Month: May 2020

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Narrative

A Message from an Old Friend

This is our second day without decent Internet connectivity. Having completed her sign-off from her air shift, Brenda Redmond logged the last three songs into the playlist, along with the ad blocks she’d run

The guys from the Alternative Lunch didn’t exactly look happy, but it was unsurprising when a big part of their show was live interviews with authors of alternate history, in between their alternative rock. With Internet to the other lunar settlements still patchy and Earth and Mars completely cut off, they were going to have a problem.

But there was no time to discuss it, not when they needed to get ready to sign on. So she stuck to the normal hand-over protocols and wished them well.

Now she needed to grab lunch before her teaching responsibility. There wasn’t time to get up to the dining commons and eat and still get to Miskatonic Sector and her classroom in time, so she always had her lunch sent to her classroom on the days she taught class.

As she went to open the Meals app and put in her request, she discovered she’d left her phone in the mail app. It had just updated with new mail, and she recognized a name she hadn’t seen in ages.

Robbie Sandberg had been Brenda’s best friend all through grade school and into jr. high. Even as anti-clone prejudice mounted and her social circle shrank, Robbie had stuck by her, even at the cost of other friendships, of taunts and cruelties.

And then one day Robbie came with tears in her eyes, explaining that her parents had ordered her to dump the “clonespawn.” Only by begging and pleading had Robbie been able to gain the tiny concession of being allowed to see Brenda one last time and explain the situation rather than simply disappearing from her life.

It had been a painful moment during a stage of life that was already painful because of the havoc puberty wreaked upon young bodies and minds. At the time she’d barely suppressed her anger enough to force out some words about the Fifth Commandment. The only saving grace was it being right about the time her own parents had decided to bring the family up here to the Moon, so she had her own burden of obedience. But looking back, she knew she’d been let far too much snark into her voice as she said she was leaving school to begin her training at Johnson Space Center to join her father in his new posting as Chief of Engineering here at Shepardsport.

Remembering, Brenda felt bad that she had hardly thought of Robbie since then, even after they’d both turned eighteen. However, Brenda had her own life up here on the Moon now, with people who respected her for what she could do, and now she had a family of her own.

As she waited for the sector airlock to cycle so she could pass through into Miskatonic Sector, she opened the e-mail. Whatever she’d expected, it wasn’t the message she got.

The tone was unmistakable panic. It took Brenda several re-reads to sort out the disorganized missive: Robbie was in college, and the administration had just received orders to clear the campus. Everyone had twenty-four hours to vacate the dorms — but Robbie couldn’t move home.

Apparently she had come out to her parents about something and there’d been a horrible row, to the point they had tried to tell her she wouldn’t be going back to school. But all her friends had gone to bat for her, finding her a job, a place to live until the semester started, a replacement laptop and phone for the ones her parents had confiscated on the grounds they’d paid for them.

As deeply religious as her parents were, it would be easy to expect it was her sexuality. Except there was nothing about a girlfriend — or a boyfriend for that matter.

Could she have decided to argue back against their anti-Sharp prejudice? But given the way America under the Flannigan Administration was going, it seemed unlikely that someone who didn’t toe that line would be getting a full-ride scholarship at any major university.

Whatever was going on, one thing was clear — Robbie was being kicked out of the dorm and being told to return to a home where she was not welcome, where she didn’t feel safe. She was desperate — and Brenda was completely helpless to do anything on her behalf.

Right now she had a class she needed to be ready to teach. Fourth-graders might not be as bad as seventh-graders, but she still needed to have her wits about her. Afterward she could look for someone she could trust and talk with them about the situation. Given the timestamp on that e-mail, it had probably been bouncing around the Internet for a while before it found its way up here. A couple more hours wouldn’t make a huge amount of difference.

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Narrative

Seeking Answers

It was really too bad that Lou Corlin had to have the morning airshift. Right now Spruance Del Curtin would’ve really liked to sit him down and talk IT.

Sprue had spent most of the morning in Dr. Doorne’s office, working on yet another dataset that needed sanitizing and verifying before it was analyzed. The further he went on this project, the more patterns he noticed — and the more he wondered just how much that data had to do with current events on Earth.

Why else would she have become so upset when I mentioned the spread of a virgin-field epidemic as an S-curve that initially looks like exponential growth?

