This is the eighth installment of an exploration of some of
the possible futures discussed on this blog, using the toolkit of narrative
fiction. Our narrator visits a city power plant that runs on an unexpected fuel
source and a stock market subject to even less familiar rules...
***********
By the time Michael Finch and I left the streetcar plant it
was pushing eleven. “Where next?” I asked.
“We’re about four blocks from one of the municipal power
plants,” the intern said. “I called ahead and arranged for a tour—that’ll take
about an hour, and should still give us plenty of time for lunch. Ms. Berger
said you’d want a look at our electrical
infrastructure.”
I nodded. “ Please. Electricity’s an ongoing problem back
home.”
“It hasn’t always been that easy here, either,” Finch
admitted. “Would you like to take a cab, or—”
“Four blocks? No, that’s walking distance.” From his
expression, I gathered that wasn’t always the case with visitors from outside,
but he brightened and led the way east toward the Maumee River. North of us I
could see bridges arching across the river, and the unfinished dome of the
Capitol rising up white above the brown and gray rooftops.
The power plant was another big brick building like the streetcar
factory, and I looked in vain for smokestacks. Finch led me in through the
office entrance, a double door in an ornate archway, and introduced us to the
receptionist inside. A few moments later we were shown into the office of the
plant manager, a stocky brown-skinned man with gray hair who came over to shake
my hand.
“Jim Singletary,” he said. “Pleased to meet you. I don’t
imagine you have anything like our facility over in the Atlantic Republic, so
if there’s anything you want to know, just ask, okay?”
I assured him I would, and he led us out of the office. The
corridor outside went straight back into the heart of the plant; at its far
end, we went through a door onto a glassed-in balcony overlooking a big open
room where six massive and complex machines rose up from a concrete floor.
“Down on the floor, you couldn’t hear a thing but the
turbines,” he said. “That’s the business end of the plant—six combined cycle
gas turbines driving our generators. We get almost sixty per cent efficiency in
terms of electrical generation, more than that when you factor in the heat
recycling to the facility. You know how a combined cycle turbine works?”
“More or less—you put the gases from the turbine through a
heat exchanger, and use that to run a steam turbine off
the leftover heat, don’t you?”
“Exactly. What comes out of the heat exchangers runs around
300 degrees Fahrenheit, which is more than enough to do something with. Here, a
lot of it goes to heat the fermentation tanks.”
I wondered what he meant by that, but it didn’t take long to
find out. Singletary led us along the balcony to another set of doors, and
through them into another glassed-in balcony overlooking a double row of what
looked a little like the top ends of a row of gargantuan pressure cookers.
“The fermentation tanks,” he said. “Feedstock goes in,
methane and slurry come out. At any given time, eighteen tanks are in operation
and the other six are being loaded or unloaded. This way, please.”
The balcony ended at another door, and a corridor led to the
left. At its end was a balcony, this time open to the outside air. Below was
the Maumee River, and a line of big blocky riverboats tied up along a quay. The
one closest to us was having something unloaded from it through a big pipe.
“And there’s the feedstock that makes the whole thing work,”
said Singletary. “I don’t recommend going down to the quayside—it’s pretty
ripe.”
“What’s the feedstock?” I asked, even though I’d begun to
guess the answer.
“Manure,” he said. “Cow, horse, sheep, human—you name it. We
buy manure from an eight county region to supplement what gets produced here in
Toledo.” I gave him a startled look, and he grinned. “Yep. If you’ve used the
toilet since you got here, you’ve contributed to Toledo’s electricity supply.”
I laughed, and he went on. “We use a three-stage
fermentation process to extract nearly seventy per cent of the carbon from the
feedstock while the nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium stay in the sludge. By
the time it’s finished in the tanks it’s sterile enough you could rub it on an
open wound. We use heat output from the turbines to dry it, and ship it back to
farmers as fertilizer. So everyone’s happy.”
We went back to his office and I got a rundown on the
economics of the plant. “How close do you get to breaking even, between
feedstock costs and fertilizer sales?” I asked.
“Not as close as I’d like,” Singletary admitted. “Ever since
the Maumee and Ohio canal got reopened, the farmers south of us can sell their
feedstock to Dayton or Springfield—Lima’s tier three so it’s not in the market.
