Day 1 through 15 of 30

The Ark of 1984's Future
By James E. D. Cline
Copyright © 2005 J E D Cline
(Author's note: This was originally written in participation with the NanoWritersMonth 2005 event, with the goal to creatively and spontaneously write a 50,000-word novel during the calendar 30 days of November. This was achieved, first year for me. The setting for this novel is within the larger novel begun the previous November, a time range between the construction of the prototype "KESTS to GEO" (Space Carousel Escalator to GEO) in Ecuador, and to the time of the defense of the transportation structure by inhabitants of the cities in GEO, which is where the original (but later time frame) story, "Spacetrains are for Peacetime" begins. The writing mode was to identify the significant characeristics of corporations, politics, and economic systems as I experienced them in my life, then push those characteristics a bit to the extreme, and write the plot around that, centering around my long time technical design for a new kind of space access.)

The Ark of 1984's Future
By James E. D. Cline
Copyright © 2005 J E D Cline

The TANFL mega political corporation board room was bland as the day’s have become, Rationallo thought, impatient for the after work excitement to start. The corporation, efficiently ever guided by its namesake motto, “There Ain’t No Free Lunch", had succeeded in its profit raising project by eliminating R&D expenses, and by mutual agreement of its member corporations, no innovations would happen to shift the balance of power between them. So the money that would have gone into R&D went into the salaries and pockets of the investors, sure, but that had started 2 decades ago, and so sameness was everywhere, consistency was law, predictability was maximized, few surprises happened, all the ducks were kept in a row. Yet the downside was it was boring, bland. His job was easy; even he, the eldest son of one of the founders of the TANFL Political Corporation, had to work for a living, it was the law, everybody works or get sent early to the digestion tanks, along with the other hydrocarbon waste material produced.

He mulled over the rumor that the rival megacorporation was up to something, claiming that they would be able to provide new livingspace for people, use solar power to totally recycle trash, be able to actually again grow food agriculturally and no longer need the digestion tanks to survive. They must be crazy to think people would believe that kind of lies. Only the TANFL Corporation could create any big project, and Rationallo knew that no such thing was even the slightest in the works.

His job was to count the virtual money that the TANFL Political Corporation made each day, and post it for membership to use to see how much money they would have extra for the day’s spending among the Elite Rich.

Now it was workday’s end, and he hurried to meet up with his friend Guardiano. Eager to change to doing something adventurous and not boring, the two went to the secret weekly meeting of the Leroy Brown Society. The secret auditorium was crowded, the air of excitement high in the room, as they saluted the flag and sang the National Anthem, then followed by the organization’s motto song, “Bad, bad, Leroy Brown, baddest man in the whole darn town...” Everybody knew that the adventure coming up was to stage an accident to one of the rival political corporation “3Musketeers”. That bunch were deserving of destruction, as it was rumored they even accepted employees’ ideas for new products, and got them patented by the corporation, to sell as innovative products on the black market, better products than made by the member TANFL member corporations. And gave bonus to the employees who had the ideas and made them happen! all this in clear defiance of the standards set by the RichElite who were the big winners in life and therefore the ones correct. Such defiant unpatriotic lawlessness deserves to be destroyed; if the police won’t do it, then the Leroy Brown Society has to.

The plan had been in the works for almost 2 years now. Every operation they performed must never be traced to them; that was a prime rule, and no such operation had ever yet been traceable to them. It was comforting to know that they also had sufficient judges in their control as to be able to free anyone unlucky to get caught, but that would be a disgrace even so. Tonight would be a big night of real action, and in the confusion Rationallo and Guardiano planned to grab an extra wife each, to be hidden away from society, the women thought to have perished with the others.

Over in the Worker’s Quarter of the city, 8 million people occupied one forth of the city’s land, the other 3/4 of land was owned and occupied by the 300,000 people of the Rich Elite class.

Standing at the edge of the Worker's Quarter as if defiantly, the headquarters of the 3Musketeers political corporation stood, even owning its own building.

