Jaci Stone - Act 03

"Feeding the planet," Graham offered.

"We're working on that," I nodded. "Think bigger."

"Space travel?" He looked at my face, and saw that I wasn't kidding. "How?"

"I can't explain it, not really well," I said.

"And I probably wouldn't understand it," Graham admitted.

"One of my scientists, probably the best mind in the world, is working on a closed-loop system. We take some...technology, add some raw material and some people, and see if we can get them to be self-sustaining. Maybe with a surplus."

"Can't be done," Graham shook his head. "Even I know that. Something would get lost in the exchange, you can't prevent that."

Night was falling in Laurel, but the sun was still shining in the desert of Nevada. I flipped open my phone and called Erin. She sent me back the picture of a place private enough to fold to. "Let's go see."

Graham took my hand and we folded to the test site. Erin just happened to have a nitrogenator running, and I explained how it was powered to Graham. He was impressed that we could almost completely enclose a small ecosystem, with a few exceptions. I wasn't sure what he meant until he tugged at the lapel of his jacket.

"Oh, shit! This closed-loop system would need near-indestructible clothing," I said. "You know, I hadn't even thought about that until now. You can be an ally, Graham."

"Near indestructible clothing," Graham said with a chuckle. "We already have that. Of course you understand why that material isn't marketed."

"Yeah, hard to sell to a market that doesn't need new stuff," I agreed. "But a colony..."

"Would still need new material. Our cloth does eventually wear out, but it would take a while. Yes, we can be allies," Graham offered his hand to me.

I shook his hand. "We'll need a steady supply if we go beyond prototype stage. We can pay your prices."

"Prototyping is acceptable. If this does get off the ground, we will have to bring in more people and equipment. Our cloth is the main source of income for our town, we can't just shun our customers, we need a steady influx of money."

"So your equipment is specialized, dedicated?" I asked.

"The company we buy our machinery from makes the best equipment in the world. It is specialized, very hard to get a hold of, and very expensive. To start new runs, it would take years to acquire all the machines we would need."

"How did you make the cloth you have now?"

"We have what are called spinning production lines. Six to fourteen machines to each line, each machine produces approximately a tonne per day. We have orders a month ahead, and cannot retool the lines for your yarn because it would interrupt that supply."

"You have to have some idea how to calibrate those production lines, correct?" I asked. "You did say 'retool.'"

"We have prototype machines, we call them pilot plants. We use them for test runs, not for production," Graham replied.

"Maybe I can help get the ball rolling," I offered.

"You can forget that," Graham shook his head. "The company we buy our machines from is making a large run of machines for a textile mill in Canada. None will be available for sale for eighteen months. We can barely get spare parts, and we have taken to having our own made."

"So you have the specifications of the machines. You know the parts you need, make your own machines."

"We can't make our own," Graham chuckled. "The company is Swiss, as in the watch, Swiss."

"You haven't seen what my company can do." I crossed my fingers, hoping that I had a division in the closet that could do what I was promising. "Can you get a full technical readout of the machines?"

"We can, if we ask nicely enough. They would probably sell a license to make our own, as long as we didn't compete with them. Of course, they would laugh behind our backs because they pretty much have the market on the machining tools we would need."

"Maybe," I mused. "Maybe not."

We folded back to Laurel. Graham had the contact information for the company ready by the time I found Petra. She was having a nice conversation with the guy from dinner, and I hated to interrupt them. Petra exchanged phone numbers with the guy, and joined me on the street.

"I feel bad," I admitted.

"Don't," she shook her head. "Let's get back to town, your offices. I can catch my ride, she's probably still parked in the garage, poor dear. How did your meeting go?"

I told Petra that it would take a while to explain it all, but told her I needed to know if we had any specialized machining companies in her division. She promised that she would check it out. I would do the same with Erin, hoping that I wasn't interrupting her big picture.

***

Erin was waiting for me when I reached the conference room. She had set the access to our science net to expire at noon the previous day, so we would wait until noon today to see who was joining with us. We needed twelve of those nineteen women in that group to join the Brookstone Pointe brigade.

