Tag: Antonia Hargreaves

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Narrative

Family Matters

Cather Hargreaves wasn’t sure whether he was glad to be getting home for the evening. On one hand, he was glad that he’d been assigned to the main Safety and Security station here in Grissom City proper, which meant he was able to go home every night. On the other hand, he was all too aware that several other members of the department were stationed out at the Roosa Barracks, monitoring flight operations (such as they were these days), although they lived here in the city. Because of the effort to prevent possible contagion from being brought from the spaceport to the city, they were stuck living in temporary quarters out there, seeing their families only via FaceTime or teleconferencing software.

And how would it benefit anyone if you were to join them, just to lessen your feelings of guilt about their situation?

Those had been Toni’s words when he’d mentioned it to her. And he had to agree that, looking at it from a perspective of efficiency, she was absolutely correct. It was just when you looked at it from a perspective of human social cohesion that he really didn’t like being able to go home every night when some of his people couldn’t.

And it’s more important that you be at your best and able to do your job to the best of your ability.

That too had been a strong argument. Or as Toni was wont to point out, sacrifices aren’t magic and don’t have any supernatural power. But she was a deist, and didn’t view the Creator as the sort of entity to be moved by sacrifices.

As usual, she was already home when he got in. She looked a little weary, but that was hardly surprising when one considered that she was one of the people trying to hold the Internet together while things were falling apart on Earth. Just last night she’d been talking about how many of the really big websites were having momentary outages as one set of servers would drop offline and the routers had to reconnect users to a mirror site somewhere else. Now IT’s big project was trying to make sure everything critical was mirrored up here on the Moon, which meant she was lucky to even get to come home.

When her eyes met his, she pushed the weariness away to look excited for him. “Hi, sweetheart. How did it go, or do I ask?”

“The usual.” Cather hoped he didn’t sound too downhearted. “No major problems, but a heck of a lot of little stuff that sure sounds like people stressing out and not quite having the level of self-control they usually would.’

“Not surprising. We’ve pretty well identified all the critical websites we need to have mirrored up here, in case all their dirtside mirrors go down. Now our biggest problem is figuring out how to expand our server capacity to accommodate that much data. Oh, and I just got an e-mail from one of your clone-brothers over at Shepardsport. Seems he’s trying to track down some rumors about the situation down at Schirrasburg.”

Cather’s guts clenched at the mention. “All I know is that they’ve had someone sick, and they’re worried enough that they stopped all flights in and out until they’re certain it’s not the diablovirus. They should have sufficient supplies to get by for at least another three weeks, although things could get pretty tight by the end of that period.”

“OK.” Toni sounded dubious. “According to what he said, he was hearing two contradictory rumors, one that the guy recovered and the other that he died but someone’s covering it up to prevent panic. And before you tell me about not passing rumors, it looks like he’s involved in trying to quash them with facts, and running short on those. I was just about to see what I could find out when you showed up.”

Cather recalled his wife’s skills as a hacker, that she’d gotten into some measure of trouble when she was younger and not so careful. Of course now she had a lot broader authorization as one of the senior members of Grissom City’s IT team, but there still were limits.

“If you’re going to take a look around, be careful. Not just because of health privacy laws, but because if they’re trying to keep a lid on something serious, they’re going to take information security as seriously as physical and biological security. And considering my own position, they could very well take it as an official action on the part of Grissom City.”

“Got it. Now that you’re home, let’s have supper first.”

“Sounds good. I think there’s some leftover chicken from last night that I can turn into something.”

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Narrative

A Helping Hand

Still annoyed that he should have to deal with such stupid antics from any of that brat-pack of teenage Sheps who’d grown a little feral since arriving as middle-graders, Lou walked alone to the dining commons for supper. Brenda needed to pick up her kids anyway, so it was a perfect excuse to say good-bye instead of walking with her.

However, the question that had originally brought them to sitting side-by-side at a computer in IT was still nagging at Lou’s mind. What exactly was going on at Schirrasburg?

