Tag: Louis Corlin

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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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Narrative

A Matter of Digital Security

It had taken Jack all day to get Steffi’s phone set back up. Given how important one’s phone was in a lunar settlement — it was your wallet, your dining commons pass, your gym card, your keychain — being without it was a real pain in the keister. But with evidence that it had been hacked and someone had access to her contacts file, there wasn’t much else to do but reset it to factory settings. Then there was the problem of determining when the intrusion had occurred and finding a backup that predated it.

At least she’d been able to use her desktop computer in her office to call in lunch. The deliverybot had dropped it just outside her door, so having her phone down for the count didn’t mean having to go hungry. But it still left her more than a little shaken. If she, the head of IT, could have something as vital as her phone hacked, what did it say about security on everyone else’s devices?

Maybe she ought to look into the situation. Make some time to talk to Betty Margrave about a settlement-wide security assessment.

Now that Jack finally had her phone up and running, Steffi had to make final tweaks on all those things that never quite restored from a cloud backup.

As they were talking, she noticed a computer sitting on the counter. Not one of the big tower workstations the scientists used for number crunching when they didn’t need the real heavy iron down here. Just a little desktop box you might find in an administrative office.

“Where did that one come from?”

Jack looked it over. “Lou Corlin brought it down from the radio station offices. Said it picked up some particularly nasty malware from an e-mail, and he didn’t think he was up to cleaning it out.”

It took Steffi a moment to place the name, but as soon as she did, she remembered the dark-haired young man at the counter when she had brought the phone for Jack to look at. The kid was getting old enough that the distinctive thick eyebrows of a Chaffee were really getting noticeable.

The Admiral had already gone completely gray by the time Steffi met him, but she’d seen plenty of pictures of his younger days. And she’d hung out with Toni enough to be acquainted with Cather, even if he spent a lot more of his time with his buddies in EMS than with the JPL people.

Come to think of it, Lou’s expression had brightened noticeably when she’d mentioned Toni. Like he’d suddenly realized something important.

Maybe she’d better check in with Toni. Not necessarily mention Lou or anything, but just see what might be going on.

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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

We’ve Got Trouble

It didn’t take Lou Corlin long to decide that he’d made a mistake carrying Autumn Belfontaine’s computer down to Jack Lang’s work area. If Jack took one look at it and told Lou it was within his skills and fix it himself, Lou was not going to enjoy carrying it back.

However, he found Jack in a chatty mood for a change. He was a little unhappy about getting information fourth hand, and was seriously considering calling up to the newsroom to get Autumn’s first-hand description of events. On consideration, he decided that she was probably busy enough already, and it would be better if he only contact her if he couldn’t figure it out on his own.

Lou was about to go back to his own work when Steffi Roderick walked in. “Got a good one for you this time, Jack.”

She described the cryptic text she’d just gotten from an old friend over at Grissom City. “It’s not like Toni to send weird stuff like that. She’s a straightforward sort.”

She’s talking about Toni Hargreaves. Lou had to suppress an urge to smack his forehead. Why hadn’t he thought of her? Especially since she was considered one of the greatest white-hat hackers of all time, and was married to one of his clone-brothers.

Sure, she didn’t live steeped in the creche traditions of lineage-right the way everyone over here in Shepardsport did. But she was aware of it, and wouldn’t look askance at his approaching her.

On the other hand, any method he used to contact her would leave a record. Which meant he would need to be very careful how he phrased anything.

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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.

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Narrative

The Information Race

Lou Corlin usually did an afternoon bench tech shift, after his air shift at Shepardsport Pirate Radio. Today, he’d switched with someone on the early morning shift who needed some extra time to study for an important exam. It meant he had to have his breakfast sent down here, but it would give him a head start on sounding out some people about the problem of locating Brenda’s friend without breaking any data security rules.

Except he’d no more than clocked in when he heard a familiar voice calling his name. There was Juss Forsythe, tool satchel over one shoulder and a computer under the other arm, walking along like he wasn’t even burdened. Maybe it wasn’t one of the big tower workstations, but Juss was carrying a desktop box like it was a cheap laptop.

“So what’ve you got today, Juss?” Lou hoped he didn’t sound too irritated.

“Apparently the news department’s getting a lot of hate mail, and someone’s getting pretty serious about it.” Juss set the computer on Lou’s workbench. “Autumn was cleaning out her inbox, and she accidentally opened an e-mail she shouldn’t have. It had an attachment that was apparently some kind of auto-running malware.”

Lou sucked in his breath, not caring that it made a whistle loud enough that the other guys would be able to hear it. “That’s bad. Especially considering that a modern e-mail client is supposed to block that sort of stuff.”

“We got it powered down before whatever it was running could infect the whole network. But I’d suggest you pull its WiFi antenna before you try to do any diagnostics.”

Lou looked down at the computer, then back to Juss. “Which assumes that I’m even going to try to do it myself. From what you’re talking about, I’m thinking I could get in over my head real fast.”

