Month: September 2020

Categories
Narrative

In the Shadow of Uncertainty

Autumn Belfontaine had not expected to get a visit from the head of Flight Operations. She knew that Bill Hearne had been a friend of her father’s, but her father had died before she was even born.

And there’s a lot of survivor guilt there. Colonel Hearne was commanding American Eagle during the NASA Massacre.

But here he was, visiting in person rather than just texting or e-mailing his questions. Autumn was getting the impression that it was a personal matter and he didn’t want records of it to be on any official NASA systems.

Which made her wish she could give him some better information. “Unfortunately, we’re not getting a whole lot of information either. A lot of the wire services have gone down, especially the Web-based ones. Even the AP and Reuters have been spotty, and I’m thinking they’ve lost a lot of their correspondents. Quite honestly, I’m getting better information from the websites of the various local radio and TV stations, especially if I’m trying to move beyond the big cities.”

That got her a nod. “Alice has been following the radio stations in the area she grew up, checking their farm reports to try to get an idea of what’s going on up there.”

Autumn recalled that Colonel Hearne’s wife had grown up on a wheat farm near Duluth. The age difference between them had imposed a distance that their both being Minnesotans and graduates of U of Minnesota couldn’t quite bridge. “I’d been following Radio K, at least until they switched to some kind of automated format after the university sent everyone home. Some of the on-air personalities have been updating their blogs, but even that’s gotten hit-and-miss.”

She paused, realized she was hesitating because what she wanted to say was a shift from reporting to editorializing. Even in a private communication like this, the distinction’s too deeply ingrained. “To be very honest, I’m concerned about just how spotty news coverage has become, and what it bodes for the future. Eventually the pandemic will have to burn itself out for the simple reason that it can no longer spread rapidly enough to sustain itself. But what will even be left by that point?”

“That’s what we’ve been thinking about too. So far NASA’s been able to hold itself together, but I’m hearing a lot of rumint from people I know down there that the cities have gotten pretty hard hit, and they’re concerned about the situation with critical infrastructure and manufacturing. I don’t know how familiar you are with industrial processes, but there are a lot of them that you can’t just turn off and back on like a light switch.”

“I covered some blackouts when I was still on Earth, so yes, I have some idea of what kinds of problems can happen when backup systems fail. Down there, they just don’t build in the redundancy we have up here, and it looks like it’s going to be biting a lot of people in the butt.” Autumn paused. “However, we’re speculating here, trying to extrapolate from way too little data. Which is a dangerous thing for news people to do.”

“Understood.” Bill Hearne pulled himself back to his feet. “Given those limitations, I won’t use up any more of your time. Thank you for letting me know what you do have.”

“And I’ll make sure to let you know if I get anything new.”

Categories
Narrative

A Touch of Home

Bill Hearne had just finished dropping off the two terabyte drives full of transportation data at the Astronomy Department office and was heading back to his office in Flight Operations when his phone chimed incoming text. He pulled it out and was astonished to find a text from his brother Frank on the lock screen.

Are you where you can talk?

I’m on the way back to my office. What’s going on?

We’ve been pretty much isolated for the last several weeks. Word from Madison is essential travel only, minimize contact with persons outside your household while making necessary trips. I don’t think I’ve even spoken to the feed truck or milk truck drivers when they do show up, so I’m not getting even that gossip.

Hardly surprising, from everything Bill had been hearing of late. Although that was getting more and more spotty, since his pilots were under similar restrictions. As much as possible, they were supposed to stay in their spacecraft and let the robots pick up any cargo. Since all radio circuits were monitored and recorded, it did put a damper on the sort of scuttlebutt that pilots engaged in while visiting other settlements or Luna Station.

So you’re wondering what I’m hearing about the rest of the three worlds.

I was hoping you’d know something. All I know is what we see on the news, and a lot of it feels pretty canned. Out here we just don’t have the bandwidth to stream Internet radio, or I’d tune in to your station.