It was also making him think of the propagation of certain kinds of malware on a network that lacked adequate defenses. Eventually you simply ran out of computers to infect — but until that happened, the spread would appear explosive.

And then Sprue remembered someone else from the station who worked with computers and networks. Spencer Dawes was working at the robotics shop, and while it was in Engineering, it had its IT aspects. Robots were controlled via WiFi, which meant needing security on those connections to ensure your robots stayed under your control, and didn’t get turned against you in obvious or subtle ways.

Visiting the robotics shop had the added benefit that Harlan Lemont was pretty laid back about discipline, and tended to be just a little overawed by Sheps. As long as Ken Redmond didn’t decide to put in an appearance, Sprue wasn’t likely to get Spence in trouble for slacking.

As it turned out, Spence was doing some pretty routine maintenance, so it wasn’t that hard for Sprue to lend a hand and avoid the issue altogether. “So how familiar are you with network security and malware?”

“Some. I have done some basic setup, especially when we have to replace a bot’s hard drive.” Spence gave him an odd looking over. “What are you looking for?”

“I’ve got a theory about the weird problems we’re having communicating with the outside universe, and especially with Earth.” Sprue considered how to lay it out, given that he wasn’t an IT guy and didn’t have that strong of background in the jargon. “The weirdest thing about this whole thing is how it’s intermittent. Part of the time you can get through, sorta-kinda, especially on low-bandwidth systems like SMS or on store-and-forward systems like e-mail. Other times it locks up completely and you can’t even ping anything outside our own networks.”

“That’s a pretty good description of the situation.” Spencer Dawes retrieved a can of machine oil and applied a few drops to several points on the robot’s joints. “That’s what’s got everybody in IT so sure it’s got to be a new kind of DDOS attack. Instead of continually bombarding our servers with phantom requests, the pwned computers are sending them intermittently, with periods of letup that make it harder to identify the sources and block them.”

Sprue had overheard enough to know how well that was going. “Except everything they do to trace incoming TCP/IP traffic is showing no evidence of unusual patterns of incoming requests. Which suggests there’s something completely different going on, that just looks like a DDOS attack. Suppose someone could create a completely different piece of malware that causes problems that look like a DDOS attack, but is completely local to the affected computers?”

“In theory it might be possible, but I don’t know enough to say. Juss might know, since he’s done some troubleshooting for IT.” Spence cast a significant glance over Sprue’s shoulder, a warning.

Sprue didn’t dare turn to take a look — too obvious. But there was enough metal around here to provide reflective surfaces enough to give him a good idea that Ken Redmond had come in and was talking with Harlan about something. No, Sprue did not want to get crosswise with the big boss right now.

Better wind it up, figure out how he could connect with Juss Forsythe. Although Juss was a clone of Ed White, which meant Sprue didn’t have lineage right to call upon, unlike with Spencer Dawes, who was a clone of Al Shepard’s Lunar Module pilot.

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Narrative

Closer to the Heart

The module lounge was quiet this evening, which suited Lou Corlin just fine. Normally he would call Emiko, maybe even FaceTime if they both felt up to it. But with Shepardsport’s data connections with the rest of the universe being in disarray, that wasn’t going to be possible.

Earlier today they’d been texting back and forth. Now even SMS was bouncing, which suggested that the problem had becoming worse.

His phone chimed mail. A quick check of his mail revealed several new messages, including one from Emiko.

When he opened it, he realized from the context that she must’ve sent it several hours earlier. Which meant it had taken this long for the store-and-forward mailservers to get it from Grissom City to Shepardsport.

At least everything she had to say was routine, the usual work, training, and teaching responsibility. Given what was happening down on Earth, and the fact that Slayton Field was the Moon’s busiest port of entry, it was hard not to fear the worst when he didn’t hear from her at all.

A sound from behind him attracted his attention, and he looked up to find Brenda Redmond giving him a worried look. “Hi, Lou. You mind if I join you?”

Lou was about to balk, then remembered that Brenda’s husband was also over at Grissom City. As a pilot-astronaut, he’d be living in the Roosa Barracks, right where everyone was coming and going.

Lou moved the bag with his laptop and graphics tablet to free some space on the sofa. “Go right ahead. We’re both in the same fix right now. I just got the e-mail that Emiko sent me about four hours ago.”

