Month: March 2021

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Pressing Pause

Shepardsport Pirate Radio — an Experiment in Storytelling is on indefinite hiatus. It was originally created in the dark and uncertain days of March 2020, as an exploration of how the Grissom timeline, and particularly the lunar settlements, might respond to a fast-moving and very deadly pandemic. At the time it gave the author a creative outlet for the stress of a situation that shifted from day to day, even hour to hour.

It was never expected to last for over a year, and as the difficulties of those early months are subsiding and the author is finding it easier to write again, it actually started taking time away from other, more traditional fiction writing endeavors. However, the author wishes to maintain the possibility of returning to it in the future, particularly if circumstances make it once again a necessary creative outlet.

Thank you for following.

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Narrative

An Unpleasant Summons

Spruance Del Curtin had just finished breakfast and was intending to head over to Science to do some preparations before his teaching responsibility. As he headed down the escalator from the dining commons, his phone chimed incoming text.

Surprised, he reached for his phone, then realized the last thing he wanted was to be engrossed in reading when he reached the bottom of the escalator and needed to step off smoothly. Surely it was something that could wait the minute or so to make sure he didn’t fall. While it was true one didn’t fall nearly as hard here on the Moon as on Earth, falling onto a running escalator could still be a very dangerous thing.

Safely on a stationary surface again, Sprue pulled out his phone. To his astonishment, the message was from Colonel Hearne down in Flight Ops. My office, ASAP. I need to talk to you.

Sprue’s guts went cold. Why was the head of Flight Ops contacting him? Not to mention the choice of words, which suggested a bawling-out, not a conversation.

Which meant there was no telling how long he might be tied up. Better to give Training a heads-up, let them know he might be late.

He hadn’t even gotten to the inter-sector airlock before the response came: we have it under control.

Not exactly the most reassuring response right now. It suggested Colonel Hearne had gone to Deena ahead of time to arrange things.

By the time Sprue got to Innsmouth Sector and Flight Ops, he was sick with dread. At least Colonel Hearne wasn’t busy, and wasn’t the sort of person who kept people waiting as a power play.

The older man was brusque and direct. “Sit down.”

As soon as Sprue was seated, Colonel Hearne launched straight into business, without any small talk or other preliminaries. “Since you don’t seem to understand a polite request to stop nosing into matters that we have very good reasons not to want publicly discussed, Captain Waite asked me to make some things plain to you. Number one: we have a very good reason to keep specific numbers relating to the pandemic quiet. This is not just to thwart your curiosity for the pleasure of exercising authority. Right now, we are looking at the very real possibility that the diablovirus will keep spreading until it runs out of susceptible individuals. To put it in very plain terms, we’re talking about losing thirty to forty percent of the global population on Earth. Depending upon exactly what parts of the population those losses are concentrated in, that’s dangerously close to the level at which it becomes difficult to maintain a technological civilization. At the moment we have hope that there will be enough to rebuild.

“However, if these sorts of figures get out in the general population, or worse, a distorted version of them gets out, we have the very real possibility of a panic. Frightened people do irrational things, and that could very well include destroying the very things they will need to sustain and rebuild technological civilization on Earth. Or worse, lead to a panic in one or more lunar settlements, if enough of the population comes to believe that Earth is effectively lost.”

He paused, letting those words sink in. “Have you even considered that your determined efforts to gain access to this sort of information might have such consequences?”

Sprue swallowed hard against the lump forming in his throat. He’d never considered that this sort of information could be dangerous. “No, sir.”

“And that brings us to Number Two. We thought that by bringing you into a privileged position and allowing you to work with some of the data, you would come to an understanding of the significance of what you were working with. Since this clearly is not the case, we are going to have to take a second look at the responsibilities with which you are entrusted, and evaluate where we may need to reduce or remove them.

“In particular, your work as a DJ with Shepardsport Pirate Radio puts you in a position that enables you to present information to the general public. As a result, we have decided to remove you from your air shift until we see clear indications that you understand the importance of these restrictions. In the meantime, Payton Shaw will be covering your air shifts. Therefore, you will be taking over some of his responsibilities to compensate. Do you understand?”

Sprue’s guts clenched, making him feel nauseous. But there was no satisfactory answer except a meek and subdued, “Yes, sir.”

“Good. Then the third and final point should come as no surprise. Because we need to be confident that you are truly taking responsibility, and not just giving us surface obedience to game the system, you will be working under very close supervision during this period. Yes, it will involve some adjustments, but given the current situation, we cannot take any further chances on you until we are confident that you understand the importance of this situation.”

This is gonna suck, hard.

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Document

Assessing the Damage

The diablovirus pandemic hit a world psychologically unprepared for such enormous death tolls. In the century since the Spanish Flu, medical advances such as antibiotics, widespread vaccination, and public health measures such as greater sanitation and improved sewage disposal led to an attitude that such events were henceforth a thing of the past. Humanity had disease under control, and while there might be localized epidemics as familiar viruses mutated to spread more widely, no disease would ever cut such a wide swath through the population.

