most know that the atmosphere is comprised of various gases. nitrogen, oxygen, carbon dioxide, water vapor, argon, xenon, et cetera. thirty years ago, however, a scientist in kenya discovered that there is another gas, some sort of unnamed compound, that exists in trace amounts so small it hadn't been detected until very recently. this was considered a minor curiosity, until it was discovered that said chemical is, essentially, the key to near-infinite energy. a gram of it could power all of europe for decades. a kilogram could, given the proper infrastructure, eliminate the need for any other energy production, period.
there's just one problem. it can't be synthesized.
sure, scientists have tried. in fact, they're still trying, and maybe one day they'll succeed. i hear turkey says they expect to have a synthetization process nailed down within the next fifty years or so. which, considering the scale of the task, is pretty impressive, but you know how politicians are. that's not soon enough. they have to get building now. they had to get building last year. twenty years ago, actually. and now they're very near done, at least in the states.
i'm sure you've seen it, right? it's all over the internet, been all over the internet so long that it's old news, and now it's been old news so long it's new news again. the raytheon kennedy-anderson liquifier. or, as most of the folks in wichita call it, the tower. or the shadow, or "that damn thing that makes it dark across town until one in the afternoon." it's the very first superstructure. well, second, after that city in saudi arabia, but don't let the americans hear you say that. it's a fuck-off huge cylinder five miles tall, very nearly poking out of the atmosphere, and damn near half a mile in diameter. lining the entire goddamn thing, eight per story, are big grates. every morning, at nine o'clock, they suck in millions of liters of air from the surrounding area, so much they had to ban kites in all of kansas just so they'd stop getting caught in the thing. i think some towns had to turn the tornado alarms off, 'cause they kept firing false alarms.
anyway. you can guess what it does, right? that entire cylinder, the entire fuckin' thing, gets down to damn near negative two hundred degrees fahrenheit. they freeze the tiniest traces of their superfuel out of the atmosphere every day. they're damn lucky the stuff has such a high melting point, otherwise they'd have to swim through oxygen soup every morning just to get a few milligrams of the stuff out of it.
oh yeah, didn't i mention? it's only a few milligrams. in fact, the tower only produces the energy of maybe twenty thorium reactors. they think they'll pay off the energy it cost to build the damn thing in maybe another fifty years. total waste of time.