I was looking over the basic specifications of the machinery Graham said he would need when Marci came in to announce our visitors. I mentally checked off the names as the women filed in. Eighteen of them, which was a victory for all of us.

One by one, they handed over the specifications of the buildings that they would need, all of them would bring their own equipment. Recognizing that there was some overlap between specialities, four companies would combine their overlapping specialities.

The nineteenth owner was ten minutes late. While she didn't want to join my company, she would sell her equipment and company name to me. It would be up to us to try and recruit the people who worked for her. After giving us her list, she smiled and said she was going to take the money and go back to fiddling around with shit in her garage.

Marci appeared before I could frame the thought, and I handed over the specification sheets to her. She looked them over and said I would have to deal with CalEd regarding the power requirements.

I didn't want those negotiations. How did you tell a power company based on natural gas generators that you wanted to put them out of business? I would have to roll the dice on that and see if I could find Travis' solar guru and use him or her as a supplementary source. "I'll go with you," Doctor Sarah Cummings offered. "They know me and my science."

"That's a good idea," Terry agreed. "Your work on passive EM shielding for their transformer farms helped them reclaim four percent of their power."

"I looked around, studying each woman at the table. "We are agreed?"

"Yes." It was nice to see that said, by all of them, in unison. Step Two was coming.

***

The power company representative had no problem supplying power to our warehouses. They had been spending a hundred thousand dollars a year to keep the lines into that transformer block maintained. They had been hoping for a resurgence of activity in those areas and now they were getting it.

My problem was going to be the taps from the poles to the buildings themselves. For many years, scavengers had been raiding what were now my buildings for wiring, both copper and aluminium. On the flip side, my engineering teams would make sure all of the new wiring was properly rated and up to code. When I asked them what that meant, they gave me a car analogy. The older cars were heavier and wasteful of both mass and fuel consumption. They could take a car from the fifties and make it run like a car from the 00's. I told them to run with it. They said to be happy after I got the bill.

I didn't care about the bill, we were going to save the world, and paper money tasted like shit anyway.

Samantha had been up and missing for two months. I had tried calling her through both the physical and metaphysical switchboards and got no response. Finally she arrived in my office, a cart of papers with her.

I rushed her and was going to pull her into a hug when she backed away from me. "Sam..."

"Jaci, sit down, please." I took one of the chairs in front of my desk, she took the other.

She looked broken, wouldn't look me in the eyes. "It was Peter, wasn't it?" My past was catching up with me.

"Jaci...I'm sorry. You warned me, and I didn't listen. I dropped my guard around him, and I paid the price. Nora paid the price. Then Peter paid the price."

"But he wasn't far enough away and you saw him get ripped to pieces."

"No, it wasn't a Revenger this time. Jonna watched over me like Grace watches over you. She took Peter's life by lightning, and after realizing what she had done, took her last breath."

I understood that. "You're leaving me?"

"Just for a little bit," she reached her hand out and I hungrily took it. "I'll be back before you know it, but I need...time."

"I understand. Can I come visit you?"

"No, I need this time to myself. I am giving the Fontalan key to Natalie. I beg you, as your wife, please don't jump planes to come see me. I know it's within your power, but your promise will hold you back."

"You have my word, my wife," I said.

"That goes doubly for you, Grace. Not for training, not for showing off."

"Yes, stepmother," Grace said from behind me.

Samantha pulled her hand free of mine. "Please give them to me, Jaci."

"No, Samantha. I'm not giving them up."

"Mother," Grace put her hands on my shoulders. "You know you have to."

I slipped the rings off my finger and handed them to Samantha. This was worse than divorce, this was limbo. "This isn't fair," I cried.

"Yes, I know." Samantha stood, and I stood with her. I tried to step toward her, but she took a step back. She held out her hand. "Grace, please."

I had a flash of anger toward Grace, but then it went away. I was really hurting, and she was Samantha's quickest exit.

My anguish had to be let out. I thought of the desert, Death Valley, and folded there. I let it all out, my despair at Samantha leaving, my anger at Peter, the loss of my daughters.

