the beast he’d eventually be vacating when it was all said and done.
Pearce shook his head. It was late. His mind was wandering. He grabbed a beer from the fridge and dropped into his favorite chair in the cabin and tapped on his smartphone. Time to check in.
Dungeness, Kent, United Kingdom
August Mann stood at the top of the old soaring lighthouse, more than forty meters in the air. Due west was the decommissioned Dungeness A nuclear reactor facility. Due south was the English Channel.
The view of the surrounding beaches was fantastic, but it was the stout wind frothing the Channel waters far below that had caught his attention. Perfect conditions for kite surfing. His phone rang. It was Pearce. He picked up immediately.
“Troy.
“I’m fine, August. How are you?”
“I was just thinking about you! San Onofre,” he barked into the phone. The wind gusting through the open window whipped the German’s hair. Ironically, San Onofre also featured a nuclear reactor by the sea, but August was referring to the kite-surfing competition where they first met several years ago.
“Did you bring your board?” Pearce asked.
“
“Don’t tempt me. How are those beautiful daughters of yours?”
August had married three years ago. His wife bore him twin girls a week after the wedding. “Growing fast. I can’t wait to get them out on the water here. Thank you for asking.”
“So, how’s it going over there? Any problems?”
“No. Everything is on schedule. We began defueling operations three days ago. The drones have functioned perfectly, as expected,” August said.
Dungeness A was just one of ten Magnox nuclear reactors that were decommissioned in the United Kingdom and scheduled for eventual demolition. Pearce Systems had won one of the first contracts utilizing tracked drones with manipulator arms and laser cutters to reduce waste materials into smaller pieces without risking human contamination. Mann headed up the nuclear decommissioning project for Pearce Systems. He had been a combat engineer in Germany’s Bundeswehr and had helped develop his nation’s first tracked drones for mine clearing and antipersonnel work. After one tour in Kosovo and another in Iraq, he quit the army to chase the wind. Instead, he found Pearce.
“No casualties on our end?” Pearce asked.
“None, of course. But we deployed one of our rescue bots when a Swedish contractor collapsed inside of the reactor core building. We pulled him out with no problems.”
“Radiation?” Pearce asked.
“No. Mild heart attack. He is recuperating in hospital. But again, no risk to personnel in the rescue.”
“Outstanding,” Pearce offered. “Keep up the good work.”
“Come out soon. The wind is fantastic here!”
Mann shut his phone and grinned. The Dungeness operation was running even more smoothly than he’d hoped. He knew his friend was pleased. August headed for the circular staircase. Time to get home to his family.
Once again, Pearce had proven prophetic, Mann thought, as his feet thudded on the steel stairs. The old nuclear reactors like Dungeness were gold mines. They took decades to fully decommission and deconstruct, and safety—for the workers and the environment—was the primary concern, not money. Over four hundred civilian reactors around the world were currently at or beyond their thirty-year design life and scheduled for decommissioning. After the tragedy at Fukushima in 2011, those schedules were being accelerated. Even Chancellor Angela Merkel, herself a Ph.D. in physics, had been affected by the Japanese catastrophe and she completely reversed her own energy policy, choosing instead to phase out all of Germany’s nuclear reactors by 2022, despite the fact they currently supplied a quarter of her nation’s electrical supply.
But Mann knew that this wasn’t just about money for Pearce, or himself for that matter. This was good environmental work that needed to be done and they were both proud to be part of it. Pearce Systems was leaving an important legacy for future generations. The fact that he and Troy would get rich doing it was just an added benefit.
August emerged from the great black lighthouse tower. He held up a hand to guard his blinking eyes against the sand stinging his face. Maybe he would bring his girls out to the beach for a picnic this weekend if the wind died down. But if it didn’t, he’d gladly bring his board instead.
Near the Snake River, Wyoming
Pearce finished his beer and picked up his phone to dial again. August was seven hours ahead of Pearce. His next call was four hours behind him on the other side of the world from the lanky German.
Port Allen, Hanapepe Bay, Kaua’i, Hawaii
Dr. Kenji Yamada was barefoot. The converted wharf workshop wasn’t technically a “clean room,” but it could’ve been. Sensitive electronic controls, motherboards, and other equipment were susceptible to damage from dust and particulate matter, but Kenji was building
The fifty-three-year-old researcher wore his thick silver hair in a braid and sported a downy silver beard that contrasted nicely with his sun-drenched skin. He’d traded in his lab coat for a pair of board shorts decades earlier. His excuse was that he’d found it easier to do lab work in board shorts than it was to surf in a lab coat. His passions were whale research and surfing, in that order, with adventurous women, premium beer, and fresh sushi next on the list, also in order.
The humpback whales had arrived last December in Hawaii to calve and now the pods had just begun leaving for the three-thousand-mile return trip to the Gulf of Alaska. Thanks to Pearce Systems’ funding, Yamada had spent the last three years developing an autonomous unmanned underwater vehicle (UUV) designed to swim along with the humpbacks without disturbing them. Yamada had spent the last twenty-five years recording the migratory habits, social relationships, and communication patterns of the giant mammals, but no one had been able to travel with them for an extended period of time, owing in part to the extreme distances and water conditions. Some humpback pods were known to travel up to sixteen thousand miles in their annual migratory loops.
Yamada was on the verge of a revolution in whale research, thanks to Pearce Systems’ support. By translating his hard-won migration data into an artificial intelligence program, he hoped to be able to insert into a whale pod a torpedo-shaped UUV equipped with radar, cameras, extension arms, and other devices needed to monitor the humpbacks in the wild. In order to accomplish this feat, the UUV had to be stealthy, self-powering, able to receive and send data signals to the control base, and perform a dozen other monitoring functions, all without disturbing the whales or disrupting their migratory patterns. Yamada also didn’t want his UUV to invoke the fearsome wrath of an angry thirty-five-ton adult, which could crush the UUV and scatter its priceless components on the bottom of the ocean floor with one mighty swipe of its massive fluke.
Yamada’s UUV was still under development, but it was far enough along that he wanted to try a short run with one of the pods. The UUV was already in position, but the AI program was still buggy. The best he could hope for was a remote-control test run of a couple hundred miles by following the underwater drone in a surface vessel like the 350 Outrage.
Yamada pointed at a stack of yellow storm-proof camera cases and told one of his grad students, “Don’t forget the Pelicans, please.” He felt his smartphone vibrate in his shorts pocket. It was Pearce’s ring tone.
“Troy! Howzit, brah?” Yamada asked. Born in Japan in 1960, he had migrated like his beloved humpbacks to Hawaii with his family when he was a teenager and had gone completely native. He was fluent in three human languages—Japanese, English, and pidgin—and he was an avid collector of whale songs.
“I was going to ask you the same thing, Kenji. Ready to launch today?” Pearce was aware of the AI bugs
