Category: Narrative

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Narrative

Troubling News

Tired from an afternoon of supervising her division’s efforts to help Gagarinsk with their IT problems, Steffi Roderick retreated to her office for a moment’s respite. Might as well check her e-mail while she was waiting for her coffee maker to heat up.

She usually didn’t check personal e-mail accounts during her duty hours, but as rough as things had been of late, she figured she could make an exception. Just take a quick peek, see if there was anything that needed her immediate attention.

At first glance it looked like the usual mishmash of mailing lists and commercial pitches that weren’t quite spammy enough to fall into her spam trap. And then she saw her dad’s name on one e-mail.

Dad usually e-mails me on the weekend. Is something wrong?

Deciding that this departure from routine constituted something significant enough to be considered an emergency, she clicked on it. A guilty part of her mind was halfway hoping that the opening pleasantries meant that whatever was behind the unexpected e-mail was a happy surprise.

Then she hit the next paragraph. Sure, her father tried to soften the blow, but she could recognize minimizing when she saw it. No matter how gently you tried to put it, discovering that a family member had been taken to the hospital was not good news in a time like this.

Even if her mother’s chest pains were just a mild heart attack as her father was saying, a hospital was not a good place to be right now. And to have to go there alone, now that family wasn’t allowed to visit… it wouldn’t be an easy situation for her mother to face, alone among strangers, not certain what was wrong with her or how serious.

And then Steffi realized she had a more immediate problem. How much did she tell her family up here? Reggie had a full plate already with everything going on, and she hated to add one more thing, especially since it wasn’t his parents. And while the kids weren’t total innocents to loss — the Moon was an unforgiving place, and more than a few of those names on the Wall of Honor were people they knew personally — they’d been relatively lucky in terms of extended family.

In any case, it was news best delivered in person, and privately. And it might be best to arrange some real-time conversation with her dad first, to make sure she had the most up-to-date information. Not necessarily FaceTime — she couldn’t remember whether his phone even had the capacity for videoconferencing — but at least a voice conversation.

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Narrative

Tomorrow Is Another Day

When you start having trouble reading the numbers, it’s time to knock off for the night. Spruance Del Curtin fought the urge to rub his eyes, which had grown gritty from spending the entire evening poring over the latest data sets from Dr. Doorne.

So what if he’d won the accolades of his peers by providing a key insight to what was wrong with Shepardsport’s Internet connection. It sure wasn’t going to get him any slack cut on this project. Every data set still had to be examined and sanitized the same way, and it seemed like there were more of them every day.

Not to mention that the ever-increasing burden was no excuse for falling behind on his other obligations. He still needed to go over tomorrow’s lesson plan for his teaching responsibility.

The sound of the module airlock cycling pulled his attention away from his laptop. Four guys walked into the module lounge, talking among themselves a little louder than normal.

Sprue looked up, noticed that they were younger guys. Back in Houston they’d probably still be in middle school, although up here kids their age were already beginning to take significant responsibility.

Just as Sprue was about to make a sharply worded remark about sounding like they were waiting for a bus, one of the guys came over to him. “I hear Colonel Hearne really went on a tear in Constitution class this evening.”

Sprue narrowed his eyes and studied the kid, trying to place the face. Do you even live in this module, or are you tagging along with your buddies. “I don’t know a thing about that. I did Constitution class last year. You must be thinking of Eli Mallory. He lives over in Module 28.”

The other guys started ribbing their buddy for making such an obvious mistake. Then they were heading back through the airlock, and the lounge was quiet again.

No, he was not going to text Eli and ask what was going on. Sprue had his status as the DJ to protect, and having to ask for information was not going to further that. On the other hand, Cindy Margrave was also in that class — she’d mentioned it more than once at the station.

But one look at the clock in the menu bar of his laptop made it plain it was way too late to be texting Cindy. There’d be plenty of time tomorrow. Even if he couldn’t catch her at breakfast, he could drop by the station offices on his way to his teaching responsibility, since it was in Engineering rather than the usual classroom areas over in Miskatonic Sector.

