Tag: Stephanie Roderick

Categories
Narrative

Unnerving Developments

Autumn Belfontaine hadn’t really known what to think when Steffi Roderick had called and requested for her to come down to IT as soon as possible. Autumn had been in the middle of preparing afternoon and evening drive time newscasts, and while there was no huge time pressure, she liked to do them in one sitting for better cohesiveness.

But one of the critical skills of a journalist was the ability to be flexible. Breaking news didn’t follow anybody’s schedule, and from the sound of Steffi’s voice, whatever had just happened was both urgent and worrisome.

Now she was waiting while Steffi finished talking with several of her immediate subordinates. From the sound of it, they were talking about fallback options, but exactly what she could not determine.

Finally they wound up their conference and the three of them came filing out. As soon as Steffi came out, she looked directly at Autumn. “Glad you were able to come down so quickly. Come inside so we can talk.”

“As urgent as you sounded, I thought I’d better not delay.”

“It looks like things may be changing rapidly. Right before I called you, I was in a conference call with the IT chiefs of all the major lunar settlements, verifying what we were observing and determining our best strategies for dealing with it.”

“So we’re looking at a major change in our situation?”

“Actually, Earth’s. We’ve been picking up cascades of micro-outages in a number of major websites. E-commerce and social media in particular, but also some major news websites. We think what we are seeing is the Internet shifting to mirror sites in other locations when they lose connectivity to their primary server farms.”

“That doesn’t sound good.” Autumn recalled her old friend who was struggling to keep a radio station on the air, and what little she’d been able to offer him in the way of suggestions. “Especially if they’re losing power. Those places are supposed to have backup generators.”

“Which have finite amounts of fuel, and if they’re not getting replenished, they’ll soon be offline. We’re not seeing as bad of problems as we might, mostly because the most popular websites all are mirrored on servers up here to eliminate light-speed lag. We’re talking about finding ways to duplicate as much functionality as we can manage, but some of it is going to be tricky. We’re talking to legal teams, making sure we don’t violate copyrights in the process, but it’s really concerning that we might suddenly lose critical parts of our information infrastructure. In fact, right after we get done here, I’m going to Engineering and Medlab and making sure that they have all their essential manuals and other documents on local servers.”

“I don’t blame you at all. I’ll work on finding other ways of keeping in contact with my stringers down on Earth, so I can still get news even if all the major news websites and wire services go down.”

“Good. At least we’re used to jerry-rigging our way through things, so this should be just another challenge.”

Categories
Narrative

Other Means of Validating Data

When Ursula Doorne first started advanced studies in astronomy, digital imaging technologies were really starting to come into their own in optical astronomy. Although she’d already specialized in radio astronomy, she had to work with the optical astronomers on a regular basis, and a lot of them were still very much of the glass photographic plate school. To them, there was no way a microchip could possibly compare with silver halide emulsion in capturing images.

By that time she already had enough background in electrical engineering to have a grasp of all the benefits of digital imaging. However, most of the most adamant members of the faculty were also very senior, and not exactly someone a student wanted to get crosswise with. Although given her specialty, it was unlikely they would be on her committee, there were other ways for someone of their stature to ruin a career before it even got started.

So she’d kept her head down and avoided them as much as possible. Which was probably why she’d spent almost as much time with the electrical engineering people as even the radio astronomers. At least there she didn’t have to watch her step quite so much, because the EE people weren’t going to be talking over coffee with the very people who most irritated her.

And that was probably why she often felt as comfortable down here in IT as she did in the Astronomy department offices. Especially when she needed to talk signals processing and data, these were her people. Of course Steffi Roderick was more of an AI specialist, but given how data-driven most AI was, especially when it involved autonomous robots like deep-space probes, she had a solid grounding in ways to deal with suspect data.

“We can certainly take a look at it. Just having more eyes looking at data helps catch anything that’s out of kilter. But there are a few things we can do that would be able to catch some of the less common instrumentation errors. Not perfect, but better than nothing while we’re waiting to get something else in position. By the way, you haven’t released any of this?”

“Only to the space weather people, as a precaution, and with a very clear caveat that it is not for general distribution. If we’re majorly wrong about some aspect of the Sun’s function, they need to know so they can adjust their forecasting accordingly.”

