Category: Narrative

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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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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.

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A Rather Awkward Position

After all his efforts, Spruance Del Curtin was still at square one on Drew Reinholt’s request. Whatever was going on down there at Schirrasburg, it was buttoned up so tight that no information was getting out at all.

That or people knew but just didn’t want to talk about it. Or had been forbidden to talk about it.

Certainly Autumn Belfontaine’s remarks to him hinted at that. She was almost certainly able to get pretty much any information she wanted that wasn’t outright classified. However, she also was not the boss at Shepardsport Pirate Radio — he still remembered her remark when they were first setting it up, that freedom of the press belonged to those who owned the press.

On the other hand, she’d just made that offer to take him into the news crew. He was still ambivalent about the idea, mostly because he really didn’t want to give up being a DJ. But he was starting to wonder if he ought to talk to her about the possibility of doing some of the back-office work of the news department while keeping his air shift.

Even as he was considering that, his phone chimed incoming text. He found a new text from Cindy Margrave.

How much do you remember the beginning of the Sharp Wars? The Arizona Memorial Incident and all that stuff.

Some, but I was still in grade school, and they kept a pretty close watch on our media access at the NASA clone creches. So we got a very filtered version, what the grown-ups thought we were ready to handle.

And you didn’t try to get around it?

Yep, Cindy knew his rep for viewing those situations as technical challenges. Trying’s one thing. Having the skills is another. So’s having the necessary access to computers and the Internet.

The three dots icon flickered for an unusually long time. Probably Cindy was needing to think about her reply.

Finally it popped up on his screen: That would be a difficulty. Did the older kids have those restrictions too?

Some of them. I think the guys who were in high school had unrestricted TV and Internet access, but they lived in the other dorm across the courtyard from us, and we didn’t have a lot of contact.

Sprue paused, considering how far he wanted to carry it, then decided to take his chances. I’m sure they’re up here, but most of them had left the creche years before the Expulsions. I mean, they started using artificial uterine environments right after the Lanakhidzist Revolution, when we first got the technology from the Soviet labs. You’re talking about more than thirty years since the creches first opened, so those guys would’ve been tracked down and Expelled individually, just like the ones who were gestated the old-fashioned way and grew up in regular families.

He felt oddly naked, talking so frankly about those matters to a young woman who wasn’t even the child of a clone, just a member of Colonel Dalton’s household.

Cindy’s response came more quickly this time. Thanks anyway. I was hoping maybe you could connect me to someone who was old enough to remember, but isn’t too busy to talk to it. Some stuff came up in Constitution class today, and I wanted to find out more on my own.

Maybe you ought to talk to Autumn about that. She was already working as a reporter for the college radio station during the 2012 election, and barely escaped a riot at the Minnesota statehouse.

Thanks. I’ll see if she has the time and wants to talk about it.

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Awkward Questions

By the time Cindy got back home, her mind was itching with curiosity about those early days of the Flannigan Administration. Days she sort of remembered, glimpses of things on TV without any context, hurriedly turned off or changed to another channel if an adult noticed she was looking in that direction. Vague answers about bad people doing bad things and how she should not worry because she was safe here and Adult Authority would protect her.

Reflecting on those days with the experience of a decade and a half, she wondered how much she was confusing memories of national events with memories of her parents’ accident. She and her sister had been safely at home with a sitter that night, since their parents had been going to an event for grown-ups, so all her memories were of strange people suddenly appearing at the door, of a neighbor’s adult daughter coming over to stay with them for a couple of days until Uncle Carl and Aunt Betty could pick them up and make the necessary arrangements. A vague memory of what she now knew to be a courtroom, in which they were granted legal guardianship, but which at the time had been frightening in its echoing vastness.

One thing was certain — she had no meaningful memories of the events themselves. And she was pretty sure that what she’d been told in school back on Earth had been so heavily slanted that it was best discounted altogether.

And since we got up here, everything’s been either practical stuff like safety and first aid or science and technology, until the time came up to take our mandatory Constitution class.

She’d no more than stepped into the apartment when one of her cousins gave her a sharp shhhh and whispered,”Mom’s got a headache. Something happened at work, I don’t know what, but she came back looking awful and went straight to bed.”

Cindy nodded her acknowledgement, scarcely daring to breathe. A sudden headache… her guts clenched with dread. Hadn’t that been one of the symptoms of the diablovirus?

Except it was also a symptom of a dozen other things, some minor and others very dangerous. Dwell too long on the worst possibilities and you’d be running up to Medlab certain that you were in the throes of a cerebral aneurysm or a brain tumor when you’d just gotten a kink in your neck.