Artesiana was new to the workforce, barely turned 17, yet was full of eagerness for the job. She had proven her aptitude for controlling the movements of the heavy machinery that forged the steel sections of their products. And she was full of enthusiasm for the 3Musketeers Political Corporation’s human resources meetings. Fondly remembering how each meeting started with a pledge of allegiance to the nation, then after shouting the 3 Musketeers’ motto of “One for all, and all for one”, singing “16 Tons” as the group song. She already liked most of her coworkers and especially her boss, Idealiana. Artisiana had finished gaining 15 minutes ahead of scheduled output and so was taking an early break, outside the building, munching down some jellybean stimulants, and waved to her boss through the window of the bosses office, just when the Wham! happened, the roof caved in most of the building. In astonishment Artisiana saw two men smash into her boss office, grab Idealiana and her Secretary and run out with them, then that part of the building collapsed too, and all burst into flame. Artisiana hid in the bushes, realizing it all was contrived and she was in danger too; from there she saw the two men jump into a truck, shoving Idealiana and the other lady in with them, and the truck sped off. The license plate was hidden, but Artisiana noted the kind of truck and that it had an unusual holder on it, the kind used when a vehicle carries a flag in a parade. She had seen such a truck before, it had been near the front of an All-City parade, an armored vehicle carrying high mucky-mucks of the TANFL Political Corporation, the “There Ain’t No Free Lunch” flag waving proudly from that flag stanchion on the truck. She slipped away from the building’s ruin, collapsed and aflame, clearly it was gutted with no one left alive in it by now. Her new job gone, all her new friends gone. Except Idealiana, maybe she was still alive, but where? Carefully, she would go look, in time. Savoring the last of the jellybean stimulant candies, she resolved that there would be more such candies at break times at a new building built there again. Someday.

The 3 Musketeers Political Corporation’s vehicles were multipurpose, both as delivery trucks and commute for employees. Artisiana went to her truck, which had already been loaded and was far from the building; she would have driven it that evening to deliver their manufactured goods, then drive it home for the evening. She hid in the truck until the fire trucks, ambulances and news vehicles had left, then drove it home.

The next morning, she examined the TANFL news reports, which said that a freak unavoidable accident had happened, an out of control heavy vehicle from the TANFL side of town had smashed into the 3 Musketeers Political Corporation’s main manufacturing plant and exploded, and there were no survivors. They all had long ago been forced to be self-insured, so there was no money to rebuild, the disaster had zeroed out everything. TANFL was sending condolences and big wreaths of flowers to the widows whose husbands had perished in the catastrophe; and delivered “Get out of town or else you will lose precious body parts” messages to the husbands who had lost their wives in the building’s collapse. All were delivered by the most handsome confident smiling men TANFL had, that usually posed as models for clothing ads, as their primary job.

Artisiana hurried over to the home of one of her late coworkers, whose wife she knew was gone on vacation far away; and she pretended to be the wife, when the smiling well-dressed hunks came to deliver free flowers, and invite her to a “new singles” party over in TANFL land, for a free lunch to express their condolences. She agreed to go; then watched as the men next went to the neighbor’s home, where a husband had lost his wife in the accident, and the guys threw rotten eggs at the house and used a megaphone to threaten to remove his precious parts if he did not leave town quickly, and left an ad where one could quickly sell one’s home. This all was standard business practice, per the new rules established when TANFL took over total control of the national government; in this case, the rule was that any non-TANFL man without a mate had to be a pervert, suspect of all sorts of sexual crimes against women and children, and were to be despised, watched and feared, and given a chance, mutilated. It was a powerful political persuader; the men who had just lost their wives were now men without mates, and so became subject to the rule. And the young widows were there ripe for the harvest by the polygamous TANFL Rich-Elite men.

