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[Story][Season 0] House Raising
[Story][Season 0] House Raising
#1
House Raising - 10/Jun/2012
Mid Spring, 2008, Luna.
Can you raise a house on the Moon?  If most of the bits come from Earth, is that a 'house falling'?  That doesn't make much sense.  But, if the Moon's above the Earth, it might still be 'raising'.
This and other nonsense went through Brains head, as he sat on the Lunar surface, looking at where home would be.  On land he owned.  On the Far Side of the Moon.
He'd spent nearly two months, over-working to get his plans and materials ready, since his 'day trip' up here.  Fortunately these days he'd the help of Brainless, who honestly seemed to enjoy the more structured (dare he say 'simpler'?) bits.  Though he'd almost nudged him out of his cottage workshop, to the one on the 'SS Champ'.
He'd come up with a new variety of 'paint'.  This took transparent mylar film used for a lot of his work and both strengthened it and made it convert about 25% of the light passing through it into electricity, while still making it almost invisible.  UV and IR too.  He'd treated the mylar pressure dome, the one he'd used to avoiding waving the clay pit, with this.  After tests he thought it ready for Moon duty.
Resources[1] was a major problem.  Theoretically handwavium must be capable of transmutation of elements, one reason he thought it was benevolent femtotech[2]. But, that was a can of worms he wouldn't open, just for his own convenience.  The results could be so horribly messy that it'd make juggling anti-matter look user-friendly.
The big problems were nitrogen, for his air, and carbon.  Oxygen was no problem.  Hydrogen was solvable if that mythical Lunar water was actually exploitable.  Otherwise it was asteroid mining time.  That'd give him water ice, and carbon, and he could hope enough nitrogen.  In the short-term he'd enough power to distil nitrogen out of Earth's atmosphere, and bottle it, or stock-up on ammonium nitrate.  And charcoal.
He'd waved the 'Recyclosaurus'.  Sometimes handwavium seemed to like silly things, and this was one of them.  An immense vegetarian dinosaur head and neck, currently attached to a bare frame robot body.  Uran called it "Nom Nom"[3], and insisted it was male.  He'd just slot in the cargo hatch of the 'SS Champ' and his chemical 'stomachs' reprocessed just about anything he ate, into useful feed-stocks.
Brains hadn't much use for Titanium, Aluminium, Magnesium, or even much Iron, at the moment, but something would probably come up.  Some nice stone walls for the garden were worth thinking about, and he'd need to make his own soil.  Plants in tubs would be a good start.
He looked over at the faint distortion where Nom Nom had been dug into the lunar regolith.  He seemed to be making good progress, the measures to stop lunar dust wrecking his works were holding.  That'd been a pain to fix.  The stuff got in everywhere.
Nom Nom's companions, the twin giant Beaver robot builders were doing well.  Following behind they took processed material and built then sealed underground walls.  Brains had named them 'Castor' and 'Pollux', but Uran said one should be called 'Teddy', though she wouldn't explain why.
A few more hours and they could seal the area where the dome was going to be raised, and stop relying on stored power.  The ship itself generated some power, of course, from energy it absorbed rather than diverted around, and the newly installed image system could provide a trickle, too.  Neither had a big enough cross-section, though.  Until he got the deep heat sinks installed this place'd show-up like an infra-red beacon to anyone who scanned it from orbit.  It was a risky time.
Uran had offered to help with the work.  But, the first part was mostly supervision, and he'd prefer to give her opportunity to play, rather than be bored.  He thought she was finishing reading "Harry Potter", at the moment.  Dipping into engineering and technical works when she wanted some diversion.  She seemed a competent programmer, but the subject didn't seem to interest her, in general.  Vehicles also didn't seem to catch her fancy, so she probably wouldn't become a 'Gearhead'.
'Ting!'  This time, unlike on the day trip, he'd brought a way to communicate with the others.  The display showed Pollux was saying they'd completed the first, outer, circle.  It'd seemed sensible not to make them too smart, and that'd worked so far.
Time to go down into the basement...
--
"It is the business of the future to be dangerous" - Hawkwind
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#2
META "House Raising"

Nothing special here, unless you're interested in half-built robot dinosaurs.

This follows after "Deadly Weapons", and is the last story in reasonably clear sequence; the next one written is "Divided Loyalties".
((Apologies, looks as though I previously posted this, but didn't update my records correctly.))
--
"It is the business of the future to be dangerous" - Hawkwind
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