Month: December 2020

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Narrative

No News Might Be Good News

Drew Reinholt was working his way through a new set of technical documents when he heard voices just outside his office door. He couldn’t make out words, but the tone and rhythms suggested distress, albeit carefully reined in. No doubt if he had been able to actually hear the words, he’d be too focused upon them to pick up that nuance.

Strictly speaking, even paying enough attention to notice the tension in the voices was a breach of privacy. Up here on the Moon, everyone was living in such tight quarters that it was liveable only if everyone studiosly avoided overhearing conversations that were not meant for them — although nobody would ever know if you did listen in as long as you never revealed it.

On the other hand, there were lots of ways of revealing information you weren’t supposed to have. Even so much as failing to show surprise at something could reveal that you must’ve come about knowledge in an illegitimate manner.

His thoughts were interrupted by a knock on the door. Back on Earth, he would’ve had to get up to open the door, but here he could just lean back and pull the door open. As long as it wasn’t a superior, his failure to rise to greet the person wasn’t a major breach of courtesy.

“Come on in.”

He was a little surprised to find Peter Caudell there. At least Captain Caudell wasn’t in his direct line of command, but the man was sufficiently senior in the list of astronaut selection groups that a certain amount of due deference was typically expected.

On the other hand, Caudell was also a clone of a Mercury astronaut, and familiar with the Shepard temperament. No, he wasn’t going to make an Issue of it.

Instead, he just leaned against the doorpost, taking an equally casual pose. “Say, Drew, have you heard any news about the situation down in Schirrasburg?”

“Not really. With their spaceport closed, I haven’t been keeping up that closely. I’ve got enough to do between studying for my latest training sequence,” he gestured to the documents on his computer, “and preparing for upcoming missions. Especially since they keep sending me down to Coopersville all the time.” Better stop there. It wouldn’t do to sound openly resentful about being unable to visit his family when Caudell’s wife and daughter lived here in the Roosa Barracks.

If Caudell picked up anything, he made no remark on it. “I’ve just heard some rumors. Some people claim the guy’s recovering and whatever he had, they’re pretty sure it wasn’t the diablovirus. Other people are saying he died but they’re covering it up to prevent panic.”

And you thought that Brenda being a DJ over at Shepardsport Pirate Radio would have her plugged into the information networks well enough that she’d know. Except there was no way to actually say that without being rude. “Unfortunately, I haven’t heard anything more authoritative, and with the current situation, I’ve been trying to keep my nose out of trouble.”

“Understood. But if you do come across something, let me know. I’m trying to reassure some people that we’re still safe, but the lack of solid information is only making them more likely to believe the worst rumors.”

“Will do.” With the conversation closed, Drew pointedly returned his attention to the material he needed to get absorbed before his next training session. After class, he’d consider whether he should contact Brenda and find out what she might know.

Or maybe he ought to contact one of his clone-brothers who happened to be one of Brenda’s colleagues at the station. That kid had a real nose for trouble, especially when he thought someone was hiding information from him.

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AFTER THE WORLD ENDS, THE ADVENTURE BEGINS

A Deadly Virus… A Civilization in Chaos… And One Man Looking for His Daughter in a World Blasted by Plague…

On a warm summer night in New York City, a monstrous plot to eradicate the human race is set into motion. 

Within days, the deadly Medusa virus is burning across the globe like a wildfire, leaving behind a handful of terrified survivors in a world unlike any they have ever known. 

Survivor Adam Fisher discovers that his estranged daughter Rachel may share his rare immunity to the virus, sending him on a quest through a post-apocalyptic America to find her. 

To find Rachel, Adam will risk everything — and come face to face with the horrifying truth about the plague that destroyed humanity.

Author’s Note – This edition contains all four Immune installments, including Unraveling, Void, Evergreen, and Citadel.

Categories
Narrative

Shadows of the Past

Sometimes it was amazing to see what kinds of rumors cropped up on various places on the Internet. Some of them were new, but every now and then old nuggets would pop back up, including wild claims of having seen deceased individuals very much alive. Elvis of course, but also individuals of a more unsavory sort, the dark side of fame.

Autumn Belfontaine was never sure how much credence to give any of them. On one hand, a susceptible mind could spin a chance resemblance into an encounter with an incognito historical figure. On the other hand, the existence of human cloning raised the possibility that someone had in fact seen a clone who had gotten missed during the Expulsions, especially if that clone were about the age the individual in question had been during the period of their fame or notoriety.