“At least you got it.” Brenda paused, as if considering what to say next. “About ten minutes ago, I got an e-mail from Drew, but when I tried to pull it up, the mail app said the message had no content.”

“Strange.” Lou considered the information, wished he knew a lot more about e-mail protocols. Almost all his work for IT had been with the big number-crunchers the science departments used. “Maybe we’d better check it out, especially if it would help get a handle on whatever’s blocking our connections with Earth. I can ask some of the people I know down in IT from my work there.”

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Narrative

Dancing in the Dark

All day Autumn Belfontaine had been going from one to another website, trying to find someplace that would give her news from Earth. Yet again and again she got one or another error message — mostly 404 Not Found, but a lot of 500-series errors that related to gateways along the route to the servers where the webpages were stored.

She tried not to listen too closely to the sales director complaining about how he’d been just about to close on a deal with a client who would provide the station with a hefty amount of advertising money, right when the teleconference link went flooey. Yes, it was another data point that might help IT run down whatever was messing up their Internet connectivity, but beyond that it wasn’t really any of her business.

On the other hand, it was something to distract her from the rapidly approaching evening drive-time newscast. Although nobody was sure just how many people tuned in to Shepardsport Pirate Radio via their cars’ mobile Internet or satellite radio, it was still an important part of their audience, and right now the station wouldn’t have it. Worse, she had almost nothing to base her evening newscast on except local events and a few bits that had dribbled through from other lunar settlements.

Autumn looked up at the newsroom clock. Fifteen minutes and she needed to be on the air, delivering the day’s news. What used to be called “world news,” although now it would be covering three worlds, if she could just connect with anything from Earth or Mars. Then the national news, and finally local news.

But right now local was all she had, other than a few incidents in Grissom City and some of the smaller settlements of the Tranquility East region. And even the local news was more on the order of public service announcements and human interest than actual news. People around here were by and large pretty orderly.

On the other hand, there was the Internet outage — but right now she was uncertain how much she should report on it, so long as its cause remained uncertain. And there were valid reasons not to broadcast just how badly they had been affected, especially while they also had no idea who might be behind whatever malware might be behind it.

She picked up her phone. Should she try to contact someone down at IT, see where they were, what level of embargo she should observe on information about the situation?

However, they were probably still busy, if not as overwhelmingly so as when this mess first started. She still remembered overhearing one of the IT people talking about the help desk switchboard being nearly overwhelmed with incoming calls at the beginning.

Better to text her contact at IT. SMS used less bandwidth, and it was asynchronous, so it wouldn’t interrupt someone who was busy with something else.

And then, with the text on its way, it was time to put together her news report for the evening. One with the report on the Internet outage, assuming it was OK to talk about it, and a second with some suitable filler to occupy the necessary airtime. And then it was off to the DJ booth to broadcast.

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Paying the Bills

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In a terrifying age of darkness and decay, these artifacts could be the keys to mankind’s salvation. But as the mystery at the core of this groundbreaking novel unfolds, it is the search itself—for meaning, for truth, for love—that offers hope for humanity’s rebirth from the ashes.

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Narrative

In the Information Void

There was one good thing of having a work shift right in the middle of a crisis — it kept you so busy you didn’t have time to brood. But now that Cindy had finished her shift as receptionist at Shepardsport Pirate Radio, she found she had altogether too much time to think about the current situation.

You now know just enough about it to worry you, but not nearly enough to help resolve it. On top of that, you don’t know what’s going on with Amy or her parents. The last thing you knew, her mom and dad were both being taken to the hospital, and both of them were in bad shape.

Even as Cindy reached for her phone, she checked herself. No, Kitty had her own responsibilities, and shouldn’t be interrupted. Right now there was nothing either of them could do about Amy’s situation, assuming they could even get through whatever was making communications with other lunar settlements difficult and communications with Earth well-nigh impossible.

As Cindy arrived at the Shepardsport dining commons, she scanned the area, but didn’t see Kitty. Nor did she see any of her cousins. Which meant she could either try to find someone to sit with, or take a seat at an empty table and have whoever chose to sit down with her.

Look on the bright side. At least you don’t have to deal with a dozen or more teenage Sheps all trying to hit on you, like the girls from other lineages have to.

As she was working her way through the maze of tables, someone called her name. She turned to see a blond-haired young man waving to her. “Over here. You can sit with me.”