It was probably the smallest of the major American settlements. For various reasons it had never really grown at the rate of Grissom City and Coopersville, and had remained more like a very large scientific outpost than a true city on the Moon. Yes, dependents were allowed to live there, but these days some of the larger commercial mining settlements were allowing the miners to bring their families, so the distinction was really blurring.

Which made it all the more surprising that Schirrasburg should be where the supposed lunar Patient Zero should show up. You’d really think it would be Grissom City, which was the big hub of lunar tourism. Before everything closed down, there were thousands of tourists coming and going, wealthy people who were apt to be lax about pre-flight quarantine procedures for the simple reason they were accustomed to their money insulating them from the consequences of their actions. If anyone was going to bring a bug up here, it was likely to be them.

But no one would go out to Schirrasburg for fun. From everything Lou had heard, the place was boring, boring, boring. All scientific and technical people, all with jobs to do and damned little time left for entertainment. The sort of people who went there took procedures seriously or they didn’t get selected.

Unless it was one of the pilot-astronauts. Things might be tamer than the wild and wooly days of the Mercury Seven, but military pilots were always a cocky and headstrong bunch. As Gordon Cooper was reputed to say, the meek might inherit the Earth, but they would not inherit the sky.

If that were the case, it would certainly explain why NASA was working so hard to keep things quiet. No matter how hard they tried to isolate the pilots from each other and from the settlements they visited, there was always a certain amount of interaction. And no one could afford the mess that would result if every pilot had to be grounded who’d had contact with an infected pilot for the previous ten days, let alone the twenty-five that some were saying was the largest possible window of contagion.

However, Lou doubted that Drew Reinholt would be satisfied with a mere hypothesis like that. No doubt he’d considered it himself, and probably avoided airing it in order to make sure he didn’t lead them down a garden path and make them less likely to consider other possibilities.

Except what other possibilities can we explore? I’m pretty well at the end of my skills, and who else is there to turn to?

Which was when he realized that he’d completely ignored his best resource. One of his clone-brothers was married to a top-notch programmer with a rep as a white-hat hacker. Better send a message off to her, see if she could help.

By the time Lou finished, he was at the landing in front of the dining commons. And gathered around the big double doors was a whole crowd of teenage Sheps. No, they didn’t look like they were hanging around to hit on girls.

Which meant that word had already gotten around, and they were looking for trouble. On the other hand, this was a very public place. How far would they push matters with so many people watching?

Lou squared his shoulders and kept walking as if he owned the place. “OK, guys, are you going to let me through, or am I going to have to Batman my way in?”

For a moment he wondered if the Sheps were going to respond with derision. But then they began to pull back. He decided he didn’t want to know whether it was the knowledge that he shared his ur-brother’s interest in boxing, or the two Security guys behind him, whose reflections were showing in the etched moonglass of the doors.

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Narrative

Evaluating the Data

By the time Cather Hargreaves got home for the evening, he was exhausted. Which was strange, since Grissom City was extraordinarily quiet right now, with all the tourists evacuated, and movement between sectors being kept at a minimum for safety reasons. He’d spent most of his workday sitting at his desk, going over reports or talking to security personnel elsewhere. Things had even been so boring for a while that he’d decided to get some extra exercise in and pulled out a set of resistance springs.

When he opened the door to their apartment, he found Toni hunched over her laptop, examining data. Best to tread lightly as he walked over to see what she was doing. At least the Moon’s lighter gravity helped with that.

What he saw was completely different that the sort of thing he was used to. Along the left side of the screen, one window had very dense data that had a lot of IP octets in it. The rest of the screen was occupied by some kind of visual presentation. Not exactly a map, but some kind of graphic.

Toni looked up from her work. “Steffi wanted me to take a look at Internet connectivity and how it correlated with other indicators of strain on the infrastructure as a result of the pandemic. I sent her some initial data, but what I’m finding interesting is how it changes over time. In particular, which nodes are staying down, and which are coming back up. And how long it takes before a given node is brought back up.”

