Category: Narrative

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Narrative

Those Uneasy Thoughts

Ever since she’d gotten off her air shift, Brenda Redmond had struggled to keep her mind on her work, whether it was teaching or studying or even just her mandatory daily exercise down at the gym. Especially since she’d drawn the weight machine today, which meant needing to count her reps instead of just doing time. Several times she’s lost track of where she was and had to guess and hope.

As she was leaving the gym, she heard a familiar voice calling her name. She turned to find Lou Corlin coming up behind her.

“I didn’t know you had the same gym hours as me.”

“I don’t normally, but tonight I’ve got something I have to deal with, so I swapped with Dave.”

Given how many special projects were always in progress around this place, Brenda decided not to ask any further. If Lou felt comfortable about sharing, he would. If not, prying would be exceedingly unwelcome.

So she went with a more neutral response instead. “Probably wise, if you’re thinking the time will be tight.”

They continued for a few moments in companionable silence. As they waited for the airlock to cycle, Lou finally brought up what was actually on his mind. “I’ve been hearing some really wild rumors lately. I’ve been wondering if I should talk to Autumn about this stuff, or if that would only be wasting her time when she has plenty of stuff already on her plate.”

“What kind of rumors?”

“Stuff like food shipments being stolen by the guards who are supposed to protect them, and then trying to use them to set up their own private fiefdoms.”

Brenda considered some of the stuff she’d heard. “You hear all kinds of things, and it’s just believable enough that it would happen somewhere out there. Especially in societies that are still heavily tribal and there’s not a lot of trust beyond the family and clan, I could completely believe it. Now if you’re talking someplace in the US, or Japan, or Australia, I’d want a heck of a lot of proof before I’d even consider taking it seriously.”

“That’s the problem. I’m hearing stories about some of the inner cities…’

“Which have been going to hell in a handbasket and one food stamps cycle away from riots since I was a little kid.” Brenda pulled her phone out. “How about I text Drew and see what he knows. Even if he’s not that tightly hooked into the Air Force grapevine, I’m sure he knows some guys over there at the Roosa Barracks who are. Heck, my dad always said that if you want to know something like that for sure, the best way to find out is to ask a non-com.”

Lou laughed, and he didn’t sound forced. Yes, he was well aware of the sergeants’ and petty officers’ interpersonal networks too.

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Narrative

Know When to Hold ’em

Although Spruance Del Curtin was a reasonably decent assistant in the process of troubleshooting the main mixing board, his skills really weren’t to the point that it made sense to have someone else cover his air shift so he could continue helping. Ken had told him to go ahead and sign on, since the Timeline Brothers both had other obligations in the afternoon.

However, the process of tracing and testing the circuits was not going nearly as well as she would’ve liked, even with a couple of the younger kids. They were good about handing up tools upon request, but they really didn’t know electronics well enough to interpret what they were seeing and offer any insight.

Ursula Doorne wasn’t exactly sure where it became clear the problem was much larger than any single component. By mid-afternoon, it was becoming increasingly clear that continuing to trace the circuitry in hope of isolating the problem was a hopeless task.

Ken had just come back to see how things were going, and it was clear he’d been dealing with some other issues somewhere else in the settlement. No, he was not going to like the news.

But there was no point wasting further time just to spare his temper. Especially since she had projects on her desk back in the Astronomy Department, and not just the more abstract and abstruse ones involved with using dishes on both the Moon and Mars to create an array on a baseline that dwarfed all previous efforts.

“Whatever’s wrong with this, it’s not just one component. We’re going to have to completely tear it down and rebuild it.”

Ken muttered a word he didn’t ordinarily use in the presence of civilians. “That’s going to be a lot of work.” He met her eyes directly. “But if you’re right, it’ll save us a lot more work in the long run. However, we are going to have to make sure that the remote rig gets a complete maintenance cycle as soon as we get a working main mixing board. That thing was never designed for the level of use we’re putting it through, and we cannot afford to have it give out on us.”

