The Fusion Cage

XXVIII

Ethan followed the light of Jesse’s flashlight through the dense forest, a thin strip of blue — white that illuminated the forest floor before them. Ethan walked alongside Lopez, Amber and Stanley behind them, with a handful of Jesse’s faithful followers bringing up the rear guard. The quiet folk had materialized like phantoms from the darkness of the forest upon a commanding whistle from Jesse.

Without them, Ethan realized that he would have been utterly lost out here. They were so deep in the woods that there were no city lights visible, the glow from them on the clouds above shielded from view by the hills rising all around, themselves only visible because they blocked the light from the stars spanning the heavens. The only evidence of civilization out here was the occasional blinking lights of an aircraft as it passed high overhead, the sound of their engines barely audible.

‘You remember Idaho?’ he asked Lopez.

‘I’m trying not to.’

He and Lopez had spent many nights camping out in the mountain wilderness of Idaho on another investigation for the DIA some years before, and then a few nights more fleeing something not quite human out in the deep woods. Now, he too found it difficult to think about anything else as he followed the faint light ahead of him.

To his surprise, Jesse finally stopped in a pitch black spot deep in the forest and turned, his features ghoulishly lit by the glow of his flashlight as he spoke softly in the darkness.

‘We’re here.’

Ethan blinked, keeping his eyes off the flashlight beam as he looked about and saw nothing but ranks of dense trees, low grassy mounds and thick foliage all around them.

‘It could use some work,’ he observed dryly.

‘On the contrary,’ Jesse replied cheerfully, ‘it’s complete in every way.’

Jesse let out a low whistle that echoed into the darkness. A long silence followed, and Ethan wondered whether the hippy had completely lost his mind as they stood in the darkness and waited.

Then, to Ethan’s amazement, a glowing rectangle of light appeared to his right in the front of one of the mounds and a woman stepped out. Then another, and then more rectangles of light appeared as people began emerging from the earthy mounds dotted around the site.

‘Welcome to Earthville,’ Jesse announced grandly as he spread his arms to encompass the entire camp.

The glow from the interiors illuminated perhaps twenty low mounds, each of them covered in grass and completely hidden, at least at night, from observation. Ethan was startled to see heat emanating from within the mounds as Jesse led them to a slightly larger one in the centre and reached down in the grass. Ethan heard Jesse pull hard on what sounded like a metal handle, and the grass and earth opened before him to reveal another well — lit interior as Jesse stepped inside.

‘Come on, quickly, we don’t want to let the heat out.’

Ethan followed Jesse inside and the hippy hauled the door shut behind them and let them get a look at the interior.

The mound was merely the top of a home deeply excavated into the earth beneath the forest. Open plan in nature, and with an entirely wooden construction, the home resembled a large apartment that had no windows. Polished wooden floors, plush sofas, even a television and modern oven were installed, along with lighting that gave off an interesting glow, more like sunlight than the unnatural flare of a halogen bulb.

‘Welcome to my home,’ Jesse said. ‘Please, make yourselves comfortable. Drink, anyone?’

Jesse strolled across to a fridge — freezer and opened it to reveal plentiful stocks of food and drink.

‘What is this place?’ Lopez uttered in amazement, a genuine smile on her face.

‘My home,’ Jesse repeated. ‘I built it nearly ten years ago, although it wasn’t quite as plush back then. But I’ve added refinements as I’ve gone along and now all of the homes here look more or less similar. They take a lot of man — hours to construct, but once done they’re for life.’

Jesse poured fresh orange juice from cartons into glasses and shared them around.

‘You still need the supermarket then,’ Amber observed with interest.

Jesse laughed. ‘No matter how much I achieve, always people seek to pick holes in it. Yes, I still use a supermarket — why wouldn’t I when good food is so plentiful in them? And I still have a job in the hardware store in town, although I mountain bike to and from work. It’s only if society collapsed that I’d have to fall back on hunting and gathering to subsist.’

‘Where’s the power coming from?’ Stanley asked as he glanced at the lights.