Cather considered the possible implications. Not just the obvious security issues, but broader ones. “Which would give you at least some idea of whether a given area is losing a lot of their technical people to this pandemic.”

“And how comfortable people in any given area are about doing their own work on equipment. I mean, there are some places where a hotel desk clerk or an administrative assistant in an office isn’t even allowed to reboot a router or WiFi hotspot that’s gotten wedged. No, they have to get the official network technician to come up and flip the switch, and if that person can’t be found, the network remains unavailable.”

Cather recognized Toni’s tendency to be cavalier about formal rules. “And there may be good reasons for restrictions like that–“

“In a hospital or a secure military installation, sure. But I’m talking your typical business setup, where you’ve got a router perched on top of a file cabinet or behind a desk, wherever it’s closest to the cable or phone line. It says a lot about a culture, whether people who aren’t technical specialists feel comfortable about working on equipment.”

Cather recalled a story his ur-brother had told him when he was young. “Which was why American military units have been so flexible. Every soldier has enough experience as a shade-tree mechanic to do at least some basic repairs on a jeep or a truck.”

“Exactly. A lot of the nodes that are bouncing right back up are in the US. But what’s interesting is how it varies within the US. Some regions seem to have a lot more people who feel comfortable doing their own network maintenance. It may also indicate where there are more businesses that are heavily micromanaged, where ordinary workers are strongly discouraged from showing initiative. But I’m thinking that this data may be very predictive of how well different regions recover once this pandemic finally burns itself out.”

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Narrative

Assessing the Damage

Steffi Roderick wasn’t sure when exactly she started becoming alarmed about the reports coming in from Earth — or the lack of reports from some areas. Not just the news reports, or the various confidential reports from various government agencies, but the reports that were logged on the various network devices in the process of managing the flow of information on the Internet.

Dropped packets were such a common phenomenon that it was hardly worth the bother to log them. Especially on radio links, there were so many forms of interference that you just built a certain amount of capacity into your systems to resend dropped packets.

Of more concern were the logs of e-mail bounces, 404 errors on websites and the like. You always had a certain amount, although a lot less than when she’d been working in one of Purdue’s computer rooms. Back in those days, almost every e-mail provider and webhosting service had hard limits on the resources you could use. She still remembered what a big thing it had been when several of the big commercial e-mail providers had upped their mailbox limits from 10 megabytes to 100. Suddenly she wasn’t constantly dealing with kids all upset because important e-mails kept bouncing.

And now she was getting more failure messages in a day than she typically got in a month. Some of it was mailboxes or URLs not responding, but an astonishing amount of those messages were one or another version on “too many hops.” Which meant that the routers were having a lot more trouble making connections, to the point they hit limits that were intended to prevent infinite loops.

Yes, a lot of them were in countries where Internet connectivity had always been thin on the ground. But it wasn’t just the remote village where Internet connectivity meant the bus that came through every day, which had a WiFi hotspot and some basic store-and-forward capacity, or maybe even actual broadband equipment to provide a brief moment of live Internet. No, some of these problems were cropping up in areas where industrial civilization was old. Parts of Europe, for instance.

So she’d contacted Toni Hargreaves. They’d talked about the possibilities, and worked out a way to do an assessment of connectivity issues in the global Internet.

The data, both visual and numerical, that Toni had just sent over was not reassuring. Yes, the Internet was continuing to route around damage — it was originally designed to degrade gracefully and maintain as much connectivity as possible in the case of a nuclear war between the US and the old Soviet Union — but there was an awful lot of damage out there. Just what was going on that it had become that severe?

Was the toll of the diablovirus bad enough that there weren’t enough technical people to maintain the Internet backbone in some areas? Or were other things going on that she wasn’t hearing about, that were being brushed under the rug, even forcibly censored. She’d heard rumors of fighting over food, over medicines, over gasoline, but so far she’d never gotten any definite reports — and no, she didn’t consider fragmentary video from Third World countries to be definite reports.

