Ebola Fate, Chapter Two

Ebola Fate

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Chapter 2

February 14, 2034 10:30 AM, Monrovia, Liberia

It had been twenty years since the onset of the last Ebola outbreak. So much had changed in Liberia since then. A few years after the outbreak, there had been yet another civil war. But this one was different from the previous ones; rather than deposing one corrupt regime in order to install another, Liberia had a new set of founding fathers who believed that the name Liberia was supposed to indicate a belief in Liberty. They formed a constitutional republic, and created a government that was as minimal as they felt was possible. It protected property, enforced contracts, and maintained roads and parks. Taxation was limited to tariffs on imports.

The results were hard to argue with. In just fifteen short years, almost all of the battle damage from the previous three civil wars had been repaired. The roads were paved. Farms were bustling outside of the cities. Children had grown into young adults, without the emotional trauma associated with growing up in a war zone.

Three years ago, a group of these young men and women had heard about a technology that some engineers in Huntsville, Alabama were trying to sell back in the early 2000's: thorium-flouride salt reactors. It never really caught on, but they figured that was largely because of fears around nuclear power and the engineers' inability to sell it. Here in Monrovia, they had a few advantages that the guys in Alabama didn't. Their government largely ignored them, as long as they weren't committing violent crime or theft. This meant that they could build pretty much whatever they wanted to, if they could just get the material. Material was incredibly cheap. Old shot-up technicals — pickup trucks with guns mounted in the bed — were a dime a dozen in the scrap heaps around town, and provided access to steel, aluminum, and plastic with very little effort.

John Merryman had naturally led them - he was without a doubt the most passionate about thorium. He had started to collect dirt and build a small-scale refinery as soon as he learned about it. Russel Klhea joined Merryman's team a few weeks later.  John had told him, "this is several orders of magnitude more powerful than any fossil fuel. Solar, wind — they're nifty, but they're weak. I think we can make a reactor that will fit on a palette, power a city block with ease, and only require new fuel once a century."

Russel had asked, "if that's the case, how do we make money? We can't very well sell fuel a century from now!"

"There's a lot of city blocks in the world."

Russel was sold. And it was a good thing for Merryman. John may have been passionate about thorium, but he didn't know how to build a damn thing. Russel did. He'd picked up welding from his uncle and learned how to cast metals by watching old YouTube videos. He pointed out all of the mistakes that John had made in building his refinery, and set about researching reactor designs. He was fifteen years old, an Ebola baby. His parents had both died in the outbreak. His uncle barely evaded capture during the war. He had no formal education whatsoever. His uncle kept him connected to the Internet, and made sure that he watched educational stuff on YouTube, used Khan Academy to learn math, and joined him in the shop as much as possible.

And it payed off in spades, because Russel figured out that the engineers in Huntsville were over-thinking it. His contraption, the ThS reactor, was a boiler that you could hook up to a simple steam turbine to get electricity. It had no moving parts - just a water inlet and two steam outlets. One outlet would go to the steam turbine. The other went to a copper pipe, where it would condense into clean water. He figured he might as well solve the freshwater crisis as long as he was solving the energy crisis.

And it worked phenomenally well. It produced a steady fifty kilowatts, required one square meter of level, solid floor, and was perfectly safe, even when it didn't have any water. Its interior would get up to about three hundred degrees Celsius and stay there in the absence of water. Sure, you wouldn't want to put your hand inside, but the insulation meant the exterior was never over about forty degrees.

Today promised to be exciting. They had used up quite a bit of microcredit building their prototype. They had done odd jobs, and worked nights and weekends to pull this off. But pull it off, they had. They figured a "properly" manufactured unit would have a manufacturing cost right around $2000, including the fuel pellets that would last a century. They intended to sell it for $4000. All they needed was some financing to patent and start manufacturing it. This was where Lane Stevens came in.

Lane was a lawyer from Dallas, Texas. He specialized in tech startups, helping them get patents and financing. He loved his work: there was no more efficient way for him to help humanity's progress, than by helping innovators make progress. He generally worked for scrip — partial ownership in the companies he was helping — and had made a small fortune in the process.

He once thought that graduating during the Great Recession was a curse. He'd had to live with his parents because he couldn't find steady paying work. None of the firms near his home were hiring anything other than unpaid interns. He tried his hand at being a barista at Starbucks, but he hated it. So he worked as an intern for Betz and Betz, until one of his friends came to him with an invention, asking for a referral. He offered one better: he would write up the patent applications and help set up the corporation in exchange for a 2% stake in the company. Two years later, that company sold out to Apple for two billion dollars. While he was in line to deposit his 40 million dollar check, he called John Betz, and told him he wasn't going to continue his internship.

