Month: December 2020

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Narrative

Days of Future Past

As Steffi Roderick walked back to her office, she thought over her conversation with Lou. He’d been trying hard to sound like the very model of probity, but he wasn’t doing quite as well as he thought he was. If anything, his responses had sounded too casual, too matter-of-fact, as if he were trying to make her think that there was nothing going on, nothing to see.

It didn’t help that his geneset coded for a very open face. Steffi still remembered when she first encountered his ur-brother. She’d been working at JPL at the time, having just come into it from a stint with Mitsubishi’s US division, where they built Blue Gemini spacecraft on contract for NASA in the old McDonnell-Douglass building in St. Louis.

It had been a big deal to have the NASA Administrator himself visit the Lab, especially since he was a famous astronaut rather than a bureaucrat or politician like his predecessors. Everyone knew why President Dole had chosen him in the wake of the Moonbase disaster — she wanted a new broom to sweep clean, and knew she was dealing with a man who’d had his own experience with sloppy work leading to disaster.

Only later, after he’d retired and settled in Silicon Valley, had she gotten the opportunity to make a more personal acquaintance of the man, thanks to her ties with Toni Hargreaves. Although they’d never been close, it was astonishing how much of him she recognized in Lou and the other clone-brothers.

Probably because you did spend a fair amount of time with Toni and Cather, at least until you transferred to Johnson.

Steffi shrugged. At this point, most of that was past history. Still, she did wonder just what Lou didn’t want to talk about. She had a good idea that Spruance Del Curtin was still up to mischief, no matter how hard everybody tried to keep him busy. But now was not the time to confront him.

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Narrative

Some Questions

It hadn’t been ten minutes after the conversation with Juss Forsythe when the boss showed up at the hardware help desk. Not the tech support supervisor, but the head of IT herself.

“Good afternoon, Mr. Corlin.” Although she was smiling, the formal address suggested trouble was in the offing. “I see you and Mr. Forsythe were having a conversation earlier.”

Although she didn’t specifically accuse him of having been caught visiting while he was supposed to be working, why else would she remark on his conversation with Juss? Which meant he would have to watch what he said, make sure he didn’t sound defensive.

Better to make it sound routine and unremarkable. “We were just discussing some problems both our departments are dealing with.” No, better not elaborate. More information might make it sound interesting enough to pursue further.

Steffi just nodded, a curt up-and-down movement. “Is there anything I need to know about these problems?”

Lou’s heart sped up, and he hoped his face hadn’t betrayed that moment of alarm. “We have things taken care of.”

No, she did not look convinced. “If it has to do with a Shep, please don’t think you can’t talk to me about it, just because I’m married into the Shepard lineage.”

Make that definite she probably suspected they were talking about Sprue. However, she was leaving him a face-saving out, rather than making an Issue about it. Which meant he’d better take that opportunity, thank her, and reassure her that he’d let her know if things reached the point she needed to be involved.

Still, once she was gone and definitely out of earshot, Lou breathed a heartfelt sigh of relief.

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Narrative

Patterns

Network activity logs weren’t usually part of Steffi Roderick’s regular checks, unless there was trouble with the network. However, given the situation right now, she had been doing a little more tracking than usual, trying to see how usage patterns had changed since the beginning of the pandemic.

It was interesting to notice how certain departments, especially in the sciences, tended to have sudden spikes all at once. She could often predict when there would be a major discovery announced, simply because one science department had a whole lot of network activity, like Astronomy was having right now.

But some of the others were more puzzling, popping up and then vanishing. Occasionally one particular device would show up in several locations, which suggested someone was doing a lot of work on something while waiting for various activities to begin.

Obviously the data would need to be anonymized if it were to be given to anyone else to analyze. But right now some of it was interesting in other ways. In particular, certain people doing some unusual searches that seemed to suggest they had some awareness of matters that were currently being kept under embargo, and were trying to find out.