Which meant she now needed to give some really hard consideration to finding out just what the situation was on the ground. Who could she even contact, who would be able to give her straight answers if the government were putting a cone of silence on things?

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Narrative

A New Lead

It was really too early to turn in for the night when Lou Corlin got back to the residential module. So he sat down in the lounge and got out his laptop. Some people might’ve played games or got on social media, but he decided to take a look at some of the upcoming materials for his current class. Study ahead a little and he wouldn’t be left scrambling if things got busy elsewhere.

And they could, especially at the radio station. DJ’s might not get as much extra work as the news team, but it wouldn’t be inconceivable for Autumn to pull them into the newsroom if something really major happened.

Lou had just opened his coursework when his phone chimed incoming text. He halfway expected it to be Autumn, or maybe someone else from the station. Instead, he saw the name “Hargreaves” and immediately thought it was Cather — until he looked closer and realized it was Toni.

What was she doing texting him directly? So far, she’d let her husband pass the word back and forth.

Unless he was busy with the situation over in Grissom City. He was the deputy chief of Safety and Security over there, focusing on the health and life safety side of things, while his boss dealt with the policing side of things.

In any case, Toni was asking him Can you talk? Realtime?

Sure. Go ahead and call.

Moments later the phone rang. He tapped accept and put his ear bug in. “Hello.”

“Lou, I just got an idea. If we can’t figure out any other way to find out where Brenda’s friend is, contact Medstaff. If you can convince them her home isn’t a safe place to be, they have some options that wouldn’t be open otherwise. And your Medlab’s still small enough that they can be a lot less formal about stuff–“

“But Dr. Thuc’s Vietnamese-American. I know she’s Catholic, but their culture’s still steeped in that whole Confucian tradition of filial piety.”

“And she’s a doctor, and therefore a mandatory reporter. When Cather was an EMT and a paramedic, he was always a mandatory reporter, so I know some stuff about that. In fact, everyone in Medlab who deals with patients should be a mandatory reporter, so you could talk with someone else.”

“That’s good to know. But before I get the big guns involved, I think I’d better touch base with Brenda, make sure she hasn’t heard anything new in the meantime. I’d hate to cause a huge ruckuss and it turns out she’s safe at a friend’s place, but Brenda just didn’t think to pass the word to me.”

“Good point. Keep me posted.”

“Will do.”

A quick exchange of parting pleasantries, and they ended the conversation. Lou looked at his phone’s clock display. Should he text Brenda now, or wait until tomorrow?

SMS was asynchronous, and if she had her phone set on Do Not Disturb for the night, it shouldn’t even chime. So he could go ahead and send the text, and she could deal with it whenever. If things had reached the point of being an emergency, Brenda would’ve contacted him already.

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Narrative

Some Awkward Questions

Steffi Roderick was just getting ready for bed when she heard her phone’s incoming text chime. Curious, she picked it up and was surprised to see a note from Toni Hargreaves: Cather’s got a computer problem. Are you where you can talk?

What’s wrong?

One of his clone-brothers is worried about the safety of a young woman dirtside who was sent back home from college. Apparently she had some kind of breach with her parents and they weren’t on speaking terms, and he has reason to worry that home is not a good place for her to go right now.

Steffi was unsurprised that Toni would be willing to help someone in that kind of situation. She had some painful history, which had been exacerbated by the destruction of her home town when the Chinese government completely botched the deorbit of the Flying Junkyard.

What kind of help are you looking for?

He’s trying to locate her, find out whether she is actually at her folks’ place or she’s found some other place to stay. If her parents are as controlling as they sound like, it may not be safe for any of us up here to try to communicate with her. But he can’t get metadata from her phone without a warrant.