Lane flew into Monrovia with extreme excitement. He'd video chatted with John Merryman a few times, and if what he and Russel were telling him was true, this was the invention that would change everything for humanity. The typical home was using right around a kilowatt at any point in time, on average. This device could power 50 homes, pretty much indefinitely, for about $4000. That was less than one month's utilities, if they pooled their resources.

He was planning on staying here for no less than a month, and wanted to work just about continuously. Too bad he started to get a headache right as they touched down. "God, I hope this isn't an allergic reaction to some weird plant they have over here. That would suck balls."

He gathered his luggage, and exited the terminal, looking to his left for the pink moustache on a fender, the telltale sign of the Lyft he had ordered. Uber didn't have a strong presence here yet, which was a mystery to Lane. A country like Liberia, with its amazing success over the past decade and a half? How could Uber not have followed Lyft's lead in bringing ride-sharing here? It was crazy to him how poor management became as companies matured. Talk about missed opportunities!

Lane climbed into the passenger seat of the 2031 Honda Civic, as the driver loaded his luggage into the trunk. The driver climbed in, and noticed the address. "Sir, this is in the warehouse district. You don't want me to bring you to a hotel?"

"No, sir! I want to get straight to work. Hey, do you have an aspirin or something?"

"No, I'm afraid not," the Lyft driver, Dorley, said as he put the car into gear and began the short trek to Merryman Labs. "What brings you to Liberia?"

"I'm here to help change the world."

"Oh? For the better, I hope!"

"Indeed, for the better. Imagine making one final electricity payment, and having your house powered for the next 100 years."

"I'd be happy just to have a house. I'm living in an apartment with three roommates."

"Heh. Well, we're going to reduce the cost of home ownership, and even apartment rental, so much that you may find yourself able to afford one."

Lane pulled his phone out and checked his messages. He opened the link to his uncle Johnny's new video showing the barn next door to his place in Blackland coming down. They had walked through it a few days ago, so Lane was looking forward to seeing the demolition. It was filthy, the rafters were rotting, the siding was pretty much gone. It really needed to come down. Hell, it needed to come down decades ago, if Johnny was to be believed, but Lane remembered seeing it as a kid, when he'd visit his cousin Kelly, and it didn't look that bad to him back then.

His next message was approximately 1000 heart emoji. Debbie wanted to make sure that Lane knew she loved him, even if he was away on business for Valentine's day.

Next message: a photo of his 9 year old son, holding a case of Valentine cards for his classmates. Man, that kid was cute!

"Here you are, sir! Merryman Labs!"

February 14, 2034, 11:20 AM, Merryman Labs, Monrovia, Liberia

"Lane, it's so great to finally meet you in person. I'm John Merryman, this is Russel Klhea, our chief of technology. This is Teta Tondo, structural engineer. She studied at the University of Texas - I understand that's your alma mater?"

"Indeed it is. Hook em horns!"

"This is Boakai Pupo, nuclear physicist. He's been instrumental in making sure our designs really are fail-safe. He figured out how large the fuel pellet could be without risking it melting down if you allowed it to dry out."

"This is Mulbah Freeman. He's been in charge of financing, and managed to keep us thrifty so that we would borrow the absolute minimum to make this thing real. He's found any number of ways to cut costs, but we've had to override him on occasion."

Lane was shaking hands with each introduction. After meeting Mulbah, he stepped back from the group, and said, "Look guys - if I'm convinced, then by the end of this demonstration, you're all going to be debt free and, by Liberian standards anyway, massively wealthy. You've certainly earned it! Let's see what you've got."

John stepped away from the group. "Mr Stevens, do you mind if I use this as an opportunity to practice my sales pitch? I know you already know a lot of what we're talking about here, and I don't want to bore you."

"Absolutely, John. Just because I'm like 99% sure I'm going to invest don't mean I'm going to be the one selling this. You're the front man here, and you need practice at being a rock star."

 "OK, then rock star training mode engaged! Lane, as you know, we've been working for three years on bringing safe, small-scale nuclear power to market. And this is what we've come up with!" He grabbed the sheet that was hanging over a meter-and-a-half tall box, and pulled it away.

"As you can see, the base is a simple steel palette, compatible with just about any palette-jack or forklift anywhere. It's housed in a frame of 100 millimeter square tubing. This box on the bottom is our boiler. It's made of 3 millimeter thick, cold-rolled carbon steel, welded into a simple box. In the production version, all of this will be powder-coated, of course. This connector is where you hook up your garden hose to give it some water. There's a sight glass here so you can tell if you need to add more water, and two pressure valves to make sure the thing won't explode due to a steam build-up. This pipe is where the steam exits the boiler, and proceeds to this conical device - the steam turbine. Teta had to get out of her comfort zone to figure out the best profile for the turbine fans. Our first turbine produced about 10 watts. Teta spent a lot of time using Blender and a CFD simulator, to come up with a turbine shape that got much closer to the theoretic limits. Now this thing produces 50 kilowatts! And that, of course, happens by way of this electric generator hooked up to the turbine. The parts cost, for the parts that are actually being used in this model, are right around $1000. We figure it's another $1000 in labor to make and assemble, for a total manufacturing cost of $2000. We ought to be able to sell them for $4000, no problem."