“That’s good to know. If we do find evidence of errors, it’s much easier if we don’t have to worry about retracting any pre-prints or poster sessions.”

“Don’t worry. I haven’t forgotten the AXIL fiasco.” Ursula paused, looked directly at Steffi. “Were you at JPL yet when that happened?”

“No, I was still finishing up my degree, but we heard about it. One of my professors discussed the sensor issues in class, since he had been one of the designers of the AXIL sensor system. Interesting days.”

“Yes, interesting days indeed.”

Categories
Narrative

Days of Future Past

As Steffi Roderick walked back to her office, she thought over her conversation with Lou. He’d been trying hard to sound like the very model of probity, but he wasn’t doing quite as well as he thought he was. If anything, his responses had sounded too casual, too matter-of-fact, as if he were trying to make her think that there was nothing going on, nothing to see.

It didn’t help that his geneset coded for a very open face. Steffi still remembered when she first encountered his ur-brother. She’d been working at JPL at the time, having just come into it from a stint with Mitsubishi’s US division, where they built Blue Gemini spacecraft on contract for NASA in the old McDonnell-Douglass building in St. Louis.

It had been a big deal to have the NASA Administrator himself visit the Lab, especially since he was a famous astronaut rather than a bureaucrat or politician like his predecessors. Everyone knew why President Dole had chosen him in the wake of the Moonbase disaster — she wanted a new broom to sweep clean, and knew she was dealing with a man who’d had his own experience with sloppy work leading to disaster.

Only later, after he’d retired and settled in Silicon Valley, had she gotten the opportunity to make a more personal acquaintance of the man, thanks to her ties with Toni Hargreaves. Although they’d never been close, it was astonishing how much of him she recognized in Lou and the other clone-brothers.

Probably because you did spend a fair amount of time with Toni and Cather, at least until you transferred to Johnson.

Steffi shrugged. At this point, most of that was past history. Still, she did wonder just what Lou didn’t want to talk about. She had a good idea that Spruance Del Curtin was still up to mischief, no matter how hard everybody tried to keep him busy. But now was not the time to confront him.

Categories
Narrative

Some Questions

It hadn’t been ten minutes after the conversation with Juss Forsythe when the boss showed up at the hardware help desk. Not the tech support supervisor, but the head of IT herself.

“Good afternoon, Mr. Corlin.” Although she was smiling, the formal address suggested trouble was in the offing. “I see you and Mr. Forsythe were having a conversation earlier.”

Although she didn’t specifically accuse him of having been caught visiting while he was supposed to be working, why else would she remark on his conversation with Juss? Which meant he would have to watch what he said, make sure he didn’t sound defensive.

Better to make it sound routine and unremarkable. “We were just discussing some problems both our departments are dealing with.” No, better not elaborate. More information might make it sound interesting enough to pursue further.

Steffi just nodded, a curt up-and-down movement. “Is there anything I need to know about these problems?”

Lou’s heart sped up, and he hoped his face hadn’t betrayed that moment of alarm. “We have things taken care of.”

No, she did not look convinced. “If it has to do with a Shep, please don’t think you can’t talk to me about it, just because I’m married into the Shepard lineage.”

Make that definite she probably suspected they were talking about Sprue. However, she was leaving him a face-saving out, rather than making an Issue about it. Which meant he’d better take that opportunity, thank her, and reassure her that he’d let her know if things reached the point she needed to be involved.

Still, once she was gone and definitely out of earshot, Lou breathed a heartfelt sigh of relief.

Categories
Narrative

Patterns

Network activity logs weren’t usually part of Steffi Roderick’s regular checks, unless there was trouble with the network. However, given the situation right now, she had been doing a little more tracking than usual, trying to see how usage patterns had changed since the beginning of the pandemic.

It was interesting to notice how certain departments, especially in the sciences, tended to have sudden spikes all at once. She could often predict when there would be a major discovery announced, simply because one science department had a whole lot of network activity, like Astronomy was having right now.

But some of the others were more puzzling, popping up and then vanishing. Occasionally one particular device would show up in several locations, which suggested someone was doing a lot of work on something while waiting for various activities to begin.