Steffi considered the problem. So you want some suggestions on what other ways we could determine whether she’s in a safe place, or if she’s stuck in a seriously dysfunctional family?

Especially ones that don’t require jumping through legal hoops. If she were from the LA Basin, Cather and I know a bunch of people who don’t have awkward ties and could contact her to make sure she’s OK. But she’s in the Houston area. I know you were at Johnson for several years before they sent you up here, so I was hoping you’d still be in contact with some of your old friends and neighbors dirtside.

Steffi hated to disappoint her old friend from her JPL days, but it had been over a decade since the Angry Astronaut Affair. As busy as she was with family and the IT department, there hadn’t been a lot of time to maintain friendships with people she’d never see again. The occasional note when someone hit a major life milestone, e-cards at various holidays, but that was about it.

It’s been a long time, so I don’t want to promise anything, but I’ll see what I can manage.

Just as she was winding up the conversation, the door opened. She looked up just as Reggie walked in, looking unutterably weary.

“What’s wrong, sweetheart?”

Reggie retrieved a slingback chair and sank into it, looking completely unmilitary. “They’re trying to keep it quiet, so don’t go spreading the news around, but Dr. Thuc just reported to me that they’ve got someone ill over at Schirrasburg. Right now there’s still a possibility that it’s just an ordinary bug, maybe a cold or a norovirus, but they’re concerned enough they’ve completely shut down their spaceport and quarantined the entire settlement. No one goes in or out until they’re sure they’re in the clear.”

A cold lump of dread formed in Steffi’s stomach. If the diablovirus had gotten up here to the Moon, it would’ve had to have passed through Luna Station. Which meant that everyone’s pilots would be exposed.

And trying to keep it quiet was like shutting the barn door after the horse was down the road, and the cattle and the pigs running after him. She knew several people here in Shepardsport who had family in Schirrasburg, who’d be in regular communication with them.

Maybe it was time to have a talk with Autumn Belfontaine, try to decide whether they should go ahead and break the news, or run some “don’t repeat gossip” PSA’s first.

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Narrative

An Unexpected Response

After dropping off the computer for Jack to look over, Lou Corlin had figured he’d heard the last of it. After all, it was Autumn’s computer, not his, so if there were any issues that required user input, Jack would call her, not him.

So he’d figured he could shoot a quick message off to Toni Hargreaves, then get to work on his actual job down here. He certainly had plenty of stuff here to keep him busy.

When his phone chimed incoming text, he was a little surprised to hear back from Toni so quickly. He’d expected it to take her a while to do some research.

But when he pulled out his phone, he was surprised to see a message from her husband instead. We need to talk.

An oddly curt message from family. Lou recalled that Cather Hargreaves was Grissom City’s deputy chief of security. No, it wouldn’t be wise to blow him off. Even pleading work hours would be risky. What do you want to know?

I think it’s time for some analog telecom.

In other words, a phone call. No, there was no use pointing out that any modern phone was a handheld computer with a broadband modem and a VoIP app, which meant voice calling was still digital. That would just get him told off for being pedantic, or cheeky.

OK, do you want to call me, or for me to call you?

Moments after Lou sent that text, the phone rang right in his hand. He tapped the Accept button and stuck the phone to his ear. “Hello?”

“Hello, Lou. I’m concerned about the text you sent Toni earlier today. Is this just a hypothetical question for a research project, or are you looking into things that could get people into a lot of trouble?”

No, Cather did not sound pleased. Maybe it was just as well they were on opposite sides of the Moon right now.

Lou recalled that Toni Hargreaves had been in some trouble back in the early years of this century, something about an experimental spacecraft Chaffee Associates had designed for McHenery Aerospace. Whatever it had been, it had been put under wraps at the highest levels, with a strong suggestion that if it didn’t remain secret, the Federal government could make life very unpleasant for certain people. And that some kind of slip had resulted in the Hargreaves family suddenly being transferred up here to the Moon a few years before the Expulsions.

