Tag: Louis Corlin

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Narrative

Communications Restored

The next morning, Autumn Belfontaine arrived at the newsroom fully expecting to get 404’s and 5xx errors more often than not. Instead, the first thing she found was her AP and Reuters feeds ready and waiting for her.

Well, it looks like whatever was knocking out our Internet downlinks to Earth, IT’s finally gotten it fixed.

She noticed Lou Corlin standing just outside the newsroom door, going through the music library terminal. “Lou, could you come in here and take a look at the Japanese news feeds. Your Japanese is a lot better than mine.”

“Sure thing, Miz Autumn.” Lou abandoned his music search to look over the websites Autumn had pulled up. “Although Tristan’s is a lot better than mine. He’s the one they’ve been having working with native speakers since he was a toddler. They even sent him over to Japan a couple of times before the Expulsions.”His translations pretty much confirmed the impressions she’d gotten from the kanji she recognized. Sometimes she regretted not having studied Japanese in journalism school. But at the time she’d assumed her career would remain Earthbound, and Spanish had seemed such a logical choice, with French a close second if she stayed in the northern tier states, close to Canada.

And if you’d just wanted an easy A you would’ve studied Swedish, since Grandma and Grandpa still spoke it, and you spent enough summers with them to pick it up.

However, it pretty well confirmed what she’d seen on the English-language wire services. The world they’d been cut off from — had it really only been three days? — was not the same world they were being reconnected to. “Lou, you need to get ready to start your air shift. But I’m thinking it’s time to call an all-hands meeting of the news department. Now that we’ve got connectivity again, our stringers can FaceTime in.”

As she started to type the mass e-mail, she paused and reconsidered. “And I think I’d better have Betty Margrave and Sam Carlisle in the loop too. They’ve probably got sources of information besides what comes in on the wire services and what I can glean from local TV news sites.”

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Closer to the Heart

The module lounge was quiet this evening, which suited Lou Corlin just fine. Normally he would call Emiko, maybe even FaceTime if they both felt up to it. But with Shepardsport’s data connections with the rest of the universe being in disarray, that wasn’t going to be possible.

Earlier today they’d been texting back and forth. Now even SMS was bouncing, which suggested that the problem had becoming worse.

His phone chimed mail. A quick check of his mail revealed several new messages, including one from Emiko.

When he opened it, he realized from the context that she must’ve sent it several hours earlier. Which meant it had taken this long for the store-and-forward mailservers to get it from Grissom City to Shepardsport.

At least everything she had to say was routine, the usual work, training, and teaching responsibility. Given what was happening down on Earth, and the fact that Slayton Field was the Moon’s busiest port of entry, it was hard not to fear the worst when he didn’t hear from her at all.

A sound from behind him attracted his attention, and he looked up to find Brenda Redmond giving him a worried look. “Hi, Lou. You mind if I join you?”

Lou was about to balk, then remembered that Brenda’s husband was also over at Grissom City. As a pilot-astronaut, he’d be living in the Roosa Barracks, right where everyone was coming and going.

Lou moved the bag with his laptop and graphics tablet to free some space on the sofa. “Go right ahead. We’re both in the same fix right now. I just got the e-mail that Emiko sent me about four hours ago.”

“At least you got it.” Brenda paused, as if considering what to say next. “About ten minutes ago, I got an e-mail from Drew, but when I tried to pull it up, the mail app said the message had no content.”

“Strange.” Lou considered the information, wished he knew a lot more about e-mail protocols. Almost all his work for IT had been with the big number-crunchers the science departments used. “Maybe we’d better check it out, especially if it would help get a handle on whatever’s blocking our connections with Earth. I can ask some of the people I know down in IT from my work there.”

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Pondering the Implications

When Lou Corlin arrived at the station to start his air shift, he was surprised to see half a dozen people from IT in the offices, their laptops connected to the station computers via Ethernet cable. He hadn’t noticed any problems with the stream when his alarm went off.

One of the IT people was talking to Cindy, so asking her what was going on wasn’t an option. And all the other IT people looked far too busy to interrupt.

Nothing to do at this point but focus on doing his own job. Back in the creche you learned that principle early, from plenty of examples out of the history of America’s early space program.

