Tag: Reginald Waite

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Narrative

The Peril Grows Closer

Reggie Waite had become accustomed to the daily meetings in Medlab with Dr. Thuc. Sometimes Dr. Doorne would attend and present the latest prognostications of her statistical team, but she did not attend unless she had something new. Not surprising, given that statistical modeling was at best her third specialty, after radio astronomy and signals processing. She had a lot on her plate, especially for a woman with a young child, who’d come to motherhood later in life.

But the meat of their discussion was always the information Barbie Thuc was getting both through NASA and through her various medical sources, both official and unofficial. Again and again their discussion would go back to the curious gaps between the official and unofficial sources, the lacunae in the official accounts.

“They’re trying to keep it quiet, but we’ve had a really close call.” Dr. Thuc’s voice was calm and professional as always, but Reggie knew her well enough to pick up that hint of tension.

“What happened?”

“Apparently one of the tour companies had a client come down sick with this thing, they’re taking to calling it the diablovirus because those two big protein structures resemble a devil’s horns.” Dr. Thuc inclined her head toward the scanning electron micrograph that had become so familiar in these past weeks. “Just someone who was beginning training for spaceflight, not anyone who was set up for a flight. But they’re concerned enough about the possibility of contagion via their own staff that they’ve suspended all their flights for the next month, even the people who are in pre-flight quarantine.”

Reggie could imagine the consternation among those wealthy tourist types, discovering that the vacation they’d spent the last year or two training for was going to be delayed, perhaps indefinitely. But there could be no question of taking the risk, not when lunar settlements were places where a disease would spread like wildfire. Even the common cold, which could never be eradicated for the simple reason that the immune system needed something to keep it busy or it got into trouble, had a tendency to sweep through whole habitats every time it mutated enough that people’s antibodies no longer reacted to it.

“Damn. This mess is making me think of a book I read when I was a kid.” Reggie closed his eyes and could see the red-bound volume in the library at Witchcraft Heights Elementary School, the illustrations within it. “The family was on its way to Mars — it was one of the books that really started my excitement about space, back when America’s cloning program was still a burn-before-reading Cold War secret — and there’d been some kind of problem with the spaceship’s reactor. All the passengers had to huddle in this shelter that was a storeroom at the far end of the ship while the crew took care of the problem. There were these special lights that would turn red in the presence of radiation, and there was a whole row of them in the corridor outside of the shelter. One by one each turns red, and everyone’s starting to watch the one inside their shelter. And then, just as the last one outside is turning red, there’s an announcement that the reactor has been repaired, and the crew is coming to sweep the area of radiation.”

He paused, trying to get his mind back in the headspace of a youngster reading a book that must’ve come out in the 50’s, before the launch of Sputnik, when a lot was believable which had now become so encrusted in Zeerust that it was well-nigh impossible to suspend disbelief. “Of course the description of how radiation works was completely ridiculous, but for me as a kid, it was so scary, and then such a relief when the crewmen in their protective suits showed up with their radiation vacuum cleaners and the lamps stopped glowing read. I loved that book so much I must’ve checked it out and re-read it a dozen times before I left for junior high. And then I’ve never been able to find it again. When my brother Chris was going to school there, we went to parents’ night one time and I slipped into the library to look for it, but I couldn’t find it. And the title never stuck with. me, so I haven’t been able to look it up online, so I’m not even sure if it actually existed, or I’m confusing multiple books into one.”

Dr. Thuc gave him a sympathetic nod on that one. “Isn’t it interesting, how the strangest things will stick with us.”

Just as Reggie was about to say let’s hope this business doesn’t end up being one of them when his phone’s messenger app chimed. He pulled out his phone, and on the lock screen was a notification from his wife: We’ve got a major problem donw here.

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Narrative

Of Abandoned Vehicles and Empty Tents

Reggie arrived at the newsroom to find Autumn Belfontaine hunched over her laptop, watching a video. Although he couldn’t get a good view from his angle, it looked like it was playing on a local news station website. A female reporter in a windbreaker was talking to the camera in front of a tow truck hooking up to what looked like an old RV. Too bad Autumn was keeping the volume low enough that he couldn’t make out what the woman was saying.

However, it also meant that it was low enough that Autumn could hear his approach. She paused the video and stood up to face him. “Hi, Reggie. Is there something I need to go live with?”

“Not at the moment, but I think we’d better have a talk.” He glanced over to his wife, who’d paused to talk to one of the engineering staff. “Steffi, could you tell Autumn what you found out today?”