Bill could appreciate that. When he was a kid growing up, the old home place was still on a party line. You always had to carefully pick up the phone and check to see if anyone else was on before you started dialing. His sister Kate had gotten in trouble a couple of times, getting home from school and being so eager to start calling all her friends that she didn’t notice one of the neighbors was already talking and just started dialing.

They’d gone to private lines some time after he graduated college, while he was on his first tour of duty. He’d gotten back to the States and came home on leave to discover the change the hard way. He’d needed to call one of the neighbors — he didn’t even remember why — and had automatically held down the flashhook while dialing, the way you had to on a party line, only to discover it wouldn’t go through.

Even after the Internet became a Thing for civilians, it had taken over a decade before the nearest dialup ISP number was a local call. Not that he was going to hook up any Air Force or NASA-issued laptop to an unsecured line, but being able to e-mail his family would’ve made keeping in touch a lot easier during the Energy Wars, at least while he wasn’t flying secret military missions like the one he’d been commanding the day of the NASA Massacre.

I don’t know if being able to stream our broadcasts would give you all that much more information than you’re getting on TV. Bill considered just how much he wanted to tell his brother. With everything in such a fragile state, the wrong information, or even just something out of context, could be worse than nothing. Especially considering that Frank needed to focus on keeping the family farms running, it wouldn’t do to go spilling his own concerns. Right now we’re pretty limited in our sources, or so the news director’s said.

Got it. Take care up there, big brother.

Will do. He put his phone back in his pocket and continued on his way. Right now neither of them could do anything to help the other’s situation, so perhaps it was best that they didn’t have much in the way of details. Enough that they each knew the other was reasonably all right.

Categories
Uncategorized

Paying the Bills

Brutality, infrastructure collapse, daily threats of war: 45 writers of speculative fiction share their visions of what’s to come.

Fighting in the streets, corruption at the highest levels, thuggish police, a daily threat of nuclear war: few of us thought we’d find ourselves here, so far into the 21st century. What’s next? Are we really going to be “great again,” however that’s meant?

In this diverse and vigorous mix of original stories by newcomers and luminaries, writers offer their takes on what life might hold for us in the next few years. The resulting visions of oppression, and daily struggle are sometimes humorous, sometimes terrifying, but always thought-provoking.

Including stories by K. G. Anderson, Richard Bowes, Elizabeth Bourne, Scott Bradfield, J.S. Breukelaar, Jennifer Marie Brissett, Becca Caccavo, Don D’Ammassa, Stephanie Feldman, Eric James Fullilove, Ron Goulart, Eileen Gunn, Leslie Howle, Matthew Hughes, Janis Ian, Michael Kandel, Thomas Kaufsek, Paul La Farge, Yoon Ha Lee, Michael Libling, Heather Lindsley, Lisa Mason, Barry N. Malzberg, David Marusek, Mary Anne Mohanraj, James Morrow, Ruth Nestvold, Deji Bryce Olukotun, Marguerite Reed, Robert Reed, Madeleine E. Robins, Jay Russell, Geoff Ryman, James Sallis, J. M. Sidorova, Brian Francis Slattery, Harry Turtledove, Deepak Unnikrishnan, TS Vale, Leo Vladimirsky, Ray Vukcevich, Ted White, Paul Witcover, N. Lee Wood, and Jane Yolen.

Categories
Narrative

Other Kinds of Traffic

Having finished studying, but not yet ready to hit the sack, Payton Shaw was taking a quick look through his social media. It split about 50/50 between the purely personal and that pertaining to his role as an on-air personality at Shepardsport Pirate Radio.

I really need to get some of this stuff updated. Of course the fact that his show was weekly rather than daily meant that he just didn’t have as much material for his professional pages as DJ’s like the Timeline Brothers or Spruance Del Curtin.

A voice calling his name pulled him out of his thoughts. Payton looked up to find Quinn Merton standing just behind him. “So you’re going through your social media too.

“Yeah, and I was trying to remember when traffic started slacking off. I mean, things have been kinda busy lately,” he decided not to mention the research he’d been doing after Colonel Hearne had left him with a puzzle, “so I wasn’t keeping as close of track. Things change slowly enough and you don’t really notice it until it gets big enough that you say hey, when did it happen?”