All the same, she considered such reports useful mostly as filler, “news of the weird” items that would inject a little levity in news reports that were becoming ever more depressing. People needed something to lighten their moods, but right now the usual forms of humor felt more like mocking matters that ought to be treated with the utmost respect.

A movement at the edge of her field of vision caught her attention. She turned to see Spruance Del Curtin slouching his way down the corridor, looking as if he really wanted to avoid being seen.

What is he up to now?

She cleared her throat to catch his attention. “Aren’t you here early?”

Was that a hint of a flinch? “Just made better time getting down here than I’d expected.”

No, that did not sound the first bit believable. But if she openly called him on the lie, he’d just clam up on her.

“Sprue, if there’s something you want to talk about, we are family.”

Sprue came over to lean against the doorpost, although he didn’t actually enter the newsroom. “Just getting tired of feeling like I’m being watched all the time.”

Autumn considered how to respond to that one. “You do realize that there’s a lot going on right now, and not all of it is for public dissemination. There’s been some concern about just how much you’ve been trying to find out things, especially with you having access to broadcast media.”

Yes, that got his back to stiffen. “Hey, it’s not like I’m going to go blabbing it all over my air shift. But you’ve gotta admit that knowing that there’s information out there but I can’t get at it is something of a challenge.”

“True. Every good reporter has that newshound’s nose. But you’re not on the news team.” Should she make it into a directive to stay in his own lane, or would it be better to extend the offer to let him join? Sprue could be difficult, and she wasn’t sure how she’d handle dealing with him that closely.

It didn’t matter, because the program director picked that moment to come out and want to talk to Sprue about something. Still, Autumn continued to ponder the question as she went back to her own work.

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Narrative

Watch Yourself

Ever since Lou Corlin had delivered his little warning (presumably from Ken Redmond), Spruance Del Curtin had been feeling on edge. Not just that fluttery feeling of unease before an important exam, or the uncertainty of dealing with a situation that could go either way. Instead, he was feeling very much as if he were being watched.

He’d tried to tell himself not to be paranoid. Of course there were cameras and microphones in all the public areas. That was pretty much a given in a lunar settlement, just like it was on a spacecraft or in a space station. There were procedures for accessing the recordings, which ensured that they couldn’t be used for inappropriate purposes, whether that be idle curiosity on the part of neighbors or vindictive spite on the part of authority figures.

But it wasn’t just knowing that the public areas of the settlement were monitored. No, he was struggling with a feeling that he was being watched by people, not just the ever-present machines. That someone, or more likely several someones, were monitoring his activities because someone in authority had decided that he’d crossed a line that couldn’t be ignored.

It would be so much easier if it had been just an issue of hitting on girls. Say, he’d paid a little too much attention to someone whose parents objected, whether because they thought he was too old for their daughter or because they just didn’t like Sheps in general. But he was getting a real feeling that it was a whole lot bigger than that, especially since he really had been too busy lately to spend much time on what would often be one of his favorite pastimes.

Lou’s comment might well have been oblique, but it strongly suggested that someone was not pleased about his interest in something. But what would be the subject that they were so determined to shut him out of that they’d be sending one of his colleagues from the station to warn him off in such vague ways that it verged on the passive-aggressive?

All the way to the station offices, Sprue mulled over those thoughts. Who could he even approach to try to figure out what was such a closely guarded line of inquiry that his curiosity was so unwelcome?

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Many lives are in imminent danger, but a mysterious entity has the power to change everything.

Life is a breeze for Andreas, a simple man, and the captain of a ferry in one of Norway’s tourist-packed fjords. But things are not as perfect as they may seem.

When Andreas begins to receive messages from an unknown source, he realizes that the future of the world is in danger. He decides to leave everything behind and devote his life to a single mission – saving the planet. He soon discovers that humanity’s history is entirely different from what he has known, and a different reality rules the world.

Now, Andreas faces the ultimate test – will he manage to complete his task, or has Earth’s fate already been decided?

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Document

Beneath the Wall of Sleep

One of the biggest challenges for the lunar and Martian settlements during the diablovirus pandemic was mental health. While the isolation produced by travel times served to protect the settlers from physical contagion, it bred a variety of mental issues in the susceptible.