As a result of this psychological shift, the earliest signs of the severity of the diablovirus were often overlooked or minimized. Stories of high death tolls in the back country of several Asian nations were chalked up to poor sanitation procedures allowing rapid spread. Even when the reports came in of entire villages being found empty, many commentators assumed that the inhabitants had simply decamped in search of treatment, rather than lying unburied in the beds in which they died from want of healthy people to proivide even supportive care for them.

Even when the Maydays started coming in from the Gloriana and other cruise ships, many people assumed that the high numbers of sick and dying were simply the result of so many people being packed into a relatively small space. Furthermore, many of the passengers would be older, often with various chronic conditions that could be managed with medical care, but which compromised their ability to fight off an illness. While the losses were regrettable, they were not seen as anything presaging any great danger for the general population.

It was only when the outbreaks began to move beyond obviously vulnerable groups and started hitting large numbers of people in the prime of life that mindsets began to change. Finally people at all levels from senior decision-makers to ordinary workers had to confront the idea that no, modern medical science did not have epidemic disease under control, and yes, modern civilization could be confronted with a disease that swept through it like fire through dry grass upon the steppe.

Even then, it was some time before the gravity of the consequences began to sink through, particularly in relation to the vulnerabilities of a highly-interdependent society to cascading failures as the loss of so many critical workers brought the Just In Time system to a halt.

—- NV Grigorenko, “The Diablovirus Pandemic as a Game-changer” in History and Psychology, Fall 2028.

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Narrative

When the Music Stops

Lou Corlin wondered whether he should ask Brenda whether the information had been useful. If he’d erred in his choice of files, he’d really want to know so he could put the matter to rights. At the same time, he knew that she might not be completely comfortable about discussing it, especially since he had gone to some sketchy websites to get those files.

Maybe it would be better if he just let her take the lead. He might be able to drop a hint or two about the matter, but pushing would be most definitely unwise right now.

When he arrived at the station to begin his air shift, the first thing he noticed was Spruance Del Curtin talking with the program director. Lou’s first thought was what did Sprue do this time? Even as the thought came to him, he knew that such a conversation would not take place just outside the door to the program director’s office. No, this was a more neutral conversation.

All the same, it would be bad form to show any interest in it. Best to keep his eyes front and walk purposefully past the station offices and into the studio areas.

Brenda was on the air with a listener right now. From the speed of the back-and-forth, that person was somewhere up here on the Moon, not down on Earth.

Not surprising, if Earth is as bad off as things are sounding.

As the implication hit, Lou stiffened and cast an awkward look around. He’d been in his teens when the Expulsions hit, so he’d been old enough to have made some friends at school who weren’t from the NASA clone creche.

And I never really tried to keep in contact with them after I came up here.

He’d told himself that he really wasn’t all that close with those kids, and a lot of them had parents who weren’t really comfortable with their children being close friends with astronaut clones. So it had been easy to drift apart once he was up here, busy getting oriented and up to speed.

But now he was wondering what had happened to some of those kids. Even if they hadn’t been close enough to borrow stuff from, they’d at least been friendly enough to give him the time of day. And he hadn’t even thought about what might be happening to them back in Houston.

On the air, Brenda was winding up her conversation with the caller. Of course she would need to — it was rapidly getting close to time for her to prepare the next set so they could hand off without creating any dead air.

Now that the ON AIR light had gone off, he needed to put aside his curiosity as to the situation on Earth, with people he’d lost contact with years ago. Right now he needed to concentrate on his professional duties as a DJ.

Brenda stepped out of the DJ booth, greeted him and began the standard rundown of where everything stood at the end of her show. And then, as she was about to hand it off to him, she leaned over to whisper into his ear, “I gave Autumn a copy of the files. I want her to look over them before I try to send them to Drew.”

Although it caught Lou by surprise, he was able to maintain enough control over his expression that he didn’t show it. He just gave her a quick nod as he acknowledged the hand-over.

Yet as he closed the door of the DJ booth behind him, her words still nagged at him. Of course Autumn would understand about protecting sources — she might not have even asked Brenda where or how she’d come about those files. But depending on how far Autumn took it, there would be a possibility that they would end up in the hands of someone who had the necessary expertise to track them back to him.

No use worrying about it. He had a show to run, and the seconds were ticking down to when he needed to do his first station identification.

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Paying the Bills

What happens after the bombs drop? This is the troubling question Philip K. Dick addresses with Dr. Bloodmoney, or How We Got Along After the Bomb. It is the story of a world reeling from the effects of nuclear annihilation and fallout, a world where mutated humans and animals are the norm, and the scattered survivors take comfort from a disc jockey endlessly circling the globe in a broken-down satellite. And hidden amongst the survivors is Dr. Bloodmoney himself, the man responsible for it all. This bizarre cast of characters cajole, seduce, and backstab in their attempts to get ahead in what is left of the world, consequences and casualties be damned. A sort of companion to Dr. Strangelove, an unofficial and unhinged sequel, Dick’s novel is just as full of dark comedy and just as chilling.

