Month: October 2020

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Paying the Bills

An explosion of incalculable magnitude in Yellowstone Park propelled lava and ash across the landscape and into the atmosphere, forever altering the climate of the entire continent. Nothing grows from the tainted soil. Stalled and stilled machines function only as statuary.

People have been scraping by on the excess food and goods produced before the eruption. But supplies are running low. Natural resources are dwindling. And former police officer Colin Ferguson knows that time is running out for his family—and for humanity….

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Narrative

Above and Below

Autumn Belfontaine had just finished typing out an e-mail on her laptop when her phone chimed incoming text. She looked over, fully expecting to see yet another text from Dan.

Instead, it was Juss. We’ve got a problem at the station.

What a crazy coincidence. But she knew where her priorities had to lie. Hit send on the e-mail, then text Juss to find out what was wrong while she grabbed up her stuff and headed down there.

And here she’d thought she’d actually have a quiet evening for a change. A time to study for an upcoming exam, or to prepare lesson plans for the broadcast standards and practices class she was teaching this session.

Nope, she had just enough technical background that she might actually be able to fix a problem with the equipment, so she was needed down at the station. At least she wasn’t dangerously behind on anything, so it wouldn’t be a disaster, but given how crazy things had been of late around here, she really could’ve used the rest.

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If It’s Not One Thing

Ken Redmond had been reading the latest reports on solar activity from Astronomy when Juss Forsythe came in, letting him know that there was a problem at the station. “From the sound of it, there’s a problem in the mixing board. When Spencer Dawes was trying to use the intro to his next number as a bed for the final announcements he needed to read, it was coming through almost unintelligible.”

Ken set down the tablet with the files Dr. Doorne had sent over. “That is not a good sign.”

It didn’t help that they’d had to jury-rig a lot of the equipment for the station. IT had been able to do a lot of it with software, but there had been some things which simply had to be fabricated as physical objects — and some significant parts of the mixing boards fell into that category.

At least they did have the remote setup to fall back on, so it wasn’t like they couldn’t keep broadcasting. But it couldn’t provide the same level of finished, professional sound during announcements. The microphones weren’t up to the same level, and there wasn’t the capacity to layer voice over a soundbed. When you were doing a location broadcast, the roughness added a sense of authenticity, of immediacy. Ken remembered listening to broadcasts from the Persimmon Festival over in Mitchell when he was growing up, and how the hint of crowd noise in the background really made the broadcast.

But for a routine studio show, it would make everything sound sloppy. Not so much the music sets, such as the one that was winding up as he and Juss entered the station offices. But as soon as Spence came on to do station identification and announce the next set of songs, that rough, crackly feel made it sound like some kid running an Internet radio station off a laptop in the bedroom. You halfway expected to hear a parental voice yelling about bedtime.

As soon as Spence was finished and the music was playing again, Ken slipped past the remote setup to take a look at their studio mixing board. “Now our big problem is figuring out whether this is hardware or software.”

Juss pulled out his phone. “I’ve already called Lou and he’s coming down.”

Ken recalled that Lou Corlin worked down at IT, and did a lot of troubleshooting. “Good.”

All the same, there was no use waiting for him to show up. Might as well get a multimeter and start checking the circuitry. Given how they’d put it together, and how much use it had seen in the past several years, there was always the possibility that a connection had worked loose somewhere.

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Visiting Grandparents

Barbara Redmond still remembered trips to Indiana to visit her paternal grandparents. Sometimes they’d fly, but far more often they’d hit the road north through the Texas Piney Woods and across Arkansas and Tennessee to the other half of I-69.

By her teens, the trips were getting fewer and further between. Her dad was getting busier with NASA, and with Flannigan in the White. House, things were getting more and more tense for clones and their families. And her grandparents were getting older, and less eager to host rambunctious children for a weekend. The last couple of visits, her folks had rented a suite in a nearby hotel rather than impose upon Grandma and Grandpa Redmond.

