29: Chapter 29 Resource Shortage Leads to Secret Meetings

Texas, Boca Chica, Starship Base.

Elon Musk had absolutely no intention of meeting Edward Warren at first.

When Edward's secretary contacted SpaceX headquarters through official channels to schedule a meeting, Musk's private assistant didn't even forward the email.

Every day, the senators, representatives, governors, and ambassadors from various countries who wanted to meet Musk could be lined up for three months; a state senator from Nevada didn't even make the list.

Furthermore, Musk had no fondness for political families like the Warren Family.

Ever since his eldest son became his eldest daughter, his attitude toward these "woke" and "establishment" political families in the Lighthouse Country had shifted from indifference to repulsion.

The Warren Family had stood tall in Nevada for over a hundred years, and that name alone stepped on two of Musk's landmines: a century-old political family, the establishment of the establishment.

He had never even considered sitting at the same table with such people.

So, the assistant replied to Edward's secretary with a politely worded rejection email:

"Mr. Musk's schedule is full for the foreseeable future, and he cannot arrange a meeting. We are very sorry."

If things had ended there, Edward and Musk would never have had any intersection in their lives.

But before Edward came to Texas, he sent one more thing.

It was an encrypted email.

No pleasantries, no self-introduction, no usual politician's platitudes.

The body of the email contained only one short sentence—

"The following data is all publicly accessible Federal Government archives. Key paragraphs have been redacted or appear blank, but pieced together, they might be worth a look."

Then, below that, he directly pasted over a dozen data fragments intercepted from different public databases.

Hydraulic resource output statistics.

Excerpts from the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission quarterly report.

Hoover Dam annual power generation report.

Water usage allocation records for Southern Nevada.

Each excerpt looked unremarkable, and each number, taken individually, explained nothing.

But Edward Warren did not just leave those data points there; he arranged all the fragments side-by-side by year and category, using eye-catching red boxes to highlight the "broken places" in the middle.

Musk saw the email at 1:17 AM.

He had just come down from the Starship Base launch tower, covered in the metallic dust of the stainless steel welding workshop and the mixed scent of antifreeze, and was preparing to catch a few hours of sleep on his office sofa.

But his private phone rang with a specific frequency of vibration; only a very small number of people could trigger this alert.

He glanced at the screen, intending to swipe it away.

Then he saw the short line of text and the data screenshots arranged below it.

He did not sleep again that night.

He downloaded the dozen data screenshots onto his workstation's oversized screen, zoomed in to one hundred inches,

and then marked the "blank" locations in each piece of data with yellow boxes, rearranging them according to the timeline.

When all the data was placed side-by-side—

In the decade before 1947, the hydroelectric output of the Hoover Dam matched the consumption of the Las Vegas area perfectly.

In 1947, a gap suddenly appeared.

Twenty to thirty percent of hydraulic resources were unaccounted for, and thirty to forty percent of power resources were not on any public recipient's account books.

This gap lasted for fifty full years, from 1947 all the way to 1997.

Fifty years.

The total amount of water and power that evaporated over half a century could supply a medium-sized city for decades.

And all of this could not be traced to any destination in any public Federal Government database.

Musk was an engineer first, then a businessman.

The engineer's way of thinking is: if you see a stable, large-scale resource consumption curve that has lasted for fifty years, but you cannot find any corresponding consumption terminal, then it means that this terminal not only exists, but its level of concealment is extremely high.

How high?

High enough to create a fifty-year data black hole in the Federal Government's public databases that no one noticed.

And the power capable of maintaining this black hole for fifty years without being uncovered—in the Lighthouse Country, there is no such thing.

No publicly existing federal agency has this level of authority.

That night, Musk did not sleep; he just stared at the data gaps on the screen, lost in deep thought.

These gaps were like a puzzle, the energy-consumption traces left behind by a massive, classified experiment.

He recalled the various conspiracy theories and rumors he had heard in Silicon Valley and aerospace circles over the years, which he had never taken to heart before;

but now, he seemed to see some sort of corroboration.

The next morning, Edward Warren's secretary received a reply.

The sender was Musk's private email, and the entire text consisted of only one sentence—

"Tell him to come to Boca Chica."

...

Texas, Boca Chica, three miles east of the Starship Base, the Old Lighthouse.

