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It was a miraculous fluke that he had this week off.
    He got out of the cab and walked up the steps to the small apartment where Gina's family was staying. Protocol suggested he should have brought a fine bottle of wine, but he brought a huge pecan pie and a strawberry cheesecake. The wine probably would have cost him less.
    Gina's mother put an enormous amount of effort into the dinner, and it showed. The mashed potatoes were even put back into the oven for an extra ten minutes, just to brown the buttered tops before being covered in shredded cheese. The yams and cranberry sauce were the only things that came pre-prepared, from a can. It was all much better than he could have done, and Thanksgiving just wasn't Thanksgiving without those touches of home.
    The after-dinner conversation naturally settled on the floating island, with Nathan peppering Jason with questions.
    ". . . Buck, the engineer in my section, could answer that question better than me," Jason answered.
    Nathan elbowed Gina, "I told you to date Buck instead—"
    "But," Jason continued, "I asked the same kind of question. 'How do you anchor two hundred acres of drifting boat?' Well, the only answer I got, that I understood, was that it had something to do with the thermal generator, which I also don't understand all that well.
    I get how the behemoth makes power from lava, that's easy, it makes steam and shoots it past a couple of turbines. But somehow, the island's design makes hundreds of megawatts off of the small temperature difference between warm surface water and the frigid water hundreds of feet below. Anyhow, to get that much power from lower temperature differences requires moving large sums of surface water. Moving large sums of water is just what you need to keep an island stationary. It stays anchored as a side effect of how it makes electricity."
    "I don't know," Nathan said, "that sounds a little far fetched. I believe the internet stories about it being the first civilian ship with a nuclear reactor."
    Jason laughed, but had second thoughts. "You might be right, for all I know. If a billionaire can't buy a nuke, who can?"
    Gina returned from the kitchen with her mom, each balancing plates of pie and cups of coffee.
    Everything was going great, until the mother suggested, to the horror of everyone, that they move the table and play twister.

    A month later, Gina spent the holiday with her family, as only seemed right. And though they were very gracious and invited him to stay, he felt like a fifth wheel the whole time. The apartment was small for a family of four, plus him, and it always felt like he was crowding them. But he stayed and got to know the people Gina grew up with.
    He watched the late night news with Nathan.
    The floating island was still front and center.
    He would think that its ultra-green pedigree would have saved it from hippie protests. It didn't. It was made from lava and sand, yet because they altered its chemistry ever so slightly so that it didn't decompose into dirt after a few years, it was deemed a mortal sin against nature.
    Next on the protest list was its chosen source of power. The thermal generator. It was a banned technology for generating power because it artificially cooled the surface of the ocean. Ironically, the loudest protests came from global-warming advocates who claimed that the world was going to end because, "greenhouse gasses were WARMING the surface of the ocean TOO much!" As a ship intended for international waters, they could use whatever source of power they could afford, and neither had to ask for permission nor care about complaints. The company was even petitioning the UN, most likely for publicity reasons, for official country status for the island.
    The thermal generators seemed to make an enormous amount of sense. Anyone who owned a mobile island would naturally keep moving it to chase the seventy-degree weather, all year round, which was perfect for just such a machine. Besides that,