While it is true that space travelers had to undergo rigorous physical and psychological evaluations, these had become steadily less and less severe as space travel became more routine, especially in the case of those going to the Moon. The Expulsions added an additional wrinkle, since Expulsees were rarely rejected for anything but the most gross of medical problems.

As a result, the stress of being aware of the crisis on Earth (thanks to light-speed telecommunications) yet unable to offer any substantial aid even to friends and family built up steadily as news grew worse and worse. Furthermore, when communications began to break down, people were left wondering whether loved ones were not responding to texts and e-mails because their local cell towers and Internet routers were down, or because these individuals had fallen ill with the diablovirus or met with some other misfortune. This information void could often be even worse than knowing that a close friend or family member was ill, even on death’s door.

On the whole, the transient population (individuals who were on short-term assignments and thus had more primary ties with persons on Earth than those in their local community) found the situation more difficult than the long-term and permanent resident population. However, even among the permanent settlers, there were enough people who had maintained strong ties with friends and family on Earth that questions about hose individuals’ well-being was intensely distressing.

This situation was complicated by a culture drawn from the “right stuff” attitudes of the early astronauts and reinforced by the military traditions of the pilot-astronaut community. The pressure to remain stoic in the face of this nightmarish uncertainty was particularly intense for anyone in a position of authority, which could be difficult for civilian science department heads and committee chairs, and particularly for dependents who were increasingly been given permission to accompany personnel in the years leading up to the pandemic.

For many people, the pressure made itself known through dreams. Particularly in settlements that used advanced telemetry in the monitoring apparatus for their life-support systems, it was possible to detect changes in the frequency of REM sleep, and of heart rate, respiration, and skin temperature of residents in sleeping quarters without intrusive sensory apparatus. This data often proved far more accurate in detecting sleep disruptions than self-reporting of nightmares, insomnia or other issues with sleep.

However, medical personnel often had limited options for dealing with these issues. Although sedatives could force the body to sleep, they could not provide normal sleep-rhythm cycles, which could be almost as damaging as the insomnia they were supposed to treat. And while there were drugs that could reduce the severity of nightmares, they did so by disturbing normal REM sleep, which could be as disruptive to mental functioning as the sleep disruptions themselves.

Fortunately, the most severe cases were generally rare. By and large, most Lunans and Martians were able to maintain a satisfactory level of job performance even with the deleterious effects of the stress resultant from the omnipresent threat of the pandemic, both personally in the case of a breach of the quarantine procedures which protected space travel, and more broadly in the potential of civilization breakdown on Earth if too many skilled workers were lost to sustain complex technological civilization.

Categories
Narrative

Check Your Data

The last three hours had given Ursula Doorne a massive headache, and she wasn’t exactly prone to them. But this work had most definitely given her one, and she really didn’t want to have to call over to Medlab and have them send a deliverybot with painkillers to her office.

Going over the data itself wasn’t that hard — but right now she did not view it as a useful process, not until she had verified that the methods used to collect it were indeed valid. And that was what was proving the most difficult problem.

With all the various satellites and scientific probes humanity had put into space in the decades since Sputnik, one would think almost any location in the inner Solar System would be covered by at two or more sets of sensors. That it would be reasonably easy to get another set of sensors trained onto a phenomenon of interest, if nothing else, just to make sure that it wasn’t an artifact of a subtly faulty sensor. Surely no one wanted a repeat of the AXIL fiasco, which had derailed several promising careers in X-ray astronomy.

But no, there was not one probe anywhere that could be trained on that one region near the Sun’s south pole that seemed to be behaving oddly. Right now the Israeli probe at Mercury was their only source of data, and given that the solar data was incidental to its actual mission, there was a very real question that they might be looking at faulty data.

Ursula closed her eyes and rubbed the bridge of her nose, trying to ease the pounding within her head. What other resources could they bring to bear to get another source of data without waiting for the Sun’s polar regions to come around to where the vast number of systems in the Earth-Moon system could get a good look at it?

In the meantime, she’d better talk to the space weather people. At least give them the heads-up about the data she was looking at. Make sure they understood this was not in any way, shape or form a formal release of information, not even a pre-print, but she wanted them to be aware that the space weather situation could change at a moment’s notice if it represented a major gap in the astronomy upon which their work was based.