Sprue closed his laptop, then headed back to his apartment, whistling “Lake Shore Drive.”

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Narrative

A Matter of Trust

Cindy Margrave hadn’t wanted to leave her sister to go home alone, but for reasons known only to the Department of Training, she’d been stuck with Constitution class right after supper. And given that Constitution class was mandatory for getting one’s high school diploma, and it was invariably taught by one of the senior pilots, there could be no question of skipping it, or even being tardy.

Captain Waite taught it a lot of the time, but this term Colonel Hearne had drawn that teaching responsibility. However, just because he wasn’t family didn’t mean he wouldn’t notice her absence. He’d shown the class more than once that age had by no means dulled his perceptions — or his response times. Cindy still remembered the time he’d caught Eli Mallory playing a game in class by hiding his phone behind his laptop.

As the most senior pilot-astronaut in Shepardsport — he was already a veteran astronaut who’d commanded important missions when Reginald Waite was still at Annapolis — he possessed an unofficial authority in the pilot community such that no one would try to gainsay him. Even Captain Waite deferred to him.

The room was about half full by the time Cindy arrived. She took a seat and pulled out her laptop to review her notes from last session. Behind her, Eli was trying to hit on one of the other girls in the class. From the sound of it, he wasn’t getting much traction.

Colonel Hearne arrived exactly at the top of the hour, as precise as a DJ signing on and beginning an air shift. The moment he walked through the door, the buzz of conversation ceased and everyone turned their attention to him.

“Good evening, everyone. Tonight we’re going to do things a little differently. Up until now, we’ve been discussing the Constitution article by article, section by section. However, it’s come to my attention that we can end up losing sight of the whole amidst the minutia. Not seeing the forest for the trees, as the old saying goes.”

Cindy could feel the unease like a palpable thing around her. Why would he suddenly decide to depart from the normal course progression? Although Constitution class didn’t have a mandatory course structure like certain critical safety courses — she remembered when Uncle Carl had to re-up his oxygen delivery certification for EVA, and it had a syllabus that was mandated by the Federal government — the teacher still needed to cover the necessary material to ensure everyone could pass the test, and that was mandated, albeit by the state of Texas, since for legal purposes all off-Earth US facilities were treated as if they were a part of Johnson Space Center in Houston.

But there was no time to wonder, because Colonel Hearne was already cuing up a video on the big monitor at the front of the classroom. It looked like a lot of news footage — Cindy had already seen some of it just walking past the newsroom during her work shift this morning, especially the one of the people swarming a semi and literally tearing the trailer apart to get the pallets of food within, climbing over each other to grab a package of crackers. But there were also a lot of clips of people waiting calmly in lines that stretched as far as the eye could see, or helping one another rebuild a structure damaged in a storm. Most were non-descript enough settings that it was impossible to tell where or when they were happening in the absence of well-known landmarks, although she did see kanji and kata on some signs that placed one clip in Japan, and the Hangul on another sign placed that clip in Korea.

And then it was over, and Colonel Hearne was looking directly at them. “It’s said that people show their true faces when they’re under pressure. You’ve just seen how different cultures react to severe stress, what is often termed a breaking strain. Today we are going to talk about why this is, and how it relates to why the system of government set out in the US Constitution has worked so well for the American people, but does not necessarily transfer to other countries.”

“First, I want to introduce you to the concept of social trust.”

Where is he going with this one? Cindy was listening so closely that she no longer had any time to worry about her sister, or her sister’s friend down on Earth who hadn’t re-established connection after the Outage had been resolved.

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Narrative

And Bitter Tears

It had been a long, difficult day, and Betty Margrave really needed a rest. Here they’d just finally managed to get their own Internet connectivity problems straightened out, and now Reggie was helping Vitali Grigorenko up at Gagarinsk with their Internet outage.

It probably didn’t help that her husband wasn’t able to be with her, even when he was back in town between missions. Betty understood the necessity of quarantining the pilot-astronauts, since no matter how careful they were, they did have interactions with people from the other settlements, and with people from Earth.