North of us we’ve got Detroit and Ann Arbor to bid against; east there’s
Cleveland, and the canal system west of the Maumee is still being rebuilt, so
that’s out of the picture at the moment.”
“You depend on canals that much?”
“We can’t afford not to. Back in the early days, we used to
ship in some feedstock by rail, but the costs are just too high these days. For
any kind of bulk cargo, if you don’t have to worry about speed, canal shipping’s
really the way to go.”
I asked a few more questions, and then we all shook hands
and Finch and I headed out into the crisp fall air. “Interested in lunch?” he
asked me; we discussed restaurants while waiting for the streetcar, and then
rode it north into downtown. A bar and grill around the corner from the
streetcar stop where we got off served up a very passable BLT sandwich, and
then we wove our way through crowded sidewalks to the big stone building that
housed the Toledo Stock Market.
“Vinny Patzek,” said the young man with black slicked-back
hair who greeted us in a crowded office not far from the trading floor.
“Pleased to meet you.” He had his jacket off and his sleeves rolled up, and
looked like he spent a lot of his time running flat out from one corner of the
building to another. “Any chance you know something about stock markets, Mr.
Carr?”
“Actually, yes—I did two years on the NYSE floor before they
moved it to Albany,” I said.
His face lit up. “Sweet. Okay, this is gonna be a lot less
confusing to you than it is to most of the people we see here from outside.
It’s not quite the same as what you’re used to, but the differences are mostly
the technology, not the underlying setup. Come on.”
“I’ll leave you with Mr. Patzek for now,” Finch told me. “I
promised Ms. Berger I’d check in after lunch and see how things are going at
the Capitol.”
“Fair enough,” I said, and he left through one door while
Patzek herded me out through another, down a corridor, and onto the trading
floor of the stock exchange.
All things considered, it wasn’t much quieter than the
turbine room of the power plant, but since I’d worked on a trading floor the
noise and bustle actually meant something to me. There was a reader board, a
big one, covering most of the far wall; it was mechanical, not digital, and
flipped black or eye-burning yellow in little rectangular patches to spell out
the latest prices. There were trading posts scattered across the floor, where
specialists handled the buying and selling of shares. There were floor traders
and floor brokers, enough of them to make the floor look crowded, and the
featureless roar made up of hundreds of
voices shouting bids and offers.
“You probably still use computers in New York, right?”
Patzek said in something that wasn’t quite a yell. “Here it’s all old-fashioned
open outcry, with the same kind of hand signals you’d see in the Chi-town
commodity pits. Lemme show you. All we need is an order.”
“I’ll take one share of Mikkelson Manufacturing,” I said.
He grinned. “You’re on.”
“You get a lot of small orders like that?”
“All the time. You get little old ladies, working guys, you
name it, who save up the cash to buy a share or two once a month, that sort of
thing, and come on down here to buy it in person.” He looked up at the reader
board. “Mikkelson’s MIK—see it? Seventy-two even a share. Let’s go.”
We plunged into the crowd, and I managed to follow Patzek
through the middle of it to one of the trading posts, where the traders and
brokers looked even busier than they were elsewhere on the floor. Right in the
middle of it, the yelling was loud enough I couldn’t make out a single word,
just Patzek gesturing with a closed hand and then a raised index finger and
shouting something that didn’t sound much like Mikkelson Industries. It only
took about a minute, though, for the market to do what markets are supposed to
do, and Patzek came out of the scrum with a big grin and an order written up on
a pad of paper he’d extracted from one of his vest pockets.
“We’re good,” he said. “Seventy-two and a quarter—it’s
pretty lively. I’d be surprised if it doesn’t hit seventy-five by closing.
Let’s settle up back at the office; they’ll be sending the certificate there.”
We went back the way we’d came. The office, busy as it was,
seemed almost unnervingly quiet after the roar of the trading floor. “So that’s
how it’s done,” said Patzek. “A little different, I bet.”
“Not as much as it used to be,” I said. “When I first got on
the NYSE floor, there were only a couple of dozen floor traders left, and it
was as quiet as a library most days. With the satellite situation and some of
the other problems lately, a lot of brokerages are putting trades back on the
floor again. But of course it’s still done with handheld computers, not the
sort of thing you’ve got in there.”