Maybe he better just go ahead and come clean. “Actually, I was trying to find a way to avoid a whole bunch of trouble. You know Brenda Redmond, don’t you?”

“At least by name. She’s married to one of our pilots, a Shep if I remember correctly.”

“Yeah, Drew Reinholt. Anyway, an old friend of Brenda’s from high school contacted her a while back. Apparently there were some serious issues between this young woman and her parents, and she was very upset at being compelled to move out of her college dorm room and back home. Since then, Brenda hasn’t heard anything further, so she’s getting worried that things could be getting desperate for her friend. But at the same time, she’s worried that trying to contact this friend could make things even worse.”

Cather was silent for a moment that seemed to stretch into eternity. “That is a nasty little Schroedinger’s box she’s handed you. Damned if you do, and damned if you don’t.”

At least he didn’t sound angry now. Nothing to do but ask the question and hope it wouldn’t make things worse.

“So what can we do about it? If we could be sure that either she found a friend to stay with, or that she has some form of communication that her parents aren’t monitoring, I’d tell Brenda to go ahead and try to reconnect with her, buck her up if she needs it. But if she’s being spied on by parents who have an animus against clones, getting a message from Brenda might just make her situation even worse.”

“Let me see what I can find out. I do have some resources, although as chaotic as things are down there, I can’t make any promises. In the meantime, I need you to keep your nose clean and try not to ask any awkward questions. Understood?”

Lou promised that he would stay out of the matter. He did get the go-ahead to reassure Brenda that someone was working on the problem, so that she could stop worrying. Otherwise, there was nothing to do but wait.

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Narrative

That Uneasy Feeling

Cather Hargreaves had spent most of the afternoon on a video conference call with the senior security staff of the other major American lunar settlements. A guy from NASA headquarters in Washington was supposed to have joined them. However, he’d failed to call, leaving the Lunans to talk among themselves.

It had been particularly uncomfortable when he’d realized that he and Betty Margrave were having one discussion while everyone else was carrying on their own conversation. It was almost as if the others viewed him and Betty as tainted, people it was best to have as little to do with as possible.

On the other hand, one only had to look at him to know he was a clone. Sure, everyone remembered his ur-brother with the famous scars, but no one could fail to recognize the distinctive dark eyebrows that made their faces almost top-heavy, and make the connection. And everyone knew Shepardsport was the settlement NASA was using as a depository for the inmates of their clone creches, so Betty was suspect even for those who didn’t realize she was married to a clone of Alan Shepard.

Maybe we ought to be grateful that we haven’t had our asses packed over to Farside.

Still, the experience had put him in a despondent mood as he returned home. Their apartment was actually closer to Grissom City’s IT facilities than the main security office, which made it pretty plain how the Housing Bureau regarded his and Toni’s respective lines of work.

Cather entered their apartment to find it quiet. Unusual, since Toni usually was home by this time. Could something have come up with the computers, that she had to stay late?

Or maybe she got a message from JPL that they were having trouble with Dispater? Although she was no longer officially on the Dispater team since being sent up here, she had been one of the key programmers of the probe’s AI — and four light-hours away from Earth, it needed sophisticated AI to carry out complex experiments and maneuvers.

And from what she’d been saying, the Los Angeles Basin was getting particularly hard by that stuff, and JPL wasn’t getting spared. If a lot of their on-site programmers were calling in sick, they’d be casting the net wide to find anyone who’d ever worked with that software.

Jase and Ronnie usually got home a little later, so at least their absence was no cause for worry. Worst case, he could activate the parental tracking apps on their phones and make sure they were indeed where he expected them to be. The kids were a study in how the straight-arrow Chaffee temparament mixed with Toni’s more headstrong disposition, which tended to view “no” as a challenge.

As Cather checked the fridge to see what he could throw together for supper, the door opened. Toni set her briefcase on the table, but didn’t extract her laptop. “Cather, how well do you know Lou Corlin?”

