Month: January 2021

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Narrative

A Helping Hand

Still annoyed that he should have to deal with such stupid antics from any of that brat-pack of teenage Sheps who’d grown a little feral since arriving as middle-graders, Lou walked alone to the dining commons for supper. Brenda needed to pick up her kids anyway, so it was a perfect excuse to say good-bye instead of walking with her.

However, the question that had originally brought them to sitting side-by-side at a computer in IT was still nagging at Lou’s mind. What exactly was going on at Schirrasburg?

It was probably the smallest of the major American settlements. For various reasons it had never really grown at the rate of Grissom City and Coopersville, and had remained more like a very large scientific outpost than a true city on the Moon. Yes, dependents were allowed to live there, but these days some of the larger commercial mining settlements were allowing the miners to bring their families, so the distinction was really blurring.

Which made it all the more surprising that Schirrasburg should be where the supposed lunar Patient Zero should show up. You’d really think it would be Grissom City, which was the big hub of lunar tourism. Before everything closed down, there were thousands of tourists coming and going, wealthy people who were apt to be lax about pre-flight quarantine procedures for the simple reason they were accustomed to their money insulating them from the consequences of their actions. If anyone was going to bring a bug up here, it was likely to be them.

But no one would go out to Schirrasburg for fun. From everything Lou had heard, the place was boring, boring, boring. All scientific and technical people, all with jobs to do and damned little time left for entertainment. The sort of people who went there took procedures seriously or they didn’t get selected.

Unless it was one of the pilot-astronauts. Things might be tamer than the wild and wooly days of the Mercury Seven, but military pilots were always a cocky and headstrong bunch. As Gordon Cooper was reputed to say, the meek might inherit the Earth, but they would not inherit the sky.

If that were the case, it would certainly explain why NASA was working so hard to keep things quiet. No matter how hard they tried to isolate the pilots from each other and from the settlements they visited, there was always a certain amount of interaction. And no one could afford the mess that would result if every pilot had to be grounded who’d had contact with an infected pilot for the previous ten days, let alone the twenty-five that some were saying was the largest possible window of contagion.

However, Lou doubted that Drew Reinholt would be satisfied with a mere hypothesis like that. No doubt he’d considered it himself, and probably avoided airing it in order to make sure he didn’t lead them down a garden path and make them less likely to consider other possibilities.

Except what other possibilities can we explore? I’m pretty well at the end of my skills, and who else is there to turn to?

Which was when he realized that he’d completely ignored his best resource. One of his clone-brothers was married to a top-notch programmer with a rep as a white-hat hacker. Better send a message off to her, see if she could help.

By the time Lou finished, he was at the landing in front of the dining commons. And gathered around the big double doors was a whole crowd of teenage Sheps. No, they didn’t look like they were hanging around to hit on girls.

Which meant that word had already gotten around, and they were looking for trouble. On the other hand, this was a very public place. How far would they push matters with so many people watching?

Lou squared his shoulders and kept walking as if he owned the place. “OK, guys, are you going to let me through, or am I going to have to Batman my way in?”

For a moment he wondered if the Sheps were going to respond with derision. But then they began to pull back. He decided he didn’t want to know whether it was the knowledge that he shared his ur-brother’s interest in boxing, or the two Security guys behind him, whose reflections were showing in the etched moonglass of the doors.

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Paying the Bills

A practical and illustrated guide to getting through all types of life-threatening situations.

Are you ready for the big one, whether it’s an earthquake, a hurricane, or a monster snowstorm? Disaster Survival Handbook will help you prepare for the unexpected—from stocking up on provisions to hunkering down in a safe area to administering basic first aid. The power of nature means that disasters are inevitable and that surviving them is all about preparation. With this useful illustrated guide, you’ll be able to take the steps necessary to keep your family and loved ones safe in the face of danger. Each chapter includes true stories of people who found themselves in the middle of a precarious situation . . . and how they managed to survive.