In fact, it made her wonder if it was time to mention Spruance Del Curtin’s activities to certain people in authority over him. On the other hand, without definite evidence that he was actually in breach of any rules, it would be tricky to get the intended corrective effect. Yanking him in for a bawling-out might just as easily breed resentment.

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Narrative

One Thing Accomplished

Lou Corlin wasn’t sure what he’d find when he got down to IT for his work shift. Given that he was troubleshooting for the hardware help desk, a day could start so quiet you were expected to find work for yourself to do, and then become so busy that you literally couldn’t keep up with the caseload pouring in. In fact, he tended to dread shifts that started too quiet. They’d come to feel too much like a setup for something unpleasant.

However, he hadn’t expected to find Juss Forsythe waiting for him. No, correct that — he hadn’t expected to find Juss just standing there waiting, as opposed to delivering some balky piece of hardware from one or another department.

“Hi, Juss. Don’t you have something to do?”

Juss knew him well enough to recognize it was a joke rather than an implied reprimand. “Thought I’d let you know Sprue seems to be getting the hint.”

“That’s good. Especially right now, poking your nose into matters that don’t concern you are not exactly conducive to good health and safety.”

“You sound like you’re actually worried about him.”

“Hey, he’s a Shep. A pain in the keister most of the time, because he’s got this drive to show everybody he’s the smartest guy in the room, and make sure you can’t miss it. But when things really get hairy, he’ll pitch right in and do his level best, with none of the shenanigans.”

“Yeah, that’s a Shep for you. Like a male version of the little girl with the curl in the middle of her forehead.”

Lou recognized that nursery rhyme, although he wasn’t sure where he’d heard it. “I just wish he didn’t take a hint of information that’s not for general release as a challenge to his personal skills in social engineering. If he’s not careful, one of these days he’s going to poke his nose into something that’s a whole lot bigger than he realizes, and he’s going to get into more trouble than he can get back out of.”

“You think so?”

“There’s a lot going on right now, and I’m getting the feeling that some of it is being kept under wraps for very good reasons.” Lou shot a quick glance over his shoulder. “Right now we’re in a very precarious position on a number of fronts. I’m hearing rumors of a major breakthrough related to the diablovirus, which suggests there’s just enough uncertainty that official announcements are being delayed until they’re sure they’re not just raising false hopes. And there’s been a huge spike in communications traffic lately, especially from two or three departments up in Sciences. Any of them could be big enough that someone who got caught poking his nose into it would not be trusted to keep quiet without measures being taken.”

That quieted Juss’s usual cheerful expression. “Yeah. Anyway, I’m supposed to be picking up a couple of items, so I shouldn’t stand around visiting.” He retrieved his phone, pulled up a message with the work order numbers.

“Let me go get them. They shouldn’t be too hard to find, if the overnight crew filed them properly.”

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Narrative

It Ain’t Over ’til It’s Over

Dr. Doorne wasn’t surprised to see Spruance Del Curtin in her office so early. He’d been doing it ever since things fell behind when they were dealing with the breakdown of the main board at Shepardsport Pirate Radio.

However, today he seemed oddly subdued, yet at the same time unusually intense — like he were really excited about something, but didn’t want to show it to all and sundry. Given he was a Shep, that could mean any of a dozen things, some good, others not so good. If he were cooking up a gotcha, she could only hope that he’d unleash it somewhere else, and it wouldn’t be too obnoxious.

On the other hand, if he’d suddenly caught fire on some project, that could be quite good. The kid was smart — anyone could see it — but he was most definitely not in any danger of becoming a people pleaser.

However, now was probably not the time to go looking over his shoulder. From what she could see, it looked as if he was hard at work on the latest group of data sets. Eventually he was going to need to be moved to more involved statistical analysis activities, because it was only a matter of time before he got bored with this level of work. But at the moment it was still a challenge to him.

Later she’d check the logs on that computer to make sure he wasn’t using its higher level of access to look at materials that weren’t generally available. Right now she had work of her own, and she needed to get onto it.