And his job was to get ready to do his air shift, and then DJ the Rising Sun J-Pop Show to the best of his ability. Not a difficult task, but one in which mistakes could have definite consequences. All the DJ’s had taken their drubbings for leaving dead air because they hadn’t adequately planned their lineup for a moment away from the broadcast booth.

While he was waiting for Brenda Redmond to emerge from the DJ booth, Lou listened to the livestream playing on the stereo behind the receptionist’s desk. The audio quality on “Blackbird” sounded fine, including the blackbird singing.

However, it wouldn’t be as good an indicator of transmission quality as it would be on a station that was transmitting via actual radio waves. With Internet radio streaming, it just meant that the stereo was getting a good feed from the streaming server, which meant only two or three routers to hop. There simply wasn’t any good way for an Internet radio station to be sure how its stream was propagating over the millions of routers across the Earth-Moon system.

And then the door opened and out stepped Brenda, looking worried. “Good morning, Lou. I see you’ve noticed the IT people up here. I don’t know if you’ve been on the Web any this morning, but Shepardsport seems to be having trouble communicating with the rest of the Internet this morning.”

Lou realized his mind was beginning to race with alarm and quickly curbed it. “What kind of problems?”

“That’s what IT’s trying to figure out right now. Stephanie Roderick thought it was a DDOS attack, but now she’s saying there’s no sign of net traffic overage. At the moment, all we can do is keep broadcasting for the local audience and hope IT doesn’t have to reboot all the servers and routers.”

“Now that would be a major piece of downtime.” Lou looked over Brenda’s air-shift notes, checking for anything he should be aware of.

Then it was time to take over the DJ booth and line up his first set of the day. As he prepared to deliver the top-of-the-hour station identification, he wondered if this were some new kind of cyber attack. They’d weathered several DDOS attacks before, until IT had put in new software to foil the software that turned improperly secured comptuers into “zombie machines” sending spurrious requests to the target servers. But information security was always an arms race between the hackers and the sysops.

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A Moment of Awkwardness

All day Spruance Del Curtin kept thinking about his talk with Dr. Doorne. He’d gone to her office thoroughly expecting a bawling out, perhaps even being told that he would get a bad grade in the class. Instead, she was bringing him onboard in a major project, one that might even get him a publication credit.

Except he had to keep it an absolute secret. Not a word about it until she personally cleared him to discuss it. In some ways that restriction was almost worse than being bawled out or getting downgraded. Where was the fun in being involved in a really cool project if he couldn’t tell all the guys about it at supper? Or worse, couldn’t brag to the girls about it when he was trying to hook up with them?

It was still bothering him as he set up a set of songs so he could get out of the DJ booth and take a stretch. Especially since he couldn’t look like he was keeping a secret — it was pretty clear from what Dr. Doorne had said that arousing curiosity would get him into as much trouble as actually blabbing. Everything had to look perfectly normal, or he would be in even worse trouble than if he’d gone and announced it on the air.

So he walked down the corridor singing ZZ Top’s “I’m Bad, I’m Nationwide” along with the streamed broadcast playing from the stereo in the front office. Make it look like he was enjoying himself in typical Shep fashion, all about being hot with the girls.

And there was Lou Corlin, apparently dropping off some files, given the USB sticks he was handling. He broke off his conversation with the programming director. “Hey, Sprue, do you really think it’s wise to be bragging about driving around with four kitsune?”

Trust the DJ for the Rising Sun J-pop Show to think of “fox” in terms of the Japanese yokai rather than a smokin’ hot girl. Especially considering Chaffees were notoriously straight-laced, right there with Roosas and Glenns.

Except treating it like a dumb mistake on Lou’s part would only make things worse, especially considering the afternoon receptionist was a girl he might actually try for a date with. Unlike Cindy Margrave, who lived in a fellow Shep’s household and had to be regarded as a blood relation, Lexie belonged to the Schirra lineage, which made her fair game. Gotta play the cool dude in front of the chicks.

“That just makes things more challenging, don’t it?” Show off that big Shepard grin, get just a little closer to emphasize the height advantage.

Lou mumbled something about just joking, but it was clear he didn’t have a good comeback. Not that he’d be worried about scoring points when he had a steady girl over at Grissom City. Called herself Emiko and was a bigtime weeaboo.