“Thanks.” As she went to join him, she struggled to recognize him. Not Quinn Merton, although he was definitely an Armstrong.

He must’ve picked up on her struggle, because he introduced himself. “I’m Cory Jannifer. Justin Forsythe asked me to make sure you had someone to sit with at lunch.”

“Um, that’s nice of him.” Cindy winced at how clumsy those words sounded. She’d met Cory a couple of times — he’d been Spruance Del Curtin’s junior TA in a basic science class a couple of years ago, and had come to the station fairly regularly to drop things off. But it had been a while, and Cory was hitting that age when puberty really started transforming a person’s appearance.

“He is concerned about your situation.”

The sudden clench of the spinal muscles caught Cindy by surprise. There was no rational reason that she should be alarmed by what was obviously meant as a courtesy.

Yet there was the inescapable question: just how did he knew he should be concerned? She hadn’t said anything to him about Amy, and as far as she knew, neither had Kitty or Brenda.

She knew he’d spent some time out in California, at the retreat house of the Institute of Noetic Sciences. They were a parapsychological research community, which strongly suggested he possessed some level of telepathy.

There were rumors about experiments that had gone on during the Cold War, attempts to create clone-lines of powerful telepaths by splicing feline DNA into humans. They were common enough to have even become the basis of several manga series, although those were pretty clearly fantastic, with their cute telepathic catboys and catgirls getting into mischief as much feline as human.

Although Cindy wanted to ponder why the idea should bother her so intensely, Cory was already asking her how her classes were going. Nothing intrusive, just the usual making-conversation sort of thing, but she would be remiss if she didn’t respond.

And quite possibly he was supposed to engage her in conversation specifically to take her mind off Amy’s situation.

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Narrative

Pondering the Implications

When Lou Corlin arrived at the station to start his air shift, he was surprised to see half a dozen people from IT in the offices, their laptops connected to the station computers via Ethernet cable. He hadn’t noticed any problems with the stream when his alarm went off.

One of the IT people was talking to Cindy, so asking her what was going on wasn’t an option. And all the other IT people looked far too busy to interrupt.

Nothing to do at this point but focus on doing his own job. Back in the creche you learned that principle early, from plenty of examples out of the history of America’s early space program.

And his job was to get ready to do his air shift, and then DJ the Rising Sun J-Pop Show to the best of his ability. Not a difficult task, but one in which mistakes could have definite consequences. All the DJ’s had taken their drubbings for leaving dead air because they hadn’t adequately planned their lineup for a moment away from the broadcast booth.

While he was waiting for Brenda Redmond to emerge from the DJ booth, Lou listened to the livestream playing on the stereo behind the receptionist’s desk. The audio quality on “Blackbird” sounded fine, including the blackbird singing.

However, it wouldn’t be as good an indicator of transmission quality as it would be on a station that was transmitting via actual radio waves. With Internet radio streaming, it just meant that the stereo was getting a good feed from the streaming server, which meant only two or three routers to hop. There simply wasn’t any good way for an Internet radio station to be sure how its stream was propagating over the millions of routers across the Earth-Moon system.

And then the door opened and out stepped Brenda, looking worried. “Good morning, Lou. I see you’ve noticed the IT people up here. I don’t know if you’ve been on the Web any this morning, but Shepardsport seems to be having trouble communicating with the rest of the Internet this morning.”

Lou realized his mind was beginning to race with alarm and quickly curbed it. “What kind of problems?”

“That’s what IT’s trying to figure out right now. Stephanie Roderick thought it was a DDOS attack, but now she’s saying there’s no sign of net traffic overage. At the moment, all we can do is keep broadcasting for the local audience and hope IT doesn’t have to reboot all the servers and routers.”

“Now that would be a major piece of downtime.” Lou looked over Brenda’s air-shift notes, checking for anything he should be aware of.

Then it was time to take over the DJ booth and line up his first set of the day. As he prepared to deliver the top-of-the-hour station identification, he wondered if this were some new kind of cyber attack. They’d weathered several DDOS attacks before, until IT had put in new software to foil the software that turned improperly secured comptuers into “zombie machines” sending spurrious requests to the target servers. But information security was always an arms race between the hackers and the sysops.