She went onto her computer expecting the usual stuff: notifications from IT on various jobs she’d sent to their heavy iron, alerts on pre-prints and various astronomical shop talk, the sort of thing earlier generations of scientists had to go to conferences to hear. But not an alert that Israel’s latest Mercury probe was picking up anomalous behavior on the other side of the Sun, where it couldn’t be observed from the Earth-Moon system.

And wouldn’t you know, Mars isn’t in the right position to get good observations either, not to mention their being twice as far out as we are.

The probe was there to do basic science, not space weather observation and forecasting, so it wouldn’t be able to provide near the level of detail as the system of satellites that monitored space weather in the Earth-Moon system. But it was closer in, which meant that its smaller sensors could pick up signals that would require a much larger sensor out here. On the other hand, everything it transmitted had to be relayed through another satellite.

And all anyone knew right now was that the data did not follow the expected patterns. Which meant it could be anything from an instrument malfunction to something that was going to change everyone’s understanding of how the Sun — and by extension, similar stars — function.

Right now, the first thing to do was take a good look at the data and make sure it wasn’t faulty. Right about the time she was doing her graduate work in astronomy, there’d been a number of very prestigious papers withdrawn when it was discovered that there was a problem with one of the early orbiting X-ray observatories. Yes, several of them were revised and resubmitted once the issues with its sensor suite were corrected, but it had been a huge amount of egg on the faces of some very senior scientists.

If it was a faulty sensor, the sooner it was caught, the better. Faulty data was worse than none at all. And if it wasn’t a fault in the sensor, everybody had better get cracking on understanding what it meant. Because if it was as anomalous as it looked, a huge chunk of space weather was no longer “in the family,” and space operations all over the Solar System could be in grave danger.

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Narrative

Keep Looking

Something was going on that someone wanted to keep under wraps. Spruance Del Curtin had known it as soon as Autumn Belfontaine had gotten that message and immediately took off without any explanation. She was gone the better part of an hour, and when she got back, she was really closed-mouthed about everything. Went straight into the newsroom and started doing searches.

However, there’d been no way Sprue could ask her what was going on. Sure, he could push the limits a long way, but there were still points beyond which it was a hard no-go. And even if Autumn was family, pressuring her about whatever was going on was one of those points.

So he’d have to find out by other means. It was especially difficult since he had no idea what it even was about.

There were ways of finding out where Autumn had gone, which would give him a good idea of what this business was about. However, most of them would get him into even deeper trouble than straight-out asking. Getting crosswise with the head of IT was not wise, especially given that she also happened to be married to the settlement’s commandant.

Which left him having to put out cautious feelers. His clone-brothers were as apt to screw him over with a particularly obnoxious gotcha as to help him. However, there were a number of clones of the astronauts who’d flown with Big Al on his lunar mission.

Except none of them knew squat about Autumn’s mysterious errand, and most of them had no idea of how to go about finding out or connecting with someone who could. Spencer Dawes might be able to turn something up — it helped that he was DJ of the disco show — but he allowed it might take some time.

So here Sprue was in the residential modules, looking for Brenda Redmond. She’d been rather close with Autumn of late, asking her to find things out, so it was possible she’d know something.

As it happened, he found her with her kids, all gathered around a tablet. From the looks of it, they were all doing FaceTime, probably with her husband.

Maybe he could catch her after they got done and she put the kids to bed. In the meantime, better look like he had something productive to do and wasn’t just hanging around waiting. At least up here on the Moon, you always had plenty of studying to do.

After a while, Brenda did call it quits and lead the kids back to their apartment. Sprue figured it might take her half an hour or so to get the kids settled down and into bed.

An hour later, she still hadn’t come back out. Had she decided to turn in early, maybe because she needed to do something else before her air shift tomorrow?

And then he realized he wasn’t alone. He looked up to meet the gaze of Lou Corlin.

“Just wanted to pass the word that you might want to watch where you poke your nose. You’ve gotten in trouble for this already, and people are starting to notice.”

“Thanks.” Sprue bit the word off without any effort to hide his annoyance at the Chaffee. Probably running Ken Redmond’s errands for him.