You’ve gotten through his deployments when he was still on active duty with the Marine Corps. Months on end with him halfway around the world, nothing but e-mails and weeks-old letters. There’s really no reason it should be bothering you so much.

And then she opened the door to their apartment and heard sobs. She looked around, wondering whether one of the kids had gotten hurt but didn’t think it was bad enough to bother Medlab. And then she saw Kitty sitting hunched over a laptop, tears streaming down her eyes.

Good god, girl, if you’re bawling because some boy dumped you, get over it. It’s just a breakup.

She caught herself before she could actually say the words. No, better not assume, even if she was tired and not really in the mood to have to deal with the sheer intensity of teen and tween emotions. Kitty had lost enough already — her parents, and now two homes and sets of friends — and while she’d been trying to put a good face on things, it was a very fragile mask.

Betty sat down beside her niece. “What’s wrong, Kitty.”

“I can’t get hold of Amy.” There was barely-controlled panic in that voice, for all that Kitty tried to hold it level and sound mature.

Betty tried to place the name. Ah, yes, one of Kitty’s friends back in Houston. They still communicated occasionally, although sometimes Betty wondered if the girl was going behind her parents’ backs to keep in contact with a friend who’d be regarded as tainted by being in a household headed by a clone of Alan Shepard.

A few careful questions brought forth the story of Amy’s frightened texts right before the malware had taken out Shepardsport’s Internet connection, how Kitty and Cindy had enlisted Brenda Redmond to guide them through giving Amy advice on dealing with her parents’ sudden illness. For a girl who’d barely be in middle school back on Earth, Kitty had handled it very well, and had borne up patiently while communications with Earth were cut off. But now that texts were clearly being delivered to Amy’s phone once again, but not being read, the girl was on the verge of panic.

Small wonder, considering how much could be going wrong. Even if she had been taken in by a friend’s parents, it’s possible that she wasn’t able to stay. Or that she’s been able to stay healthy herself.

No, there was no use speculating. Long ago she’d learned the danger of letting one’s mind onto the hamster wheel of worry — she wouldn’t have stayed sane as a military wife if she hadn’t.

Right now the best thing she could do was comfort Kitty, reassure her that she’d done quite well in her efforts to help her friend. And then, when Kitty was calm enough to hear that she might need to wait, discuss what resources might be available to find out what was going on.

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Narrative

A Meeting of Minds

Reggie Waite was just finishing his first cup of coffee when the call came through. When he looked at the number, he thought he was looking at a system glitch, until he realized that the incoming call didn’t use the North American Numbering Plan.

It started with 8, which meant a Russian phone number. Up here the VoIP systems were supposed to filter out international numbers, thanks to the enormous number of scams that the Russian mafiya was running with autodialers. However, by agreement between NASA and the other spacefaring nations’ space agencies, numbers assigned to people in their lunar settlements and their space centers were supposed to be passed through.

Hoping he wasn’t making a mistake, he hit the accept button and answered. Any cosmonaut who was calling an American would know English, so there was no point fumbling with his admittedly rusty Russian.

“Good morning, Captain Waite.” There was something familiar about the timbre of the voice on the other end. “I apologize for calling you from an unfamiliar telephone, but we are experiencing difficulties with our office network and I was forced to resort to a personal device. This is Vitali Grigorenko, at Gagarinsk.”

Astonishment blew away any lingering brain fog. No wonder the man’s voice sounded familiar. Not surprising, given that Vitali Grigorenko was in fact a Grissom clone, kidnapped as a newborn by KGB agents in retaliation for the Kolya-Yozhik Incident and raised by parents who were involved in the old Soviet space program.

“Good to hear from you, Vitya. We’ve been having trouble with our Internet connection down here, but I hadn’t realized the problem was going around. It’s not like you guys are running a pirate radio station critical of your government.”

“No, we are not.” Was that a hint of regret in Grigorenko’s voice? A sense that he wasn’t pushing hard enough, never mind that he’d come up here by his own request, wanting to share his clone-brothers’ exile when he had been preparing for a comfortable retirement? “But we have Purificationists.”