‘Oil generators,’ Jesse replied, ‘or gas — powered spares in emergencies. They’re used just for the normal appliances, although we like to cook outdoors using barbeques as much as possible in the community and we grow what food we can ourselves. Because these homes are built mostly underground they have natural insulation, on the top as well as to either side. We have heaters but we rarely need them either in winter or summer because the homes maintain a natural temperature of about sixty degrees Fahrenheit. I’m hoping to install solar panels too somewhere nearby and channel the supply to these homes, but that’s a big step and quite expensive. We’re working on the logistics right now.’

Jesse sat down on a sofa as he sipped orange juice.

‘So you’re off the grid completely?’ Ethan asked, starting to develop a grudging respect for the strange man before him.

‘For ten years now,’ Jesse confirmed. ‘You’d be amazed how much money that saves. I was lucky, my father owned this land so I inherited it from him when he passed away and could do what I liked with it. I’d always dreamed of trying something like this and when I achieved it and people, friends and such like saw what I was doing, they wanted to join in too. In all there are nine homes here, all of them built by our hands, all of them independent of energy supplies but for the essentials that we all like. We also have hot water storage tanks installed, use old car tires cut up for extra wall insulation and such like to improve our living conditions. The heating is piped under the floors for maximum efficiency when we need it.’

‘What about light?’ Lopez asked. ‘Isn’t it always dark down here?’

‘Not at all,’ Jesse said and gestured to the corners of the walls where they met the ceiling. ‘There are strips of transparent plastic on the surface above the home that allow sunlight into shafts along the edges of the walls. A mirror deflects that sunlight into the home, providing natural light during daylight hours. It’s not as bright as a full window, but because we’re in a forest it’s further diluted, but it does the job as long as we clean the upper panels daily. We also use natural light LEDs for night time, which have a more natural glow. That’s the blue light you see reflected off the walls.’

‘And you can do everything else down here without any trouble at all?’ Amber asked.

‘Everything,’ Jesse confirmed. ‘We have composting toilets, rainwater collection devices, pretty much all that you need to survive. The one thing that we’ve made the most effort to preserve when we all came out here is human contact. You might be surprised to learn that there are many communities like this all across the United States, and all across Europe for that matter. Disconnecting from the grid and living a simpler life, but one which does not deprive people of the creature comforts of modern society, is a surprisingly popular pastime. But for most a pastime is exactly what it is, people moving into and out of such communes as their own requirements dictate. New jobs take them away too but most of all it’s just a need for human contact because for some reason most off — grid communities are built way out in the middle of nowhere — you know, like Washington state nowhere, far from urban centres. I built our commune here because I wanted to stay reasonably close to major towns. Frankly, I like being able to go and rent a DVD or buy a pint of milk whenever I want to, rather than having to trek fifty miles just to find a loaf of bread.’

‘You said you had a job,’ Stanley said. ‘How come the government hasn’t penalised you for avoiding taxes?’

‘Because I pay them,’ Jesse replied. ‘I don’t earn much from my job and it could hardly be called a career move, but what I do more than covers the cost of my food, travel and holidays should I want to take them. We actually live pretty normal lives here and we don’t need to earn a fortune in order to do so. I don’t have to pay rent, I don’t have a mortgage and thanks to Stanley here, my car costs almost nothing to run because it uses water for fuel. One of the guys living here is actually a lawyer in St Louis and pulls down a pretty respectable salary, which he uses to travel on his holidays rather than paying a mortgage on some enormous house that he doesn’t even need.’

Ethan looked about them and realised that were it not for the knowledge they were sitting ten feet underground, he wouldn’t really have known any different. The interior of the house looked pretty much as any home would except for the unusually open plan nature and slightly smaller size.

‘And you’re not worried about something coming through here and destroying everything?’ Lopez asked.