And kicking this problem upstairs would also give me an opportunity to talk to some of the senior techs about just what latitude I’d have in locating Brenda’s friend before I’d have to take the matter to Betty Margrave.

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Narrative

Of Friends and Family

The tutoring session finished and his students dispersing to their own modules, Lou considered whether it was time to head back to his own apartment. Or at least back to that module, although its lounge wasn’t nearly as nice as this one.

But as he was putting away his materials, he noticed Brenda Redmond sitting at the far wall, looking very much as if she were stewing over something. Should he ask her if there were something wrong? Or would that be an intrusion?

They were colleagues, both DJ’s at Shepardsport Pirate Radio. And they did have lineage ties: although Brenda had married into the Shepard lineage, she’d been born into the Grissom lineage. So he did have certain responsibilities.

Make it light then. Leave the door open, as it were. “Hi, Brenda. Just wondered if you needed anything before I took off.”

Brenda pursed her lips, as if ready to form a polite no, thank you. “Well, I was just thinking about some technical issues in telecommunications.” She paused, moistened her lips. “A few days ago, I got an e-mail from an old friend, from before the anti-Sharp stuff started really revving up. She’d apparently had some kind of breach with her parents, and when all the dorms closed at her college, she was really upset about having to go back to them. And then, with all the stuff with Kitty Margrave’s friend and everything we found out about that, it just slipped my mind.”

Yes, she definitely felt bad about that one. Not exactly guilty, but more than just sheepish at a mental lapse.

“Don’t beat yourself up, Brenda. This is not exactly a normal situation, and I’m hearing a lot of people are having to struggle to keep track of ordinary things.”

She essayed a wan smile. “Thanks, Lou. If these were normal times, I’d just write and let her know that things came up and I hadn’t gotten a chance to get back with her. But right now I’m not even sure if it’s safe for me to try to contact her.” Another of those awkward pauses. “I mean, her parents are so dead-set against clones that they made her dump me as a friend, just because my dad’s a clone of Gus Grissom. It was like they wanted her to forget I even existed after we headed off to training to come up here.”

Lou’s nerves prickled with alarm. “Then you think she could be in danger?”

“I don’t know. Maybe, depending on just what kind of breach she had with her parents. For all I know, she may be holed up in an apartment with a friend. But if she’s had to go back to her folks’ house and the price of peace there is that she pretend to agree with whatever position of theirs led to the breach, and especially if they’re insisting that they now have the right to monitor her telecom, just texting or e-mailing her could risk an ugly blow-up.”

Lou considered that information. “That is a nasty Schroedinger’s box. Do you leave it closed and hope for the best, or open it and risk making a bad situation even worse?”

“That’s a pretty good way to put it. Except if I don’t reach out to her and she really is in a desperate situation, might her feelings of abandonment and hopelessness lead her to do something rash?”

Lou could tell what Brenda was thinking but didn’t want to say aloud: suicide. It was a taboo topic for a reason, especially after Clarissa Munroe’s spectacular act of self-destruction. There were very good reasons to condemn that particular young woman to damnato memoria, but it meant it became very difficult to talk in a constructive way about someone else under unendurable pressure without looking like you were excusing what she did.

“Which means you need to figure out some way to find out where this person is without potentially letting other people in the same household know that you’re making inquiries about her.”

“That’s pretty much the size of it.” Brenda paused again to consider her words. “I mean, I know there are techniques, especially after I watched Eli dig out information on the crazy stuff that’s going on in several states’ child welfare departments. But those are techniques you’re only supposed to use if you’re acting in an official capacity. And somehow I don’t think this is the sort of thing that’s going to get taken seriously. I mean, that creepy I’m OK message that was supposed to be from Amy is going to set off just about anybody’s alarm bells, but someone unhappy to have to go home to their parents is far more apt to be told to make the best of it.”

“You’ve got a point.” Lou weighed the options. “I can ask around at IT, see what options I would have to legitimately find out where she is.”

“Thanks.”

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Narrative

Echoes and Memories

Brenda Redmond didn’t like having to do homework in a crowded module lounge. However, she’d had enough trouble getting the kids to sleep after an all-too-brief FaceTime call with their dad that having a screen on in that apartment was not an option.

So here she was, trying not to listen to Lou Corlin tutoring a couple of teens. Differential equations, from the sound of it — stuff that dirtside kids didn’t even start studying until their third or fourth year in college. Up here, students moved forward as fast as they could master the subject material, rather than being forced to advance in lockstep with the rest of their agemates.

A lot of Alan Shepard’s problem when he was that age was probably being bored to tears by regular classes in grade and high school. Even at Annapolis, he didn’t really hit his stride until his third year.

How many times had her own father grumbled about the difficulty of keeping Spruance Del Curtin motivated to put out his best work? Brenda knew a lot of those remarks hadn’t been meant for her ears, but when she was still living in her folks’ apartment, it had often been difficult to avoid overhearing her dad’s remarks to her mom about problems in Engineering.

