Neanderpundit

Now that’s what I’m talkin about.

still in the deepest throes of a miserable headcold and feeling thick as a brick, I woke at five for the morning pee, and lay back down to sleep.

I had a dream that I had been asked to go work on an antarctic jobsite. We would be installing small scale nuke reactors, made in France and designed to be literally dogsled portable (though it took four hundred dogsleds) but we would actually be taking a repurposed (And nuclear powered) Alaskan land train.

I woke up and went back to sleep several times, and the dream continued through each interruption

There were ten of us, the mission commander, the navigator (we had five reactors to install at precise locations) the assembly/startup techs (of which I was one of five) one system guy, one medical doctor, and a cook, who also helped drive. All of us were well qualified and well trained, and just about each of us could do one another’s job.

The job was to be six months. There would be ongoing contact with friends & famiily, just no weekends at home. The ten of us had to work together for a month in close quarters before we left to make sure we wouldn’t kill one another.

We were going to be living aboard the land train for the whole time. At each installation, we would have to spend about a week putting in each reactor. Each reactor would have to be unloaded, steam would be generated to dig out a pit. The reactor would be lowered into the pit and steam would again be used to blow a dome of ice over the reactor.

Each reactor was a self contained generating station, and it had an automated system to keep it’s surroundings habitable. The purpose was to provide habitable outposts. Where each generator was placed, would become a settlement. Behind us came teams of builders to use the steam to cut main streets through the ice, and branches off those streets became homes, those homes became neighborhoods, and those neighborhoods became settlements.

THe pilot project would just place the reactors. Other land trains would come behind us with medical facilities and hydroponic farms. We were the advance guard.

I hate cold, and snow. I wondered, in my dream, why I would volunteer for such a gig. The pay was OK, but not incredible. The work wasn’t particularly hard nor mentally taxing. So why?

I did like the surroundings being thousands of miles from anything, entirely self sufficient. We all got along pretty well, no closet addicts or alcoholics, the cook was gourmet, the living quarters small but well laid out, with each person occupying a small “capsule” whose space enlarged with each dropoff of equipment.

They provided clothing and equipment that was more than perfect, and we never had much discomfort, other than the first time you opened that door and let the cold air into that aft airlock.

I woke up several times, each time wanting to know more about what would happen, I willed myself back to sleep.

Toward the final drop we were all sitting in the galley while the cook dished out inch thick angus steaks, and we talked about what we were doing, and how in thirty years we would have a new nation.

And it dawned on me what this was all about. We were creating a nation where the weak would not follow, where only those willing to scrape hard at the earth for their sustenance could live. We had learned from the mistakes of America; this time we’d make it much much harder for the fools to take over. In that moment I saw the emergence of a nation different from any other, a nation of peoples capable of dealing with the harshest of environs externally and internally. I saw a new frontier.

I’m sure a lot of weird TV watching over the holidays, combined with the low grade fever and a lot of Nyquil contributed to this. But it was so vivid, so clear. I remember one of my fellow techs was nicknamed “Bulldog” because he had an underbite, his upper teeth closed just inside his lower. I remember the feeling of the bunk under my back as i slept. I remember sitting drinking tea in the observation car/galley, staring at the southern sky overhead. Each sensation of nearly six months of doing the job, setting up the reactors, bedding them in, testing them, each interaction with each person was so real, it is as if it happened. The memories, of course, are fading as I write this, even, but they were so, so real.