Up here, taking her kids to visit Grandma and Grandpa was just three airlocks: the one out of the module her apartment was in, one intermediate airlock, and the airlock into the module where her parents’ apartment was. At least in theory, it should’ve been easy to visit on a regular basis — but with everything going on and her parents having such responsible positions, visits practically needed to be scheduled a week in advance. And even that was no guarantee, because an emergency in Engineering or Food and Nutrition could mean the visit was off.

Like tonight. The kids had been asking when their daddy would come home again. She’d offered to set up a FaceTime call with Drew, since she knew he was off the flight roster for a couple of days. But no, both of them were wailing they wanted to see Daddy, not just look at his image on a screen. And no, they didn’t want to go down to Flight Ops and talk to him through a pane of moonglass, hear his voice through a speaker. They wanted him here, in the apartment, to sit crosslegged on the floor and play with them like he used to.

They were still young enough that they really didn’t grasp why it wasn’t possible for Daddy to come home right now. They understood being sick, but only in the terms of the colds and stomach bugs that sometimes went through lunar settlements. They didn’t really grasp how dangerous the diablovirus could be, how it could endanger an entire settlement, and she didn’t want them having nightmares because of the way a child’s limited life-experience could misconstrue an explanation. So she’d just told them that it wasn’t possible right now, and no, she didn’t know when it would be. Not just because she had no real idea how long it might go on, but also because children that age had no real grasp of time. Even the few weeks between Thanksgiving and Christmas seemed like an eternity at that age.

But she’d thought she could at least arrange a visit to Grandma and Grandpa’s apartment, if only for a half hour or so. Not just seeing them at the dining commons when everyone was concentrating on eating, or a quick hi-bye in the corridors, but a bit of time set aside just to go over and visit.

And now that wasn’t happening after all. Her father was busy with the ongoing solar situation, which might have seemed to calm down right now, but was still showing magnetic irregularities that suggested more CME’s and flares would be on the way soon. And now her mother had just texted her and said that she was in an emergency meeting with Alice Murcheson because they were having further problems. Apparently that one set of planters wasn’t all that had defective irrigation tubing, just the first one to actually have trouble.

At least you didn’t build up the visit too much with the kids, so the disappointment isn’t going to be quite so crashing as if it were all they were thinking about.

But it was still going to be a disappointment, and there was no way to get around it. The best she could do right now was give them something else to distract them. At least kids this young weren’t as likely to hang onto disappointments and let them turn into bitter resentments, as long as something else came along to capture their attention.

But what? Brenda took a half-hearted look through the contacts list on her phone, trying to think of someone who could offer something that would entrance them so well they’d forget about having to miss the visit with Grandma and Grandpa.

And then the module airlock cycled, and in came Lou Corlin, looking breathless. “Didn’t you get the text?”

“What text? The last text I got was from Mom, about the problem down at Agriculture.”

“We’ve got a problem at the station. We’re having trouble with the sound mixing board, and we’ve switched to the system for remote broadcasts.”

“Crap.” Brenda knew that most of the station’s equipment was jury-rigged, since they couldn’t very well have standard studio equipment shipped up here from Earth. “Let me see if Cindy can watch the kids, and then I’ll be ready.”

“No worries. I already asked Rand to come over.”

Even as he said that, the module airlock hatch opened again, and Rand Littleton walked in. “Here I am.”

“Good. Let’s get going.”

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Word from an Old Friend

Autumn Belfontaine had just finished copying the files from Steffi Roderick’s USB stick onto her own computer and was about to take a look at the data when her phone chimed incoming text. Surprised, she retrieved the phone, wondering if Steffi had arranged for one of the data analysis people to reach out to her in case she needed help.

Instead, the message was from an old friend from her Radio K days. Dan had been on the Engineering side of stuff rather than an on-air personality, but she’d been interested enough in the technical aspects of radio that they’d talked a lot. As a result, they frequently worked together at remote events. They’d gone their separate ways after graduation, but they’d tried to keep in contact, until their diverging lives led too far away.

From the sound of his message, Dan was still in the radio business, but somewhere in the Southwest, a long way from Minnesota. And he was having some trouble keeping his station running, what with power becoming increasingly intermittent and the difficulties of replacing malfunctioning or damaged equipment.

