Free The Wandering Island Factory by TR Nowry Page B

will turn to your favor.'
    He smiled, folded it, then finished his cold coffee with the last two mini powdered doughnuts. The dryers had another ten minutes, each.
    He would be folding clothes soon.

[Chapter 13]
    Pissed, he looked for his keys in the bowl by the door again. But he knew it was fruitless. His car was gone. He checked his empty cigarette box, then crushed it and tossed it to the table where his keys should have been. He needed his morning fix, bad. Frustrated, he grabbed his wallet, slammed the door behind himself, and walked the ten blocks it took to get to the nearest overpriced convenience store.
    It wasn't the first time someone had taken his car and left him stranded. It was a regular damned occurrence!
    It might not have been so bad, but he wasn't even having sex with Gina yet!
    He kicked the first mailbox he saw, then stomped a discarded cigarette box a few feet away. He was angry, very angry, and it didn't seem to be fading away. It seemed to be getting worse.
    He didn't like the situation he found himself in. He hadn't expected to still be in the kissing stage. He hadn't expected to buy a car and only get to use it half the time. He didn't expect to struggle this hard and have nothing to show for it. And he didn't expect to be stranded at home on a weekend with no car and no smokes!
    He coughed in anger, desperation, and withdrawal. He still had another six blocks to go.

    He opened the box in the store, smoked his first in under a minute just outside their doors, then chain-smoked two more on the walk home. There was something just so calming about a good cigarette, in this case, three.
    Hopefully, most of his anger had been over not getting his morning fix. But somehow, he doubted that was the case. Something had to happen with Gina, or he was going to call it quits. He stopped short of the apartment at the bus stop bench.
    He liked her. No, he loved her. He did. They had a lot in common, and he fully understood her reluctance to move their relationship further. Hugging her could change the day for him. But she kept herself at a distance.
    Sharing a car was easy; sharing a bed with someone he loved more now than he ever did before, but that was keeping herself at such a distance. . . that was something he wasn't prepared for.
    He bought a paper from the machine.
    Global warming was hitting, full force. And carbon capping and trading had failed, miserably. Cap and trade had moved jobs overseas, by the millions. It had destroyed America's competitive advantage by pricing energy, a key cost factor in everything, at four times that of China and India.
    Sitting, the behemoth's thermal turbines earned it carbon credits, but even they had pushed up their rates. Ironically, they had been sued by the local power company for undercutting the market, and the legislature FORCED the behemoth to up their rates.
    But, global warming was proving to be a bigger mixed bag than the experts had predicted. Canada, for example, was enjoying an increase in agricultural exports of sixty percent. Same with food exports from Alaska and Siberia, of all places. Even including crop failures in traditional breadbaskets, the world was seeing an unprecedented surplus of food, and India and China were literally eating it up.
    But as with all news worth printing, they found a way to make this good news depressing. Food was at a surplus, which should have driven prices down across the globe, but didn't. Food prices were up because shipping costs had spiked because of automatic 'triggers' in cap and trade. With windmills going mostly silent with a global shift in wind patterns, everyone was burning exponentially more natural gas to compensate.
    Australia had lifted their ban on the Wandering Island's thermal generator designs years ago and was now using a small array of them to power Sidney, instead of the unsightly tidal generators. A shift in rain patterns had solved their long-standing drought problems and seemed to be turning their