Obviously the data would need to be anonymized if it were to be given to anyone else to analyze. But right now some of it was interesting in other ways. In particular, certain people doing some unusual searches that seemed to suggest they had some awareness of matters that were currently being kept under embargo, and were trying to find out.

In fact, it made her wonder if it was time to mention Spruance Del Curtin’s activities to certain people in authority over him. On the other hand, without definite evidence that he was actually in breach of any rules, it would be tricky to get the intended corrective effect. Yanking him in for a bawling-out might just as easily breed resentment.

Categories
Narrative

Finding a Way to Fix It

Normally Lou Corlin did his troubleshooting in the room right behind IT’s hardware help desk. He wasn’t an actual bench tech, although he wouldn’t be surprised if he’d get tabbed to train for it. But today he’d gotten nabbed and brought down to work on some equipment deeper in the IT department, where only authorized people were supposed to be going.

At least he was working directly under one of the senior repair techs, which meant getting told stuff like “hold this wire” or “hand me the #0.0 Torx screwdriver.” Stuff that was well within his present capabilities, even if he’d rather be doing any of several other tasks up front.

But he’d been the one called down here, probably because they knew a Chaffee wouldn’t argue or give them any static. He recalled Juss Forsythe telling him about being given the task of sorting out an entire tool kit that had been returned from an EVA dumped into three buckets coated in moondust. Juss was pretty sure Ken had given him that task for pretty much the same reason: he was an agreeable sort of guy who would do the job and do it right.

They were just winding up whatever they were supposed to be accomplishing and closing the machine back up for tests when Steffi Roderick walked in. “Looks like you’re coming right along there. At least we’re not trying to repair a forty-year-old line printer that’s been out of production so long you can’t even find spares.”

Before he could even consider whether he might be speaking out of turn, Lou said, “That sounds like an interesting one.”

“Oh yes, it was interesting all right, in the sense of the proverbial curse.” Steffi’s mouth quirked into a wry grin. “I was a junior by that time, and I was working in the computer rooms. We all wondered why Purdue was still running that thing, considering this was well before eBay, so you couldn’t just do a quick search and find a used part someone halfway across the country was selling. But that thing was still printing up jobs for several of the mainframes, which was where a lot of the science and engineering stuff was being done. And that meant we’d have some senior professors seriously unhappy with us when they’d come in and discover their printouts weren’t available because the line printer was down again.

“I can imagine. I’ve had to deal with people from the science departments here when their equipment was down. Some of them can be really, really cranky, especially when you tell them it’s going to take a few days and they’re trying to beat a deadline on paper submissions for a big conference.”

“Oh, yeah. If anything, it was even worse, because they sort of understood when their equipment wasn’t working properly, but they expected the university’s stuff to just work. The last year I was working there, we were getting pretty creative working out solutions to hold it together and coax a little more work out of it. A couple years later, someone told me that they got rid of it right after I graduated.”

“Figures. Just figures.”

Categories
Narrative

Assessing the Damage

Steffi Roderick wasn’t sure when exactly she started becoming alarmed about the reports coming in from Earth — or the lack of reports from some areas. Not just the news reports, or the various confidential reports from various government agencies, but the reports that were logged on the various network devices in the process of managing the flow of information on the Internet.

Dropped packets were such a common phenomenon that it was hardly worth the bother to log them. Especially on radio links, there were so many forms of interference that you just built a certain amount of capacity into your systems to resend dropped packets.

Of more concern were the logs of e-mail bounces, 404 errors on websites and the like. You always had a certain amount, although a lot less than when she’d been working in one of Purdue’s computer rooms. Back in those days, almost every e-mail provider and webhosting service had hard limits on the resources you could use. She still remembered what a big thing it had been when several of the big commercial e-mail providers had upped their mailbox limits from 10 megabytes to 100. Suddenly she wasn’t constantly dealing with kids all upset because important e-mails kept bouncing.

And now she was getting more failure messages in a day than she typically got in a month. Some of it was mailboxes or URLs not responding, but an astonishing amount of those messages were one or another version on “too many hops.” Which meant that the routers were having a lot more trouble making connections, to the point they hit limits that were intended to prevent infinite loops.