Sometimes it seemed like just yesterday that she was still living with her natal family, and sometimes it felt like another lifetime. Heck, the craziness of the last few weeks sometimes seemed to stretch backward through her memory far further than it had any right to.

Speaking of which, she realized that she’d become so occupied with Kitty Margrave’s friend Amy that she’d completely forgotten about the message she’d gotten from Robbie Sandberg. Sure, she’d sent some kind of very basic response right away, of the I’ll be praying for you type, but she’d never followed up with anything substantial.

And now enough time had passed that she had no idea what Robbie’s situation might be now. Had she been able to find some kind of accommodations with a friend or trusted mentor? Or had she been left with no choice to return to her parents’ home, told it was her problem to deal with the breach between them? In which case, would it even be safe to send her a message?

If her parents were reading her e-mails, checking her phone, on the grounds of under our roof, under our rules, discovering a new message from a former friend thought to be banished from her life could cause trouble. Anything from a shouting match to beatings, confiscations of belongings, even things that would leave her wishing there weren’t a stay-at-home order keeping them from tossing her out on her ass.

Was there some way to contact Robbie, buck her up if necessary, without revealing her identity? All of a sudden she wished she knew a whole lot more about hacking.

Lou was winding up his tutoring session. On the other hand, he was a typical Chaffee straight-arrow. If she asked him, he’d probably aver that they shouldn’t be trying to go behind the backs of someone’s parents when those parents were putting a roof over that person’s head, not to mention that a lot of the necessary hacks were a bit sketchy if you weren’t doing them under the direction of appropriate authority. And while it made sense for Kitty Margrave to go to her aunt when it was clear that Amy was in danger, Brenda wasn’t sure she wanted to go to Betty about an old friend’s situation with so little to go on.

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Narrative

The Ill Wind

As Lou Corlin arrived at the station offices, he considered that he might have spend more time than he should’ve on the traffic analysis Steffi Roderick had given him. Sure, it was a really thorny problem, but he also knew he had responsibilities the next day, including his air shift and his training.

But the whole time he was looking over that data, he couldn’t shake the feeling that he was overlooking something important. That maybe everyone was overlooking something important, because they were so certain they knew what kind of problem they were looking at.

Which is what happened when we were locked out of the Internet. The symptoms resembled prior DDOS attacks so much that nobody in IT paused to wonder why it was intermittent, or why the usual remedies didn’t work. And then Sprue asked a couple of awkward questions, Steffi insisted they needed answers, and suddenly a whole bunch of weirdness had reasons.

And speaking of Spruance Del Curtin, he was here early today, and talking with Cindy. Not that scheming sort of talk that suggested he was trying to gain points, or wheedle something out of her without looking like he was obviously trying to gain a favor. No, he seemed to be actually discussing something with her.

Lou recalled hearing that Colonel Hearne had abandoned the syllabus last night in Constitution class and got into a whole lot of heavy stuff about how societies work. Of course the standard syllabus was intended for a typical public school classroom, so it probably wouldn’t be that hard for a class up here to catch back up to where they were supposed to be in plenty of time to take the test.

Much as he’d like to hear more about just exactly what Colonel Hearne had said, Lou could tell now was not the time to butt in on Cindy and Sprue’s discussion. Not to mention that he needed to get ready to do his air shift.

That was when Autumn Belfontaine poked her head out of the newsroom. “Lou, can I talk with you for a moment?”

“Sure.” Lou joined her in the newsroom, wondering what could be going on.

“I’d like for you to verify my understanding of some news releases in Japanese.”

As Lou skimmed over them, an icy knot of dread formed in the pit of his stomach. “It looks like they’re pretty much shutting down the Earthside part of their space program. Reading between the lines, it looks like they’re focusing on protecting their installations here on the Moon and on Mars from contagion.”

“Which strongly suggests those Indian astronauts did spread the diablovirus to the Sakura, but its medstaff detected it in time, so they didn’t spread it to Luna Station or anyone on the ground.”

“But they’re never going to come out and actually say that, because that would mean losing face.” Lou paused. “Or perhaps putting their Indian partners in a face-threatening situation.”

The fall of China’s “flying junkyard” and the destruction of Phoenix was before Lou’s time, but he’d studied it in enough classes to have a pretty strong awareness of the role played by fear of losing face in the decision chains of the Chinese Communist Party in those last fateful days and weeks. Spaceflight was no longer such a touchy national prestige thing for Japan, but the issues were still there.

And there was also the implication for the American and Russian space programs. Lou had already heard there were problems with infections at several of NASA’s space centers causing staffing shortages, and he wouldn’t be at all surprised if the Imperial space program was getting hit by the problems too.

And all it would take is one careless person somewhere in the process of clearing people for spaceflight to get it up here too. We’ve been lucky so far, but how much longer will our luck hold?