In the meantime, maybe she’d better start thinking about who else she could go to with her questions. People who were definitely old enough to have clear memories of that period and understand what they saw, but who wouldn’t consider it an imposition to take some time to talk with her about those events. While she was getting old enough that adults were starting to take her seriously, it was still tricky to know exactly where the boundaries were when it came to conversations that didn’t immediately relate to work or class.

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Thoughts and Implications

Constitution class seemed unusually subdued today. On the other hand, they were rapidly approaching the end of the course, at which point they had to take the test. So of course everyone would be paying close attention for a change.

Today Colonel Hearne was doing another of his “big picture” lessons, in which he pulled back from the minutia of articles and clauses and amendments to see how they all worked together. However, this one was a little different from the earlier ones because he was also trying to put the entire Constitution into the context of the Revolutionary War and the Framers’ concerns about putting too much power in the hands of any one person.

Cindy Margrave listened raptly, realizing that none of her American history classes back in Houston had drawn the connections between the colonists’ quarrel with King George III and the flaws of the Articles of Confederation. In retrospect it was obvious, once someone connected the dots, so why had none of her teachers ever done so?

As class wore on, she realized that Colonel Hearne was holding back. Although he was talking about the weaknesses and failure points of the Constitution, particularly as related to the Civil War and Watergate, he was very carefully avoiding the issues that had led up to the Sharp Wars and the Expulsions.

It’s not just the issues of human cloning and genetic engineering. If those were the real issue, he could just point out that the questions could’ve been resolved with an amendment any time after the revelations of the Lanakhidzist Revolution. And he’s talked about the issues of technological change as they relate to Constitutional law multiple times, especially when we were talking about the Twenty-fifth Amendment and its relationship to improvements in medical technology.

It must have something to do with President Flannigan that he doesn’t want to come out and say. Cindy recalled talks with her Uncle Carl, about a military officer’s obligations of respect to the Commander-in-Chief, and how it related to the peculiar situation that had obtained since the disastrous 2012 elections

So he has to walk around the edges, and trust our training in independent thinking to lead us to the conclusions he’s trying to point us toward. Presumably related to the way the Framers wouldn’t have been able to anticipate the disastrous 2012 elections, balanced against the dangers of specific language allowing for emergency powers, given how so many other countries have seen tyrants use them as vehicles for assuming absolute power.

Yes, she’d have to talk with Aunt Betty tonight. Unlike Uncle Carl, she was civil service, so she didn’t have the issue of not appearing to speak disrespectfully of the Commander-in-Chief. If she needed to say hard words about President Flannigan, she could.

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Beginnings

Those of us who grew up here on the Moon tend to think of the Sharp Wars as beginning with the Expulsions. Much as our tendency as Americans to think of World War II as beginning with the attack on Pearl Harbor, this is a misconception born of our perspective as a people isolated from the earlier parts of the conflict.

In fact, the Sharp Wars begin almost a decade before the Expulsions, with the Arizona Memorial Incident. Although Mitchell Sandoval’s actions could be more than adequately explained by PTSD from his experiences in the Energy Wars, the press pounced upon his experimental combat biomods as having made him unstable.

This played on the attitudes that had been present in American culture from the moment the US cloning program was revealed in 1984, in response to the Lanakhidzist Revolution in what was then the USSR. In some ways the perception of cloning and biomodding as Frankenstein science predated those revelations, having been developed in various works of fiction such as The Boys from Brazil and In His Image.

From this came the tendency to stigmatize the victims of those technologies, although the difficulty of identifying the actual culprits involved in these secret government programs also played into it. But after Sandoval’s actions, it turned into a hue and cry to “get them under control,” which in practice meant making the stigmatization of clones a formal matter of law, with identifying marks on driver’s licenses and other forms of ID…

—– PR Yamaguchi, essay for history class, Shepardsport.

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Connecting

Payton Shaw was just finishing his latest report to Colonel Hearne when a familiar voice called his name. Payton looked up to see Spruance Del Curtin leaning over the back of the sofa. “What brings you here?”

“I need a little help.” Sprue gave a quick look around, lowered his voice. “You’ve heard about the guy over at Schirrasburg who’s supposed to have caught the diablovirus?”

“Mostly because the whole settlement’s closed down and Colonel Hearne had to completely redo our flight roster to isolate the pilots who’d been there right before the guy turned up sick. Sure, we’re following strict quarantine procedures and pilots are no longer allowed to go inside the settlements they’re visiting, but there’s still a certain limited amount of contact.”

Sprue’s lips quirked up a little, not a full-out Smilin’ Al grin, but definitely mark him down as pleased with the situation. “So here’s the problem. There are a bunch of rumors going around now. Some of them say the guy’s recovered and may never have had the diablovirus in the first place. The rest are claiming he died but NASA’s covering it up to prevent panic, since nobody’s sure where he got it from.”