Reggie recognized the term. They were a splinter sect of the Russian Orthodox Church that believed clones were soulless abominations, quite possibly animated by demons. Two Patriarchs had condemned their position as heretical, saying that it was inconceivable that God should refuse to provide a child with a soul simply on the basis of the child’s irregular conception. The current one had excommunicated the most prominent Purificationists, but instead of recanting, they had taken the attitude of screw you and the horse you rode in on.

Like his own ur-brother, Reggie had been raised Christian Scientist. Although the Church of Christ, Scientist did not have an episcopal hierarchy in the same sense as the Eastern Orthodox Churches, the Mother Church in Boston did have the authority to excommunicate members and practitioners whose teachings were not in line with doctrine. And there had been those who had rejected that corrective and gone their own way.

“And you’ve become just a little too prominent for their liking.”

Now that got a definite affirmative from his opposite number in Gagarinsk.

Reggie considered his response. “In ordinary times I’d send some of our IT people up there to help you straighten things out.”

“But these are not ordinary times. No doubt you have heard already about Indian astronauts having been exposed to diablovirus.”

“That I have.” This time yesterday the news would’ve caught him by surprise, for the simple reason that he had still been catching up with the enormous amount of e-mail that had been stuck on various servers all over the Earth-Moon system. By last night he’d read over a dozen accounts of the situation, including three separate official NASA advisories. “Do you think your IT people would be able to communicate with ours via videoconference well enough to be of any use.”

“I would have to ask, but I do not know why we should not try.”

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Narrative

Deep Thoughts

This early in the morning, the tunnels to Shepardsport’s solar storm shelters were quiet. Later in the day, cleaning robots would come through to sweep and generally make sure the tunnels were always ready to be used at a moment’s notice. But right now they were a perfect place for Justin Forsythe to run.

And a perfect place to relax his barriers and open his mind to his psi talent. Down here, there wasn’t the continual din of other minds to make it overwhelming, even with his Institute training.

Normally the geneset of Ed White wasn’t used for genetic experiments. However, a clerical error — a simple reversal of two digits in a catalog number that tracked embryos — he had received a gene graft intended to give him precognition.

Or at least that was the plan. The people at Appleton might understand genetics, but they didn’t understand quantum mechanics. True classical precognition — the ability to see what would happen in the future — would require superdeterminism. And the Chang-Mendolssen experiments had pretty well discredited superdeterminism as a plausible subset of quantum theory.

Instead, Juss got a weird sort of precognition in which he saw a multitude of possible futures fanning out before him. As events foreclosed various possible futures, they fell away to become alternate worlds.

What worried him right now was just how dark those futures were becoming. Fewer and fewer of them held much in the way of hope.

Everything was going to depend on whether the diablovirus could be kept away from the Moon. The Martian settlements were safe, thanks to the long travel times between Mars and the Earth-Moon system — but that distance also meant they could offer little help in the subsequent rebuilding. Only the lunar settlements were just isolated enough that their populations could be protected from infection, but could also offer material aid in any meaningful quantity.

But even a little slip-up would be enough to introduce the virus. They’d already had one close call, and as a result the Japanese lunar ferry Sakura was unavailable for the three weeks’ quarantine it would require to ensure not only that none of the Indian astronauts came down with the diablovirus, but also that none of the crew had picked it up from anyone with such a light case that it was fairly indetectable.

No, it was just too painful to observe. Juss simply didn’t have the authority to act upon these visions in any meaningful way. He was just a troubleshooter, not a decision-maker.

Better to barrier himself against his precognition and concentrate on the things he could do to put Shepardsport in a better position once he went up to Engineering and reported for today’s shift.

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Narrative

Communications Restored

The next morning, Autumn Belfontaine arrived at the newsroom fully expecting to get 404’s and 5xx errors more often than not. Instead, the first thing she found was her AP and Reuters feeds ready and waiting for her.