Doesn’t that last one sound familiar. We’d be in a pile of trouble if Ken Redmond and his people hadn’t gotten so adept at jury-rigging things and fabricating parts when they needed them.

After a moment’s consideration, she wrote back to Dan, telling him that if he could e-mail her a full description of what he was having trouble with, she could talk to some people up here. Even if they couldn’t help directly, at least having some additional ideas was always useful.

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At the Bottom of the World

Chandler Armitage had gotten reasonably used to the BOQ at the Roosa Barracks, to the point where he hardly needed to think about most of the things he needed to do for an overnight stay. His nutritional profile and food preferences were in the kitchen database, so there was little chance of a mixup resulting in the deliverybot presenting him with something inadequate or completely unacceptable. The WiFi password was in the keychains of all his devices, so logging on was a single click and he could catch up on his studies or surf the Web in search of entertainment. Quite honestly, it wasn’t all that much difference from being back home in Shepardsport, now that the pilots were all being quarantined from the general population of settlements.

Now he’d just drawn a flight down here to Coopersville. Something to do with the mess in Agriculture, from some things Colonel Hearne had said in the briefing. In normal times he would’ve known all about it, simply by talking to people, but being confined to Flight Ops was keeping him in the dark about most of what was going on in his own home settlement. Sure, he was picking up some stuff from listening to Shepardsport Pirate Radio, but he had a feeling that Autumn Belfontaine had been told to keep a lid on the situation for the moment. Which suggested something seriously bad.

Might as well take a look at his e-mail, see if there was anything of interest. At least cleaning it out would take up some time. Not as much as usual, since a lot of the aviation and astronautics lists were a lot quieter. He hoped their usual participants dirtside were just too busy with relief efforts, not down with the diablovirus or worse.

Some stuff in from the settlements on Mars, from the looks of the headers. Not surprising, since Mars was far enough away to provide an automatic quarantine for anyone going out there from the Earth-Moon system. As long as the settlements there remained free of the diablovirus, life would continue as usual. All of them would have stockpiles of essential supplies, including spares for vital equipment, sufficient to last for at least a few years, so they would have time to work out long-term solutions. Which meant that the people there would have at least some breathing room, and thus some time to relax and chew the fat online.

And then he saw a subject line he’d given up hope on ever seeing. It was a quote from one of Robert Frost’s less well-known poems, a verse that he and his mother had agreed upon as a code way back when he headed off for the Naval Academy and had to face the possibility that e-mail would be censored.

Could his mother have survived after Flannigan’s goons disappeared her in the wake of the disastrous 2012 election? She’d been one of the few governors to offer any substantial resistance to Flannigan’s increasingly hostile measures against clones and people with genetic modifications (two sets with a great deal of overlap), and they’d pretty much assumed that she’d caught a bullet in the back of the head, probably in the basement of a Federal building somewhere.

Hardly daring to hope, Chandler clicked on the e-mail. Would it be a message from his mother?

If it was a message, it wasn’t in the clear. Instead, it was just a poem by Emily Dickenson. The one about clover and bees, which wasn’t any agreed-upon message.

On the other hand, it wasn’t the one about death stopping, which would’ve meant she was definitely gone. Which meant there was hope — but hope could be almost worse than knowing. Where had he read that line about hurting a man who’s lost everything by giving back something broken?

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Following the Farm News

A lot of the kids who’d been assigned to work in Agriculture complained about it when the adults weren’t listening. Truth be told, Quinn Merton was just as happy to draw that job assignment, and had even asked about the possibility of taking course work or getting a teaching responsibility in that area. No doubt it ran in the blood, given that his ur-brother had become a farmer after leaving the astronaut corps in the wake of the Gemini VIII disaster.

However, he’d not expected to have the big boss pull him into her office for a private conversation. His initial response was concern that he was about to be reprimanded for some error. Quinn was all too aware that he was taking on responsibilities that usually would be given to older individuals, largely because the emptying of the NASA clone creches during the Expulsions had left Shepardsport with a disproportionately young population, and the jobs needed doing.