‘I suppose,’ Jesse answered, ‘but there’s not much to go wrong really. Forest fires are easily the greatest threat because of the damage they obviously cause, and if one of the big trees decided to come down it could cause a great deal of damage to any one of the homes, although it’s unlikely it would be unrepairable as they’re constructed from wood anyway. For me the greatest problem is the local state council deciding that such properties are illegal, which isn’t unheard of. They don’t like people having such complete independence. It seems that being a part of the grid, and I don’t mean just the National Grid but our interconnected digital society, means that they can keep an eye on everybody. Out here, short of my taxes, they don’t really know what I’m up to.’

‘Exactly as I’ve been saying,’ Stanley confirmed. ‘These things aren’t always about money. If Jesse here became successful enough from what he did, and others began emulating him as swiftly as possible, you could start a wave that would see thousands if not millions of families breaking away from the structure of normal society and becoming fully independent but for their food and emergency fuel supplies.’

‘That’s right,’ Jesse agreed. ‘The main opposition to communes like this is health and safety, especially for children who may not have been able to make the decision for themselves to come here, but it’s usually a veil for more base motives such as collectible taxes, profits for fuel companies and such like. They all earn their revenue from people’s dependence on the energy grid — take that away in big enough numbers and they’ll start to fight for their right to charge us for the right to be warm. To me, it’s like bottled water — nobody needs it because we have water coming out of our taps, or in our case here out of the sky, but still millions of people will go and buy bottled water just because they can. It’s insane, but it happens every day.’

Jesse looked at them all for a moment and then set his glass down. ‘I digress, as I often do. You said that you were looking for me. Why?’

Stanley leaned forward in his seat. ‘How would you like to be able to get rid of your generators and yet still have more power than you will ever need for free?’

Jesse raised an eyebrow.

‘You’d be amazed how many people come by here saying things like that,’ he replied. ‘I did my physics at high school, and I know that such things require either large wind turbines or major solar arrays to generate enough energy. Regrettably, the amount of land I own is not large enough to install either.’

‘You won’t need any more space than a boiler cupboard,’ Stanley said. ‘If you can get me the required components, I’ll build the damned thing right here. All you have to promise to do is build another one just like it and pass it on to another community like yours, with the promise that they will do the same.’

Jesse stared at Stanley for a long moment, apparently stunned into silence. Something about Stanley’s confidence and enthusiasm for his work compelled people to believe, so much so that even Ethan found himself hoping that he would be able to see the completed device in action soon.

‘Why would you do that, and how would you do it?’

It took Stanley no more than about ten minutes to give a brief explanation of what he intended to do. As the old inventor described what had happened, how he had achieved what he had and of how the government was attempting to prevent it from becoming commercialized, so Jesse leaned further forward in his seat until he looked as though he were about to fall forwards out of it.

‘How long?’ he asked finally, ‘to build one of these fusion cages?’

‘Once I’ve got the pieces, about three days plus a few extra days of testing to make sure it’s stable and performing as it should,’ Stanley replied. ‘A week, and you’ll never have to worry about energy ever again.’

Jesse stared at Ethan, his features alive with excitement and hope.

‘Do it,’ he said, ‘and if it works, I’ll build enough of the damned things with you to power half of the country.’

Stanley reached out for Jesse and the younger man shook his hand firmly.

‘Let’s change the world, for the better,’ Stanley said.

Ethan felt a surge of hope flicker into life like a pale flame within him as he realized that he might be witnessing a meeting that would herald the beginning of a new dawn for humanity, felt those high hopes thumping in his chest alongside his heart.

Lopez snapped him from his reverie.

‘You hear that?’

Ethan blinked and realized that the thumping in his chest was not his heartbeat but a building crescendo of helicopter blades battering the night air outside.

Jesse leaped out of his seat even as a voice from outside cried out for help. His eyes raged as he glared at Ethan.

‘Who have you brought here?! What is this?’

‘They’re onto us,’ Lopez said urgently. ‘How could they have found us out here?’

‘Damn it, it doesn’t matter,’ Ethan snapped. ‘Nicola, grab the shotgun. We’re leaving!’