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Document

The Course of Disaster

Every event has its own rhythms. In the case of a pandemic, it begins with uncertainty and fear. In these early stages, we see only the worst cases, and have no idea what proportion of actual cases they represent. Especially if it is a new virus, like the diablovirus, nothing is known about how contagious it may be, the methods by which it spreads, or any of the other parameters by which one can determine how best to deal with it.

As a result, public health agencies will almost invariably either over-react or under-react. Furthermore, the direction in which they err is almost invariably determined by the last major disease outbreak. In effect they are like generals preparing yet again to fight the last war.

As the course of the pandemic proceeds, early assumptions will often prove to be inaccurate, perhaps even wildly so. At this point, the authorities have choices to make. Will they alter their messages to fit the new data, or will they insist on sticking to their original messages and policies even after new discoveries have invalidated them?

There can be multiple reasons for a decision to persist with an official line that is based upon superseded science. Yes, fear of losing face in the eyes of the general public can be a real issue, particularly in cultures heavily invested in the notion that Authority Does Not Err, but it is certainly not the only one. Some authority figures can be worried that going back on one’s advice will end up sowing confusion, quite possibly leaving people unsure who they should believe. And some can believe that, if the existing advice is not actively harmful, it is better to avoid changing it unless the need to update is pressing.

In the time when mass media was entirely broadcast, with an effective monopoly of a small number of media sources over the information being broadcast, the argument of avoiding confusion might have still held some water. However, by the early twenty-first century, the monopoly once held by major newspapers, radio and television stations had broken down. People were as likely to look to well-known independent bloggers as to national networks for their news.

As a result, major media outlets following the old policy of soft-pedaling new information that contradicted their earlier messages actually ended up damaging the very credibility they were trying so hard to preserve. In the case of the diablovirus, many people became so uncertain as to what preventive measures would actually work that they would end up persisting in useless ones that felt comforting while ignoring ones that actually worked but failed to conform to their intuitive sense of how things ought to work.

—– Helen Cherwell, essay for Intro to Broadcast Media, Shepardsport, 2033.

Categories
Narrative

Reasons to Worry

Autumn Belfontaine swirled the last bit of her coffee around in the bottom of the mug. When she’d first gotten into broadcast journalism, it had seemed like a straightforward occupation. Yes, there were many ways a reporter might use to ferret out information, but it all boiled down to covering the news.

She’d never imagined that being a radio station’s news director could put her in the position of having to locate technical information for old friends who were just trying to stay on the air as best they could amidst infrastructure breakdowns. She’d never imagined that it would involve trying to hold together a team who were becoming increasingly worried about the safety of friends and family at the bottom of a gravity well while sitting at its top with no way to give them material help. And she’d certainly never imagined that she could be watching a civilization-wide catastrophe unfolding 1.5 light-seconds away, hardly an eyeblink in network times, yet a well-nigh unbridgeable distance in physical terms.

But now there was nothing for her to do but deal with the situation as best she could. At least Ken Redmond’s people had managed to put together a new main board, so Shepardsport Pirate Radio once again had a clean, professional sound. Now they had to put the location rig through a full maintenance cycle to ensure it would be ready to go when they could broadcast on location once again.

However, finding good solutions for Dan’s ongoing trouble with keeping his radio station powered up had proven far more elusive. Engineering had offered her several, but every last one of them had presupposed certain elements of the lunar environment that simply wouldn’t be available on Earth.

And then there was the stuff that was just disturbing enough that she really felt that she ought to get the word out, but without independent confirmation, she was hesitant to even put together a story and run it past the appropriate people. Like the business about the eco-fanatic cult whose lair had been found in smoking ruins, who might or might not have some connection with the diablovirus — except that it had first appeared in poverty-stricken villages of Central Asia, not staid and proper Central Europe. Or the rumor Brenda had heard about a gang leader in the south side of Chicago turning warlord and stealing groceries and other vital goods to be distributed to his people.

Not to mention just what Spruance Del Curtin might be up to right now. On the surface, it seemed like he had suddenly become very good, very conscientious, very helpful. Except it really felt like he was trying to hide something.

No, she’d never imagined that a news director could end up bearing so many burdens, all at once. But these were her people, and she couldn’t help but care about them.

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