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Narrative

The Peril Grows Closer

Reggie Waite had become accustomed to the daily meetings in Medlab with Dr. Thuc. Sometimes Dr. Doorne would attend and present the latest prognostications of her statistical team, but she did not attend unless she had something new. Not surprising, given that statistical modeling was at best her third specialty, after radio astronomy and signals processing. She had a lot on her plate, especially for a woman with a young child, who’d come to motherhood later in life.

But the meat of their discussion was always the information Barbie Thuc was getting both through NASA and through her various medical sources, both official and unofficial. Again and again their discussion would go back to the curious gaps between the official and unofficial sources, the lacunae in the official accounts.

“They’re trying to keep it quiet, but we’ve had a really close call.” Dr. Thuc’s voice was calm and professional as always, but Reggie knew her well enough to pick up that hint of tension.

“What happened?”

“Apparently one of the tour companies had a client come down sick with this thing, they’re taking to calling it the diablovirus because those two big protein structures resemble a devil’s horns.” Dr. Thuc inclined her head toward the scanning electron micrograph that had become so familiar in these past weeks. “Just someone who was beginning training for spaceflight, not anyone who was set up for a flight. But they’re concerned enough about the possibility of contagion via their own staff that they’ve suspended all their flights for the next month, even the people who are in pre-flight quarantine.”

Reggie could imagine the consternation among those wealthy tourist types, discovering that the vacation they’d spent the last year or two training for was going to be delayed, perhaps indefinitely. But there could be no question of taking the risk, not when lunar settlements were places where a disease would spread like wildfire. Even the common cold, which could never be eradicated for the simple reason that the immune system needed something to keep it busy or it got into trouble, had a tendency to sweep through whole habitats every time it mutated enough that people’s antibodies no longer reacted to it.

“Damn. This mess is making me think of a book I read when I was a kid.” Reggie closed his eyes and could see the red-bound volume in the library at Witchcraft Heights Elementary School, the illustrations within it. “The family was on its way to Mars — it was one of the books that really started my excitement about space, back when America’s cloning program was still a burn-before-reading Cold War secret — and there’d been some kind of problem with the spaceship’s reactor. All the passengers had to huddle in this shelter that was a storeroom at the far end of the ship while the crew took care of the problem. There were these special lights that would turn red in the presence of radiation, and there was a whole row of them in the corridor outside of the shelter. One by one each turns red, and everyone’s starting to watch the one inside their shelter. And then, just as the last one outside is turning red, there’s an announcement that the reactor has been repaired, and the crew is coming to sweep the area of radiation.”

He paused, trying to get his mind back in the headspace of a youngster reading a book that must’ve come out in the 50’s, before the launch of Sputnik, when a lot was believable which had now become so encrusted in Zeerust that it was well-nigh impossible to suspend disbelief. “Of course the description of how radiation works was completely ridiculous, but for me as a kid, it was so scary, and then such a relief when the crewmen in their protective suits showed up with their radiation vacuum cleaners and the lamps stopped glowing read. I loved that book so much I must’ve checked it out and re-read it a dozen times before I left for junior high. And then I’ve never been able to find it again. When my brother Chris was going to school there, we went to parents’ night one time and I slipped into the library to look for it, but I couldn’t find it. And the title never stuck with. me, so I haven’t been able to look it up online, so I’m not even sure if it actually existed, or I’m confusing multiple books into one.”

Dr. Thuc gave him a sympathetic nod on that one. “Isn’t it interesting, how the strangest things will stick with us.”

Just as Reggie was about to say let’s hope this business doesn’t end up being one of them when his phone’s messenger app chimed. He pulled out his phone, and on the lock screen was a notification from his wife: We’ve got a major problem donw here.

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Narrative

Seeking Connection

It’s really sad when you’re listening to a disreputable Internet radio station just to hear your wife’s voice in one of the canned announcements. Drew Reinholt fiddled with his vTuner settings yet again, hoping yet again that it would connect with the Shepardsport Pirate Radio livestream. And it’s even sadder when you can’t.

Strictly speaking, there was no prohibition on the Slayton Field pilots listening to Shepardsport Pirate Radio, even in their offices when they were at work on their secondary astronaut specialties. But then Colonel Dyer knew better than give an order he knew would not be obeyed.

He pulled up the computer’s terminal and began doing some basic network tests. Although Drew wasn’t an IT specialist, or even an electrical engineer, he’d learned some basic network troubleshooting techniques over the years, especially back in the days when he was roaming the lunar surface with Dr. Schwartz.