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Narrative

Forward Motion

“These robots are actually turning out to be even more useful than we’d expected.” Alice Murcheson cast a significant look at the robot now threading tubing through the structure of the planter towers, replacing the tubing that had failed. “Quite honestly, I had expected that we’d end up having to find enough techs with both oxygen delivery certifications and the skills to set up that tubing.”

Harlan Lemont’s lips quirked upward into a smile. Not a big grin like a Shep might have given her, but a quiet expression that matched his personality. “Actually, we’d learned quite a bit just from all the work we’d done with the watering bots. Of course that was a lot simpler, which was why we could put kids on the job, but it gave us a lot of expertise in the issues of teleoperation.”

“Which allows us to use someone who understands the structure of the planter towers and the irrigation system, but doesn’t necessarily have oxygen delivery certification.”

“Teleoperation technology’s getting better all the time. Back in the early days, everything was clunky joysticks that might or might not work properly. A lot of the kids were telling me that they’d put the spex and haptic feedback gloves on and it was like they were right there inside the robot. A couple of them said they even had some vertigo when they took their control gear back off.”

Alice considered that information. “Did you have them tell Medlab?”

“I suppose I should’ve thought about it, but at the time it didn’t seem that concerning. I’ve heard of really heavy gamers reporting that kind of experience, and they came out of it in a minute or two, so it didn’t seem like anything too dangerous.” Harlan paused, looked back at the robot hard at work. “But if you think I ought to, I can tell the kids to drop by Medlab and let them know it might be an issue.”

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Narrative

More Disturbing News

Cindy’s shift as receptionist at Shepardsport Pirate Radio had not been an easy one, mostly because of all the commotion. At least they were getting fewer listener complaints about the sudden decrease in broadcast quality, which was a relief. But right now she was just as happy that there wasn’t any secretarial work to be done, because there was no way she could’ve managed to maintain her concentration with everyone coming and going. Quite honestly, it seemed like half of Engineering had been in here over the course of her shift.

And with so many people coming and going, not to mention the continual possibility that Ken Redmond might come back in, she didn’t want to check her e-mails or her texts or anything else that might be considered “personal.” Which made the shift all the harder to get through. Finally she’d gone on the computer, checking some news websites and hoping she could make it look like something Autumn had assigned her for the news department. Except most of what she was seeing only made her feel even worse.

At least Mars and the Moon are holding together so far, assuming the command structure hasn’t lowered a cone of silence over the problems. Cindy was aware that Autumn sent sensitive stories past Captain Waite before airing them, although as far as she knew, he’d never outright silenced anything.

By the time Cindy’s shift was over and she could leave the station, she was very glad to be out of there. She didn’t have the technical expertise to help with the broadcast equipment issues — although she wasn’t sure how much more Spruance Del Curtin could bring to the table. And after spending most of the shift trying to look as if she was doing a project for the news department, she was pretty sure that no, she did not want to go into journalism as a career.

As she was walking down the main corridor of Engineering toward her first airlock, she checked her phone, was surprised to find several new texts waiting for them. Among them was one from Shelly Walstrand.

Curious, she swiped the flag on the lock screen to open the text. As it turned out, there were actually a whole string of texts. Apparently the food at the place Shelly was holed up had run out. They’d all brought the food from their own houses when they’d gathered there, so that was no longer an option. So the friend’s big sister had gone off to look for a store that still had food. One of the guys had insisted on going with her, even though he was just fifteen and pretty skinny.

Apparently it was a good thing, for the simple reason of having a second pair of eyes watching. The convenience store at the corner gas station was empty, whether because it had sold out or had been looted, neither of them could determine because it was abandoned, the door swinging loose but not showing any obvious signs of having been forced.

They’d continued onward to a small community grocery store, where they’d found the door locked, but with the window boarded over in a way that created a narrow slot through which one could pass money and products could be pushed out.

Not surprising, considering how a pandemic would make people want to minimize contact. More surprising was the prices for what little the store had on offer. A single loaf of bread and a jar of peanut butter would take all the money they had brought. Not to mention none of them had any more cash, and it was a long way to her bank, assuming her paycheck had even deposited, given her workplace had been closed.