Well, it looks like whatever was knocking out our Internet downlinks to Earth, IT’s finally gotten it fixed.

She noticed Lou Corlin standing just outside the newsroom door, going through the music library terminal. “Lou, could you come in here and take a look at the Japanese news feeds. Your Japanese is a lot better than mine.”

“Sure thing, Miz Autumn.” Lou abandoned his music search to look over the websites Autumn had pulled up. “Although Tristan’s is a lot better than mine. He’s the one they’ve been having working with native speakers since he was a toddler. They even sent him over to Japan a couple of times before the Expulsions.”His translations pretty much confirmed the impressions she’d gotten from the kanji she recognized. Sometimes she regretted not having studied Japanese in journalism school. But at the time she’d assumed her career would remain Earthbound, and Spanish had seemed such a logical choice, with French a close second if she stayed in the northern tier states, close to Canada.

And if you’d just wanted an easy A you would’ve studied Swedish, since Grandma and Grandpa still spoke it, and you spent enough summers with them to pick it up.

However, it pretty well confirmed what she’d seen on the English-language wire services. The world they’d been cut off from — had it really only been three days? — was not the same world they were being reconnected to. “Lou, you need to get ready to start your air shift. But I’m thinking it’s time to call an all-hands meeting of the news department. Now that we’ve got connectivity again, our stringers can FaceTime in.”

As she started to type the mass e-mail, she paused and reconsidered. “And I think I’d better have Betty Margrave and Sam Carlisle in the loop too. They’ve probably got sources of information besides what comes in on the wire services and what I can glean from local TV news sites.”

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Malware Solutions

When Spruance Del Curtin got Steffi Roderick’s voicemail, he’d assumed that would be the end of it. But about fifteen minutes later, he’d received a call from her: get down to the IT Department ASAP.

So here he was, doing his best to look the part of the hotshot Shep who wasn’t afraid of anything. He didn’t usually go down to IT, and when he did, it was mostly to drop off or pick up stuff related to the station for Lou Corlin.

But tonight it looked like Steffi had assembled most of her division chiefs on pretty much a moment’s notice. Not all of them — he knew from Lou’s descriptions that several of the hardware people weren’t. But the key systems analysts and network security people were all here — hardly surprising given they’d been working around the clock trying to restore Shepardsport’s network connectivity ever since this mess started.

Now he had to explain his theory to the real professionals, when he wasn’t entirely sure whether he was even using the correct terminology. He’d learned some of it in the course of his training on audio streaming technology, but he still wasn’t entirely sure of things like the precise difference between a gateway and an access point, or how a router differed from a hub. Not to mention that he might not even have the right term for the kind of malware he was envisioning.

However, all these people were listening to him with genuine attention. Not just the polite smile and nod he would’ve gotten back on Earth, but actually taking notes.

Of course it probably helped that Captain Waite himself was sitting at the side of the room, looking very much like Alan Shepard himself preparing for his moonshot. Being reminded that they were listening to one of the commandant’s clone-brothers, and that he had the favor of the boss himself, went a long way to keeping the adults from doing the old auto-brushoff.

Which is.a far cry from him calling me on the carpet — when was it? Already that awkward interview felt like another lifetime ago.

And then they were actually asking him questions, sometimes technical enough that he’d have to admit most of his background in networking came from his work with Shepardsport Pirate Radio. But they showed him no condescention for the admission, which truly astonished him.

However, it looked like they weren’t actually going to be pulling him into their team. Steffi reminded everyone that he was already committed to Dr. Doorne’s project, and needed his rest to be ready to meet with her tomorrow.

Oh well, you can’t have everything. Sprue did his best to look genuinely pleased as he thanked everybody. With luck, nobody would be sure whether any stiffness wasn’t just the Icy Commander peeking through.

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For a Bit of Quiet

Reggie Waite didn’t usually eat meals in his office. Unless he was particularly busy, or had to squeeze lunch in between back-to-back meetings, he preferred to go down to the dining commons. Especially in such troubled times, it was good for people to see their leadership sitting at the head table.