Yes, a lot of them were in countries where Internet connectivity had always been thin on the ground. But it wasn’t just the remote village where Internet connectivity meant the bus that came through every day, which had a WiFi hotspot and some basic store-and-forward capacity, or maybe even actual broadband equipment to provide a brief moment of live Internet. No, some of these problems were cropping up in areas where industrial civilization was old. Parts of Europe, for instance.

So she’d contacted Toni Hargreaves. They’d talked about the possibilities, and worked out a way to do an assessment of connectivity issues in the global Internet.

The data, both visual and numerical, that Toni had just sent over was not reassuring. Yes, the Internet was continuing to route around damage — it was originally designed to degrade gracefully and maintain as much connectivity as possible in the case of a nuclear war between the US and the old Soviet Union — but there was an awful lot of damage out there. Just what was going on that it had become that severe?

Was the toll of the diablovirus bad enough that there weren’t enough technical people to maintain the Internet backbone in some areas? Or were other things going on that she wasn’t hearing about, that were being brushed under the rug, even forcibly censored. She’d heard rumors of fighting over food, over medicines, over gasoline, but so far she’d never gotten any definite reports — and no, she didn’t consider fragmentary video from Third World countries to be definite reports.

Which meant she now needed to give some really hard consideration to finding out just what the situation was on the ground. Who could she even contact, who would be able to give her straight answers if the government were putting a cone of silence on things?

Categories
Narrative

Get ‘er Done

Having dropped off the data with Autumn Belfontaine, Steffi continued through the corridors of Engineering with Ken Redmond. “I’m not that much of a statistician, but it was interesting to see the patterns in the distribution of network speeds and disruptions. I’d expected a lot of Africa and Asia to have trouble keeping their networks up. Until the recent mini-sat constellations, a lot of those countries didn’t even have Internet outside their major cities. But I’d expected better of Europe.”

Ken gave her a wry smile. “You must not have done much traveling back when you were still on Earth.”

“I was pretty busy, but I did go abroad to some conferences–“

“In major cities, with people who had a Western education, often at universities in the US. Not out in the hinterland, working with people who’re living the way their ancestors did since time immemorial. Now there’s an eye-opener for you.” Ken paused as if considering what he was about to say. “Back in the Energy Wars, I did a tour of duty in the Middle East. We were at a base right near one of the bigger cities, and one of the things I really remember is how, whenever anything went wrong, everyone would wait for someone in charge to come and give orders. No one wanted to be the guy who stuck his neck out and tried something that might work.”

Steffi’s expression must’ve been more transparent than she realized, because Ken responded, “It’s a lot more common than you think, and not just in Third World countries. Heck, half of Europe is damn close to it, just not as crude about it. But you go to Germany or Sweden or any of those countries, visit an office and need something copied, only the copier’s jammed. In any American office, someone would be opening the thing up and digging the paper out to get it running again. Over there, only the person with the proper authorization can even touch the inner workings of the copier.”

“Come to think of it, that would go a long way to explain why almost all the connections that seemed pretty jury-rigged looked to be in the US. Some Canadian ones, a couple from Australia and New Zealand, but that was about it.”

Categories
Narrative

Of Resilience and Antifragility

When Autumn had talked with Lou Corlin, she’d expected that it would take a while to get the data, if it was even possible. IT had a lot of work on its plate already, and this job was more a matter of curiosity. So it was better to spend the time developing some contacts in the Astronomy department so she could follow up on Sprue’s lead without having to out him as the leak.

Being a proctor down at the testing center did give her one advantage — she already had established contacts with plenty of research scientists up here. Even if they weren’t in the Astronomy department, most of them had working relationships with people there. So much of science these days was heavily interdisciplinary, and Shepardsport was still small enough that it was more like a small town.

She’d just finished talking with a physicist who’d immediately started geeking out on her about his specialty, magnetohydrodynamics. From what she could extract, it had definite applicability to the Sun, and to stars in general, which had gotten his name on a number of astronomy papers as a contributing author. However, most of his knowledge was sufficiently technical that she’d been hard-pressed to make heads or tails of it. Sure, she had the general astronomy classes everyone up here had to take, but it sure didn’t give her the background to really grasp it.

