Backscatter

Porto Santo with its 42 sq km of land was 5.7% of the size of main island of Madeira, and with 1200 residents held 1% of the country's population. Once a plush vacation getaway for Europe's elite, the tiny island was now a fabulously successful year-round agricultural community, for reasons Megan still did not fully understand.

She had first arrived at these docks by hitching a ride on a fishing boat on a sunny afternoon in mid May of 2047, one brief day after being dazzled by the richness and power of Funchal. The trip on the fishing boat had fascinated her almost as much as her jet flight two days previously. The boat was powered both by sails and a powerful hydrogen engine, and the nets were operated with battery-driven winches. Megan was amazed at first at the rich and varied harvest the crew delivered to the people of Porto Santo at the end of the day. But then an elder crewmember told her they had caught in five hours of work what his grandparent would have caught in one. The deep sea around Madeira was not nearly as fished out as the Caribbean, but it was still in sad shape.

As she waited now for Alvaro's ferry, her mind drifted back to her first days on the island. Everything was so novel then! But now the small island was her home. She felt as if she knew almost every square meter, and each one was a treasure. Playing on the beaches, hiking on the short mountains or on the rough rocky coastlines, riding absolutely everywhere, it was one picture-postcard day after another. As in Texas, she had a challenging job that she loved. But unlike Texas, she also had lots of free time for recreation and reflection. And her soul had responded to the gentle beauty and the kindness around her, growing in ways she never realized were possible.

Love! Twelve hundred people, and they as dear to her now as one large family. Her first day at Madeira, Megan remembered feeling shocked when Alvaro told her the position reserved for her was that of Lead Veterinarian of Porto Santo. Alvaro would continue to live and work on the main island. Megan was asked to commit to the job on Porto Santo for one year. She did, and for the first few weeks felt somewhat abandoned.

But as the spring of 2047 turned to summer, she began to see Alvaro's point and the thoughtfulness behind her placement. Portuguese and English were both in common use on Madeira. Here on Porto Santo, almost everybody knew a little English but by tradition it wasn't used. It was full immersion for Megan into the new language, and she picked it up far more easily than if she had been at the capital. By the fall, she felt comfortable speaking in the language, before winter she realized she had switched to thinking in Portuguese, and on Alvaro's last visit at the end of January, he had paid her the ultimate compliment of saying she was speaking without an accent. Megan wasn't sure, but she suspected her dreams now were in Portuguese too.

Beautiful and free. That's what Alvaro said he wanted her to be. And it had come to pass. She had a true and permanent place in the society around her, and it was totally independent of her relationship with Alvaro. In their dating now, when they would meet as the transport made its round trips on the last weekend of each month, they met as equals.

Porto Santo! Her home! She knew it so intimately well, and yet her island still presented her some deep mysteries. Such dichotomy! Sometimes reality is just as it appears, and sometimes appearances can be deceiving. The dilemma that Megan faced when she first arrived was how to tell the difference.

A smile crossed her face as she spotted the ship heading for the harbor. She had never known the modified naval frigate to be late, though on one month its service between Madeira and Porto Santo had been cancelled due to an extended 14,000 km round-trip trading expedition to Scandinavia and Russia.

Megan knew the ship was used extensively for trading besides its month-end ferry service between the two home islands. A dock hand once told her the ship usually paid a monthly visit to Dar-el-Beida of the Islamic West African Union, the city once called Casablanca. The I.W.A.U. was Madeira's number one trading partner, and its port was only 800 km due east of Porto Santo. Over Christmas the ship made a more extensive excursion, traveling 2500 km to the north and east to trade with Ireland and the UK.

The ship was named Discovery and with a length of 134 meters was rather small for its mission of deep-sea merchant. It had an unloaded displacement weight of 4800 tons and was a former Halifax-class military frigate. The ship was converted to a corvette transport in 2040, retaining almost all of its original firepower with the exception of the helicopter landing deck in the stern area which was converted to additional cargo and passenger space.

