Category: Narrative

Normally Reggie Waite preferred to call his department heads to his office for conferences. Having to come to one’s superior’s bidding and to stand within a space that was clearly his territory had certain desirable psychological effects on those who reported to him.

However, today he needed certain information which, in accordance with Federal privacy mandates, had to remain on certain secured computers. And those computers couldn’t simply be broken down and brought from Medlab to the commandant’s office.

So here Reggie was in Medlab, listening as Dr. Thuc went over an enormous amount of very technical medical information, mostly from the Glorianna, but also from two additional cruise ships that were reporting a fast-spreading illness. Although none of this material seemed to have actual patient names or other obvious identifying information, even this superficially anonymized data contained just enough personal information that sophisticated computers could correlate it to identify individuals, hence the security restrictions.

It made him recall Lovecraft’s words about the inability of the human mind to correlate its contents. Of course Lovecraft was talking about the little glimpses of horrors beyond comprehension, the evidence that humanity was not the first intelligent species to tread the Earth and likely would not be the last, and that far from being the crown of creation, humanity was in fact a very small fish in a very large pond. But it was a good point about how the mind didn’t really appreciate the significance of disparate data points and how modern computing technology could assemble them into a data-portrait of an identifiable individual.

However, what was important right now was the general data landscape created by the data in the aggregate. Of course there were still a lot of uncertainties, given that people got off and got on at various ports of call, and it was not always the same individuals. A lot of the turnover was crew, but these kinds of cruise ships did not run a simple closed-ended trip where everyone embarked at the beginning and disembarked at the end. Instead, they had open-ended cruises built from multiple legs between ports of call, and passengers could buy any number of those legs. It was common for this population of travelers to piece together an extended vacation by flying to one location, then traveling overland, say on a historic train like the Orient Express, then join a cruise at a nearby port of call and visit several other ports before getting off to either go home or continue their travels by other means.

Even with the level of uncertainty, he could see why Barbie Thuc was alarmed enough that she’d want to talk to him. This thing was nasty, and it spread like wildfire once it got into an enclosed space with a crowded population that had limited opportunities for going elsewhere.

Like a spacecraft or a lunar settlement. “However, we should have some degree of protection from the simple fact of distance. It takes three days to get from Earth to the Moon.”

“True, Captain.” It was a mark of the gravity of the situation that Dr. Thuc should switch to his Navy title when they were usually on a first-name basis. “And the risk of spreading disease in the space environment is why all space travelers undergo a fourteen-day quarantine. However, if we look closely at the quarantine process, it’s astonishingly loose, and almost entirely on the honor system. We both know how many astronauts, from the beginnings of the US space program to the present, have seen it as a challenge to slip out undetected for various excursions, typically to eateries and nightspots.”

Reggie’s cheeks grew warm as he remembered some of his own pre-flight extracurricular activities. “And who knows how well the space tourism companies supervise their clients’ quarantine periods. Most of them probably rely on the fact that these people have plunked down a cool million or two for their tour package, including pre-flight training, and will forfeit it if they’re booted for cause. But a lot of the super-wealthy get used to having money insulate them from the consequences of their actions, and let’s face it, a lot of the personnel in those companies aren’t paid so well that they’d laugh off a six- or seven-figure bribe to look the other way.”

“Which means we are going to have to think seriously about not only how this disease will affect our supply lines from Earth, but also what we are going to do to limit our own exposure and that of the smaller habitats that depend on us, once the inevitable happens and someone brings it to the Moon. Maybe someone who slips off the night before launch and doesn’t show symptoms until they’re in Grissom City.”

“Which is everyone’s nightmare.” Reggie pulled out his phone, began texting Betty Margrave. “I think it’s time time to get Safety and Security onboard with this.”