“How hard would it be to get actual traffic data on that stuff? I know Lou Corlin works down at IT, so he might be able to get some logs. And Spruance Del Curtin’s working on some kind of super-secret project for Dr. Doorne, and he got picked because he was in her statistics class.”

Payton considered that information. “Lou would be easy to approach, but if he doesn’t think he ought to be handing out that information, he’s going to be tough to convince. Sprue’s just the opposite. Aloof as a cat, but if you want to get him to do something for you, make it into a challenge and he’ll knock himself out to beat everyone else to it.”

Categories
Narrative

A Worrisome Situation

After her conversation with Dr. Doorne about statistics and metrics, Betty Margrave was feeling a lot less reassured about the present situation. Which was why she had decided it was time to talk to Bill Hearne.

When she’d first contacted him, she was thinking in terms of meeting him in his office down at Flight Operations. However, he was concerned about holding a routine consultation down there. Yes, there was the concern about infectuous agents, whether on an object that had not been properly sterilized or by someone who had contact with an infected person. But there was also the problem of Flight Operations being somewhat in disarray right now, what with all the pilots having to be quarantined down here instead of going home to their families.

There had been a moment of awkwardness, given that Betty was married to a pilot-astronaut who was currently sitting down there in the BOQ. Sure, they could FaceTime each other, but they could do it when he was in any spaceport all over the Moon.

But Betty wasn’t going to make an issue of it. Bill was only able to go home to Alice every night right now because he’d reached mandatory retirement age for pilots, and had taken over the top job in Flight Ops so that Colonel Carlyle could be freed up to fly full-time again instead of squeezing in a minimum of flight time among ground duties.

So here they were in the Safety and Security conference room, which had been set up specifically so S&S personnel could meet with people who were not cleared to deal with private information. In many ways going the other way would’ve been easier for the reason that Flight Ops very rarely dealt with material that could not be generally disseminated, and what little they did have (some classified military projects and the occasional medical issue) could easily be sequestered from general meeting spaces.

They had been talking mostly about spacelift, and how both the raw numbers and the distribution of spaceflights had changed since the beginning of the diablovirus pandemic. Somehow the subject had drifted to transportation in general, and how much it was changing. Betty knew that the cruise ships and casual airline travel had been shut down almost as soon as it became clear that they were dealing with something deadly. She’d also heard anecdotal reports about varying levels of restriction on personal mobility, from “stay at home orders” that were on the level of polite requests to blockades and arrests, even one story of a person being shot for breaking quarantine.

Where had that been? Bill averred that he’d heard it, but couldn’t recall exactly where. He wanted to say Germany, but both of them agreed that it was unwise to let past history do their thinking for them, especially in the absence of solid facts. For all they knew, it was a hypothetical that got turned into a friend-of-a-friend story courtesy of social media.

But by the time they were finished, he had agreed that it was time to pull together as much transportation data they could find and see what Dr. Doorne’s number-crunchers could make of it.

Categories
Narrative

Baby Steps

Dr. Thuc was reviewing the latest CDC updates, which she’d downloaded in full onto her workstation just in case they got a solar storm strong enough to disrupt Internet connections with whatever server they were on. Although she thought the MedCenter over at Grissom City kept copies on their servers, it was still possible that communications between the two settlements could be disrupted.

She was concentrating so intensely that she almost didn’t hear her phone chime incoming text. It was only on the second chime that she realized someone was texting her, that it might be urgent.

She picked up the phone and was surprised to discover that it was Vitali Grigorenko from Gagarinsk. I have some interesting information for you.

Her first thought was what kind of interesting? However, it would be rude to ask so bluntly, even if she was wondering if it were interesting in a bad way.

Thank you. What kind of information are we looking at?

Grigorenko took a little time to respond. English wasn’t his native tongue, even if he was a Grissom — he’d been kidnapped right out of Riley Children’s Hospital hours after birth by KGB agents, and had grown up speaking Russian. Which was what made teleconferences with him such an exercise in cognitive dissonance.