A storm came over the valley, rain that drenched my clothes in a second. Lightning flew from my body, and I wished I could bring Peter back so that I could kill him again and again.

My anger finally died down, the rain with it. Grace appeared beside me and sat down on the rocks. "You know, it's been raining in central California and southern Nevada for three solid days. Governors of both states are getting ready to declare disasters."

"Why didn't you come tell me?"

Grace put her arm around me. "Well, I was up at the North Pole, freezing exploration ships in ice so they can't do any more damage up there for a while. You know, something constructive."

"Sounds like fun."

"Then I heard what you were doing, and came here to stop you, but I couldn't. You were generating a huge electrostatic field that I couldn't fold through. I just had to wait you out. We do need to go, someone is bound to come looking."

We stood up together and Grace whisked me home. "Thank you, daughter."

She smiled and gave me a hug. "Don't mope too awful long. Fifty thousand people are counting on you. Well, they need their leader so they can point to you on TV and go 'hey, that's my boss.'"

"When did you get so serious?" I asked.

"Only temporarily, mother. Only temporarily." She gave me a daughterly peck on my cheek, then vanished.

***

My security was out front the following Monday. I was conveyed into work, alone in my thoughts about business. The cart that Samantha had wheeled into my office the day that she left was pretty much everything I needed to know about Birch Research, Development, and Production.

The Jaci of eight years ago wouldn't know what to do with the papers before me. The language would have been foreign to me, indecipherable.

Jaci of today knew the language of business. I started unpacking them, laying them out on my small conference table. It wasn't big enough. I repacked all the paperwork and took the cart up to my large conference room.

Marci followed me up, giving me a brief hug and kiss before she left the room. She knew I was heartbroken, but I needed to organize the papers to help organize my mind.

I had just finished spreading out the papers when Marci brought in lunch. It was already fourteen hours, my self-imposed schedule ended my day at sixteen hours. Today it would be eighteen hours. I quit at half-past seventeen, so I could fold home with Marci and play with my children for a few hours.

The next morning I rode into work. Marci was surprised by this change in behavior, I usually folded or drove myself everywhere. I explained that I just needed to think. She jokingly told me to not think too much, lest the car burst into flames. I told her she could survive it. Barely.

When we got to the building, I changed my mind and told Sail to go to Marika's shop. I wanted a haircut, something to literally take a load off my head. When Marika was finally done, she showed me what she had done. She had trimmed my hair into a pixie cut, and added some frosting at the tips. I approved, Marci didn't.

Sail wasn't really sure what to say when she opened my door to let me into the sedan. Marci held her tongue until we got up to the conference room, giving me both barrels about how I had lost my style. I did miss the weight a little bit, but I think it was Marci's hurt look that changed my mind.

When I was done untangling the Charlie-Foxtrot that was the Birch RDaP, I told Marci that she would have to catch a ride home with the car. I folded to my house in North Angeles to retrieve a little bit of the sphere in the cavern underneath my house.

Starr was coming into the cellar as I was pushing the secret door closed. She started laughing and pointing at my head. My haircut was obviously a source of amusement for her. She said that Marci was right, my hair was absolutely hideous.

I told her that I would take the comments, both hers and Marci's, under advisement and let my wife comment on my hair when she got back. I added that we were supposed to be best friends and that even if I shaved fucking bald I shouldn't be called hideous.

Starr was speechless, she started to say something but I had already thought of my next place to sulk. The place in the desert where Samantha and I had made our exit from the hall of doors seemed like a good enough place to think. I sat down in the sand, still warm from the day's bake in the sun. "I don't feel like talking right now, Grace."

"Mother, if you would have executed the remote viewing counter-spell I might be inclined to believe you," Grace plopped down in the sand in front of me and pulled her legs into the lotus position. "I don't know why they were so mean to you."

"Thanks, Grace."

"Now, I've already asked Marci how she would take it if I burned the hair off her head. She didn't have a good answer, so I toasted her sorry ass anyway. Starr, you're going to have to take her apology in person. I felt that betrayal, and it hurt you bad. There is no excuse for that bullying bullshit, these are supposed to be grown women."

"So what do you think?" I asked.