This lighthouse was built in the late 19th century and was one of the earliest navigation lighthouses along the Gulf of Mexico coast.

After being abandoned in the last century, the Federal Coast Guard built a new steel navigation tower next to it, and the old lighthouse completely lost its function.

Its tower was built from local limestone, and after more than a hundred years of salt wind erosion from the Gulf of Mexico, the outer wall was mottled like some kind of abstract sculpture.

The lantern room at the top of the tower was empty;

the glass and copper lamps had been dismantled in the 1980s, leaving only an exposed octagonal stone platform that could overlook the entire Boca Chica peninsula and the gray-blue horizon of the Gulf of Mexico in the distance.

Musk bought it the year SpaceX first started building its base in Boca Chica.

Some said he bought the old lighthouse for feng shui, others said it was for sentiment, but the real reason was simple—

In Boca Chica, there weren't many places where he could think quietly, and this lighthouse terrace was his favorite.

There were no cameras here, no recording equipment, and no signal coverage belonging to his company's internal communication system.

There was only one dirt road leading in under the tower, and there was an iron gate at the entrance of the dirt road, which could only be opened with two keys;

one was in Musk's hand, and one was in his head of security's hand.

And today, his head of security had temporarily handed the second key to his invited guest.

Edward Warren had arrived an hour ago.

He had driven himself, in a black Ford rented from San Antonio airport, without any entourage or staff.

The dirt road from the Boca Chica base to the old lighthouse was hard to travel, and the chassis scraped twice, but his expression did not change as he drove;

a Nevadan who grew up in the desert had patience for dirt roads and wilderness carved into his bones.

He parked the car outside the iron gate, unlocked it with the key, and walked up the stone steps.

The stone steps were narrow, the sandstone steps were pitted by the sea breeze, and the height of each step was not quite the same.

He walked slowly but steadily, without holding the railing once.

When he stepped onto the terrace, Musk was already there.

Musk was leaning against the stone railing on the top floor of the lighthouse, holding a white ceramic coffee mug in his hand; steam rose from the rim of the cup and dissipated as soon as it was blown by the sea breeze.

He was not dressed in his usual suit or leather jacket and boots, but rather in a casual dark gray T-shirt and a pair of jeans that had been washed white, with work boots stained with mud and dried cement powder on his feet;

he had just been in the base watching the workers install the booster engine mounts.

His hair was blown into a mess by the sea breeze, and there were two dark gray marks under his eye bags,

similar to the eye bags Edward had seen when he met Walsh on Chestnut Street that day, both the result of staying up late.

But when those eyes looked at Edward through his messy hair, they were bright enough to be almost blinding.

"Senator Warren."

Musk spoke first, his voice not loud, partially scattered by the sea breeze, but the edges of every word were still there,

"The things you sent in the email kept me up all night last night."

"Just call me Edward."

Edward stood still at the other end of the terrace,

there was a distance of about four or five meters between the two, not far, but enough for two people meeting for the first time to maintain their respective psychological comfort zones.

He did not walk over, nor did he deliberately try to close the distance with Musk, just naturally found a slightly flat edge of the stone railing on the top of the tower, brushed the dust off with his palm, and sat down.

"Then you must have checked everything you could last night," Edward looked at Musk, his tone as flat as if he were chatting about the weather,

"The more you check, the more problems you find, and then the less you can sleep."

"Isn't that right?"

Musk held the coffee mug without answering immediately.

He looked at Edward by the railing,

this old politician from Las Vegas, dressed casually, speaking casually, even sitting down as casually as if he had returned to his own living room.

But he did not lower his guard by even half a point.

A senator who had stood tall in Nevada politics for nearly twenty years,

the head of a political family that had taken root in Nevada for over a hundred years,

such a person's "casualness" was never truly casual.

"I found more than what you sent," Musk took a sip of coffee, then tilted his chin slightly toward the distant Starship launch tower,

"But with all due respect, Senator Warren, did you send the file to the wrong place?"

"I only have stainless steel and Raptor engines here, not the Federal Government's audit department."

"For things like the Hoover Dam hydroelectric anomaly, you should go to the Department of Energy, the Government Accountability Office, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, or..."

"I have." Edward interrupted him.