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Narrative

An Obstacle

Sometimes two heads really were better than one. In spite of all her efforts, Brenda Redmond had been getting nowhere with Drew’s request to find out something about the situation in Schirrasburg, even after he’d followed up. Much as she hated to tell him she had hit a wall, she was coming to realize that she was avoiding texting him because she didn’t want to have to admit it. And there was no way to have a conversation without the subject coming up, and once it did, no way to talk around the issue without it being obvious that she was dodging it.

And then Lou had seen her slipping into the newsroom to check their computers while everyone else was away. There’d been no way to evade the question without being rude, and the DJ’s were supposed to be a team.

So here she was down in IT with Lou, doing some searches on web traffic. It wasn’t exactly hacking, but it was just enough of a gray area she was surprised he’d be delving into it. So far most of what they were seeing was routine stuff, completely unremarkable data transfers. A lot of personal e-mail and texts going back and forth, a lot of web searches, all private stuff that they couldn’t look at, but strongly suggesting a community of people confined to quarters when not working on survival-essential activities, trying to distract themselves from their worries.

However, there did seem to be a fair amount of traffic on some official channels. Given the sudden spike in the data, it looked like they were probably sending files back and forth.

“Which could mean any of a number of things,” Lou averred. “We can only see what’s changing, not what’s in in the files that are going back and forth.”

“But there’s definitely something going on. And you’re pretty sure it started about the same time as the rumors about someone with the diablovirus at Schirrasburg.”

“Roughly. It’s hard to pin a date on the basis of a rumor, but I think we can be confident that things are most definitely not normal at Schirrasburg. However, it’s still not enough information to say for definite whether it involves a patient with the diablovirus, let alone whether any such individual has recovered or died from it.”

Lou was about to say more when a youthful voice called out, “Oooh-la-la.”

Brenda looked up just as a teenage Shep walked in, lips curled upward in a grin of amusement. As she realized what he was assuming, her cheeks grew warm.

However, Lou’s expression showed no embarrassment, only anger. He leaped out of his chair and across the distance, grabbing the young Shep by the shirt and slamming him up against the wall. “You’d better watch your mouth, buddy.”

The Shep squirmed in a desperate struggle to break Lou’s hold. Once the kid got his full growth, he’d tower over a Chaffee, but Sheps were always smaller than normal when they were younger. Drew had talked about being one of the shortest kids in his class all the way until he got into high school and finally got those last couple of growth spurts. Even then, he didn’t fill out until he was in his mid-twenties, never mind doing a regular astronaut workout every day after he got shipped up here.

The kid was babbling something about not meaning any harm, and it just being a joke. However, Lou wasn’t having any of it.

“You know as well as I do that Brenda’s dad is a Grissom. That makes her family, so you’d better not be going around insinuating that she and I are doing something disgusting together. Or do you want me to get him involved, especially considering you work in Engineering too?”

Now the kid knew he’d gotten in way over his head. He was fighting the urge to blubber in fear, but his eyes were still wide enough the whites were showing top and bottom, more than even a Shep’s naturally buggy eyes.

Another man might’ve humiliated him, made him beg and plead to be set free. But Lou just let him go and pointed toward the corridor leading back out. “Now get out of here. And don’t let me find out you’ve been going around blabbing.”

The kid just nodded, then fled. Lou brushed his hands off, then returned to the computer. “Now that’s settled, let’s get back to work.”

Let’s just hope it really is settled. Brenda knew how hyper-competitive Sheps could be, and how vindictive. She really didn’t want to see this incident rebounding back on Lou, especially when he was just trying to help her answer a question.

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Narrative

Unnerving Developments

Autumn Belfontaine hadn’t really known what to think when Steffi Roderick had called and requested for her to come down to IT as soon as possible. Autumn had been in the middle of preparing afternoon and evening drive time newscasts, and while there was no huge time pressure, she liked to do them in one sitting for better cohesiveness.