"This is fantastic.  What's the fuel pellet look like?"



"Before I show you, let me cool it down by adding some water to the boiler. We keep it dry in there when we aren't actively testing the generator, so that we can make sure it truly is fail safe and won't melt down." John connected a hose to the inlet, and turned on the water. The boiler immediately started hissing as the new water flashed to steam, sucking heat out of the floor and walls. This stopped shortly thereafter and the sight glass slowly filled to about five inches of depth. John then opened the boiler's service panel, reached in, and pulled out an unusually machined ball. It was cool and wet. "This ball is the outer sheath for the refined thorium core. The sheath is made of lead, and consists of two halves that thread together. Both halves are 3D printed. The idea is to allow water to flow freely into the core, where it can be heated by the thorium, while at the same time providing no clear line-of-sight to the thorium itself. This means that no radiation escapes, and even though I'm holding it, I am not being irradiated by it any more than I am by the concrete floor of this lab. However, it is producing heat, and I'm going to put it back in before the heat burns me."

He did so, and screwed the boiler's service panel closed.

"Now, it will take about 5 minutes for the thorium to heat the water in the boiler to the point where it starts to steam. When it does, we'll hear the turbine start to spin. That will in turn spin the generator, and voila! 50 kilowatts of power.  And it will generate that 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, for at least 100 years."

"John, this is amazing. While we wait, I thought I'd show you the rough draft for the patent application. So, do I have the diagram on page 3 right? Based on your description of the sheath, I wonder if these dimensions are reasonable."

Russel chimed in, "It's close, but it misses a critical detail. If you look right here, you'll see that this line overlaps this arc - that's not really physically possible. It ought to terminate at the arc."

"Oh, you're right. I'll put a red-line in for my draftsman back in Texas.  Hey - do any of you happen to have an aspirin? I've been fighting a headache since I landed."

Teta hopped up from her chair. "Sure thing, Mr Stevens. Let me just run to the kitchen. I've got just the thing to cure what ails you."

February 14, 2034 11:38 AM, Merryman Labs, Monrovia, Liberia

... Or not.

Lane's headache had already gotten to the point where it was astonishing that he was still working.  The adrenaline rush of seeing the device in person, and meeting the team that was destined to change the world, had been enough to push the ache to the back of his mind. But now it came crashing to the forefront. His temple pulsed, and his eyes felt like they were on fire. He pressed his hand to his forehead, grunting as the pain overwhelmed everything else. His vision narrowed until he could barely see a single letter on the page in front of him - everything surrounding it had become a dark kaleidoscope of browns and blacks, and the occasional neon purple light. He'd had migraines before, and this was worse. Significantly worse.

"Guys, I think this is a stroke or something. Call an amb-"

His stomach cramped up, blocking his ability to speak, and seizing his abdominal muscles. His chest slammed into his knees as the cramp grew stronger. "What the hell is going on?" he thought to himself as his head slammed into the table. He screamed out in agony, and fell out of his chair.

John was shocked. In fact, everybody at the table was shocked. Teta, hearing Lane's scream, came running from the kitchen. She knelt down in front of him, and turned him onto his back.

He opened his eyes again. His full field of vision was restored, but now everything was blurry; his eyes were full of tears. "I think I need an ambulance."

Russel, forcing himself into action, pulled his telephone out of his pocket, and pressed the emergency call button on the lock screen, and placed the phone against his face.

Lane's vision was turning a pink hue. "Why am I seeing pink?"

Teta looked at him with a growing sense of horror. She saw his eyes turning red, but not in a bloodshot way. It was more like his tears were becoming suffused with blood, and his eyelids were swelling. She averted her eyes from his, and looked at his mouth. His gums were bleeding. She pulled her hands away from him, stood up and started to back away. "No. Oh, good God, please. No."

Russel finished telling the operator their location, and looked at Teta, "What is it?" He stood up and started to walk towards her.

"GET BACK!" She yelled. Everybody froze, rather than actually getting back. "I mean it - BACK AWAY! Go in the other room!"

As Russel walked backwards, he asked, "Why!? What's going on!"

"I haven't seen this since I was a little girl. I prayed every day I would never see it again."

With that, all of the other young people on the team instantly knew that they were in terrible danger. It was a threat that had not been seen in Liberia - or anywhere in the world, really - for twenty years. Even so, most of them were old enough to remember the last time it wreaked havoc in Liberia. They instantly recalled the first time they saw their parents terrified. Russel, the youngest, wasn't old enough to remember the last outbreak, but he knew how sad his uncle would get if he could be coaxed into talking about it.

Ebola.

Chapter Three >>