“About as well as the rest of my clone-brothers from the NASA clone creches.” Cather mentally went through the list of them. “He’s Emiko’s boyfriend, he does the Rising Sun J-pop show on Shepardsport Pirate Radio, and if I remember correctly, he works in IT over there. I’ve met him a few times when business took me over there, but I haven’t really had the time to cultivate relationships with those kids.”

It stung to have to admit that lapse. He should’ve figured out some way to step into the breach after Braden Maitland’s death, but it had never seemed all that urgent. That was a level-headed bunch of kids, and Ken Redmond and Sid Abernathy were both taking an interest in everyone in the Grissom lineage. Heck, Ken had sent him e-mails making sure all was well.

Toni just nodded. “Lou sent me a rather odd text right after lunch. Something about just how hard it would be to pinpoint the location of a person without breaking any privacy laws.”

“That’s an interesting question.” Cather considered the implications. “It would depend on what information you had on that person, not to mention your relationship to them. A parent of a minor child has a lot more resources available than, say, a friend or a distant relative. If you’d like, I can contact Lou and see what’s raised the question. For all we know, it could be a completely theoretical matter. Maybe he’s taking a class in crime and mystery literature and wanted your take on the plausibility of something he read.”

“Or it could be someone spoofing his e-mail in hopes of entrapping me for one reason or another.” Toni moved her briefcase, then sat down at the table. “Which is why it may be best for you to contact him. It’s much less likely that they would’ve also compromised my phone.”

Cather promised he’d send Lou a text as soon as they were done eating. Right now he had a supper to fix, and the kids would be home soon.

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Document

Back of the Beyond

One of the advantages of being on Farside is its isolation. Particularly in the early days of the settlement of the Solar System, Farside was almost completely shielded from human electromagnetic activity, making it a perfect location for telescopes intended to peer into deep space, and thus deep time. Although both the Far Side Optical Telescope (FSOT) and Far Side Radio Array (FSRA) have since been surpassed by telescopes that use the gravitic lensing effect of various celestial bodies, including the Sun itself, in their heyday they were the source of many career-making discoveries.

But Farside was distant in other ways. For those who were born on Earth, the fact that it was forever cut off from sight of the Mother World made it psychologically distant in a way that even Mars could not be, for all that Mars was much further away. This feature made it a place of exile, originally for those who’d displeased senior officials, but later for the astronaut clones who were no longer welcome in a society that was coming to reject its Cold War experiments.

And during the Great Outbreak, this isolation would play out in a multitude of ways, great and small. It was a form of safety, to be so far away from what was now sources of contagion. But it was also danger, to be so far away from help if something were to go wrong.

—- V. N. Petrov, The Psychology of Isolation, Grissom City: St. Selene Digital Press, 2088.

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Narrative

The Digital Dungeon

A single computer’s cooling fan wasn’t that loud, but the big fans that cooled the rack servers produced a curtain of white noise. Here in the main Shepardsport server farm, surrounded by rank after rank of rack servers, someone could be talking a few feet away and Steffi might not even hear them.

Even the click of the KVM switch was muffled as she worked her way down the rack of blade servers. Normally this sort of thing would be handled by someone much lower than the head of IT. However, after the trouble they’d been having, the possibility that malware had gotten through their security systems again was alarming enough that she wanted to check things herself.

She was almost done with the rack when the text chime sounded on her phone. She started to reach for it, then checked herself. SMS was asynchronous and could wait until she got this rack of servers checked.

Finished with the task, she took a look at her messaging app. What was with this cryptic message from Toni Hargreaves? It wasn’t like her to write such an evasive message

Or was it from Toni? They’d been having some problems with spoofed texts of late. It wouldn’t be impossible to get someone’s contacts list and make it look like a message came from a trusted friend.

Steffi decided she’d better ask Jack. He was one of her best security guys, and would be able to tell if her phone had been compromised, or if the settlement’s SMS servers had been hacked.