We’ll see if I get called into his office for a bawling-out tomorrow, or if he decides to just let it dangle.

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Paying the Bills

Nick Abrahams still holds the official world record for the number of space launches, but he’s bored stiff with his job hosting space tours. Only when his wife leaves him, however, does he try to change his life.

He accepts a tempting offer from a Russian billionaire. In exchange for making a simple repair on Neptune’s moon Triton, he will return to Earth a multi-millionaire, enabling him to achieve his ‘impossible dream’ of buying his own California vineyard.

The fact that Nick must travel alone during the four-year roundtrip doesn’t bother him at all, as he doesn’t particularly like people anyway. Once en route he learns his new boss left out some critical details in his job description—details that could cost him his life, and humankind its existence…

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Document

The Peril of False Hopes

One of the biggest problems in uncertain times is to avoid unnecessarily raising false hopes. Much like the “cry wolf” effect of warning of perils that fail to materialize, it can lead audiences to tune out the source, believing it to be too unreliable to give credence.

However, the loss of trust in the reliability of a source of information is not the only risk involved in raising false hopes. Unlike bad news, which is a warning of things to be endured, good news can be perceived as a promise of a good thing to come. As a result, when it fails to materialize, the audience feels not only disappointed but actively betrayed.

Yet at the same time, official sources need to be able to maintain the morale of the populace. Particularly in difficult times, positive news can often make the difference between people’s willingness to make an effort on something that does not immediately benefit them, and putting out only the minimum effort. By knowing that some things are becoming better, they can believe that their efforts are accomplishing something positive, something that will benefit them in the long run, even if it appears at the moment that things are becoming worse.

However, if the hope they are offered should prove overly optimistic, or even outright wishful thinking, it becomes dangerously likely that people will feel they’ve been had, that they’ve been tricked into wasting their time to someone else’s gain, rather than working for everyone’s benefit.

We see this during the Energy Wars, particularly during major reverses. Small victories, even the rescue of an escaped POW, were given considerable air time on the home front as morale boosters. However, there were several noted cases in which the situation was portrayed as being far more heroic than was in fact the case. As the true situation came out, a disillusioned audience even turned against the very heroes they’d cheered only weeks before. In some cases, there were demands for harsh punishment, often of the participants in the rescue rather than the media personalities who exaggerated the heroism of the people involved.

—– Autumn Belfontaine, paper for journalism course, University of Minnesota, 2012.

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Narrative

Hope and Horror

Autumn Belfontaine had been watching Ken Redmond’s people install the new main board when she got the message from Medlab. Part of her wanted to call and ask what the heck was going on, but the message was plain: report to Dr. Thuc’s office.

So here she was, hoping she was ready for whatever she was about to find out. Given that it was Dr. Thuc, it was most likely news rather than something about her own personal medical situation. Not that it made it any easier.

And then the door opened and Dr. Thuc stepped out. “Thank you for coming down here so quickly. I hadn’t expected you until later.”

“I’d just finished my last news segment of the morning, so I was watching the installation of some new equipment. I shouldn’t need to be back for at least an hour, so there’s time to talk.”

“That’s good to know. Please come in and sit down.”

As Autumn took a seat, she noticed Dr. Thuc closing the door behind her. Whatever they were going to be talking about was confidential.

“I just got some news that Captain Waite thinks you should know. There’s been a discovery at an old hunting lodge in the Alps which suggests the diablovirus is probably artificial.”

“OK.” Autumn recalled the earlier statements to the opposite effect. “I thought it was a natural mutation because several key proteins would’ve been arranged more efficiently if it were artificial.”

“That’s what everyone thought, because we were all assuming that genetic engineering would be done by professionals, to best standards. Instead, we think we’re looking at an amateur job by eco-fanatics. We aren’t even sure if the building was burning because they were careless with their equipment, or they decided it was time to commit suicide.”