“That’s pretty heavy stuff, Sprue.” Payton considered just how deep he wanted to get into this mess. especially since he had no idea where Sprue had gotten his information. For all Payton knew, he’d gone and poked his nose into some place he shouldn’t again. “And you know the big boss really doesn’t want people passing rumors.”

“I know what Captain Waite’s said. We had a talk about it a while back.” Sprue sounded a little exasperated. “Anyway, I’m not passing rumors. I’m trying to find out whether there’s any substance to them. After all, isn’t the whole point of Shepardsport Pirate Radio trying to get the truth out so that people aren’t stuck having to sift through masses of contradictory rumors?”

“You really have a talent at putting me in a rough place, Sprue. I’m not going to promise anything, but I’ll see what I can find out.”

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Other Means of Validating Data

When Ursula Doorne first started advanced studies in astronomy, digital imaging technologies were really starting to come into their own in optical astronomy. Although she’d already specialized in radio astronomy, she had to work with the optical astronomers on a regular basis, and a lot of them were still very much of the glass photographic plate school. To them, there was no way a microchip could possibly compare with silver halide emulsion in capturing images.

By that time she already had enough background in electrical engineering to have a grasp of all the benefits of digital imaging. However, most of the most adamant members of the faculty were also very senior, and not exactly someone a student wanted to get crosswise with. Although given her specialty, it was unlikely they would be on her committee, there were other ways for someone of their stature to ruin a career before it even got started.

So she’d kept her head down and avoided them as much as possible. Which was probably why she’d spent almost as much time with the electrical engineering people as even the radio astronomers. At least there she didn’t have to watch her step quite so much, because the EE people weren’t going to be talking over coffee with the very people who most irritated her.

And that was probably why she often felt as comfortable down here in IT as she did in the Astronomy department offices. Especially when she needed to talk signals processing and data, these were her people. Of course Steffi Roderick was more of an AI specialist, but given how data-driven most AI was, especially when it involved autonomous robots like deep-space probes, she had a solid grounding in ways to deal with suspect data.

“We can certainly take a look at it. Just having more eyes looking at data helps catch anything that’s out of kilter. But there are a few things we can do that would be able to catch some of the less common instrumentation errors. Not perfect, but better than nothing while we’re waiting to get something else in position. By the way, you haven’t released any of this?”

“Only to the space weather people, as a precaution, and with a very clear caveat that it is not for general distribution. If we’re majorly wrong about some aspect of the Sun’s function, they need to know so they can adjust their forecasting accordingly.”

“That’s good to know. If we do find evidence of errors, it’s much easier if we don’t have to worry about retracting any pre-prints or poster sessions.”

“Don’t worry. I haven’t forgotten the AXIL fiasco.” Ursula paused, looked directly at Steffi. “Were you at JPL yet when that happened?”

“No, I was still finishing up my degree, but we heard about it. One of my professors discussed the sensor issues in class, since he had been one of the designers of the AXIL sensor system. Interesting days.”

“Yes, interesting days indeed.”

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Indecision

Spruance Del Curtin looked at his phone, trying to decide what to do. So Drew wanted him to get answers about the situation in Schirrasburg, right when he was getting told that Command was taking notice of his curiosity, and not in a good way.

Should he contact Autumn Belfontaine, express interest in taking her up on that offer to put him on the news team? Except he really didn’t like the idea of having to give up being a DJ.

Who else could he talk to? A lot of times he’d ask Brenda, but she was Drew’s wife and Ken Redmond’s daughter, and Sprue wouldn’t be surprised if she told both of them that he’d asked her. Drew might be amused at having his own question come full circle, but Sprue was pretty sure that Ken was the one that sent Lou Corlin to make those passive-aggressive remarks last night.

However, Sprue did have a reasonably good rapport with Chandler Armitage. Not close, given that they were both Sheps and there was always a certain edge of competitiveness in any interaction between them. But if Sprue played his cards right, Chandler might just take the question as a challenge and plunge right into the search for the answer with all the determination of a terrier digging out its prey.

On the other hand, did he really want to discuss it over an insecure channel like SMS when it was clear that very senior people were taking an interest in his activities, and not in a good way? In normal times he might’ve found an excuse to go down to Flight Ops and see if Chandler was in his office. When you had lineage rights, there were plenty of ways to make the connection without catching flack about it.

Maybe sent a carefully worded text, to avoid making it too clear why he wanted to talk, and see if Chandler was at least in town. In the meantime, he had studying to do, and at least the latest lesson packet in his statistical analysis class would keep his mind too busy to fret.