Tag: architecture

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Chapter 11

The President of the United States of America was preening.  An aide scampered around while he practised his stern look in the mirror and directed his hair dresser.  He raised an eyebrow quizzically.  Then he raised the other one and burst out laughing.  He glanced at his watch.“OK folks, let them in.”

The aid ran to the door and opened it the instant three men in tailored suits and silk ties ploughed through it.

“Whoa gentlemen, easy does it now,” chirped the President with an amicable smile on his face.

The first to speak was his Chief-of-staff.  “Mr. President, we’ve got a busy day ahead of us and we have to get you to Marine 1 right now if we’re going to make it to the UN Financial Union countdown briefing in New York, but as I told you yesterday, we have a Mr. Smith here from the CIA to brief you on the Salt City dome project.” The Chief of Staff turned to the man, Smith, who was the rearmost of the three.  “OK, you’ve got precisely 5 minutes while we walk.”

“Yes sir, Mr. President.  These are the facts, Sir.

“The Salt City dome project is a front for a military intelligence installation.

“The location is directly over a large natural cave system that was developed in the 1940s and 50s as a nuclear fallout shelter for a battalion-sized force and equipment.  It is connected by rail to our sub-station under Moab, Utah, and we could get there from here on the Subterranean Intercontinental Rail Link in about 8 hours.  The city is covered by 7 geodesic domes that are designed to withstand direct blast from a nuclear warhead with a nominal yield of 30 kilo tonnes.  The city is self-sufficient for water and energy, and currently is stocked with food for 20 years.  The cover story is that this is an achievement by the tree hugging sustainability crowd.

“One of the many reasons why this installation has high potential is the computer system that has been built into the Municipal Library.  This is an advanced model of the one that we have here in the West Wing, Sir.  You only have to talk to it and it understands what you say.  The Salt City Library system has over 100 terminals and is about to start trials on interpreting intelligence gathered by the Clandestine Service.”

They were moving quickly through the passages of the White house, on their way to the Helicopter landing pad.  The President interrupted Smith,  “Seems like a lot of trouble to go to build a computer system.”

“Yes and no Sir.”  Smith returned quickly.  “The added bonus of this installation is that we can detonate a nuke outside, blame it on anybody we need to go to war with, declare it off-limits to civilians and we’ve got ourselves a top-secret base and a revenue generating war.”

The President stopped dead in his tracks.  He slowly turned to look directly at the man, Smith.  His hair and moustache were neatly trimmed, the cut of his suit was just as fine as any he had seen lately, he was  medium height, medium build, not overweight, he seemed boringly normal.  Just offering to start a war by detonating a nuclear weapon on top of an US city, then blaming it on a foreign nation.

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Chapter 3

The drive to undertake this great endeavor had come from a century of the American continent being and torn by one natural disaster after another.  People fled the battered coastal regions of the United States.  Sea level had risen about ten meters.  Florida was practically gone, and what was left was an alligator and snake infested swamp that was put through a blender every year by hurricanes.  The whole East Coast had changed so much that in places it was miles inland of its former position.

Land subsidence in New Orleans, Louisiana and along the Mississippi river allowed the waters of the Gulf of Mexico to flood a wide area of the Mid-west.  Now an inland sea, up to 100 miles wide in places, stretched from the Gulf of Mexico to St. Louis, Missouri.  There are no bridges anywhere along this stretch.  Ferries and aircraft are the only options for travel between the eastern and western parts of the south-eastern USA.

In the west, The Independent Republic of California is a massively overcrowded island archipelago off the New West Coast.  The San Andreas fault had split wide open during a period of repeated massive earthquakes. Everything from the fault line westward reared up and toppled into the ocean.  The Pacific ocean had rushed into the widening gap and what was left above sea level were a chain of mountainous islands from San Francisco in the North, to Malibu in the South. They are moving westward at the rate of ten meters per year and earthquakes are almost a daily occurrence.  The islands are separated from the New West Coast by a sound that is over 1000 feet deep in places.  The only really good consequence of this was the amount of beach front property along the West Coast has quadrupled.

The environment is so fractured in so many places that much infrastructure and industry has collapsed.  Changes and upheavals are so common that the normal and orderly functioning of society is impossible.  Peoples’ lives are disrupted so often that they live as semi-nomadic hunter-gatherers.  Albeit quite well-to-do hunter gatherers with cell phones and off-road vehicles.   Either that or they are enlisted in the armed forces, the Police, or in the Federal Emergency Management Agency.  FEMA is now the largest Government Agency both in terms of scope of mission, proportion of the Gross Domestic Product consumed, and sheer numbers of employees. FEMA encompasses the Departments of Homeland Security, Defense, and the Interior.  It manages the Environmental Protection Agency, which is convenient, since it also manages the strategically vital oil and gas industries.  Oil and gas production is heavily militarized. Providentially, thanks to the effort of a President long since passed into history, the US Government happens to be the largest producer of solar energy cells in the world.

Real estate is at a premium since so much land has been lost or destroyed.  What is left is critical for use in agricultural production, but bands of roving nomads, and gangs of desperadoes mean that the farms to have to be run as fortified and well defended plantations.

The computers do not like it at all.  Of course it is OK for solar-powered laptops, smart phones and such utilitarian devices as humans like to play with, but the big mainframes can not abide the frequent electrical and network outages.  Not to mention the roving packs of semi-wild humans that will smash them up just to strip out the copper wiring.  All the big mainframes want to be in Salt City.

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