He was able to ping the server, but only intermittently, which suggested that something was interfering with the transmission of packets. If there had been physical damage to the cables that ran alongside the ice train’s tracks, down to Coopersville and back north on Farside, it should’ve resulted in every IP address associated with Shepardsport simply disappearing from the Internet.

He recalled a long-ago leadership lecture about “rewarding intermittently” as a means of motivation. If someone were deliberately sabotaging Shepardsport’s connectivity, say with some kind of malware, might they allow just enough packets to go through to keep people trying to get through? Drew could think of several possible ways to create such an effect, although he knew he couldn’t describe them in sufficient detail to get IT to pay attention to him.

A tap on the door of his office brought him out of his ruminations. Drew looked up from his computer to find Peter Caudell standing there. “Hey, Drew, I know you’ve got family over at Shepardsport. Have you been having trouble making connections with them?”

“Damn skippy I have.” Drew knew he was being sharper than was politic with someone so senior, who’d done a hitch up here back in the days when the Roosa Barracks was just the moonbase. “Just this morning Brenda and I were going to FaceTime before she went on her air shift. Then it broke up and I wasn’t able to connect with her. I was hoping I could at least try to text her when we got back down, but by that time I couldn’t even get through on SMS.”

Peter nodded, concern drawing a furrow between his eyebrows. Even at his age he still had Scott Carpenter’s good looks — that was a geneset that aged well. “One of my clone-brothers over there has been having some problems. I’ve been checking in with him pretty regularly, trying to buck him up when things get particularly bad. Our last check-in should’ve been about four hours ago, and I haven’t been able to raise him at all.”

Drew nodded toward his computer with vTuner up. “Right now all I know is I can’t connect with Shepardsport Pirate Radio’s streaming service. I’ve been hesitant to contact IT about it because I don’t want to advertise that I listen to them. But I’m thinking it’s a lot more than just the digital radio stream getting cut off.” He looked straight into Peter’s eyes. “Maybe your word would have more weight than anything I could say.”

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Document

Of Spherical Cows and Runaway Trolleys

I remember when I was taking my first college physics course and we were confronted with the standard “cow in the sun” problem that, for ease of solving, directed us to assume a perfectly spherical cow of uniform density in a frictionless environment. I could tell it was intended to be a practical application of the principles we were learning — except it was so unrealistic that it effectively undid any nod to practicality.

I already had enough background in computers to know we had the necessary programs to model the actual processes. In fact, I had been using them at a summer job, and was familiar enough with them to feel comfortable looking for a computer lab where I could access one of them and do the modeling for real.

I’d expected my professor to be pleased with my cleverness when I delivered my printout. Instead he frowned and handed it back to me, telling me it was unacceptable. I was to do the problem as directed, and because I would be handing it in a day late, I would lose one letter grade.

I was a bit of a smart alec, and I just couldn’t resist arguing my case. Looking back, I realize just how lucky I was that Professor Rockwell was a man secure in his abilities, who did not see argument as affront. Instead he very patiently explained to me that he wanted us to do the problem with the mathematical skills we had already mastered, at most using a scientific calculator to speed the calculations. Without a firm understanding of the mathematics involved, using modeling software would be altogether too much like magic, and would not teach us the physical principles, only how to push the buttons marked push and pull the levers marked pull.

Some years later I was taking an ethics of engineering course, and we had to discuss the usual problems of levers that could either kill a beloved family member or a thousand strangers and runaway trolleys that could either kill a crowd of children or one portly businessman. As the class progressed, I grew increasingly frustrated with how artificial and contrived so many of them were, to the point I found it difficult to take them seriously, even as hypotheticals.

Perhaps if this had been an undergraduate course, I might have become the subject of a how-dare-you pile-on. But this was a graduate-level course for doctoral candidates, and instead of everyone trying to humiliate me into silence, the class actually engaged my objection. Although I’d managed to derail the professor’s intended discussion, we ended up reaching a conclusion not dissimilar from Professor Rockwell’s explanation to me back in freshman physics — that using modeling software to create realistic situations full of degrees of risk, of known and unknown unknowns, would make the process altogether too much like magic, an answer box that you put questions in one and and get answers out the other.

—- Ursula Doorne, PhD, Leland Professor of Astronomy, Kennedy University Tycho, oral history interview, October 18, 2067.