The extensive missile, torpedo, and gun armament of Discovery had saved it more than once from pirates. Its high firepower to cargo ratio made it very unappealing for pirates to attack. It was the flagship of Madeira's tiny navy, which consisted of Discovery and twelve high-speed armed patrol boats that were hydrogen powered and used for local coastal defense. Discovery with its boats and land-based attack helicopters was a formidable weapon. The flagship had state-of-the-art battle control systems, and could coordinate the mini sea and air fleet into one integrated multi-point firing system.

Megan pushed out her bare arms into the warm sunlight and stretched. What was her previous thought? Oh yes, dichotomy! She thought of the obvious facts of her first days here, and what an obvious fit her placement was.

The tiny island of Porto Santo had a compact community hospital at the airport terminal complex near the center of the island. It had first-class facilities and staff. Adjacent to the human hospital was the animal clinic, equally well equipped but staffed by local farmers. They had a huge amount of practical experience but none the advanced training that Megan could offer. She immersed herself in farm-animal care and treatment, horses and goats, dogs and cats, ducks and chickens. There were even a few pigs and sheep and incredibly, a dozen milk-producing cows and three bulls. She would often partner with the human surgeons in the treatment of injured animals.

And then there was the not so obvious, in fact, the incredible. Power! Electricity existed here in abundance, both at Madeira and even at tiny Porto Santo. In her nine months here, Megan had never known it to fail. Impossible! Like a dream from her childhood bedtime stories in Portland. Her Irish father would tell young Megan fables of a fast world bright with its power, in the times before the cruelty took the brightness away.

Security about the abundance of power was a concern for everybody. There were strict standards against exposing electric lights to the outdoors, especially at night. The island was isolated, but such displays might arouse the puzzlement of ships passing on the horizon or people analyzing satellite photos. Occasional accidents would of course happen, but the island tried to emit no more light than what would be typical for 1,200 people using lamp-oil.

On the main island of Madeira, the standards were considerably more relaxed. It was public knowledge that the high mountains provided hydroelectric power, and there was an extensive farm of twelve 2.0 MW wind turbines on Die Ilhas Desertas, the thin narrow island chain 35 km southeast of Madeira. It was power that had saved the society in 2036. But at Porto Santo, where was the power coming from?

Although Megan's island home of Porto Santo had no hydroelectric power, there were three 2.0 MW wind turbines on Ilhen na Cahleta, a tiny island at the southeastern tip of Porto Santo. Megan would often ride her horse along the southern beach and gaze westward across the narrow 500 meter channel. The three huge wind towers were clearly visible, ninety meter diameter rotors with their hubs a hundred meters above the ground. Almost everyone on the island thought that these three towers were the sole source of Porto Santo's power.

But were they? Were they enough to run the very capable hydrogen disassociation plant and desalination plant and water storage systems that were also on Ilhen na Cahleta? Were they enough to run the sewerage treatment plant on the opposite eastern end of Porto Santo? Were the three towers enough to run all of Megan's household appliances and first-class plumbing and give her all the concealed lighting and hot water she would ever want? In her idle time, she played with the numbers, and they just didn't add up. So where did all the power come from?

And the fresh water! The desalination plant produced a tremendous amount of fresh water, enough to do extensive irrigation during the hot dry summer last year. The common attitude among the local population was just to shrug and avoid prying too deeply into how the government was performing its magic. Her husband-to-be Alvaro Lopes was universally held in almost reverent regard. In the year after becoming Madeira's managing director of Energy in late 2041, power outages became a thing of the past, and fresh water was now abundant. No one wanted to ask the probing question of why.

In addition to the remote island wind farms, the Madeira Energy Department ran two very well secured power facilities, one in the high mountains of Madeira where Alvaro worked and one in the high hills of Porto Santo. Megan had often ridden or hiked up the hill to the boundary of the local power plant, both to enjoy the view of the island and to exchange friendly waves with the guards. But the power plant's interior was the one complex on the island she had never visited. Where did all the power come from?

