Cleaning Up

Three weeks of sports, sex and workouts later they were finally back in orbit around Earth.

The news of Sebastian’s cowardly demise made it into the news, but was merely a minor story, it seems like everyone in the Federation were just glad he was of no further concern.

Mark and the girls were getting impatient as they came out of FTL and it seemed to take forever before the shuttles started leaving for the surface. Everyone eager to get back home, since they’d been away so long.

They were already waiting in the shuttle, when the announcement was made that shuttles could begin departing and they were immediately off into space and headed to the surface. A few minutes later they saw Atlantis on the horizon and everyone started getting giddy about returning.

Soon they were touching down at the palace and giving Luna and Astra a quick tour of the residence and they each picked out a bedroom. Since everyone had already switched to living on Atlantis time, they realized it was nearly lunch time, so they decided to go grab a bite to eat and then go work off their lunch over a round of golf or maybe going to the survival park.

As they reached the front desk of the palace, Ally informed Mark that there was a message for him.

Mark thanked her for the message as he read it. It was from Jacob Marsbe, the recycling guy, it just said he’d appreciate a time to sit down and go over plans for rolling out his recycling system.

Mark tapped his wrist device and within seconds, Jacob was answering the call.

“My King! It is good to hear from you. Thank you for calling!”

“Nice to hear from you Jacob, I’m guessing you’re on Atlantis and I’m back as well, where and when would you like to meet?”

“If now is a good time, I can be there in 30 seconds.”

“That works for me, I was just going for lunch, so we can talk and eat.”

Sure enough, 30 seconds later Jacob came floating down in the hover elevator. Since the message was left at the concierge desk, he suspected Jacob was staying at the palace.

Since it was nearly lunch time already and overhearing their plans, Ally suggested one of the bars in the entertainment district, which had an excellent lunch menu.

They thanked her for the suggestion as they all started walking out of the palace.

It was a 10 minute walk out to the entertainment district and all of the bars seemed to be fairly busy and fairly noisy, so they were starting to reconsider going to a bar for lunch. The one Ally suggested was busy also, but they offered Mark the use of one of their semi-private rooms, which was much quieter and more conducive to having a productive meeting.

Since Jacob had been on Earth for over a week, he had done some looking into how garbage and recycling was done in numerous cities around the planet, and he had made quite a few tweaks to his design.

The recycling system was now modular, with separate collection and conversion units. He also made them more compact and Earth-like so they should be fairly universal.

The collection modules now just looked like a normal rectangular garbage bins, complete with force field lids between each load, and depending on how busy the dump was, they could have any number of bins for simultaneous dumps and then the matter was temporarily stored as super dense storage matter for the conversion modules.

The conversion modules were now designed to be overhead bins that trucks could drive under and the preset amount of matter was converted and dumped back into the trucks. By making them modular and locking them to a specific matter conversion type, prevented governments from taking garbage and turning it into gold or diamonds. Jacob wanted true usable materials that were in high demand, but nothing that was rare or super valuable.

From his research he figured plastic pellets, glass pellets, dirt, sand, gravel, wood chips and for metals he figured iron and aluminum ingots, he also had a few specialized conversion units for turning matter into various sizes and types of wood, including paper, one to create clean drinking water and one that could create various types of grains. He had also made one for creating oil and gas and one that converted garbage into electricity, but decided against them as he didn’t want to contribute to the planet’s pollution by creating more oil and gas and he didn’t want to compete with the power cell business Mark already had going.

Mark asked, “You’ve put a lot of work into this, even more since the last time I talked to you. Do you have a business plan for how you want to roll these out?”

Jacob sighed, “I’m an engineer, I don’t want to try and run a business. I just want to live comfortably, so I don’t need to make a ton of money.”

Mark said, “I think I can get you some help to run the business, but have you given any thought on how you want to get these units into service?”

“I was actually thinking rather than selling the units, we could give them away for free, or for a nominal fee, and then just take a percentage of their collection and conversion fees. I’ve already got the units setup to provide real-time collection and conversion reports, I figure each month the unit could auto-send an invoice to whoever is running the recycle station and then they would just pay.”

Mark laughed, “I like it. We’ll get it up and running in no time.”

Jacob smiled, “So who do we need to talk to for help?”

Mark said, “The breakfast club. If they have room, maybe they’ll even give you office space in their building. Let’s eat first and then we’ll go talk to them.”

The rest of the lunch conversation was pretty light and casual, it was mainly the girls discussing some of the things they could take Luna and Astra to for the afternoon. Survival Park, Poseidon’s Garden, Lunar Adventures, the zoo and even the ranch was mentioned. Astra and Luna thought the Survival Park would be a blast, but then they thought better of it when they looked at Annabelle. Annabelle recognized their concern and indicated they could go to the Survival Park, as she was just going to go to the ranch and relax, as it had been months since she saw her parents.

After lunch they left the bar and split into their own groups. Annabelle caught a lift to the ranch and Rayven accompanied her. Gyges, Athena and Gaderius all wanted to go to the Survival Park also, so they went with the rest of the girls. Except Liyana, who was going to go back to her desk to work.

That left Mark and Jacob to walk through the entertainment district and around to the office.

During the walk, Jacob had indicated he was moving to Atlantis and had actually bought a lakefront lot in the Ampheres region and he had already had a house designed and it was just waiting on the community contest period. So far there hadn’t been any contest, so if all went well he should be able to move in on Friday and spend the weekend on the lake. All his current stuff was in a storage pod at the port.