Still, it was good to know he’d just made Lou back off. It almost made up for not being able to tell Lou about the real prize he’d gotten today.

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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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Document

A Little History

Shepardsport Pirate Radio started almost by accident. It was right as the Expulsions were really getting started. A bunch of us kids were sitting around in the big lounge in Miskatonic Sector, talking about the situation. Somebody wondered aloud how many people down there realized that this wasn’t a voluntary exodus, no matter what the Russian tsar might have intended when he issued his invitation.

So it went from just another bull session to a very earnest discussion of how we could get the word out about what was really happening. [laughs] When you get older, it’s easy to forget just how passionate teenagers can be about something that matters to them.

One of the guys, I think it was one of the Sheps but it could’ve been a Cooper or a Conrad, pipes up with the idea of an underground newspaper. Not surprising, since we’d been studying World War II in history class and Mrs. Townsend was having us read a book about the various resistance movements, including their various clandestine presses and newsletters. And there was a really popular teen-lit book right then about a school with a dysfunctional administration and how the kids circulated a secret newsletter about everything nobody could talk about.

Of course we knew we weren’t going to be printing up a physical paper. That was so twentieth century, and up here on the Moon, copy paper was a scarce resource anyway. But everybody’s got a computer up here, and HTML’s not that hard to learn, at least enough to put up a credible Website. Lou Corlin and a couple of the other guys with work responsibilities down in IT said they could do the fancy CSS to make it look like a professional newspaper’s website.

That was when Autumn Belfontaine overheard us talking and dropped in to ask us just how much traffic we really thought we could get for a straight-up digital newspaper. There were millions of blogs and billions of static websites, and most of them could count their monthly visitors in the hundreds. We needed to be able to offer our audience more, something they’d come for the enjoyment and then listen to the news while they were waiting for the next entertainment segment.

That was when she suggested a pirate radio station. She’d actually worked in radio, so she knew how a station would be run. She probably could’ve been our general manager if she’d wanted the job, but she was a reporter first, foremost and always, so she decided to be the news director and teach the rest of us how to be reporters and DJ’s.

The more we talked about our plans, the more I realized there was going to be a lot more nitty-gritty than just scheduling or even coming up with funding to pay royalties on our music. We’d need a place to set up a studio, and a lot of equipment, not to mention access to the bandwidth to transmit it back dirtside, since there was no way we could do an actual airwaves transmission like the old pirate radio stations on Earth.

No, this wasn’t a lark us kids could do with a half dozen laptops and some cheap mics. We were going to have to get the adults involved, which meant that Autumn was going to have to somehow get the senior leadership convinced that we were actually doing something serious and productive.

And then Luna Station blew up and the Kitty Hawk Massacre happened, and all of a sudden Captain Waite was wanting to talk to all of us about getting the truth out.

Brenda Redmond, “The Beginnings of Shepardsport Pirate Radio” from The Lunar Resistance: An Oral History. Kennedy University Press, Carpenter Point, Tycho Crater, 2059.

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Narrative

Who Knows What and Which?

The Shepardsport dining commons was crowded this evening. And it didn’t look like just a matter of people who had their lunches sent to their desks showing up now.

Lou Corlin looked over at the pilots’ table, crowded to capacity. He hadn’t seen it that full since Shepardsport was handling flights displaced by the cyber-attack on Slayton Field. Usually Shepardsport got mainly cargo landers, since Farside wasn’t exactly a tourist destination.

A lot of the local pilots preferred to sit with their families at one or another of the small round tables. Bill Hearne almost always sat with his family, and Sid Abernathy often joined his wife at one of the scientists’ tables.

Still, the sheer level of crowding made Lou uneasy, and not just because of the increased difficulty in finding a seat. Usually one of his clone-brothers would have a free seat at his table, but from the looks of things, he was going to have a hunt on his hands.

And then someone shouted his name. He turned to discover that no, it was not a fellow Chaffee, but a Shep.

What does Spruance Del Curtin want with me now?

Although Lou really didn’t want to sit with Sprue, giving him the cut in such a public setting would be rude in the extreme. And while Sheps could be incredibly competitive with one another, having one of their number dissed by a clone of a member of the third astronaut selection group might just be enough to get them to circle the wagons. And becoming a target of the mischief of Sheps would not be a pleasant experience.