But with the younger kids scraping crumbs from the bottoms of the remaining jars, there wasn’t much choice. They had to bring something home, so they bought it and started heading home.

They hadn’t gotten far before they realized they were being followed. They ended up running the last several blocks back home, got through the door and then had to barricade all the entrances against several very desperate looking people who were now trying to force their way in.

All over a loaf of bread and a tiny jar of peanut butter. Cindy’s gut clenched, hard. And here we were worrying about losing those big planters down at Agriculture because of the irrigation breakdown.

Although Uncle Carl and Aunt Betty did belong to the Christian Science Church, the denomination Alan Shepard had been raised in, they’d never been very active members. And now Cindy felt a very strong urge to pray for her old friend down on Earth, and she wasn’t sure how.

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Narrative

Keeping On Keeping On

With technical people coming and going pretty much constantly, Autumn Belfontaine was glad that she’d learned early in her broadcast career how to work in chaotic circumstances. Some lines of work, you could count on a nice quiet office to retreat into, but broadcast journalism wasn’t exactly one of them.

At least this set of problems hadn’t disrupted Shepardsport’s connections with Earth. She could still do her usual checks of various TV and radio stations’ websites, searching for patterns of events that someone seemed to be trying to put a cone of silence on at the national and international level.

Not to mention the help that her old colleague Dan was giving her. He seemed to be pretty well plugged into the rumor mill wherever he was, and had picked up some really interesting bits of information. In particular, he’d been a bit of a CB enthusiast long before he decided on radio as a profession, and he still kept a base station at home, albeit only to listen to the truckers on nearby highways.

Autumn had to agree that listening to radio chatter could be interesting — more than a few times she’d gone to websites that allowed a person to listen in on air traffic and space traffic control channels. If nothing else, the jargon was fascinating.

However, Dan’s interest was less in the lingo that had developed over the decades since CB had originally become popular. Instead, he was more interested in what the truckers had to say to one another about travel conditions. These men and women drove thousands of miles every week, crossing the country to deliver critical goods, something that couldn’t be suspended.

Everywhere they were reporting a eerie pall over the cities and towns through which they passed. Stores were closed, even many that should’ve been essential like gas stations and grocery stores. Even where businesses were open, people would keep their distance, as if afraid to get too close to a stranger. Shipments had to be dropped on loading docks and left, and all bills of lading had to be handled in digital format.

The latter was reminiscent of the protocols that had been developed up here to supply the various outlying settlements, especially the small research habitats. The biggest difference was the simple fact that most terresetrial businesses couldn’t just send out a robot to collect what the pilots had dropped off, typically using one of the lander’s robots.

But then again, terrestrial businesses wouldn’t have the additional layer of protection that was provided by the lunar surface environment. If the diablovirus could survive on surfaces, packages dropped off on a loading dock could remain a source of contagion for hours, even days.

Even more concerning was the increasing difficulty truckers were reporting in meeting their basic hygiene needs. Truck stops might be open for them to pump gas, since pay-at-the-pump had been common back when Autumn was still a girl. But more than a few had closed their stores, and with them access to restrooms and showers.

If the truckers were having to resort to makeshift hygiene solutions, how long would it be before those took a toll on their health? Even if they could avoid the diablovirus, getting ill from fecal-borne illnesses or succumbing to skin infections from being unable to shower could take them off the road just as thoroughly. And if too many truckers began falling ill, what would happen to supply chains already strained to the breaking point from the closure of the production facilities?

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Narrative

A Change of Plans

Spruance Del Curtin was on his way to the Astronomy Department when his phone chimed incoming text. What would it be now?

It was Dr. Doorne: Meet me at the station.

So whatever was going on with broadcast quality, she was involved in it. On second thought, he probably shouldn’t have been surprised, given that signals processing was her engineering specialty.

He wasn’t sure whether to be happy or disappointed that he wasn’t going to be going through data today. Quite honestly, it was getting tedious, even if he did like being someone’s special student, trusted with actual research material.

