The Girl in the Road Read Online Free PDF Page A

bobbing on the surface of the water, stretching toward a hazy horizon. That’s that famous Trail, then. I stare at it all the way up.
    Once on the eleventh floor I walk in the direction of a black doorway that says cinema in silver lettering. The word is comforting. I feel good. I’d like to sit still and watch an educational film. I enter a black velvet room shaped like a half-circle. When I sit, the room senses my presence and the screen springs to life. I’m relieved it’s not an immersive theater where the images get into your head and cup your eyeballs. I like there to be a distance between me and art. Mohini and I argued about that, with her feeling that I was being a Luddite on par with Luddites who impugned film as a valid art form in the early twentieth century. I disagreed. I still do.
    The film begins. It’s beautifully produced. The narrator is a woman speaking in English with a north Indian lilt and for once it doesn’t annoy me. She tells me about the history of artificial energy on our planet. Wood. Water. Coal. Oil. Nuclear. Geothermal. Wind. Solar. The twins Fusion and Fission, both functional in laboratories, but still too expensive to be scaled up. And lastly Wave, which I think is what the Trail is. They call it Blue Energy, the successor to Green Energy. I’m excited for whatever Red Energy and Purple Energy and Orange Energy will turn out to be. I’m starting to feel euphoric.
    The narrator doesn’t call it the Trail. She calls it the Trans-Arabian Linear Generator, or TALG. She presents a succession of pleasing metaphors: that its technology draws from ancient pontoon bridges which, though remarkable for their time, only spanned distances of a few kilometers, like the Bosporus or the Hellespont, in times of war. And then they were discarded, more easily disassembled than assembled. The narrator emphasizes that the TALG only resembles a pontoon bridge, as its overall shape is more like that of an upside-down caterpillar. Each segment is a hollow, inverted pyramid made of aluminum, and each sunward surface is faced with solar paneling, which seems brilliant to me, makes me want to applaud. Between the segments are hinge arrays called nonlinear compliant connectors, each of which contains a dynamo, in each of which is suspended an egg of steel that bobs up and down as the wave does. This generates energy, as does the solar paneling, making the TALG a dual-action apparatus. Mohini would love this—I wonder if she knew about this. And then the energy is imported to its recipient plant in Djibouti—there is an image of a house in Djibouti lighting up, and a Djiboutian family rejoicing—via superconductor threads made of metallic hydrogen, a controversial material whose manufacturing process was perfected ten years ago. Despite its history of catastrophic accidents, metallic hydrogen is metastable, the narrator assures me; structurally sound, like an artificial diamond. She explains how the TALG was also a breakthrough in intelligent self-assembly on a mass scale, because every component of the TALG has an intelligent chip that, like a human cell, “understands” where it goes and what it’s supposed to do and can monitor and repair itself.
    Then the tone of her voice changes. This is a pilot project, she cautions. HydraCorp and its partners, mainly the Djiboutian government, rich from recent oil wealth, wanted to know if this is a viable, sustainable form of energy after oil runs out, in which case they’ll build a TILG for the Indian Ocean and a TPLG for the Pacific Ocean and all the world’s oceans could be crisscrossed with energy generators like a fishnet flung across the entire planet. This is incredible. Mohini would be clutching at my sleeve right now if she were here. And how does the TALG stay roughly in the same place? Well, because of breakthroughs in materials science, the TALG is anchored to the seafloor by means of Gossamoor,