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Narrative

Hard Data

Medlab was quiet this early in the morning, which made Barbie Thuc’s office all the better for a private conversation. And from what Ursula Doorne had said, it sounded like this was not something that either of them would want to get overheard.

The radio astronomer arrived as requested, through the employee and supplies entrance rather than the check-in entrance. Right now it was just as well to keep this meeting as quiet as possible. They’d had enough trouble with rumors circulating around the settlement already, and didn’t need any more of them.

“I’ve brought a copy of the latest data.” She held up a USB stick with an unremarkable blue plastic body. “This way you can go over it yourself.”

They ended up linking Ursula’s laptop with the big monitor that got a lot more use looking at X-rays and other medical imaging. When you were looking at a lot of data and the analysis of it, larger images were almost always better.

On the other hand, she wasn’t sure exactly how well positive words like “better” fit the data they were looking at. Even from what little information she could get via official channels, she knew that the situation at Schirrasburg was bad. But now that she was seeing the numbers, she had to fight down a surge of anger that NASA and HHR had suppressed the information to the point even senior medical personnel were unable to obtain it.

“I should not have had to get this by back-channel methods, and neither should my opposite numbers at Grissom City or Coopersville or any of the other settlements up here. If we’d been appraised of the situation from the beginning, we would’ve had that much more time to prepare. Instead, we’re going to be running to catch up.”

“You’re telling me.” Yes, Ursula Doorne was holding back a considerable amount of anger herself. “I only knew what to look for because my husband is a pilot-astronaut and knows some people over there. He’s the one who first told me how bad it was, although he just had general figures, not hard data like this.” She gestured at the charts and graphs that now covered the huge monitor, the columns of numbers on her laptop.

“And now the only thing we can do is prepare as best we can. We’ve got the advantage of a compartmentalized structure that makes isolation much easier, even if we can’t keep it out altogether. But I’m wondering how bad things are going to get on Earth. If they end up losing such a high proportion of their population, can technological society even survive?

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Narrative

The Spaces Between

Reggie Waite had been a little surprised to get the text from Autumn Belfontaine. Given the situation, he’d granted her pretty much a blank check to use her own judgement in covering the diablovirus pandemic. Which suggested that she’d found something she considered too hot to handle alone.

Which was why he’d told her to come up and talk with him rather than say that she shouldn’t worry about it. Trusting her judgment went both ways. If she said something was bigger than she wanted to handle on her own, it probably was.

So here she was, looking notably uncomfortable. Not nervous like someone being called on the carpet for some shortcoming, but like she had some seriously bad news to report and was trying to figure out whether to break it to him gently or just drop the bomb on him.

Reggie invited her to sit down, offered her coffee, which she politely declined. Now that the courtesies had been satisfied, he could get down to business.

“I understand you have some material you are concerned about releasing.”

Autumn handed him a USB stick, a completely unremarkable black shell of the sort that were cranked out by the million, so cheap they could be used for promotional purposes. “It has a number of video files that the Administration probably would find embarrassing, as well as some data files I believe they are deliberately suppressing.” She paused to consider what to say next. “Given their uncertain provenance, I thought it would be wise to run it past you before I put anything in the public view.”

The careful wording suggested she was protecting a source. Steffi had mentioned that someone had been visiting the dark side of the Internet. She’d been concerned mostly because of the disreputable sorts of porn one could find there, and the high risk that downloads could carry malware.

“I’ll look it over.” Reggie kept one computer specifically for examining questionable materials of this sort. Steffi had set it up specifically to have no connections to any other computer, and with some of the best anti-malware protections that didn’t require a specialist to use. “You might be able to help me sort through the files and identify the most relevant ones.”

It was a little awkward when she leaned over his shoulder to point out some file names, but he reminded himself that genetically she was his niece, the daughter of a clone-brother. Never mind that he and Lucius Belfontaine had never met — Reggie was still flying F-18’s off carriers when Belfontaine had died in the NASA Massacre — the connection was still very real.

Just focus on the material, not the person presenting it.

And Autumn knew those files up, down, sideways and backward. Not surprising for a news reporter. You had to be able to find the right file without a lot of wasted when your got back to the station and needed to file your report. Especially if you were prepping clips to play on air.

By the time Reggie had gone through the relevant material, he was shaken in a way he hadn’t been since the Kitty Hawk Massacre. “This is some pretty hot stuff. I think we’d better talk this over with Betty Margrave before we put any of it on the air. On second thought, let’s also have Dr. Thuc take a look at that epidemiological data.”