As Steffi explained about the e-mail, Autumn’s eyes widened. “So it’s not just the homeless population.” She gestured toward the frozen video on her laptop. “I’ve been visiting local TV and radio station websites from all over the country, and about half of them are reporting a sudden spike of illness in homeless camps. This one’s a human-interest story about a homeless vet, I think they said he fought in the Energy Wars, who’d been living in an old RV under an Interstate overpass in the Chicago area. They’re trying to locate next of kin to claim his remains and the possessions inside his vehicle, including his medals and citations.”

Reggie had his own memories of the Energy Wars, although he’d been a fighter pilot flying off aircraft carriers, not a ground-pounder. “Damn. Make it definite, someone is suppressing this news. I can still remember when I was fifteen and we had the big flu outbreak, the one they always blamed on the chaos after the fall of the Soviet Union. That was back when it was just the three networks, but they started running reports when the first big groups of cases showed up, and it wasn’t even all that deadly.”

“Then you want me to run this?”

“Write up a report and run it past me first. We may need to tweak the emphasis a little, but we definitely have to get it out that we’re looking at a very big picture. Big enough that I need to talk with Dr. Thuc about what precautions we need to start taking now.”

Autumn looked back to her laptop. “Then you think it could get up here?”

“We can’t discount the possibility. The Martian settlements should be safe, but it’s a three-day journey from Earth to the Moon. All it would take would be one person breaking the pre-flight quarantine.”

Yes, Autumn realized just what it would mean. Because pressurized volume was such a valuable commodity, people in lunar settlements lived in the sort of close quarters that were usually associated with extreme poverty on Earth, outside seagoing vessels and offshore drilling platforms. Worse, the life support systems would circulate a virus through the entire settlement, infecting everyone.

“I’ll get right on it.”

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Narrative

The Widening Shadow

Reggie Waite didn’t usually go down to IT to talk with his wife. As commandant of the settlement, he needed to avoid any appearances of favoritism. However, given the tenor of Steffi’s text, he’d decided that it wasn’t worth the stress to have her come up to his office.

Shepardsport’s IT department was located in the lowest levels of the settlement’s habitats, where they could use the Moon itself as a heatsink for cooling their fastest and most powerful number-crunchers. Here and then he passed doors opening onto rooms filled with racks of servers — but even these were run of the mill machines, busy with routine data applications, ranging from render farms to e-mail store and forward for the local Internet nodes. The real heavy iron was kept in secure rooms, well past the help-desk offices and data-center equipment.

Reggie found Steffi in her office, her face a mask of calm he knew at once to be false. When she greeted him at the door, her professional face stayed firmly in place, division head to commandant. Only when she closed the door did she let it slip.

“Thanks for coming down here, Reggie.” Her voice had that breathless sound of someone under severe emotional strain.

“What’s wrong, Steffi?”

“I just got an e-mail from an old friend at JPL. Things are getting really bad down in the LA Basin. Apparently that sickness that’s going around showed up in several different nursing homes all at once. They think it was a doctor who’d just flown back from some kind of professional conference and visited patients at all of them. But there are two nursing homes that he never visited, so there’s some speculation that some part-time workers carried it back and forth.”

Reggie recalled a recent e-mail from his father, mentioning having to reschedule an appointment because of illness at the client’s facility. “That’s not good.”

“No, it’s not.” Steffi moistened her lips with the tip of her tongue. “Right now they’re especially worried because a couple people at the Lab have family that work at those nursing homes. Siblings for the most part, a couple of parents who were looking for part-time work after they retired. Not someone they see every day, but close enough to visit on the weekends. Although one of the senior scientists had a daughter in high school who’d been volunteering at the one that got hit worst.”

Reggie considered what to say. It had been over two decades since he was working with JPL on the Dis Pater project, and he had no idea who some of these people were. However, it was possible that Steffi knew them, so he didn’t want to come across as overly clinical and insensitive. “Do they think she’s caught whatever this thing is?”

“Not yet, although with JPL’s flexibility about telecommuting, they’re apparently telling him he’s free to work from home if there’s any question of putting the girl under quarantine. And they’ve told all the janitors and support staff that they are not to try to be heroes and drag themselves in if they feel sick. They’re to call in sick, and the Lab will make sure that they’re covered if they run out of sick days.”