All the same, he knew he was going to get some questions when he turned around and headed back the other way. There were enough people up here in Miskatonic Sector who knew he was doing data work for Dr. Doorne every morning, and would want to know why he was heading the “wrong” way.

Except that, given most people around here did listen to Shepardsport Pirate Radio at least some, even if only on their alarm clock, they’d be aware that something was wrong down there.

As it turned out, he actually managed to arrive at the station offices before his mentor. Then again, she might not know some of the back ways through the service passages that he did. He’d worked for Engineering long enough that he’d learned quite a few shortcuts that weren’t strictly approved, but could shave off a few minutes when seconds counted.

As he’d expected, the place was already crowded. Not just the usual station staff, but half a dozen people from Engineering, including the big boss himself. And no, Ken Redmond did not look pleased today.

Make that double when he looked at Sprue. “So what brings you down’ here today?”

“Sir, Dr. Doorne just texted me to come down here.”

Ken narrowed his eyes. “How convenient–“

At that moment a familiar voice joined the fray. “Major Redmond, if you will listen to me for a moment.”

Dr. Doorne spoke with sufficient authority that Ken Redmond turned to face her. She continued in the same firm tone. “I requested Mr. Del Curtin to meet me here because I believe the skills he’s learned with me will be of use in this problem. Now, if we can take a look at the equipment we are dealing with.”

With that settled, Ken Redmond led them back to the main mixing board. Dr. Doorne set out a bag of equipment and they set to work.

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Narrative

The Many-Talented

Ursula Doorne went over the latest solar activity data, seeking the patterns that warned of imminent instability in the Sun’s magnetic fields. Normally she’d be reasonably confident of her ability to scan through the data and pick out those patterns, although it wasn’t her specialty. After having been surprised twice now, she was no longer feeling so confident.

In fact, she was feeling very much like a rank beginner all over again. A whole lot of stuff she had assumed about the way in which the Sun — and by extension main-sequence stars of that size in general — operated was now very much in question once again. Theories that had been considered pretty much standard when she was doing her undergraduate work were now having to be reconsidered.

When she’d been a student, she’d thought it would be so exciting to be a scientist during such a major paradigm shift. And quite honestly, it might well have been, if the science she was dealing with were something in distant galaxies, so far away as to effectively be abstract. But this was stuff that could mean the difference between life and death for thousands of people up here on the Moon, millions down on Earth. And not just faceless masses, but her own family, her colleagues, her neighbors. Her own husband was a pilot-astronaut, and while spacecraft shielding was a hell of a lot better than in the early days of Apollo and Zond, it still provided only sufficient protection for ordinary solar storms. For the big X-class ones, the astronauts depended in getting sufficient warning that they could get to shelter, whether in one of the larger orbital facilities or on the surface.

And if the Sun isn’t behaving the way our theories say it should, our forecasts are going to be just as unreliable.

Maybe that was why she felt as much at sea as right after the Expulsions began, when she got a message from the training department that she was being assigned an intro to astronomy class. And not even an undergraduate-level one. This one was going to be aimed at middle-school kids, at a time when she wasn’t even sure how to talk to kids that age, let alone describe the discipline she’d spent a lifetime mastering in words they could understand.

And you went back to first principles. Started with the story of early humans looking up at the sky and seeing the lights in them, and realizing over time that there were patterns to their movements. There’s got to be a new set of patterns in the data, but we just don’t know how to see them yet. Best case, it’ll turn out that our current theories are a special case, and we just haven’t seen the conditions that are leading to what we’re observing. Let’s hope we don’t have to throw out everything we thought we knew and start all over.

And then her phone rang. She’d halfway expected it to be one of her colleagues with a new insight on the data. Instead it was Ken Redmond from Engineering.

“Dr. Doorne, we’ve got a problem down here at the station. You’re our best signals processing person who isn’t tied up in one kind of quarantine or another. Can you get down here and take a look at it?”

In this context “the station” would refer to Shepardsport Pirate Radio. For the most part she’d viewed it as something on the order of the underground newspaper that had been circulated at her high school, albeit a little more approved by the authorities than those photocopied sheets that passed from hand to hand every morning. But given that the head of Engineering was specifically requesting her skills, there wasn’t much way of saying no.

