Tag: Cather Hargreaves

Categories
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.”

Categories
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.”

Categories
Narrative

Widening the Net

Cather Hargreaves sat hunched over his computer, typing in yet another request. Right now he wished he could have Toni helping him, but he was working in databases of sensitive information, and privacy regulations made it impossible for him to bring Toni in unless she were actually assigned to deal with a technical problem in access to it.

Even searching them without a work-related reason could be risky, since it could be construed as a breach of privacy. But he was fairly confident that, given the situation, he could justify it in the interest of this young woman’s safety. Already he’d heard some unsettling stories of the unintended consequences of sending everyone home when not all homes were safe havens. Of course he was working on third-hand information — he hadn’t actually talked to Brenda about her friend — but he had no reason to believe that Lou would deliberately exaggerate the risk level of this young woman’s situation in hope of motivating him.

Unlike some people I’ve known, who’d ratchet up the emotional content of their request because they thought it would get me to treat their lack of forethought as my emergency.

So far, he’d largely drawn blanks. He’d verified the locale in which this young woman’s phone was registered, but could not get into the databases that would give location metadata for calls and texts. Apparently that required a warrant issued by a judge, unless one could make the case that the person was in such immediate danger of life and limb that there was no time to go through the normal procedures.

Which I don’t know. Brenda’s afraid she could be in an emotional pressure-cooker that could drive her to self-harm, but we have no actual proof. Until I can get actual location metadata for where her phone is now, the only thing we have to go on is her parents’ past history of ordering her to dump a friend solely on the basis of that friend’s father being a clone, and one admittedly panicky e-mail. For all we know, she may have been able to arrange a safe place to stay, but that situation is not conducive to her being able to casually text or e-mail friends to reassure them of her safety.

Back in his San Bernadino days, he knew a couple of judges who’d tend to be sympathetic to intervention in family-law cases like this. But up here on the Moon, everyone was carefully screened, so you just didn’t have the sort of dysfunctional families that produced the cases that made you cringe just to think about them. So while there were a couple of judges, since human beings being human, they did from time to time need recourse to a court of law, neither of them were apt to see the facts Cather could produce as evidence this young woman could be in danger under her own parents’ roof. If anything, they’d probably see her as the problem, and make remarks about adolescent angst.

And I was really hoping to give Lou something solid, at least enough to tell him whether Brenda should go ahead and e-mail her friend, see if she needed some bucking up, or if any contact would merit extreme caution, perhaps even the mediation of someone who had no obvious connections with any clones.

It would’ve been so much easier if the young woman in question had been from somewhere in Southern California. He still had enough connections in the EMS community down there that he could’ve put out some discreet feelers, at least find out whether she was with her parents or elsewhere.

Instead, he was left trying to figure out what his next step would be. And while Toni was a world-class hacker, she was supposed to be a white-hat hacker — and right now he simply didn’t have enough solid information to put her on the case.

On the other hand, she could give her some pointers. He’d have to ask her tonight, see if there were any angles he’d overlooked.

Categories
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.