The factory was gargantuan. Square shaped, it was an open room fifty feet high and almost a quarter mile in every other dimension. Hidden from view and sensors just as surely as Brad’s island was supposed to have been, and exceedingly well-lighted and air-conditioned.
And while many hundreds of workers were in view, the factory was extensively automated. I’d say it was other-worldly automated, but my understanding was that modern human factories routinely now appeared that way. As though the manufacturing was being orchestrated by a many-headed, thousand-armed leviathan, alive with a precise and dazzlingly efficient robotic intelligence. A leviathan manipulating a mosaic of parts, and welding machines, and lathes, and assemblies, and so on in a choreographed ballet of great speed and complexity.
We were standing on an elevated platform in the center of the facility, with expansive views all around, brought there by one of the hundreds of speedy, pallet-sized steel platforms that obeyed vocal commands. Each hovered six inches above the floor, even while not in use, surely making use of some kind of anti-gravity technology to transport personnel throughout the vast facility with speed and efficiency.
In one quarter of the facility, zip-craft of various sizes were being assembled, with drives and other critical parts being ferried to them from all other parts of the building.
Given all that was taking place inside, not to mention the presence of what Nick had told me was a work-force of over four hundred, the building was remarkably quiet, making use of sound cancelling tech throughout that had been provided by the Benefactors.
“It boggles my mind that a facility like this is possible,” I said, interrupting the steady commentary that Nick had been providing on the activities I was witnessing.
“I agree,” said the Aussie captain. “But humanity has always thought big—built big—even without alien help. When we first started building this site, in 2023, we were inspired by the two largest manufacturing facilities in the world at the time. Any guesses?”
I didn’t have to guess. Armed with nanites, the answers flashed into my head immediately, but I didn’t want to rain on his parade. “None,” I replied.
“The second largest was the Tesla Gigafactory. Which, at the time, was seventy feet high and covered an area equivalent to about a hundred football fields. Fun fact,” he added with a smile. “This works out to almost fourteen million square feet of floor space.”
“I don’t know what’s more impressive,” I said with a grin. “This statistic . . . or the fact that you have this number at your fingertips.”
“I wanted to give a proper tour,” he replied in amusement. “Even if I had to do almost five minutes of homework.”
“I can tell you put in quite the effort. I know you Aussies still use an antiquated system of measurement. What do you call it? Oh yeah . . . the metric system. So you even took the trouble to convert the answer from square meters into square feet. Not to mention giving me football-field equivalents rather than comparing the space to rugby or soccer fields.”
“Anything for my American friends.”
“So if that was the second largest manufacturing facility in 2023,” I said, “what was the first?”
“Glad you asked. It was Boeing’s aircraft plant in Washington State. Which, by the way, was built from start to finish in just over a year—in the late nineteen sixties.
“How spacious is it, you ask? Four hundred seventy-two million cubic feet spacious. Or, put another way, it’s a facility so large that all of Disneyland can fit inside of it.”
He was right. Humanity had huge issues, but we could also be awfully impressive.
The nanites served up any number of additional examples to me. Facebook in the 2020s had constructed buildings containing tens of thousands of identical data servers, each the size of large refrigerators, side by side by side, like a hall of mirrors going on for eternity. The Pentagon, completed in 1943, was built in only sixteen months, even though it contained over seventeen miles of corridors alone.
“Interestingly enough,” continued Nick, “most of the people we recruited to head up the construction of our zip-craft facility were poached from the two companies I just mentioned, Boeing and Tesla.”
“I’ll bet that recruitment process was . . . challenging.”
“You have no idea. We had to identify key personnel, vet them, bring them up to speed on what’s really going on in our galaxy, and then ensure our secrets are kept.”
“Keeping an organization as extensive as yours secret from Nari and the Federation for this long is an amazing feat. Hard to believe that you’ve never made a single bad hire who went on to betray you.”
“That’s because we don’t take chances,” said the captain. “In the early days, Kussmann realized he needed two things to vet personnel in a way that was foolproof. One, a perfect truth serum. And two, an agent capable of erasing selective memories.”
I nodded. I had learned that the Federation could also erase memories.
“The Benefactors helped him perfect these agents,” continued the captain. “Their AI could hack black site laboratories around the world to find the nations whose scientists had achieved the most success in these two areas.
“With respect to the truth serum, the commander started with a scopolamine derivate developed in Russia. It wasn’t perfect, but it was the most effective yet developed. The Benefactors provided blueprints for tech able to sever the most stubborn chemical bonds, enabling us to modify molecules in ways that human science could not. Kussmann had chemists use this new tech to synthesize thousands of variations of the starting molecule. Variations that couldn’t have been synthesized otherwise. In fairly short order, the truth serum was fully perfected.”
I didn’t know whether to be impressed or appalled. “And you use this on every hire?”
“Yes. But only to be sure they believe in what we’re doing and intend to keep our secret. We re-check periodically. But we never invade their privacy. I mean, we couldn’t care less about their outstanding traffic tickets, banking passwords, or sexual fetishes.”
“Right. So you only use this truth serum for good—not ill.”