But one of the critical skills of a journalist was the ability to be flexible. Breaking news didn’t follow anybody’s schedule, and from the sound of Steffi’s voice, whatever had just happened was both urgent and worrisome.

Now she was waiting while Steffi finished talking with several of her immediate subordinates. From the sound of it, they were talking about fallback options, but exactly what she could not determine.

Finally they wound up their conference and the three of them came filing out. As soon as Steffi came out, she looked directly at Autumn. “Glad you were able to come down so quickly. Come inside so we can talk.”

“As urgent as you sounded, I thought I’d better not delay.”

“It looks like things may be changing rapidly. Right before I called you, I was in a conference call with the IT chiefs of all the major lunar settlements, verifying what we were observing and determining our best strategies for dealing with it.”

“So we’re looking at a major change in our situation?”

“Actually, Earth’s. We’ve been picking up cascades of micro-outages in a number of major websites. E-commerce and social media in particular, but also some major news websites. We think what we are seeing is the Internet shifting to mirror sites in other locations when they lose connectivity to their primary server farms.”

“That doesn’t sound good.” Autumn recalled her old friend who was struggling to keep a radio station on the air, and what little she’d been able to offer him in the way of suggestions. “Especially if they’re losing power. Those places are supposed to have backup generators.”

“Which have finite amounts of fuel, and if they’re not getting replenished, they’ll soon be offline. We’re not seeing as bad of problems as we might, mostly because the most popular websites all are mirrored on servers up here to eliminate light-speed lag. We’re talking about finding ways to duplicate as much functionality as we can manage, but some of it is going to be tricky. We’re talking to legal teams, making sure we don’t violate copyrights in the process, but it’s really concerning that we might suddenly lose critical parts of our information infrastructure. In fact, right after we get done here, I’m going to Engineering and Medlab and making sure that they have all their essential manuals and other documents on local servers.”

“I don’t blame you at all. I’ll work on finding other ways of keeping in contact with my stringers down on Earth, so I can still get news even if all the major news websites and wire services go down.”

“Good. At least we’re used to jerry-rigging our way through things, so this should be just another challenge.”

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Narrative

Slow and Steady

One good thing about having worked in Engineering was plenty of connections with the older clones, the ones who remembered the early days of the Flannigan Administration. Although some of them had been born from artificial uterine environments and raised in the creches, a fair number of them had been raised in regular families and as a result would have a wide variety of experiences of those days.

However, now that he was no longer working in Engineering, he had a lot less contact with those guys. That made it a lot harder to make contact with them. He couldn’t very well walk up to them and ask them what they remembered about the early Flannigan Administration and the beginning of the Sharp Wars, and there just weren’t the opportunities to have a conversation start up naturally that could be steered in the appropriate direction.

Still, difficult was not the same as impossible. He did still have enough in common with those guys that he could find ways to get together with them and strike up a conversation. It just took a lot more work.

Which was why he really didn’t want to have to see Cindy Margrave right now. He really didn’t want to admit that he’d made little or no progress on finding out what she wanted to know.

Which made him very relieved when he arrived at the station offices and found no one at the receptionist’s desk. Sometimes Cindy did stay a little late, especially if she needed to wind something up.

But he had to come early if he wanted to talk with Autumn Belfontaine about the possibility of doing work with the news department and still be a DJ. Once his air shift started, he didn’t want to get involved in a conversation that could take him away from the DJ booth too long.

Except when he got to the newsroom, Autumn was nowhere in sight. One of the younger reporters looked up from a computer and said she’d been called down to IT for something.

Nothing to do but thank the kid for the information and find something to busy himself until time for his air shift. He certainly had some studying to do.

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Paying the Bills

While investigating an ancient ruin in a distant star system, archeology student Liu Shang discovers a mysterious pendant. When she examines it, she sees the past through the eyes of a woman whose choices will change a world.

A short story originally published in Visions V: Milky Way.