“Good Lord.” Autumn recalled a couple of the groups who’d been active at U of Minnesota a decade ago — and while they were fringe, they weren’t completely out there, for the simple reason that the university didn’t tolerate any student group that promoted violence or other criminal activity. “The sort of people who believe humanity is a plague upon the Earth. It’s a sort of secular Calvinism, absolute depravity without irresistable grace.”

“I’m afraid I’m not overly well versed on the theology of Protestant denominations, but calling them a cult is probably not too far off the mark. At this point, our best hope is to try to recover enough information from their computers and paper files to get a working model of the diablovirus. If Voronsky is as good as people say, we can hope we’ll have it under control in a few months.”

“Then we can start to rebuild.” Why did that not sound nearly as hopeful as Autumn really wanted it to. “Which raises the question of just how much we can rebuild. From some stuff I’ve heard, there are areas where whole communities have been wiped out, and a lot of places where civil society has broken down altogether, even in the US. And even in the places that are holding together, do we have enough people to rebuild back to the same place we were, or are we going to have to allow some areas to slip backward? At least up here we’ve dodged the bullet, so personally we shouldn’t be worrying about losing any critical technologies. But I’m thinking it’s going to be a lot rougher than people anticipate.”

“That may very well be. Right now almost everyone I’m in contact with is focusing on trying to keep the health care system reasonably functional, even in the face of inadequate supplies and often inadequate staff. So I really don’t have that much of the big picture.”

“But even what you’ve given me will help. I’m going to see what I can find out about it, and whether we’re going to want to start broadcasting about it, or we want to hang onto it for a more opportune time.”

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Narrative

A Piece of the Puzzle

Reggie Waite had been working his way through some documentation — supposedly from NASA HQ, although he had good reason to think most of the updates were from someone over at Grissom City. The bureaucratic gobbletygook was just thick enough that his eyes were glazing over when his phone rang.

Who was calling at this hour? Had the materials he was reading been more engrossing, he would’ve been tempted to just let it go to voicemail. Right now, the distraction was actually welcome.

As soon as he answered, he was glad he had, because it was Barbie Thuc down at Medlab. “I just got some news. Apparently we’ve been wrong about the diablovirus being natural.”

He recalled the presentation, way back when this whole mess started. “So what happened to all those inefficient gene-complexes a lab wouldn’t have used?”

“Everyone in the field assumed a whole lot more competence on the part of the people doing the work. The information is pretty sketchy right now, but we may have found the laboratory where that thing was put together. Or at least what’s left of it after the fire that drew the authorities’ attention in the first place.”

“Crap.” Reggie could see some pretty bad implications. Especially if they still had live cultures in there… “Any information on who or where?”

“As I said, we’re still working on sketchy information. But we do know it was a cabin up in the Alps, an old royal hunting box from back before World War I that had apparently been abandoned for a while because it was just historical enough that no one wanted to tear it down, but not historical enough to get maintained. From what I’ve heard, it’s in an area where there’ve been a lot of the really crazy deep-ecology types, the sort who regard humanity as a plague upon the Earth, inherently destructive, that sort.”

“Ayup, I remember the business with that one cult that had all holed up and all got found dead. Was there ever a definite decision on whether they thought they were going to be the sole survivors but ended up dead because they couldn’t operate a wood stove properly, or if they were trying to commit suicide to go to some perfect evergreen paradise?”

“That’s been a long time, and I was busy enough that I really didn’t read up on the literature. But you’re right, that’s the same area, so it’s possible we’re dealing with an offshoot from that apocalyptic cult. Right now I’m hearing that the local police, or what’s left of them, are trying to find someone with the authority to deal with it. Personally, I’m thinking they ought to get hold of Voronsky. He’s the man with the chops to understand whatever can be recovered from the computers and hardcopy files, but I could see how it could be touchy diplomatic going to get the Russians involved in Central Europe.”

“Very true.” Reggie was old enough to remember the Cold War, when it looked like Europe would always be divided by the Iron Curtain. “Keep me posted as this thing develops. And put Autumn Belfontaine in the loop. This may be something we want to get out, especially if anyone up here would have the background to be of any use.”