She looked Reggie straight in the eyes. “This thing is serious. Which makes me wonder why we’re not hearing a lot more of it from the Earthside news media. Some blogs here and there, but none of the major networks, not in the US, and not abroad.”

“I think the two of us need to have a serious talk with Autumn Belfontaine. I’d been counseling caution, but I’m starting to wonder if we’re looking at a coverup.”

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Document

A Letter from Home

From: George Waite (gwaite@waiteassociates.com)

To: Reginald Waite (rwaite@nasa.gov)

Subject: A Cause for Concern

I hope this message finds you well. I’ve hesitated to write to you about my concerns, since I know you have many responsibilities occupying your attention.

However, I think you should know this latest piece of news. I had been doing a little design work on the new construction at the Shady Rest Retirement Home, as much to keep myself busy as anything. This morning I had been scheduled to meet with the director to go over the final plans and sign off on the contract for the work.

However, just as I was ready to leave the house, I received a call from Mr. Markwalter, asking to postpone the meeting. Apparently they’ve been having some kind of illness going through their community the last several days, and he was concerned about my being exposed to it. I reminded him that I’d survived rolling a Jeep back in ‘Nam, and if that couldn’t kill me, a bug wasn’t likely to.

Mr. Markwalter was insistent, telling me that he was trying to minimize the number of people coming and going, for the protection of both the residents and potential visitors. We’re tentantively rescheduling our meeting for the first part of next week, hoping that this illness will have run its course by then.

I will keep you posted in case there is any more information of note. Your mother says to tell Steffi and the kids hello.

Take care.

Dad

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Narrative

A Warning Against Nosiness

Reggie Waite studied his younger clone-brother. “Good afternoon, Sprue. Do you have any idea why I’ve called you in here today?”

Spruance Del Curtin tensed, a subtle movement barely visible through his track suit. “No.”

Yes, there was a subtle hesitation, a drawing out of the negative particle with a little too much emphasis. Subtle cues, but easier to recognize in your own flesh and blood. Sprue wasn’t trying to falsely deny a definite positive. Instead, he was trying to brush away a multitude of possibilities.

“I was expecting that answer.” Reggie kept his voice mild, knowing it would keep Sprue wondering. “No doubt there are so many places you’ve been sailing a lee shore that you’re not sure which one’s the problem.”

Make that definite — Sprue had quite a few things on his mind. Now the question was whether to openly confront him about his pump people for information, or to leave things ambiguous enough that he’d might decide to tighten up on a number of things where he was playing fast and loose.

As Reggie expected, Sprue was far too cagey to blurt anything out. “It seems like someone’s always after me for something. One person’s unhappy that I’m not studying enough to suit them, and another’s complaining that I’m showing people up. It’s pretty hard to know what’s the real problem.”

“In which case, maybe you ought to do some serious thinking about just what you’re doing, and why it bothers people.” Reggie looked straight into his eyes. “Consider this a warning that some people are not pleased with your attitude, and things may go poorly for you if they do not see some change. Dismissed.”

Sprue managed to choke out something shaped like a promise to do better, then left in a little more haste than was appropriate. However, calling on him on a violation of protocol at this point would not be a good idea.

Still, they were going to need to curb his curiosity. That or bring him in on things, which would require being confident he knew when to keep his mouth shut.

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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.”

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Narrative

A Touch of Ice to the Heart

Reggie Waite could tell that something was bothering his wife the moment they met just on the way to the Shepardsport dining commons for supper. “Is something bothering you, Steffi?”

Her gaze dipped away for a moment, a sure sign of stress. “I just got an e-mail from Dad. Aunt Margaret’s not doing well.”

Reggie had to think a moment to place her — he and Steffi had come up here right after their marriage, and he’d not had much opportunity to become acquainted with his in-laws. “What’s happened?”

“Apparently she went to some kind of program a few days ago, and last night she got sick. Like really, really sick, real fast.” Steffi moistened her lips. “And she’s always been so active, and so healthy for a woman of eighty-three. Sure, she lives in a senior community, but she’s in an apartment of her own, not assisted living. And she only moved there because the maintenance on the house just got to be too much after Uncle Michael passed away.”

Reggie considered the information. “Any idea what the program was?”

“Some kind of inspirational speaker who’d just come in from a stay at an ashram somewhere in northern India. Dad wasn’t too clear on that. He never was too fond of Aunt Margaret being into all the hippie woo-woo stuff. When we were little kids, he told her she could see us only if she promised not to breathe a word of any of that nonsense in our hearing.”