Patzek nodded. “The way I heard it, there were handhelds on
the floor in the early days after Partition, but the first time the outside
tried regime change here they hacked the system and crashed it, and the exchange
just let it drop. Computers are just too easy to hack. Floor traders? Not so
much.”
“I bet,” I said, laughing.
I wrote a check for the price of the share, then, and filled
out a couple of forms covering my side of the transaction. When I got to the
form for dividend payouts, though, I looked up at Patzek. “I’ll have to make
some arrangements back home before I can finish this.” He nodded, and I went
on. “What kind of dividends does Mikkelson pay these days?”
“Five, maybe six percent a year. Not bad, especially since
it’s tax free.”
That startled me. “Mikkelson, or dividends in general?”
“Dividends in general. They count as earned income, like
wages, salaries, royalties, that sort of thing. Most other investments, you’re
gonna pay tax, and if you sell that share and make a profit on it, that’s
speculative income and you’re gonna get whacked.”
“So earned income is tax free, but investment income isn’t.”
“Yeah—again, except for dividends.”
I remembered what Elaine Chu had said about taxes back at
the Mikkelson plant. “So you tax what you want to discourage, not what you want
to encourage.”
“Heck if I know,” said Patzek. “You’ll have to ask the
politicians about that.”
A moment later a messenger came in through the door we’d
used, plopped a manila folder on one of the desks, and ducked back out. Half a
dozen people converged on the folder; Patzek waited his turn, and came back
with a sheet of stiff paper printed in ornate script.
“Here you go,” he said. “One share of Mikkelson Manufacturing.
Congratulations—you’re now a limited partner with Janice Mikkelson.”
I gave him a startled look, then glanced at the certificate.
I’d read about printed stock certificates, but never actually handled one, so
it took me a moment to sort through the fancy printing and read the line that
mattered. Sure enough, it read MIKKELSON MANUFACTURING LLP.
“Limited liability partnership,” I guessed. “So it’s not a
corporation?”
“Nah, it’s a little different here. Back in the day—and
we’re talking before the First Civil War, forget about the Second—corporations
had to be chartered by the legislature, for some fixed number of years, and
only for some kind of public benefit, not just because somebody wanted to make
a few bucks. After all the problems the old Union had with corporations
claiming to be people and all that, we up and drew a line under that, and went
back to the original laws. Here, if a business wants to sell stock, it becomes
a limited liability partnership. The limited partners are only on the hook to
the value of their stock holdings, but the managing partner or partners—their
butts are on the line. If Mikkelson Manufacturing ever goes bust, Mikkelson can
kiss her mansion goodbye, and if the company breaks the law, she’s the one who
goes to jail.”
I took that in. “Does that actually happen?”
“Not so much any more. Back when I was a kid, there were
some really juicy cases, and yeah, some really rich people lost their shirts
and landed behind bars. These days, you’re in business, you watch the laws as
closely as you watch the bottom line—there’s too many people in politics who’d
be happy to buy their constituents a new streetcar line with the proceeds from
a court case.”
That didn’t sound much like the politics I was used to back
home. I was still processing it when the other door came open and Michael Finch
came in. “Mr. Carr,” he said, “I just talked to Ms. Berger. They got everything
settled around lunchtime. If you’re ready, the President will be happy to see
you this afternoon.”
I glanced at Patzek who grinned and made a scooting motion
with one hand. We shook hands and said the usual, and I followed Finch out the
door.
***********************
Those of my readers who are fans of deindustrial fiction
will be interested to hear that Founders House, the publisher of my novel Star’s
Reach and the four After Oil anthologies, has a new peak oil SF
novel just out, Dark
Peak by George R Fehling. It’s a crisp and highly readable thriller
set a generation or two after industrial civilization unravels—worth a look.
More generally, interest in deindustrial SF seems to be
picking up; those of us who have been writing and reading fiction along those
lines for a while may just have gotten in on the ground floor of a new genre.
In a conversation a little while back with Founders House veep Shaun Kilgore,
he mentioned that his firm has decided to branch out into Young Adult fiction
with a deindustrial slant. Any of my readers who are interested in writing
something along these lines should contact Founders House via their
submissions page.