And then the text appeared: I have some connections in Ministry of Health and Imperial Academy of Science. They have passed me some material that indicate Academician Voronsky has success in sequencing DNA of diablovirus. I know Autumn Belfontaine has asked about this, but I want to send it to you first.

Yes, that was probably wise. Autumn was a professional journalist, and she might decide to run it past a medical professional before making any public announcement. However, with everyone desperate for even a glimmer of hope, she might let eagerness overcome her better judgment and release the story immediately.

Before she could even start a reply, a second text came through: Can you receive large attachment to e-mail, or should I give you URL for file to download?

After a bit of technical back-and-forth, they determined it would probably be best to go the URL route. As it happened, Grigorenko already had the file on a server up at Gagarinsk, and it was just a matter of changing the permissions so she could access it and then giving her the URL.

As soon as she got the file downloaded and opened — at least it was in a format her software could deal with, instead of one peculiar to Russian operating systems — she realized that she would need some help reading it. Although she did have a reasonable acquaintance with the Russian language, and with medical terminology in Russian, it didn’t extend to some of the technical aspects of genetics, which had developed somewhat differently behind the old Iron Curtain, back in the days when genetic engineering and human cloning were still burn-before-reading secret in both East and West.

Still, she made sure to let Grigorenko know that she’d successfully downloaded it and thank him for thinking of her.

Categories
Narrative

Preparations

Lou Corlin didn’t mind the occasional “crunch time” project. He understood the necessity of going beyond normal working hours to get something done by a deadline because unexpected complications had resulted in delays. Equally, he understood that things could come up suddenly and necessitate long hours to get them done on time.

However, he was seriously wondering why NASA had ever allowed so much vital electronic equipment to be put in the topmost levels of the settlement. And it wasn’t just the admittedly hasty expansions that had been constructed right after the Expulsions, when they had to make room for so many unexpected residents. What they were moving right now had been installed in the original construction effort, over a decade ago. Surely someone at one or another of the various research centers had at least heard of the Carrington Event.

Unless they thought it was something so rare that it could be considered effectively unique.

It would certainly go a long way to explain why so much important equipment, especially in Agriculture, was at ceiling level rather than in sub-floor plena. Half the water pumps for the hydroponics would have to be shut down for anything but the mildest solar storms, and in a major one there was a real risk that the power cables would produce enough system-generated EMP to arc over the switches and burn out the windings.

And all this could’ve been prevented if someone had just considered that lower means more shielding.

Categories
Document

Breaking Strain

There is a saying that trouble never comes as single spies, but entire espionage agencies. That is, that you seldom have only one problem. The first problem puts a strain on the weak places in your systems, which then cause additional problems. Sometimes this is a rapid failure cascade, but often it is a sort of slip-slide into oblivion.

We see both types of expanding trouble in the Big Sick. For instance, a number of countries appear to have had rapid breakdowns of their public services when relatively small numbers of key individuals fell sick. These situations show a strong correlation with two key factors: 1. heavy dependence upon a few key technical experts as opposed to a generalized level of technical competence throughout the population and 2. weak social trust beyond the immediate social circle of extended family, clan, or tribe.

By contrast, in countries in which familiarity with advanced technology was widespread throughout the culture, and in which trust tended to be generalized, failures spread slowly rather than catastrophically. When someone fell ill, there were enough people with some of the necessary knowledge that equipment could be kept running, and people trusted them to work with this valuable equipment and not steal it to enrich their own families or clans.

As a result, communities with a high level of trust were able to patch together solutions that kept things working far longer. Instead of a catastrophic failure cascade, they experienced a slow deterioration as solutions became increasingly patchwork, like a garment that has been repaired so many times that it becomes difficult to find solid material to attach further patches.

—– Randall Littleton, essay answer in Civics quiz

Categories
Narrative

Of Deep Space and Deep Time

The air in Reggie Waite’s office felt oddly stuffy. One look at the panel of the life-support systems monitor told him that everything was nominal: temperature, pressure, partial pressures of oxygen, nitrogen and carbon dioxide. Even humidity was well within normal range.

