Tag: Betty Margrave

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Narrative

And Bitter Tears

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Narrative

What Is the Matter With Those Phones?

Steffi Roderick was at the dining commons, finishing her breakfast, when her phone rang. Unusual, since most people would text first at this hour, to make sure she was available to talk.

She pulled out the phone, saw the name of the head of the helpdesk department. If. Bob were calling, something serious was going on. Better go ahead and answer.

Bob Quires was a man of phlegmatic temperament, and she’d chosen him for this job because very few things could rattle him. However, today his voice had an under tone of alarm under the surface appearance of calm. “Steffi, we’ve got a problem down here. The phones are ringing off the hook, and my people are working like a bunch of one-legged men at an ass-kicking contest.”

The expression telephones ringing off the hook had always amused Steffi. In theory it could actually happen with analog telephony, particularly if a few unusual malfunctions were to occur. But with modern digital telephony it would be logically impossible for a ringtone to be initiated during an active call instead of the interrupting call going to voicemail.

But there was no time to reminisce about how curiosity about an expression had begun her journey into electrical engineering. Right now she had a problem to solve. “What are we looking at?”

“Right now it seems to be a dog’s breakfast of problems. People getting cut off in the middle of early-morning teleconferences. Researchers unable to access datasets they need. Websites suddenly becoming unavailable or unreliable, especially financial ones.”

“That’s not sounding good. I’ll be down as soon as I can. In the meantime, get the traffic analysts on the job. I’m thinking there’s got to be a pattern in there somewhere.”

The conversation finished, Steffi finished the last few bites of her meal. Even after that desperate first year of the Expulsions had become just a memory, wasting food was something one simply did not do. As soon as she’d cleaned her plate, she scanned herself back out so the bots could take away the dishes and make her place ready for the next person to sit down at it.

As she walked down to the IT offices, she did some tests of her own. Although she wouldn’t be able to access the sophisticated diagnostic software until she was at her work computer, there were some basic things she could do from her phone, like checking various websites.

It didn’t take long to notice a pattern. Anything on the local servers was no problem to access. Servers elsewhere on the Moon were hit and miss, while anything on Earth got her nothing but the spinning circle.

She could think of several kinds of accidents that would produce this sort of situation. However, it was also possible that someone was deliberately trying to cut off Shepardsport’s ability to communicate with Earth. Ever since they started up the radio station and telling the truth behind the Flannigan Administration’s lies, they’d been dealing with intermittent DDOS attacks.

Although this didn’t look like a typical DDOS attack, there was no way to be sure until she could get to her diagnostic software, which didn’t run on a phone OS. But in the meantime she’d better let Betty Margrave know, just to be on the safe side.

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Narrative

Absence

Autumn Belfontaine had spent over an hour up at Medlab, talking with Dr. Thuc about how best to present the increasingly disturbing information coming in from Earth. It was absolutely critical to make the danger clear, especially with the growing evidence that someone in the Administration was trying to soft-pedal it by keeping people from correlating information from different cities. At the same time, it was also important to present it in a way that would not lead to panic.

When she arrived at the station, she noticed the empty receptionist’s desk, but thought that Cindy Margrave had probably just stepped out to take care of something. Maybe run a document somewhere, or just an ordinary restroom break.

That lasted only until Lou Corlin intercepted her. “Cindy still hasn’t shown up, and she’s never late.”

“Have you tried to text her?”

“She’s not answering, and I’m not sure if I should call. Especially where she and sister are sharing an apartment with their aunt and uncle and their kids.”

Autumn could appreciate the problem. When she first came over here on Captain Waite’s invitation, she’d had an apartment all to herself. But when the Expulsions began in earnest and Shepardsport’s population ballooned, she’d suddenly been asked to double up with another single woman — and it was pretty clear that the request was a politely stated command. There’d been more than a few awkward moments over calls and even text chimes interrupting someone’s sleep, or even concentration.

On the other hand, she didn’t think anyone in that household was on night shift. “I’ll call. As a director, I’ll have a little more authority than a DJ.”

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The Least of These

By the time Cindy Margrave got back from the gym after her daily mandatory exercise session, she just wanted to get to bed. However, tomorrow she had a test in her chemistry course, and while she had done some studying, she really needed to review everything one last time.

At least the module lounge was quiet at this hour. Although her aunt and uncle had been able to secure a larger apartment, it was still crowded enough that it wasn’t exactly conducive to study. And she really didn’t want to go all the way up to Miskatonic Sector to use the study carrels in the library.

She settled into the chair in the furthest corner, glad that the two guys were keeping their voices low. From the looks of it, they were playing Space Race, although she couldn’t get a good enough view of the cards to be certain.

She was almost through with the aldehyde series when she felt a tug on the sleeve of her tracksuit. She looked up from her tablet to the wide eyes of her younger sister. Who’s supposed to be in bed already.

“What’s wrong, Kitty?”

“Amy just PMed me. Both her folks are sick, bad.”

Amy? Cindy tried to place the name. Kitty was such a social butterfly, there was just no keeping track of all her friends, even in a community as small as Shepardsport. Not to mention all Kitty’s online friends, with whom she spent about as much time as anyone up here.

Better just ask. Especially with whatever was going on back on Earth, any sickness in a community in as tight of quarters as everyone lived up here would be disastrous.

“She’s still in Houston. We were classmates, remember?”

Cindy didn’t want to admit that she honestly didn’t remember many of her sister’s classmates. It would sound too much like she didn’t care. Kitty had been just old enough to be distressed by the abrupt break from their old life when Uncle Carl and Aunt Betty took them in after Mom and Dad’s accident, and getting sent up here had been a second uprooting just as she was finally beginning to trust that her life would be stable.

“Sort of, but it’s been a long time, and I was pretty busy.” Hoping that would suffice to comfort her sister, she asked a few clarifying questions.

Kitty was a little shaky on details, but probably because Amy hadn’t been very clear on them. Up here, everybody got trained in remaining calm in a crisis and being able to deliver a coherent, organized report on one’s situation. Cindy knew she wouldn’t have been able to perform much better if she’d been called upon to report their parents’ accident to a 911 operator.

However, Cindy wasn’t sure if telling Amy to call 911 would be the best advice. It didn’t sound like they were in immediate danger, and when you were a kid, illnesses that weren’t actually that dangerous could be scary if both your folks came down with them at once.

Cindy wished there were someone she could talk to right now. However, Uncle Carl was out of town on a mission, taking supplies to some of the outlying scientific outposts, and Aunt Betty was spending more time up at the Safety and Security offices in Arkham Sector than she did here.

Who else could she turn to? Maybe some of her co-workers from the station? While Spruance Del Curtin would probably love to get any tidbits of information he could find, there was no way on Earth, the Moon or Mars that she was going to tell him about this.

On the other hand, what about Brenda Redmond? She was just enough older to be taken seriously, but young enough to still remember what it was like to be a kid, even if she was married and had two kids of her own.

Better text her first and see if she was where she could talk.

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Narrative

Tete a Tete

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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