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Narrative

Of Zeerust and Enjoyment

Cindy usually didn’t come over to this module to study, but tonight there was something about sitting in a recliner chair by a fireplace that made the task all the more pleasant. Even if the recliner wasn’t much more than a fabric sling on a reclining frame, and the fireplace was electric with digital sound effects, they created an atmosphere of cozy warmth that made her reading assignment more enjoyable.

Literature classes up here were always interesting. Unlike back on Earth, her teachers didn’t automatically dismiss science fiction as “escapist trash.” Far from it, several of them explicitly included sf books in their curriculum, using them to show how the Literature of the Possible created sufficient interest in spaceflight and other advanced technologies that a whole generation would work to make it actually happen. She’d found it especially amusing when one of her teachers gave the class excerpts from several early astronauts’ memoirs in which they mentioned reading or watching science fiction about space travel in their younger days.

On the other hand, there was the down side: namely, that reading for class was always different from reading for fun. You had to pay closer attention to the text, especially if it was something new to you, and that could actually take away from being able to immerse yourself in the story and the world and just be there.

Which was probably why she noticed Juss Forsythe puttering around at something behind her. Deciding it was a perfect excuse for a break, she looked up. “Hi, Juss.”

His solemn expression was washed away by one of those big grins his geneset was famous for. “How’s it going, Cindy?”

“OK, I guess. I mean, I’d always heard about Frank Herbert and the Dune books, but I never actually got around to reading them until we got assigned them for lit class. Well, at least the first one, and the first four if we can manage it. Our teacher doesn’t think much of the rest of them.”

“So how are you liking them?”

“It’s pretty heavy reading. Some of the language is a little old-fashioned, and I thought there was some kind of experiment that proved that true precognition couldn’t exist.”

“You’re talking about the Chang-Mendolssen Experiments, aren’t you?”

“I think that’s the names I heard. Something about superdeterminism.”

She could tell she’d hit the right answer when he gave her a vigorous nod. “Although I’ve heard some arguments that Herbert’s interpretation of prescience is based on the Copenhagen Interpretation of quantum mechanics rather than superdeterminism. Basically, the whole business about being able to see into the future freezing the future in that form suggests that prescience causes the wave front to collapse. But these days there’s more and more evidence for the Many Worlds Interpretation, which completely disallows the possibility of foreseeing a definite future, only a manifold of possible worlds.”

“Wow, that’s fascinating. Maybe I ought to write my essay on the quantum mechanical underpinnings of his portrayal of prescience.”

“If you have Jenny Taylor as your teacher, she really likes getting essays that dig into the science under the fiction. And if you want, I can help you track down sources.”

“Thanks. That’d be great.” Cindy shot a pointed glance at the life support monitor on the wall, with the clock readout above the standard indicators for partial pressures of oxygen, nitrogen and carbon dioxide. “Right now, I’ve got another thirty percent of this book I need to get to get read before I go to bed.”

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Document

The Founder Effect

As populations migrate and disperse, we find that the part of the population which moves to a new location is almost never a representative sample of the entire parent population. Instead, we find that only certain parts of the parent population are represented in the daughter population. Over time, those differences become accentuated until the new population becomes markedly different from the original.

We are most familiar with it in biology, but it also holds true in human populations. When a group of humans leaves their homeland, the people in the migrant group represents only a subset of the original population, and are often self-selected for certain temperaments and interests as well as skill-sets.

For instance, the English settlers of the eastern seaboard of the North American continent shared a number of characteristics that were not so widely distributed among those who remained in England. These characteristics, particularly a tendency toward contrarian views and attitudes (many of them had been religious dissidents in a time and place in which religious conformity was considered a sign of political loyalty), almost certainly contributed to their growing conflict with the Crown in the years following the French and Indian War, which ultimately led to the Revolutionary War and the formation of a new nation that rejected monarchy and kingship as foundational principles of governance and founded a Republic that would spread across a continent and establish the first footholds on other worlds.