“I’ll be on my way.”

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Narrative

Bigger Than We’d Expected

Ken Redmond had called a halt on their efforts to repair the main mixing board shortly before midnight, right before Spencer Dawes would wind down the Disco Ball and sign off. It was becoming increasingly obvious that everyone was tired enough to affect judgement, and given that the midnight-to-six segment was run by a software robot that selected songs and could make basic announcements, it made far more sense to send everyone home for a good night’s rest and start over in the morning.

Now that morning was here, Ken was no longer feeling quite so sanguine about the ease of repairs on this issue. It didn’t help that he couldn’t go straight to the studios of Shepardsport Pirate Radio, since there were a number of other issues around the settlement that he needed to follow up on first. Not that Juss Forsythe was a bad tech, but he was still young enough that he simply didn’t have the years and decades of experience that often allowed an old hand like Ken to make intuitive leaps on fragmentary information.

By the time Ken finally had his docket cleared enough that he could even consider going over to look into matters personally, Brenda was winding up Breakfast With The Beatles and getting ready to hand things over to Lou Corlin. They were both experienced enough with dong remote broadcasts to be able to use that system to its best advantage, but there was no mistaking it for the full studio system.

On the other hand, the network traffic reports he’d gotten from IT were showing that the lowered transmission quality hadn’t led to a significant drop in listenership. In fact, it looked like connections from outside the lunar Internet had actually picked up, which made him wonder. Could it be a case of people trying to connect multiple devices in hope that one would have better reception?

From some things that Autumn Belfontaine had said, it was sounding like a lot of dirtside radio stations were resorting to various makeshifts just to be able to broadcast at all. Some of them were sharing transmitters, running simulcasts, even going all Internet when their ability to broadcast over the airwaves was lost. So it was possible that a lot of people were getting used to making do with whatever they could find.

It must be getting really bad down there. It made him realize just how little connection he had with family on Earth. Both his parents were deceased, and Jenn was estranged from her mother. He had a couple of siblings, but they’d drifted apart, to the point they rarely corresponded other than at the holidays. No hard rupture like Jenn’s break with her mother, just an ever-growing lack of common points of reference that made it hard to communicate.

As Ken walked into the offices of Shepardsport Pirate Radio, he encountered Juss walking out. The younger man had a worried expression. “I was just looking for you. We’ve got a major problem. I’m thinking we’re going to have to tear that mixing board down and rewire about half of it.”

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Narrative

Is No News Good News?

Reggie Waite was coming to dread these meetings with Dr. Thuc. Although she continued to report that the lunar community had been able to keep the diablovirus at bay, the news from Earth just kept getting worse and worse.

After delivering the latest litany of bad news, Dr. Thuc added, “However, we must be careful to remember the rule about absence of evidence. We cannot assume that regions that are not reporting information are necessarily charnel houses. While it’s true that some of the earliest warning signs came in the form of reports from travelers of entire villages found desolate, even then it didn’t mean every inhabitant had died. There is some evidence of survivors deciding their numbers were simply too small to sustain a village, and leaving in search of a community that could support them. In fact, there is some speculation that such migration played a significant role in the early spread of the diablovirus.”

“And given how poor record-keeping was in those parts of Earth even before the current crisis, we’ll probably never know.” Reggie considered the situation, trying to push back the old memories from the Energy Wars. “I wouldn’t be at all surprised if some of those ass-end-of-nowhere places were still functioning at some minimal level, but nobody knows about it because the communications net is so thin they hardly notice when it goes down. There’s even some places in the US that are like that, out in Alaska, up in the Rockies, heck, even up in the mountainous parts of New England.”

“That’s completely possible. On the other hand, it appears that a surprising number of areas are keeping things operating by various ad hoc solutions as things break down and repair parts aren’t available.” Dr. Thuc flipped through a number of files in her tablet. “I have several reports of hospitals jerry-rigging repairs to generators and other vital equipment when normal spares couldn’t be found.”