Back home, Artisiana looked in her delivery truck, at the boxes of parts that were the last product of the 3Musketeers Political Corporation’s former main headquarters. The boxes were marked “3 mm sliding armature segments, 1,000 each”, per box. In the morning she drove the truck with its payload down to the harbor part of WoQu, and delivered them as would be usual. But when she arrived, she was greeted by the 3Musketeers workers in surprise; all was thought to have been lost. Quickly they unloaded the truck, and sent the cargo on its way express to Equador, they said, a most desperately needed cargo. Something was being built in Ecuador, up in the high Andes Mountains on the Equator, that could save civilization, they babbled, in gratefulness for the sliding armature segment components she had brought. Artisiana took a job they offered, with the provision she was to have a couple weeks vacation first. She was going to go looking for Idealiana, her former boss; at least give it a try. She drove home in a different truck, that was assigned as part of her new job; she had a new identity now, as all people’s identity was defined by the job they did. If one lost their job and found no other, they lost their identity, thus could not buy food or anything, and so they had to go to the digestion tanks.

Food was part of Rationallo’s concern on the job. His department was responsible for providing the food at the most profit for the company; and in the two decades since the TANFL political party had succeeded in taking over most of the country, great strides had been made, although with odd secondary effects. To maximize use of land resources, TANFL had declared all life forms that were not domesticated for food, to be considered parasites, and were methodically eliminated from the world ecosystem, putting in domestic animals and plants in the newly vacated space. Profits went up, bountiful produce filled their plates. Yet unfortunately the ecosystem then collapsed, and little remained alive except for people. Before innovation had been outlawed, enzyme processes were developed that would digest almost any biomass including that of former people, and converters then made it into standard rations for food. The rich-Elite got product food that was well spiced and shaped; the working class got the remainder from the digestion tank labs. It had been that way for over a decade now, and all seemed stable, for indefinite balance into the future, all could remain the same.

But there was this project that had been started before TANFL took the government over, something being built by the 3Musketeer Political Corporation down in Ecuador. A real crazy idea, something about building an escalator to the geosynchronous orbit, where the riffraff hoped to build all sorts of things. Rationallo suspected that if it became operational, the stability upon which TANFL functioned, would be upset from new energy sources, new recycling processes, even places to build new homes that were not under TANFL control; an intolerable situation. Yet in his chats with his buddy Guardiano, he had learned that an even more interesting thing could be done. Let the space escalator be built, and start to be used to temporarily vacate the planet so as to be able to restore the world environment, or so they thought. Guardiano’s secret plan was to let it happen, then when most people had left the planetary surface for temporary homes in GEO cities, then grab a bunch of young women, destroy the space elevator, and the world was all theirs, all of it, for free!


day 02 of 30


Rationallo spent his lunch hour introducing himself to his latest addition to his wives. Her name was Idealiana, she said, and was a manager for 3Musketeers Politico Corporation. Smugly he pointed out her surroundings, which were a windowless solitary confinement space steeped in silence, and said she was to be his wife, one of five at this time. She would be well fed, provided great comforts, and be provided television entertainment without limit, but could have no communication with the outside world, ever, from now on. She would produce and care for babies, that is all she had to do to live in great comfort for the foreseeable future. When she stopped doing that for Rationallo, she would go to the digestion tanks, the end. Get used to it, he said, struggling and plotting won’t work. And no, she would not meet his other wives, nor anyone ever from now on, except Rationallo. She would grow to crave his company, relief from solitary existence; the other wives have done so, he pointed out, matter of factly. He is not an unkind husband, he advised her; merely an efficient and logical one. That females had been grouped for breeding by a single male, is a successful pattern throughout time, even the now extinct sea mammals such as walruses and whales had done it. It is a tried and true system. The dominant males father the next generation; she will become proud to mix her genes with the soon to be owners of the whole world. He set down his attractively wrapped traditional gift for her, and left her in solitude. When she had passed her second menses here, it would be time to begin breeding.

day 03 of 30

Idealiana was determined to escape and get back to work; the project she was working on was essential to the future, she believed. But after a thorough inspection of her livingspace... labels on everything told all: it was a Haremspace model 14A Version 2, each appliance had instructions in three languages, and the daily cleaning routine was written on the walls. Plaques on the wall instructed how to prepare for all the steps of producing a baby, how to care for the baby until age 3, how to release it and get ready for creating another baby; and how to prepare for going to the digestion vat when no further babies have been produced within a specific amount of time. The place was clean but clearly had been well used by former occupants. And no indication that the former occupants left to anywhere but the vats.