Reggie could understand. He had a few relatives his immediate family didn’t talk about, including a cousin of some degree on his mother’s side who’d gone to Canada to avoid the draft in the later years of the Vietnam War. “Do you think–“

“That it has something to do with that cruise ship the Navy had to rescue? Hardly likely. As far as I know, that motivational speaker had flown straight from one of the big Indian airports to O’Hare. Maybe a layover somewhere while they refueled, but certainly no visits to cruise ships.”

“Not directly, but if the symptoms are similar, there’s likely to be a connection. I think we’d better pass the word to Medlab after supper, at least give them another data point.” As they approached the big double doors of moonglass etched with the Shepardsport emblem, the squid with its tentacles wrapped around a map of Farside, Reggie noted the crowd gathered here.

Hardly surprising when one considered the dining commons was the largest single pressurized area in the habitat, other than some of the big work bays for landers. As such, the dining commons was a central place to socialize, both during meals and for meetings and other activities.

And if there were something going around and it got up here, it would become grand central for infection. Definitely he was going to need to talk about this latest news not only to Barbie Thuc, but also to Betty Margrave over at Safety and Security.

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Narrative

A Meeting of Import

Autumn Belfontaine didn’t know when she’d gotten into the habit of counting the airlocks as she went from one part of Shepardsport to another. However, it had become a useful way of marking her own progress on any journey of significant distance. Go from one sector to another and you went through an airlock. Go between modules within a sector and you went through more airlocks.

From the radio station offices to the commandant’s office was eight airlocks. Since there was no need to wait for pressure to equalize, it didn’t take all that long to go through them, but there’d been trouble with people overriding the safety interlocks to get through faster, never mind it defeated the purpose of having the settlement modularized.

She arrived to find Captain Waite already in conference with Dr. Thuc, Shepardsport’s Chief Flight Surgeon. From the sound of it, telling the kids to keep a lid on it had been the right thing to do.

As a civilian, Autumn didn’t have to formally report to the commandant upon arrival as pilots did. All the same, the various courtesies helped to smooth the difficulties of life in such close quarters.

Reggie gestured for her to take the other seat. “We’ve got a problem on our hands.” He turned to Dr. Thuc. “Barbie?”

“I’ve just received alerts from both Jerusalem and Tokyo about an emergent disease in multiple places in Central and South Central Asia. I’ve queried Star City, and they’re telling me they’re waiting for a report from Academician Voronsky before making any definite announcement.”

A sudden chill gripped Autumn. Nikolai Voronsky was the Russian Empire’s foremost expert in genetic engineering, having learned from his adoptive father, the notorious Vladilen Voronsky. If Star City was getting him involved…

Autumn forced her mind to stay focused, professional, remember what she’d learned about contagious diseases from reporting on that nasty flu during her first full-time job. “What kind of figures are we looking at?”

“Right now information’s pretty spotty. Hardly surprising when a lot of those areas are still held by die-hard fanatics, and the ones that aren’t have governments notorious for corruption and misinformation. But even in the absence of hard data, the anecdotal reports are concerning, in particular the ones of whole villages empty, the goats and chickens wandering freely.”

“That’s not good.” Autumn tried to remember any mention of such things on the news wires. “Why haven’t we heard anything about this until now?”

“Actually, there has been a fair amount of discussion over the past few weeks, if you’ve been following the medical blogs.” Dr. Thuc’s expression darkened. “That’s where I got the stories about abandoned mountain villages. Why none of the official sources have been mentioning these things is hard to say. The local governments may well be covering it up rather than look weak. It may not be considered newsworthy elsewhere, or there may have been a decision to keep quiet rather than risk panic.”

“Understood.” Autumn recalled a journalism ethics class. “The ’76 Swine Flu outbreak was before my time, but we still study the effects of careless reporting on the reaction to it.”

She paused, considering not just the information she’d been given, but the spaces between. “If this is going to be something serious, why isn’t the head of Safety and Security here?”

Reggie jumped in to answer that. “Right now she’s dealing with a problem down in the port facility. As soon as that’s dealt with, we’ll be briefing her. But right now, we need to work out a plan for how we’re going to release information on this situation, so you can lay it out to the rest of the station personnel.”

Autumn fought down an urge to bristle. No, there was no criticism of the professionalism of the DJ’s, just the need to make sure they had a coordinated approach. “Completely understood. The worst thing we can have is contradictory information coming out of different sources. Once people start wondering who’s lying, they lose trust in all sources.”