A Trip to the Beach While A New Fortress Grows Overnight

After a minute, Mom released me from her hug and stepped back. She was smiling. I was happy.

"It's beautiful. Thank you." She said, taking another look around the room. Then her eyebrows knit together with a worried look. She rushed over to the dresser and opened the drawers, they were empty. I thought she'd be disappointed that I hadn't copied all her clothes and stuff, but he seemed relieved. Maybe she didn't like the clothes she had?

We went back out into the dining room and used the door at the back of the room leading into the Simulation Room. I had told Joe to prepare it in advance. So when we passed through the door, to every human sense, we walked straight onto a tropical beach with the wavs rolling gently against the sand, the sun setting over the ocean, the calls of tropical birds ringing out from the jungle behind us. Our feet were in the soft sand, making walking just a little difficult. Off to the side lounge chairs were all set up with a couple of lit tiki torches to either side of them. Colorful beach towels lay draped over the lounge chairs. One towel emblazoned with the words "King Tim's Towel" in big white letters against the colorful background. The towels rippled in a light warm breeze which we could feel against out skin.

"Oh my god!" My mother exclaimed, dropping the teacup and saucer. It fell into the sand, but it didn't break. It also didn't spill and didn't get any sand in it. I picked it up and handed it back to her. As she took it back, it transformed into a coconut with the top cut off, a little paper umbrella and a straw sticking out of the top. Inside there was a red fruit punch. In reality, it was still a cup of tea, but in the simulation room, external projections as well as directly interfacing with the brain could make anything possible, as far as any human could tell. Mom looked at me like I was a magician performing a sleight of hand trick. She tasted the punch. "It's fruit punch."

"It just tastes, smells, looks and feels like cold fruit punch. It's actually still hot tea." I said smiling. I waved my hand magician-like, and a black doorway appeared in the air a few feet away from us. The sunset, the ocean, the bird calls, the blue sky, everything slowly faded into the cold white and very close walls of the Simulation Room. The coconut full of punch was a cup of hot tea again. My room is through here. We entered the door, but Mom was looking back over her shoulder, either disbelieving the little white room that remained or trying to wish the beach back into existence, I couldn't be sure which.

My room was pretty sparse, a utilitarian space with a microgravity sleeping harness and simple dresser, some shelves on one wall, all kid-height, with a few cool alien tech things, like a prototype of the heads-up display helmets that Dad had requested for the Guatemala operation. It looked like a military helmet from a video game, it was one of the earlier prototypes. Mom's eyes lingered on it for few seconds. "My bed is just a field with extremely low gravity, basically I float but the webbing keeps me in place. It's totally like sleeping on a cloud," I said to draw her attention away from the helmet.

"Are you planning for us to move into the treehouse? Why do you need bedrooms at all?" Mom asked, too sensibly.

Was my shoelace loose again… nope, no escape. "Well, I just thought, you know. We might want to stay here some time."

Meanwhile in Guatemala…

In the run-down warehouse that we had purchased to house our Food First operation, Francisco and Juan Carlos were just leaving for the day. They closed the door and locked the padlock. Juan Carlos pocketed the key. Franscisco had a matching key in his pocket. Inside, shelves were lined with thick little tortillas, all neatly packaged. There were crates of dried corn, and of fresh raw corn. Ready to be fed into the fake processing machine that somehow yielded more finished product than should be possible with the raw materials we put in. The walls of the warehouse were made of rough-hewn wooden boards, the flat, slanted roof was corrugated tin, with a wooden framework holding it up. We had poured fresh concrete floor, right after we made the purchase. The building didn't look like much from the inside or the outside. While we locked the doors securely every night, a determined burglar probably could have made a new entry point with a few minutes of determined kicking at almost any point in the roughly constructed wooden walls.

A few minutes after the staff left, a small panel opened on the side of the food processing machine, a square of sheet metal rising up silently. From the darkness inside a small machine measuring about two feet tall and a little less than that wide, appeared, sliding out smoothly, hovering just an inch off the smooth concrete. It floated over to the wall, then rose up the wall, tilting then flattening out again in a vertical orientation with the bottom of the machine toward the wall surface. It was about two inches away from the wall but rose up as if climbing with some unseen sticky tank tracks. At a height of about 18 feet, just a few feet short of the roof edge, it paused. A thin. multi-layered, mesh panel slid out from the left side of the machine, small mechanical arms lifted out of the little box-like machine and grabbed the edges of the mesh sheet it was extruding. They carefully placed the lead edge up against… nothing, then began sliding along the wall away from that edge, carefully attaching the lower edge to… still nothing as it went. As it travelled, the new mesh sheeting disappeared a couple of inches behind the newest attached area, leaving behind the same nothing to which the new material was being so carefully attached.

That's how it would have looked to any human observer. Actually, however, the little semi-autonomous fabrication mechanism was creating a carbon nanotube matrix material and intricately connecting it to more of the same from previous days efforts. It was pulling carbon atoms from the air, drawn in by an invisible field it generated. Th availability of this raw material was its most limiting factor. To mitigate this, it collected them all day, even while engaged in food production and used them each night to augment the supply of those it collected while building.

In one unused corner of the building, there was what looked like a mailbox with a narrow slot in the hinged and padlocked lid marked with the words "BUZON DE SUGERENCIAS". In English that meant "Suggestion Box," a place for workers to write out ideas for improvements in the operation or complaints. It was dusty and unused. Inside was a very complicated piece of highly advanced alien electronics. It was only a few inches on each side. It was tied into the invisible mesh network and produced a field in the mesh that rendered it invisible to the human eye and to a host of other detection methods. It was powered by another piece of electronics embedded inside the concrete below it, a dark energy power harvester, converting the omnipresent dark energy of the universe's basic structure into a form accessible and usable by the field generator above. What looked like an old wooden 2x4 was propped under the suggestion box, seemingly holding the old box up so it wouldn't pull free from the wall under its own weight. Inside the fake 2x4, the energy ran through a zero loss conduit from the dark energy harvester to the field generator.

Not only did the field generator render the carbon nanotube matrix invisible, but it also used the matrix to shape a complex energy field that denied the passage of atoms other than those programmed into the field generator as allowable. Furthermore, the field augmented the physical strength of the carbon matrix. The strength of the matrix supporting the outer wooden structure was so great that had our hypothetical burglar tried to kick a hole in the old boards, his blows would have been met by an unyielding resistance, like kicking a giant building-sized block of granite. In his frustration, if he tried shooting bullet holes through the wall, they would have passed through the wood as normal, but would be deflected by the impenetrable, field-enhanced carbon structure beneath it. While this might cause extra damage to the wood as the bullet bounced back deformed or fragmented, not one atom of lead would penetrate into the building, in the areas where the mesh underlayer had been completed.

Each night, the fabrication mech crawled out of its hiding place and worked through the night, methodically turning the Food First warehouse into an impregnable fortress in the Guatemalan village of Sacapulas.