"I would have gone with that pixie cut in black with blue tips myself. The auburn and the frosted tips don't do it for me."

"Can you help me with something?" I extended my hand, gold pellets in my palm.

"You're giving into the pressure? Mother, these aren't your peers, you're in a class by yourself. This is coming from someone who was bullied because I was different."

"I was getting ready to pull it back out some anyway. You know why?"

"The weight helped you think?" Grace asked.

"Precisely. When it was longer, I could toy with it while I pondered."

"Twirling it around your finger. Yeah, I get the drift," Grace nodded. "What do you need me to do?"

I handed her a couple of gold pellets. "Braid then tug. Wait, did you really burn Marci's hair off?"

"No, but it sounds like fun. Hold on, mother."

***

I dreamt about Samantha that night. We had so much fun playing with each other's hair on Fontalan. Of course it would have been fun if we could have played 'Rapunzel,' but she couldn't use magic and we didn't have any towers to play with..

What was she doing right now? Was she pondering the universe inside the diamonds of our engagement rings?

My fold took me to the nap-room attached to my office. Somebody, probably Marci, had laid out a suit for me. I suddenly felt bad about the way I had treated Marci, then subtracted the way she had made me feel.

Grace had pulled the frosted tips out of my hair and we decided at shoulder-length. That was enough to play with if I got stuck on something and needed to think.

I pulled the rest of my hair back into a tail and got to work. The papers on my desk were monthly reports from each division, outlays, expenditures, profits. When I got that information, it was sufficient to hear that everything was okay.

The next folder told me about the companies I had just absorbed. The construction was over budget because they had to bring certain areas up to code before setting the very heavy equipment. That was to be expected, Jordan had told me about that when he had purchased the buildings for the company.

All of the electrical stuff was good, the report said. The added security had already chased some metal scavengers off. I had to debate on whether or not to assist the guards with magic. Artemis's warding rods would work, but they would have to be toned down a little bit. I shot off an email asking if it would be possible and went back to my papers.

Erin was asking for an outlay of five hundred thousand dollars for an experiment. She tried to 'dumb down' the specifics for me, saying that it was important to the trucks. I made a note to Marci to provide the outlay for Erin, and continued.

All-in-all, my company looked like it started the week out right, so I had time to go and fiddle with the paper invasion upstairs. Neither Marci nor Janine were at the front desk when I came out of the office. There weren't any visitors in the lobby, either, so I took the stairs up to the very quiet upper level.

Grace appeared in front of me. "They're not here, everybody is still at the house."

"Why?"

I pulled out my phone and called Janine, who didn't answer, Marci the same. I called the front desk, and that line rang. After the requisite four rings the voicemail kicked in with Marco's voice: "Thank you for calling the Main Office of Brookstone Pointe. This office is closed. Media inquiries can be left on this line and will be returned as soon as possible."

"What's going on, Grace?" I asked

Before she could say anything my phone rang. Francine, I had a bad feeling that I knew what was going to happen next.

"Hello, Madame Talbot."

"Don't be so formal, Jaci," Francine scolded. "We need to talk."

"Are you at the house?" I asked.

"Hmm. I'm in the lobby of your condo."

"Very well, I'll be there within the hour," I ended the call. "It's much worse than I thought," I said.

"What?"

"Let's get into the car, and we'll chat," I said.

If Francine was calling me, the only person calling me on a weird-ass crappy day like today, it meant that she wanted her company back. This proviso was in the agreement that Francine and I had signed. If either Francine or I got into the position we thought unresolvable, she would step back in and take the reins. What was left unsaid was this takeover was irreversible. It wouldn't do to have us switching back and forth in the media, it would confuse the employees and the customers.

Grace was surprisingly quiet on the way to the condo. I felt guilt from her, but not what about.

I stopped the car at the front of the building, Yelena there to drive it into the garage. "What's going on, ma'am?"

"Just a wrinkle, I hope," I replied.

"All of the magician security guards were uninvited from The Hills house this morning. Our group in this building has also been asked to leave security's assigned floor. The guardhouse in North Angeles was turned over to us. They didn't tell us why, and we didn't ask."