The problem came to the forefront of her attention in the late summer of 2047, when for several weeks the west trade winds died and it was still business as usual for the island's power consumption. In quiet talks with the locals, Megan discovered that before 2042, the still air of the doldrums would have resulted in major hardships of spoiled food in non-working refrigerators and running the farms purely on human and horse power. But no longer. Where did all the extra power come from?

After pressing her friends to discuss this, Megan found that there were several ideas existing in the local population. The first was that additional power was being delivered from Madeira through an undersea power cable to Ilhen na Cahleta. Megan was sure that wasn't right. Porto Santo had 20% of the country's wind turbines and 1% of its population, and the main island was much more prodigious in its use of power. The thought of Madeira shipping power to Porto Santo was absurd.

What was in the powerhouse? The island's second conjecture was that the government had somehow procured and installed compact SNAP (Space Nuclear Auxiliary Power) generators for the days and weeks when the wind died. Megan did some research. SNAP power units were basically cans of plutonium-238 dioxide surrounded by radiator fins with thermocouples in between. Megan had done very well in basic college physics back at U.C. Davis. It wasn't her calling but she understood the concepts.

Megan's problem was that she saw people charging electric farm equipment on the island's power grid during the weeks when the wind had died. Could SNAP generators meet that kind of demand? Her back-of-the-envelope calculations suggested a minimum of a hundred tons of plutonium dioxide to support the usage she had seen. Where in the world could anyone ever get a hundred tons of plutonium dioxide? At a very basic level, the idea seemed ridiculous.

And to make matters absolutely maddening, she was sure Alvaro knew the true answer to the apparent magic. In some quiet times with her, when they were alone together in the evenings, he did everything but openly admit there was a hidden explanation, and Megan in her mercy would stop her questioning only because she could see how much she was distressing him.

She thought perhaps if she researched his background, she might discover the key to the mystery. Without telling Alvaro, she downloaded from Madeira's online library all the papers he published in the late 2030's and his doctoral thesis from Princeton. Megan was stunned by the quality of Madeira's main library. It was located at the University at Funchal, and its archives were vast, world-class. Megan guessed it probably surpassed the current U.S. Library of Congress.

Megan O'Connor was born in Portland, Oregon on July 10, 2024. She started grade school a year early and then skipped a grade, starting junior high in 2033 as a young nine-year old and then spending three years each in junior high, high school, premed undergrad at the University of Washington, and then finally veterinary grad student at U.C. Davis. Megan was very proud of her achievement of going from junior-high to her Doctorate in just nine years.

Alvaro had done it in eight, and starting from a much younger age. He was a true wunderkind, spending only three years in grade school and two years in junior high and entering high school as a young nine-year old, the same year Megan entered junior high. Megan was flabbergasted when he told her his birthday was August 03, 2024. She was actually older than he was by a few weeks. When Alvaro had come to Princeton as a grad student in the fall of 2039, he was barely fifteen years old, but he already had an extensive list of publications in refereed journals. He received his Ph.D. in June of 2041, two months before his seventeenth birthday. He was among the first of the foreign students to swear mandatory allegiance to the United States.

And his Princeton thesis! What a disappointment for Megan, at least in terms of solving the energy mystery. It was on cosmology, the creation and lifecycle of the universe. His ideas on cosmological evolution were so revolutionary that he had resurrected an extinct field of physics, pulled several world-renowned Princeton professors out of retirement just to work with him. It was a revolutionary advance, with a whole new branch of fundamental physics that Alvaro in his thesis called singularity mechanics.

His approach seemed to solve three distinct long-standing problems with astrophysics and deep-sky observations from the 2010's. The first had to do with the inflationary phase of the early universe, just after its conception in the Big Bang. The second was the Mario Livio anomaly, concerning the gravitational lensing of the cosmos. The third was the apparent super quiescence of black holes. Alvaro's work was considered seminal for solving all three major problems.

Megan's problem was that she had no idea how to understand his work. The mathematics was simply too difficult for her to follow. But it certainly didn't seem the type of thesis that would explain how to get the equivalent of a hundred tons of plutonium dioxide on a hilltop. Her love was a brilliant astrophysicist and probably among the world's top mathematicians, and his current work remained a complete mystery to her.