Another example of this phenomenon is developing in humanity’s expansion into the larger Solar System. In societies in which women were able to enter any occupation they were physically capable of, rather than being confined to the traditionally feminine occupations, they have typically been a small number of the total members of those occupations. Although this disparity has often been regarded as the result of women being made unwelcome in traditionally masculine professions, self-selection appears to be a significant factor. Far fewer women either have or are willing to develop the single-minded dedication to operate at a professional level in the most demanding fields, particularly if it is incompatible with the needs of childrearing.

However, given that most of the women who entered the astronaut corps and who made up the populations of the early settlements are self-selected from that portion of the female population who do have that single-minded dedication to their professions. Although some have carved out time for having a family, particularly as artificial uterine environments are becoming increasingly available, these women generally have fewer children that women following paths that give them greater flexibility in relation to family obligation.

As lunar and Martian settlements are growing larger and more robust, we are seeing women from a wider variety of backgrounds joining the permanent population of these communities, particularly now that dependents without specialized training can accompany scientific and technical support crew. However, they do not represent the same proportion of the population as we find on Earth, even in cultures that strongly encourage women to pursue non-domestic careers.

In a society with only natural reproduction, it would be probable that over time natural selection would tilt the balance back toward women who prioritize the domestic life, simply because they will have more children than women who put their careers first and give family a carve-out. However, the development of the artificial uterine environment by the former Soviet Union as part of their Cold War cloning and human genetic modification program has irrevocably altered that dynamic. Particularly as nanotechnology becomes ever more sophisticated and reduces the risk involved in the collection of viable ova for in vitro fertilization and gestation, women have more options, and can reduce the trade-off between career and reproduction, which will have effects on the psychological makeup of future generations.

—- Martha Long-Caudell, “Women, the Workplace, and the High Frontier” in Population Genetics and Space Settlement. Carpenter Point: Kennedy University Press, 2028.

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Narrative

Fragments of News

There was one thing to be said for the current situation — it had significantly reduced the level of both accidents and illnesses, simply because people weren’t coming and going as much as normal. In normal times, Barbie Thuc planned on at least two hours for daily rounds, checking on the various patients who were being kept in Medlab for treatment, touching base on emergency and elective visits, and generally making sure she knew where everyone in her department was. Today she’d completed everything in less than an hour.

Of course it helped that they had a generally healthy population. People with major medical issues simply didn’t come up here, although there was your fair number of more minor issues, especially since the Expulsions. A few people with asthma or allergies, a couple of thyroid cases, the sort of stuff that could be kept under control with daily medication — but still required regular office visits, lab tests and the like.

But she wasn’t dealing with the continual whack-a-mole of rhinoviruses, noroviruses and the like. Stuff that wasn’t that dangerous, as long as you weren’t so goddamn hardcore that you ignored it until you ended up in major trouble. Way too many guys thought it was sissy to come in for sick call for “a little sniffle” or a “bit of a stomachache,” and kept going until their oxygen sat was in the low seventies or they weren’t even able to hold down water.

As if it’s just guys. Barbie recalled when she was growing up, how more than one of her classmates’ mothers ended up in the hospital because they just couldn’t spare the time to convalesce and tried to motor through their usual routines because “the house is a mess and the kids need clean clothes” and ended up finally collapsing.

And there were more than a few civilians up here, men and women alike, who were so absorbed in their work that they were apt to ignore their bodies’ desperate signals for help. Probably not as many as you’d get at the average research university — she’d heard some stories of people going thirty and forty hours without sleep when they were hard on the tail of a solution to something they’d been struggling with for years — but Linnea down at Fitness had caught more than a few coming in for their mandatory exercise “looking downright peaked” and ordered them to report to Medlab.