Alice Murcheson must’ve picked up his concern, since the first words out of her mouth were a reassurance that she was not calling him in here for a reprimand. Instead, she needed some help from him.

“How much access do you have to the wire services?”

The request caught Quinn by surprise, so much that it took him a moment to respond. “I’m a dj, not a reporter. I mean, it’s not like Autumn keeps the door to the newsroom locked or anything, but it’s not exactly somewhere I go poking around.”

“But you could take a look at things if you wanted to?”

“I suppose, but there are an awful lot of computers in there, and I wouldn’t want to mess anything up for the sake of my own curiosity.” He narrowed his eyes and studied his boss. “Do you need something off one of the news services? Is there a reason you don’t want the news director to know about it?”

Alice Murcheson didn’t take offense, although his response certainly could be considered impertinent, even downright insubordinate. “I hadn’t meant to imply that you should trespass. I just thought that you might be able to get some confirmation on what I’m getting on the USDA farm reports. Since your air shift is on Saturday evenings, when the news department is usually closed, I thought it would be easier if you just took a look at the wire service computers to see if there is anything on agriculture.”

“It would if I were familiar with the systems, but I wouldn’t even know which computer has the wire services. I’m under the impression that the station’s subscriptions cover only one machine, and I don’t know whether there’s a general login for all the news staff, or everyone has their own. Honestly, it’d be easier to just ask Autumn. I’m sure she’d give you the information.”

“That may be, but if she’s not there during your air shift, how will you see her?”

Quinn tried not to look amused by the question, since it could look insulting. “I do have some discretionary time during the hours she’s usually in. I can run by the station then and talk to her.”

That seemed to satisfy Alice, which was a good thing, considering that he had a class in ten minutes and he’d do well to get all the way to Miskatonic Sector in that time.

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Paying the Bills

It was a catastrophe without precedent in recorded history: for months on end, starting in A.D. 535, a strange, dusky haze robbed much of the earth of normal sunlight. Crops failed in Asia and the Middle East as global weather patterns radically altered. Bubonic plague, exploding out of Africa, wiped out entire populations in Europe. Flood and drought brought ancient cultures to the brink of collapse. In a matter of decades, the old order died and a new world—essentially the modern world as we know it today—began to emerge.

In this fascinating, groundbreaking, totally accessible book, archaeological journalist David Keys dramatically reconstructs the global chain of revolutions that began in the catastrophe of A.D. 535, then offers a definitive explanation of how and why this cataclysm occurred on that momentous day centuries ago.

The Roman Empire, the greatest power in Europe and the Middle East for centuries, lost half its territory in the century following the catastrophe. During the exact same period, the ancient southern Chinese state, weakened by economic turmoil, succumbed to invaders from the north, and a single unified China was born. Meanwhile, as restless tribes swept down from the central Asian steppes, a new religion known as Islam spread through the Middle East. As Keys demonstrates with compelling originality and authoritative research, these were not isolated upheavals but linked events arising from the same cause and rippling around the world like an enormous tidal wave.

Keys’s narrative circles the globe as he identifies the eerie fallout from the months of darkness: unprecedented drought in Central America, a strange yellow dust drifting like snow over eastern Asia, prolonged famine, and the hideous pandemic of the bubonic plague. With a superb command of ancient literatures and historical records, Keys makes hitherto unrecognized connections between the “wasteland” that overspread the British countryside and the fall of the great pyramid-building Teotihuacan civilization in Mexico, between a little-known “Jewish empire” in Eastern Europe and the rise of the Japanese nation-state, between storms in France and pestilence in Ireland.

In the book’s final chapters, Keys delves into the mystery at the heart of this global catastrophe: Why did it happen? The answer, at once surprising and definitive, holds chilling implications for our own precarious geopolitical future. Wide-ranging in its scholarship, written with flair and passion, filled with original insights, Catastrophe is a superb synthesis of history, science, and cultural interpretation.