“That’s good to know. However, I’m wondering what’s happening outside the medical field. How many factories are still in operation, and of the ones that weren’t, how many were properly shut down before they were abandoned? Ken Redmond would know this sort of stuff better than I do — he’s the mechanical engineer — but I remember from some of my coursework at Annapolis that there are a lot of processes that you can’t just terminate with the flip of a switch. A lot of chemical plants could be in a bad way if the operators weren’t able to execute an orderly shutdown before they lost power for good, or didn’t have enough personnel to continue operations.”

“That’s really out of my area of expertise. But I certainly can appreciate your concerns. The issue has certainly gone through my mind. However, given that there’s not a lot we can do about that situation right now, my primary focus has been on determining what we’re going to be looking at in terms of rebuilding when all of this is over.”

“And that’s all any one of us can do at the moment. Other than getting information out via Shepardsport Pirate Radio, we pretty much have to concentrate on keeping contagion out and keeping our own systems running.”

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Narrative

Coming Back to Try Again

Brenda could tell it was just one of those days, when you started late and spent the whole day scrambling to catch back up. The kids were still upset about missing out on their visit to their grandparents. They weren’t openly pouting, the way kids their age back on Earth might have done. But they were definitely less than enthusiastic about getting dressed and ready for the day.

They’re just kids, said a voice in the back of her mind. With everything that’s going on, they have a right to be disappointed.

But she also knew that they were living on a world that was very unforgiving, and it was far easier to form good habits from the beginning than to break bad ones. Indulge them now, and when it was time for them to assume serious responsibilities in a few years, it could end in tears. No one had forgotten the Munroe girl, and what her stubborn self-pity had gotten her.

All the same, by the time she got the children through breakfast and handed off to their teachers, Brenda was thoroughly frazzled. And she had an air shift to get through — and given her dad had finally called it quits on the main studio board last night, she’d have to do hers on the remote broadcast system.

As she was approaching the station offices, she was surprised to see Cindy Margrave walking just ahead of her, head bent over phone. Brenda lengthened her stride to close the gap with the younger woman. “How are things going.”

“OK.” Except her voice didn’t sound OK. When Brenda made it clear she was willing to listen, Cindy expanded. “I mean, I’m doing OK, and the rest of the family is. But I just got a text from an old friend I hadn’t heard from in years.”

When Brenda asked whether it was a friendship disrupted by the Expulsions, Cindy shook her head. “No, it was when Aunt Betty got transferred, a couple of years before. Shelly and I both swore we’d e-mail every day, but things happened, and we sort of grew apart.”

Brenda could understand how that sort of thing worked. She’d lost touch with a number of friends who’d moved away, especially the ones whose parents worked in the oil industry. No matter how close they’d been, no matter how sincerely they’d sworn to keep in contact, things would come up and the letters or e-mails or texts would become fewer and far between.

However, she doubted that reflecting on that would help Cindy. “So how is she doing?”

“It doesn’t sound good. Apparently the Pennsylvania child welfare system isn’t going around scooping up kids whose parents are in the hospital, whether or not they’ve made other arrangements. In fact, she was a little surprised when I told her about Amy.” Cindy paused. “Shelly went to stay with a friend’s family when her folks got sick, and then her friend’s folks got sick, and now all of them are sort of holed up in another friend’s place, with that friend’s twenty-something big sister as the only adult in the whole place. From the sound of things, they’re kind of worried about what would happen if the government ever notices, but apparently things are getting bad enough around there that the government’s got a lot bigger fish to fry than making sure every child has a proper legal guardian.”

“No, that doesn’t sound good at all.” Although Brenda suspected that the big sister in question was about her own age, maybe even older, she also knew that things were different dirtside.

Except telling Cindy that there was nothing they could do right now wasn’t going to be helpful. If anything, it was apt to make her worry more. “How about trying to find out as much as you can about their situation, anything they need to know to keep their place going. If you need to, let me know so I can see what I can find out.”

By then they were at the doors to the station offices. There was work to be done, and it wouldn’t wait.