Tonight he was enjoying a quiet, private supper with his wife. He and Steffi had agreed they’d keep business out of their conversation, just pleasantries and family matters. They’d even agreed to put their phones in a hush box so they wouldn’t be interrupted by incoming calls or texts. If a real emergency were to come up, Betty Margrave knew where they were and why, and her office was just down the corridor.

Even so, all good things must necessarily end. And as they pulled their phones out of the hush box, Steffi’s came on with an alert: missed call and voicemail. “What’s Spruance Del Curtin calling me about? Maybe I’d better check.”

Had it only been a few days ago that Reggie had called Sprue on the carpet right here in this office? The last few days had been so crazy that it seemed like another lifetime ago. “Put it on speaker. I want to hear what he’s up to.”

There was a buzz of background noise that made it difficult to hear Sprue’s words. “…have an idea … not what we think … different kind…. something something malware…”

Reggie looked at his wife. “Is it just me, too many years of jet and rocket engines battering the old ears, or is he coming through really badly?”

“It may just be having it on speaker. This is an older phone. With everything so tight, making it work a little longer with a bit of judicious application of a soldering iron has been one fewer resource we have to find.” Steffi woke the screen. “Let me take it off speaker and replay it for you to listen.”

This time it was a little better, although it also made it easier to hear a couple of younger kids passing through whatever room Sprue was in. Maybe preschoolers, using the module corridors as a playground — kids up here learned to keep their voices down young.

However, it did enable Reggie to follow what Sprue was saying, enough to tell the kid seemed to think he was onto something. “Steffi, I think you’d better listen to this a couple of times. If he’s right, the whole IT department may have wasted two days on a completely wrong strategy.”

It just took her one listen to be convinced. “I think he’s onto something. We’d better have a talk with him.”

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Connections

Spruance Del Curtin was sitting in the module lounge, struggling with the latest problem for statistics class. Now that Dr. Doorne had selected him as a research assistant for her special project, he was leery of asking her for help. Not just because she might think he wasn’t up to the job, but because the rest of the class might think she was giving him special help.

He was concentrating so hard he only halfway heard someone calling his name. Just another distraction to shut out, like the daughter of one of the other Expulsees sitting on the far side of the lounge and pretending to study on her laptop while she watched a video on her phone.

And then a hand interposed itself between Sprue’s eyes and his laptop screen. Sprue looked up, straight into the bright blue eyes of Juss Forsythe. “Uh, hi.”

Juss’s lips curled upward, not the big grin of a Shep in Smilin’ Al mode, but still a real, friendly smile, not that forced thing some people used when they were putting a good face on something unpleasant. “Spence tells me I should talk to you about the network problems.”

“Yup.” Sprue’s cheeks grew warm and he hoped that his face wasn’t betraying him. “Is IT still proceeding on the assumption that we’re dealing with a DDOS attack?”

“As far as I know. I don’t work that closely with the software side of things. I’m mostly a hardware troubleshooter, but the last I heard when I was down there, that’s still their primary thrust.”

“I think they’re mistaken.” Sprue explained his theory, that there was some other kind of malware making it look as if Shepardsport were under a DDOS attack. “I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s right here on one of our own servers. Someone was careless about their passwords, or loaded a piece of software from a shady site, and that was all it took. As long as everyone keeps looking for an attack from without, they’ll never find it.”

Juss took a moment to process it all. “That’s pretty sneaky. But why didn’t you just go down to IT and tell them?”

“Because I don’t have any background in IT, for starters. I go down there, and they’re going to act like I’m just wasting their time.”

“Sprue, you’ve got lineage rights to go straight to the head of IT herself. I think it’s time you use them.” Juss paused to let those words sink in, then continued, “Or would you rather I tell her you’re too scared to talk to her?”

“Don’t call me chicken.” Sprue retrieved his phone and started hunting through the directory for the IT numbers. He wasn’t sure he had Steffi Roderick’s direct number, but he figured he could find it. He’d be damned if he let that goody-two-shoes clone of Ed White make him look like a coward.