant design in the Great Commonwealth used gravity.) The resulting power plant generated 1300 megawatts of electricity, enough to supply Livelle, its laboratory and village of 15,000 transhumans, with energy they required to survive.

Chancellor Livelle’s first priority was to ensure the power plant could continue its operation without access to the Western Hegemony’s infrastructure, including nonrenewable resources supplied by its asteroid mines. Reassortment risk was, of course, also a concern. He wanted to be sure the water used from the nearby lake could be treated with liquid ethanol and radiation
before
it neared the city-state. Once he confirmed the power plant could, in fact, proceed with normal operations including radiation treatment for 250 years without resupply (based on modest population growth estimates), he quickly focused the scientists in the laboratory on production of raw materials via synbio tech.

The chancellor understood that every synthetic organism (or synism) requires a source of two things: (1) carbon (to make stuff); and (2) energy (need energy to make stuff). The first requirement was technically negotiable if the synism was trained to make molecules out of silicon or sulfur or possibly, at high enough temperatures, metal oxides, but the second one was not. Energy is necessary to change molecules, a consequence of the first law of thermodynamics.

Bacteria typically get energy from the sun in the form of electromagnetic (EM) radiation (light) on a certain part of the EM spectrum. They use it to boost electrons to higher energy states, then transmit them along a series of reactions that allow the organism to reduce low-energy molecules (ADP) to high-energy-carrying molecules (ATP). In Livelle, scientists used thermal radiation (heat) instead of light, procured from the heat loops surrounding the power plant. They used a ratcheting system whereby multiple photosystems each contributed a small boost, drawing lots of heat extracted from inside the Earth to create small amounts of biological molecules they called “thermotrophs.” (The reason the amounts were small was because thermal radiation is longer wavelength (less energy) than light, and thus it took a lot of it to boost electrons the necessary amounts.) Keep in mind that these structures were modified from photosystems, and have analogous function, but were entirely different; the new thermosystem was modified from the photosystems that were used by photosynthetic bacteria.

While the thermotrophs constructed in Livelle’s synism vats created amino acids and proteins transhumans required to live, and removed transhuman waste, they could not make iron without a source of iron; they couldn’t rearrange protons and electrons to construct elements. This is a nuclear process, and can only be achieved at monstrously high pressure and temperatures associated with nuclear reactors, or the insides of stars. The same is true for copper, nickel, iron, aluminum, diamond, and gold, among other metals and minerals. (For instance, nickel and iron are made up of nickel and iron atoms, which, at the time, could not be manufactured.)

Plastics are different, because they are polymers, constructed of large hydrocarbon molecules that can be arranged by bacteria; they are made of carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen. But the bacteria cannot simply synthesize these elements on their own. Even the carbon and hydrogen and oxygen in plastics have to come from somewhere (e.g., whatever the bacteria are eating).

Some types of organisms (e.g., chemolithotrophs) are capable of obtaining electrons (reductive power) by stripping them of certain metals. For instance, in the case of ferrous iron, the process assumes that (1) bacteria obtain energy to live; and (2) the ferrous iron was oxidized to ferric iron (a different compound) that in turn oxidized insoluble metal sulfides, turning them into a form that could be extracted by transhumans. The bacteria weren’t creating metals, but rather moving metal-containing compounds from a state where they were not usable by man to a state where they were.

Bacterial mining had been performed within the Earth for centuries prior to the Death Wave and led to large swaths of the crust being hollowed for nonrenewable resources. The Western and Eastern Hegemonies devised two-part names for materials based on the organisms used to produce them, including
Ferrous coli
, or
F. coli
for short, (just like bacterial nomenclature, except in this case the name of the organism was also used to describe the metal that is obtained from it). In this case, it was a genetic variant of
E. coli
but used to precipitate iron ions out of solutions (dissolved in underground seas and from the vast reserves in the Earth’s crust). The name of the bacterium reflected the metal it was used to produce, like
Ferrous coli
(a gram negative gamma proteobacteria similar to
E. coli
, but producing iron) or
Cobaltous subtilis
(gram positive firmicute similar to
Bacillus subtilis
but producing cobalt); other examples include stibium (antimony), cuprum (copper), aurum (gold), ferrum (iron), plumbum (lead), hydragyrum (mercury), kalium (potassium), argentum (silver), natrium (sodium), stannum (tin), wolfram (tungsten).

When the Eastern and Western Hegemonies exhausted the capabilities of bacterial mining, they turned to celestial bodies in the solar system. Accordingly, Livellans could not dig around the city-state and obtain raw materials necessary for long-term survival; additionally, they lacked the resources required for space travel and space mining.

Another option was to train bacteria to undergo a form of nuclear fusion to create minerals and metals. Pressure stability would come from the reaction taking place in super small molecular “reactors” made of tightly packed lattices of molecules (like buckeyballs but with many layers), which would exist only for microseconds before degrading, but long enough to make a few atoms of nickel, iron, even diamond.

High enough temps would only exist in tiny enclosed locations, and only for very small amounts of time, not long enough to lyse the cell but long enough to smash a few atomic nuclei together and make a nickel atom, for instance. Energy would come from a chain reaction, initiated by manipulating the zeropoint field.