That was the way interplanetary moves happened. You rented a storage pod and packed your belongings into it, then once it was closed up, the contents went into a sort of stasis where nothing could move and thus get damaged. The trick was you couldn’t ship anything organic in a storage pod, but plants and pets weren’t allowed to be transported off planets anyway. Then the storage pods were collected and then loaded onto transports, if they had room, or freighters and shipped to the destination. They were offloaded to the Space Station just like luggage, but then stored on the space station or more often down at the port, until they could be delivered to their final destination.

It didn’t take very long to walk around the ring, they could see the communications array by the time they got to the stadium and several minutes later they were entering the office, which was now teaming with employees.

They had totally overhauled the office, the bottom level sounded like it was pretty much a call centre and the upper level was open to the lower level and had offices all around the exterior.

After talking to Amelia for a minute, Henry came down to meet them and then escorted them upstairs. The girls still shared an office, but Zack was nowhere to be seen.

Mark asked, “Where’s Zack?”

Henry just shook his head, “Zack’s on leave right now, since he recently got arrested.”

Mark asked incredulously, “Arrested? Zack? What did he do?”

Cass said, “He broke up with that guy he was seeing and, in rebound, he found a group of people that had moved here from the US and Canada. Some of the people in the group were those activist wackos and they tried to start up a pride parade and paint a rainbow crosswalk.”

Mark now realized what had happened and said, “I would have thought Zack was smarter than that. He should have known the Federation doesn’t allow public bellyaching and crap like that, that’s just people with rainbow soapboxes.”

Those kinds of parades were illegal in the Federation. Just like how news agencies couldn’t mention skin colour, race, sexuality or religion in a headline, you can’t openly have a parade or inconvenience people to promote any of those things either.

Most people judge you on your attitude, actions and personality, and don’t care if your skin colour is blue, black, white, red, green or purple, or if you’re heterosexual, homosexual, pansexual, bisexual or asexual ... but forcing your views on others and inconveniencing people ... that actually grows angst and hatred against the group that’s trying to promote themselves. It does more damage to their cause than it does good ... people don’t like to be inconvenienced!

Henry then tried to get the meeting back on track by asking, “I take it you’re wanting to start another business? Do I need to bring in one of the other programmers for the meeting?”

“No, this should be a fairly straight forward business and I think Jacob here has already built in all the databasing and stuff he needs. What he’s needing is an online presence and some business guidance.”

Henry said, “We can help him with his accounting and the girls can probably setup a website for him. What kind of business is it?”

Mark simply said, “Recycling!”

Henry smiled, “You mentioned that back when we were in Calgary. You’re finally going ahead with it are you?”

“Yeah, Jacob here is the guy that actually invented the recycling machine, so more or less it’s going to be his business or in partnership with you guys.”

Henry then said, “So we’re going to need what? Land acquisitions, recruitment, sales and marketing people?”

Since Jacob wasn’t speaking up, Mark took the reins, “I’m almost thinking of doing it like the world peace system, put it out there and municipalities can request a site to be setup in their city. By letting the municipal governments take the lead on it, they will deal with all the land and taxes, in fact most of them will likely just put it where the current garbage dumps are and we can literally build the new recycler using their old garbage and store what’s leftover for future use.”

Henry asked, “So how would we make money then?”

“We charge a flat fee for the tonnage in and out. As far as I know there’s no such thing as free garbage disposal. The city pays wages to the people that collect, transport and then manage the collected garbage. So there’s already fees involved, plus if they’re then able to sell raw materials, it’s free money for them so it’s a win for the city and income for us. Waste disposal then becomes a profit centre, rather than a cost centre.”

Henry then thought about it, “So it’s pretty much just an accounting position, read the reports given by each unit and send bills on a monthly basis?”

Jacob then spoke, “Actually the system can automatically send an invoice on whatever schedule we want and send a copy to our accounting department as well. I think the biggest jobs will be coordinating and overseeing the installation of each location and possibly the collections of the invoices. If we give them a running total of the tonnage processed to date, any fiscally responsible business owner should be able to budget to pay us.”

Henry laughed, “Fiscally responsible?!? Not very many governments on this planet would even meet the definition of responsible, let alone fiscally responsible!”

Then after thinking about it for a second, he added, “Or, we setup our own accounts and we manage the conversion side of the business and send them their share of the profits each month. It’d be a bit more accounting and administration work, but it increases our involvement with using Federation technology!”

Mark said, “I like that idea! They can keep 100% of the collection fees, then the conversion business is one of our companies.”

Jacob then added, “Actually, if we controlled the conversion and sales side, I could simplify the process so we could literally build one big conversion building. Orders could be placed online and the order numbers could be sent to the truckers. Then when they arrive at the facility, they would provide their order numbers and be directed to an empty bay where their order will be filled. By having a centralized system controlled by us, we can provide a wider range of conversion products as we don’t have to worry about governments abusing them.”

Then the website will more or less advertise what the capabilities of the recycling system are, and it would be nice to have charts showing the tonnage collected, maybe daily, monthly and yearly. Then it also needs to have a form to request an installation and in that form it should ask if they already have a site, ideally an existing garbage dump, as we could then recycle and reclaim their current garbage and turn it from eyesore into something better, plus it would give us a lot of material to convert.