But she just wasn’t seeing it right now. She had a good idea of the reason: your typical pre-flight quarantine procedures for people coming up here from Earth leaked like a sieve. Not just the obvious problems like space tourists slipping out of their quarantine quarters for a quick visit to a bar, but also the ones people didn’t really think about, like employees who had contact with the people in quarantine, but then went home every evening. Every one of them was a potential vector of disease transmission, especially the mild but annoying ones that didn’t make you sick until several days after you started shedding virus particles.

With all routine travel shut down and essential supplies being transported with minimal contact between personnel on each spacecraft, that line of disease transmission had been closed off. On the other hand, she’d gladly take dealing with an outbreak of the sniffles or the pukes rather than having to watch helplessly from up here as a pandemic gutted the mother-world.

Especially now that the horrific stream of reports was lessening — and she had a dreadful feeling that it wasn’t a matter of things getting better. Instead, information was becoming more fragmentary, with whole areas no longer reporting. She hardly bothered to do more than skim the WHO reports, they were so scanty that they gave her no idea of what was actually going on out there.

US sources were better, although civilian ones like the CDC were a lot shakier than the military ones. But it was pretty clear that people were having to do a lot of patching and jury-rigging to keep things running as supplies were exhausted, spares ran out, and short-staffing was the norm.

They’re learning to make do like we have to all the time.

But one thought kept gnawing at her: what would be left when all of this was over? It would end eventually — all pandemics eventually ran out of susceptible people and burned themselves out. But there was a limit to how many people, especially highly-skilled critical workers but even just able bodies to do basic but essential tasks, a society could lose and keep functioning without having to fall back to a lower state of complexity.

We could end up in a situation where the lunar settlements have to send aid to Earth to get everyone back on their feet.

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Narrative

Our Inconstant Sun

Over the past several days, the data had trickled in far more slowly than Ursula Doorne would’ve preferred. After talking to several people in flight ops whose grounding in orbital mechanics was much stronger than her own, she’d been forced to conclude that there just wasn’t any way to get better equipment on that part of the Sun before it would rotate into view of the far larger number of assets watching from the Earth-Moon system.

That made it particularly frustrating, since the solar poles rotated noticeably more slowly than the equatorial regions — thirty days as opposed to twenty-four. If the conditions the Israeli probe had reported were transitory, they could have completely returned to normal by the time that region of the Sun rotated into view.

Which is something a lot of people don’t understand — that the Sun, and by extension main sequence stars in general, don’t rotate as solid bodies. Back when I was still teaching intro astronomy classes, I always struggled to get that across to my students.

The thought made her try to recall when she’d last taught basic astronomy. Deena had been giving those classes to the junior members of the department, a lot of whom would be TA’s at any university back on Earth, while she was getting more and more classes that dealt with the mechanics of observation, like signals processing or statistical analysis.

Speaking of which, right now she simply didn’t have enough data to do any meaningful analysis. She’d seen far too many situations in which scientiests in any number of fields got over-excited about some results they’d gotten from too small of a data set and couldn’t wait to verify it with a larger data set before running out to go public. It might not be quite as embarrassing as the prospectors on Mars who thought they’d discovered a brick wall and thus evidence of indigenous intelligent life, only to have closer examination by actual geologists reveal that the “bricks” were actually naturally occuring cracks, similar to ones that had confused terrestrial explorers. But it was still embarrassing, especially for someone who didn’t have a fair number of solid monograph credits, and often made it harder to get tenure or grant money.

And in the case of this discovery, it would have immediate practical importance in space weather forecasting, and thus space operations. They could not afford to race to conclusions based upon data that might turn out to be faulty.

On the other hand, even if this were to have some profound effect on space weather in the next fifteen days, we should still have enough warning to get everyone under cover. And that’s assuming that something that close to the solar south pole would result in effects here in the Earth-Moon system.

But we still need to make it a priority to get more solar observation satellites into closer solar orbits, so we can monitor the entire Sun all the time.

Even as that thought crossed her mind, she realized that it might well be easier said than done. Like as not, they’d have far more immediate priorities for years to come than expanding their solar observation satellite network.