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Get ‘er Done

Having dropped off the data with Autumn Belfontaine, Steffi continued through the corridors of Engineering with Ken Redmond. “I’m not that much of a statistician, but it was interesting to see the patterns in the distribution of network speeds and disruptions. I’d expected a lot of Africa and Asia to have trouble keeping their networks up. Until the recent mini-sat constellations, a lot of those countries didn’t even have Internet outside their major cities. But I’d expected better of Europe.”

Ken gave her a wry smile. “You must not have done much traveling back when you were still on Earth.”

“I was pretty busy, but I did go abroad to some conferences–“

“In major cities, with people who had a Western education, often at universities in the US. Not out in the hinterland, working with people who’re living the way their ancestors did since time immemorial. Now there’s an eye-opener for you.” Ken paused as if considering what he was about to say. “Back in the Energy Wars, I did a tour of duty in the Middle East. We were at a base right near one of the bigger cities, and one of the things I really remember is how, whenever anything went wrong, everyone would wait for someone in charge to come and give orders. No one wanted to be the guy who stuck his neck out and tried something that might work.”

Steffi’s expression must’ve been more transparent than she realized, because Ken responded, “It’s a lot more common than you think, and not just in Third World countries. Heck, half of Europe is damn close to it, just not as crude about it. But you go to Germany or Sweden or any of those countries, visit an office and need something copied, only the copier’s jammed. In any American office, someone would be opening the thing up and digging the paper out to get it running again. Over there, only the person with the proper authorization can even touch the inner workings of the copier.”

“Come to think of it, that would go a long way to explain why almost all the connections that seemed pretty jury-rigged looked to be in the US. Some Canadian ones, a couple from Australia and New Zealand, but that was about it.”

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Of Resilience and Antifragility

When Autumn had talked with Lou Corlin, she’d expected that it would take a while to get the data, if it was even possible. IT had a lot of work on its plate already, and this job was more a matter of curiosity. So it was better to spend the time developing some contacts in the Astronomy department so she could follow up on Sprue’s lead without having to out him as the leak.

Being a proctor down at the testing center did give her one advantage — she already had established contacts with plenty of research scientists up here. Even if they weren’t in the Astronomy department, most of them had working relationships with people there. So much of science these days was heavily interdisciplinary, and Shepardsport was still small enough that it was more like a small town.

She’d just finished talking with a physicist who’d immediately started geeking out on her about his specialty, magnetohydrodynamics. From what she could extract, it had definite applicability to the Sun, and to stars in general, which had gotten his name on a number of astronomy papers as a contributing author. However, most of his knowledge was sufficiently technical that she’d been hard-pressed to make heads or tails of it. Sure, she had the general astronomy classes everyone up here had to take, but it sure didn’t give her the background to really grasp it.

So she’d decided to take a break and stretch her legs. As news director, she was salaried and didn’t have to worry about being on the clock like the hourly employees.

As she stepped out of the station’s front door, she saw Ken Redmond and Steffi Roderick walking down the main Engineering corridor, talking in low voices. Assuming it was something private, she turned the other direction, only to have Steffi call out her name.

“I was going to drop this off with Maia, but since you’re here, I thought I’d give it to you in person.”

It was a USB stick. “Um, thanks. I gather this is some data I’ve asked for.”

“The project you’d approached Lou about, related to Internet connectivity and how it has degraded since the beginning of the pandemic. I had some of our programmers write up a script to systematically ping IP addresses all across the system. I did some preliminary statistical analysis on it, and yes, there are definitely patterns in it. From the looks of it, we’ve lost whole regions. Some of them were to be expected, in countries where the tech base was always fragile, but we’ve had some surprising ones, especially in Western Europe. However, the US is holding together better than would be expected, although from some of the response times, we may be looking at a lot of jerry-rigged connections.”

Ken was nodding in agreement. “Not surprising. The Internet was originally a Defense Department project to create a decentralized communications system that would hold together even if numerous major cities were destroyed in a nuclear attack. Just like the old Timex watches, it takes a licking and keeps on ticking.”