Alvaro, her love! The transport ship Discovery was docking now, and in a few minutes they would be in each other's arms again. Two wonderful days of hiking and riding were before them. Picnic lunches in the hills, leisurely strolls on the beach, riding their beautiful horses, two electric-light dinners with superb farm-fresh food, two wonderful nights of being with her future husband.

They had not announced anything yet, and some of their friends were beginning to roll their eyes and ask what they were waiting for. But unknown to all their friends, they had not yet begun to sleep with each other. Megan was quite willing. It was Alvaro who wanted to hold back until they were married, or perhaps at least until they announced their engagement. The reasons were the morals Alvaro's parents had taught him as a child. The question of whether Megan was a virgin had nothing to do with the decision. They had discussed the issue briefly. Alvaro was a virgin and Megan was not.

Megan knew the wait was almost over. They met only one weekend a month, but they had been talking and e-mailing with each other daily through the undersea cable since her first day on the island. They both knew each other's character intimately. They both owned each other's love, and soon they would announce to their country that they owned each other's bodies. Megan smiled. Perhaps as early as this weekend, and if not this month, probably the next. The long wait was almost over.

And he was here! Her true love was walking down the plank to the docks. She got up and raced to meet him.

Chapter 4. St. Bridget's Complaint

Time: Saturday, February 29, 2048 9 PM, lower level of Megan's quarters

Alvaro and Megan came back to Megan's house at 9 PM after a long evening stroll and headed straight to the lower level. It had been a wonderful day of recreation for them both. Most of it was spent riding their horses in a great circumnavigation of the beaches and coastal roads of Porto Santo. They had dinner at Megan's home at 5 PM and then left again just at the sun was setting at six. A full moon rose in the east a half hour later and provided ample light for their long walk. They started off by holding hands and soon switched to holding hips. The numerous houses along the roads appeared dark and vacant, but they both knew how deceiving appearances could be. The world was quiet and peaceful, filled only with the sounds of the night wildlife and the farm animals.

"Such a beautiful night," commented Alvaro in Portuguese as they walked.

"I like it even better with a new moon," replied Megan with fluent Portuguese and a cheerful laugh. "The stars are stunning then... Hah!"

"What?"

"I was just thinking about something my parents told me long ago. It seemed so romantic this evening when we had dinner by electric lights. We save the candles for emergencies. But my mom once told me that when she was a teenager, candlelight was considered romantic, much more so than electric lights. Imagine!"

Alvaro smiled. "Do you think of home often?"

Megan paused. "The people sometime. Our web connections are down so often now, not to Madeira but to the rest of the world. I sometimes wonder if my old friends are okay, and I haven't been able to reach my parents since Christmas."

Alvaro nodded and sighed. "It's not us. The worldwide web is failing."

"Yes, I know. Everything is under the knife and the explosive. But not here!" She gestured at the nearby farm houses with her free arm. "Here is an oasis of peace! I bet you every one of those doors is not even locked."

Alvaro laughed. "Ha! I grew up here, remember? No bet!"

"Is it the same on Madeira?"

"Almost. Not quite but almost. There's actually a jailhouse in Funchal."

"No! Really?"

"Uh huh. A 120,000 people Megan. They can't all be sociable."

"No, I suppose not."

There's one here at Porto Santo too."

"A jail?! Oh nuts, really? Are you serious? Where?"

"By the docks. Well, it's not really a jail, but you can lock people up there, a holding pen. Criminals would be transferred to the main island."

Megan paused for a moment and then laughed. "How I've changed! A year ago I would have thought it impossible to live in a society without locks and fences and jails. Now I'm having a hard time with the reverse."

Alvaro smiled and squeezed her hip and switched from Portuguese to French. "Viva la difference!"

"Oh, indeed!" she laughed as she returned his squeeze and leaned to give him a quick kiss. "It almost feels as if I must think this way while I think and speak in Portuguese, and to think of locks and jails, I'd have to go back to thinking in English."

"The solution is obvious. Continue thinking and speaking in Portuguese."