Which meant that it was psychological. Probably because he was trying to sort through the data Dr. Doorne had sent him, and even with all her annotations, he was still finding it heavy going.

She’d had one of her junior TA’s run it up here, mostly because she was helping supervise the effort to relocate or harden the electronics in the upper levels — when she wasn’t helping put together procedures for all the various outlying settlements and research outposts that were associated with Shepardsport but had their own command.

Quite honestly, he couldn’t blame her. Solar astronomy was not her specialty, and her choice of data reflected her much stronger background in deep-space objects, and the use of statistical techniques to study massive amounts of radio data from them. It made more sense for her to concentrate on her EE skills, which could help with the more immediate issues of protecting their equipment from overloads and damage if they did get hit with a major solar storm. Even shutting down might not necessarily protect equipment from an X-level CME, especially if it were to induce system-generated EMP in the wiring. During the Carrington Event of 1859, disconnected telegraph lines had still transmitted messages as a result of such induction.

The data Dr. Doorne had sent was not for the Sun. Instead, she had selected a wide variety of G-class stars of comparable age to the Sun, all going through similar activity levels to a solar minimum. She’d highlighted certain patterns in the data, particularly related to frequency of flares and magnetic storms associated with what few starspots those stars were having.

Which looks very much like we’re going to be in for a wild ride for the next month or two. Right while Earth is still in disarray from the ongoing diablovirus pandemic and effectively unable to help us if we lose anything vital.

Categories
Narrative

Old Memories

This part of the Roosa Barracks dated all the way back to the beginning of humanity’s permanent presence on the Moon. No doubt one could argue that these were not in fact the original modules of that first American moonbase, for the simple reason that routine maintenance had pretty much replaced every component.

Still, it hadn’t kept NASA from deciding to put considerable effort into restoring everything to what it had looked like back in 1979 when the moonbase (there had only been one back in those days) had been established as a staging base for the first crewed mission to Mars. They wanted a regular little museum for the big celebrations around the fiftieth anniversary of the original lunar landing, so all the grandees and VIP’s could see the humble beginnings from which Grissom City had come.

Except they’d never appointed any staff to keep the museum. As a result, everyone out here had taken turns devoting some of their off hours to tending this little museum. For the younger pilots and ground crew, it had been something done out of a sense of obligation.

For Peter Caudell, coming here always brought a sense of nostalgia. Not that he’d actually seen the moonbase in its original configuration — he hadn’t come up here until the latter part of the 80’s, when the second Mars mission was coming back home. By then the place had expanded a fair amount, and there’d been some problems with the interconnections between the older and newer modules, which had created a near-disaster just when the Mars astronauts needed to be quarantined before going home to Earth.

It had been a different age, maybe not as wild and woolly as those early days of the Mercury astronauts, but still very much a frontier outpost from which home was very far away.

And now it may well be a refuge, if things are as bad as some reports seem to indicate. Or rather, the lack of reports.

In some ways the silences were almost worse than the information that was coming through. Not just the various Third World countries that had seemingly fallen off the grid altogether, although the reports of flyovers showing whole towns abandoned were disturbing. But on a more personal level, pretty much everyone up here had lost contact with one or more friends, colleagues or family members.

His own children and their families were safe — one of the back-handed benefits of the Expulsions, which had brought them up here to lunar exile. But his natal family was still back on Earth. His parents had both passed away shortly before the Expulsions, so they hadn’t had to watch those appalling events, but he had siblings and cousins with family scattered around the US, even abroad, and while he wasn’t constantly e-mailing or texting them, he did keep some contact through social media — and every now and then he’d think when did I last hear from that person?

Sometimes he’d become worried enough to actually look back and find it had only been a few days. Other times he’d find that more time had passed, and when he attempted to contact the person, he’d get a brief reply that the person was hanging on. He could only hope they weren’t canned replies, similar to the “out of office” replies some people set up in anticipation of a planned absence.

And that’s one of the most draining parts of this whole thing — the uncertainty. Risk can be managed — you don’t get into this line of work if you can’t deal with risk. It’s the damned uncertainty and ambiguity that is so crazy-making.