So she’d decided to take a break and stretch her legs. As news director, she was salaried and didn’t have to worry about being on the clock like the hourly employees.

As she stepped out of the station’s front door, she saw Ken Redmond and Steffi Roderick walking down the main Engineering corridor, talking in low voices. Assuming it was something private, she turned the other direction, only to have Steffi call out her name.

“I was going to drop this off with Maia, but since you’re here, I thought I’d give it to you in person.”

It was a USB stick. “Um, thanks. I gather this is some data I’ve asked for.”

“The project you’d approached Lou about, related to Internet connectivity and how it has degraded since the beginning of the pandemic. I had some of our programmers write up a script to systematically ping IP addresses all across the system. I did some preliminary statistical analysis on it, and yes, there are definitely patterns in it. From the looks of it, we’ve lost whole regions. Some of them were to be expected, in countries where the tech base was always fragile, but we’ve had some surprising ones, especially in Western Europe. However, the US is holding together better than would be expected, although from some of the response times, we may be looking at a lot of jerry-rigged connections.”

Ken was nodding in agreement. “Not surprising. The Internet was originally a Defense Department project to create a decentralized communications system that would hold together even if numerous major cities were destroyed in a nuclear attack. Just like the old Timex watches, it takes a licking and keeps on ticking.”

Categories
Narrative

Network Degradation

Lou Corlin had arrived at work a little early today, figuring that he could get ahead of the situation for a change. However, he’d no more than started taking stock of the situation when he got a phone call. Not on the official IT department phone, but his personal phone.

He was surprised to discover that it was Autumn Belfontaine. Why would she call his personal line when she knew he would be at work right now?

Still, he was technically three minutes before the beginning of his shift down here, so he could take a personal call without any trouble. “Hello, Autumn. What’s going on?”

“What kind of network analysis software do you have access to?”

“Pretty much everything that’s legal for civilians to have, although some of it is the sort of thing that would get questions raised if I were using it.”

“OK, is it pretty much limited to the local networks here in Shepardsport, or could you run scans on networks elsewhere?”

Lou had to pause a moment to consider how to answer it. “I’ve never had to do any scans that go beyond our own systems, but I’m pretty sure it would be possible. What are you looking at?”

“I’m noticing that an awful lot of the local news websites are either intermittently available or have gone down altogether. I keep wondering if I can’t get to them because the servers have crashed, or if whole segments of the Internet are failing.”

“OK.” Lou considered the implications of that information. “Are there any patterns in the locations that are failing? I know that a lot of companies use webhosting companies in other cities, and the physical servers are often located in rural areas where electricity is cheaper, which are often some distance from the company’s business offices. But if you’ve noticed patterns, it would at least give us a start.”

That got an awkward pause. “Let me do a little looking around and put together a list. Right now it’s more of a hunch, one of those right-brain intuitions that sees a pattern as a whole, the sort that says something’s wrong to a very ancient part of the brain.”

It wasn’t like Autumn to go off half-cocked, which suggested that she hadn’t realized the implications until she was talking with him as an IT person, not an on-air personality for Shepardsport Pirate Radio. But Lou wasn’t going to criticize her — she didn’t have all that much training in IT, and certainly not that much in the operation of online networks. So he let her wind up the conversation and get the necessary data together to send to him.

It was only when the connection terminated that he realized he’d been standing here taking what was fundamentally a business call while he still wasn’t checked in. Which meant that officially he would appear to be late.

Even as he was considering whether it was worth it to ask for his official timesheet to be amended, the door opened and in walked Steffi Roderick. “What’s going on? You’re not the sort of person to be taking personal calls while you’re on the clock.”

“Um, actually it wasn’t a personal call.” Lou explained about Autumn Belfontaine’s query. “Would it be possible to do a general scan of the terrestrial Internet to see what parts are still up, and whether it correlates with reports we’re getting through other channels of whole regions that seem to be shutting down?”

“That’s a pretty ambitious task. Let me do a little research of my own while Autumn puts together her list of news sites that have gone dark. We may just have something important going on here.”