Lou slid into the available seat. “What is it, Sprue?”

“What have you heard about the Glorianna?”

“Only what was on the announcement this afternoon.” Lou studied the Shep, wishing he could look through those buggy blue eyes to the mind behind them and see just what he was up to. Is he trying to lead me into speculating about what’s going on? “It does sound disturbing.”

“Disturbing is a mild way to put it.” Sprue didn’t even bother to hide the annoyance in his voice. Make it definite he wanted to gossip-monger, never mind how many times senior leadership had warned against passing rumors or speculating on partial information. “I was hoping you might know something, especially since you do your operational responsibility down in IT. I’m sure you get to see a lot of data going by.”

How to get this conversation into a parking orbit without blatantly shutting Sprue down? “Of course I do, but most of it’s pretty technical stuff. And anything from Medlab is covered by patient privacy law, so I’m not even cleared to see the metadata. I’m not even supposed to talk about how many cron jobs they’re putting through, because in theory that could allow someone to know what questions are worth asking.”

Sprue nodded, but the annoyance furrow remained between his eyebrows. “And you probably can’t tell me if any department’s been showing unusual levels of web traffic either. But you know as well as I do that all those public service announcements about sanitation didn’t come out of nowhere. I’m thinking that whatever bug got loose on that cruise ship, someone around here has known about it for the past several days.”

“That’s quite possible.” Lou considered how many times he’d had to run one of the several pre-recorded announcements over the past three air shifts. “But speculating on it isn’t helpful, and it could get both of us into some serious hot water with the higher-ups.” He cast a significant glance at the people who were beginning to look their way.

“Yeah, you’re probably right.” Sprue didn’t sound happy about having to make that admission, but he’d gotten in trouble more than once for things that gotten him taken off his air shifts as punishment. “But I think all of us ought to keep our eyes and ears open for anything significant.”

Lou didn’t like agreeing; it felt too much like promising something he shouldn’t. But at least it allowed him to move the conversation onto a more neutral subject.

Even so, he found that he was still thinking about the subject by the time dinner was over and he headed back to quarters to study for that upcoming test in DiffEq.

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Like a Distant Storm on the Horizon

As soon as Lou Corlin stepped out of the DJ booth, he was glad he’d just finished lining up a long set. Their news director had just emerged from her office, phone stuck to ear and a worried look on her face.

“I’ll be right up there.” Autumn Belfontaine paused, a thought furrow forming between her eyebrows. “No, I’m not going to tell anyone until I get up there and have a chance to talk to you. We need facts, not rumors and speculation.”

Finished with her conversation, she looked over at Lou and the receptionist, who had been bent over a tablet, apparently studying for a class. “We’ve got a developing situation, and Reggie wants to talk to me right now. You two hold down the fort while I’m gone.”

Although Lou wondered what would require a visit to the settlement’s commandant, he kept his professional face on. “Yes, ma’am.”

Not quite in unison with the receptionist, since she’d gotten surprised, but good enough. And then it was just the two of them.

Lou looked at Cindy, then at the flimsy partitions that walled off the station offices. Unlike the studio proper, the office area was most decidedly not soundproof. Which meant that he’d better watch what he said. “Looks like things are going to get interesting.”

Cindy twirled a stylus between her fingers. “It sounded like something bad’s happening. Like when they had the cyber-attack on the landers over at Slayton Field kind of nasty.”

Lou remembered that day. He’d just been finishing up his air shift when Autumn had come into the DJ booth and practically pushed him right off the mic. Even her trained professional-journalist voice had betrayed a hint of breathlessness as she reported the crash of the first lander.

And even then we thought it was just an accident.

“I think we’d better be very careful right now.” Lou cast a sharp look at the phone at Cindy’s elbow. Not her personal phone, which was lying beside her tablet, but the official station line. “Until we get definite word otherwise, our face to the outside universe is business as usual. In the meantime, I’d better grab my coffee break before this set runs out and the boss yells at me about having dead air.”

“Got it.” Cindy returned to her studying. Technically she wasn’t supposed to be studying during her work hours, but with the station manager off to Grissom City for some kind of training class, things had slacked up.