The bacteria would need to be “seeded” with radioactive isotopes. The good part about this would be that the process would still be regulated by which metabolic pathways the bacteria were using, which enzymes were present, and which types/numbers of biofusion reactors they were making, all a product of information stored in DNA. The bacteria would require a source of radioactive material to take into their cytoplasm (endocytosis) and encapsulate in their mini reactors. While promising in theory—and implemented without success during the Second Hundred Years’ War—Livellan scientists couldn’t devise a workable methodology to synthesize minerals and metals from bacteria.

Chancellor Livelle understood that to get this system to work would require numerous, unprecedented breakthroughs in the fields of biology, nanotechnology, physics, and nuclear engineering. He instead insisted that scientists focus on molecules they could create with existing resources, rather than wasting time and energy on biologically mediated nuclear processes. Accordingly, Livellan scientists trained bacteria to produce weaving composite materials made primarily from carbon structures. (What I mean by “weaving” is simply taking carbon-containing monomers and arranging them into polymers like starch, peptidoglycan, lignin, cellulose, or even graphene and carbyne.)

In general, composite carbon-based materials are superior to pure metals and even alloys because (1) they can be produced microbially with relative ease; (2) are made from carbon (which implies that human remains could provide raw materials); (3) are incredibly strong, durable, and flexible (i.e., they don’t melt); (4) can be used as a semiconductor; and (5) can be used to make flexible screens. In simple terms, graphene is a thin layer of pure carbon; it is a single, tightly packed layer of carbon atoms that are bonded together in a hexagonal honeycomb lattice. It is among the thinnest and lightest compounds known to man at one atom thick, with one square meter coming in at around 0.77 milligrams. It is between 100 to 300 times stronger than steel with a tensile stiffness of 150,000,000 psi. Carbyne is also a chain of single atoms, but has twice the tensile strength of graphene and three times the tensile stiffness of diamond.

The consortiums used the composite materials to expand and fortify Livelle, and by the year 55 AR, while Chancellor Livelle had perished of old age, his legacy would influence humanity for centuries. (Note: Noriel Livelle had served as chancellor of the Livelle city-state from 2 AR to 12 AR.) Livelle’s population had increased to 23,573, and the city-state was ruled by its fifth chancellor, Sora Lubourne. Early in her rule, she received a request from the chief engineering officer of the Bashkirian Consortium to allow construction of villages beyond Livelle. The chancellor, sensitive to the needs of a growing population, granted the consortium’s request, and the Underground Realm was born.

The Bashkirian Consortium discovered thousands of underground streams and rivers, which connected to more caves and caverns. Very soon, numerous villages formed beyond the jurisdiction of Livelle, governed instead by local magistrates and executives. But unexplained, instantaneous deaths in shallower villages surrounding Livelle in 72 AR provided the first proof of concept of
Reassortment seepage
, the unexplained osmotic, diffusive process by which the strain passes through solids, including the Earth’s bedrock.

Scientists formulated a number of hypotheses regarding seepage including: (1) known imperfections in the Earth’s crust could’ve enabled the strain to descend, including faults, hydrothermal vents, volcanic hotspots, among others; (2) for many centuries, humans exploited the Earth through deep drilling for resources, which provided man-made features for the strain to descend; (3) even structures that seem impermeable, like bedrock, have small fissures and imperfections and over time, Reassortment, which is metabolically diverse, metabolizing organic molecules (heterotrophy) as well as extracting carbon from CO2 (autotrophy), could survive at greater and greater depths; (4) as it was suspected that Reassortment could use nitrogen/ammonia as an energy source (which would’ve enabled it to spread rapidly over the Earth’s atmosphere), it could also possibly use sulfur/sulfides, as well as hydrogen, methane, etc., which could allow it to thrive at even greater depths; and (5) a less likely scenario was that perhaps it was sentient, perhaps it was simply seeking out pockets of transhumans. (Note: we still don’t understand how Reassortment passes through gases, liquids, and solids.)

Though Reassortment seepage was an unfortunate occurrence, it wasn’t wholly unexpected, given the loss of contact with the Western Hegemony’s underground laboratories and bunkers located elsewhere in North America and around the world. But that the Reassortment Strain mysteriously descended so far underground presented a new and dangerous stage in the history of Livelle.

The recently elected chancellor, Abdiel Marlour, issued a travel and trade ban to and from Livelle, even as the ministry and Science District objected. Their concern was that if the Reassortment research team could not study the strain underground or upon the surface, Livelle had no hope of long-term survival. Hence, not all of them viewed Reassortment’s seepage as a terrible event, primarily because it would force Livellans—who hoped the strain would somehow disappear, or perhaps mutate into a benign organism—to face the truth and focus their time, energy, and resources on finding a cure, rather than bickering over expansion plans and barter trade. (Note: Noriel Livelle didn’t believe in a traditional monetary system, preferring instead a transfer of wealth based on a sophisticated, complex barter system, a system in place until the Age of Masimovian.)