Yet the place was splendid with comforts. The bed was more plush than she even knew existed; the television screen so huge that it filled a whole wall, and the food menu was more lush than any restaurant she had ever visited. Exercise equipment was everywhere, along with instructions for how much to use it, at each step of pregnancy, and before and afterwards. Clearly she was to get in good physical shape and stay that way. As long as she produced babies, that is. It brought memories of a henhouse, producing eggs for the farmer; then finally the roasting oven.

There seemed to be no means of escape. No clue as to where she was even located, other than in the RiEl part of town.

After a couple days of prowling her confined space, she began to think, that she had long postponed a relationship and creation of a family, never enough money and too many job responsibilities. Now she began to think that here was her chance to have family, time out from work; and Rationallo was something of a handsome hunk at that. So some part of her mind settled into acceptance of her new fate, the excess of plush comforts enfolding her, and her new role in life. Albeit probably quite a bit shorter life than would have been otherwise.

And she longed for company, something besides the television screen and sound that did not know she existed. When would Rationallo come visit her? And what kind of present would he bring this time? She had little to think about, but these things.

Meanwhile, Rationallo had much to keep him busy. He was letting his new wife soak in her new world for a few weeks, it was standard technique for new acquisitions. The caper in which he and Guardiano got their breeder additions had gone perfectly, the women were listed among the casualties, and the shock to the 3Musketeer Political Corporation was intense at the loss of their flagship group, their finest leaders. And most satisfyingly to Rationallo, the rate of patent applications by the 3Musketeers Political Corp fell drastically. That will cut down on those black market new gadgets, he thought, a big win for the TANFL Political Corporation, yes.

Yet the pressure was ever on him. As a member of the Rich Elite, and in top management of TANFL, he had to keep his body in well exercised shape, a trim musculature, and the latest clothing styles ever at hand, and the practiced public knowing smile while slightly bulging his biceps and expanding his chest ever so slightly, he ever had to exude the look of a long accomplished winner. Two hours a day he performed academic studies, the pressure to learn new more was as much a requirements as was the need to present a hansome physique. He had to perfom in sports, although ritualized gaming with somewhat predetermined outcomes that still maximized the competitive stress on people, and there was still the physical stress and motions to go through quite strenuously. Then enduring the bland office and rote duties as a leader of the TANFL Political Corporation, hunting down any variation from standardization, so as to maintain the business environment to accurately predict all management moves as rigid as the gears of an old clock's movement. He looked forward to the weekly meetings of the Society, where his aggressive, creative powerful real self could be more fully expressed.

The next meeting of the Society focused, as so often, on the acting out of procedures for what happens when there was some witness to their doings, or even some member who was too horrified at what was being done to remember the long term greater goals they all were serving, that "the end justified the means.". The practiced acting out of the cold and ruthless terrifying termination of the witness, or informant, brought the blood lust to Rationallo's state of mind, a balance to his being. And, of course, conditioned him to never think of betraying the Society's cause, ever in the slightest, lest those brutal cunning forces set their implacable group eye upon him.

He and the rest of the Society group members sat and drank in the multimedia real life documentary, this time of what was done to one who was not even a member, but who was aware of the Society's existence, and happened to be in the wrong place and time, saw too much , and was too smart for his own good. He had become worried that the same fate might befall him and others, so he left some sealed messages to be read in case of his "accidental" demise on a trip. One of them was discovered by the Society. And thus his doom was sealed, yet the process done as much adventure for the members, as well as reinforcing prevention of any urge they themselves might have to not do the dirty work of the Society, when called upon. The too-smart-for-his-own-good witness had his father hastened to death, his mother remarried to one of the Society's members, the family home sold and all possessions moved the their new home, and all the items sifted to remove all trace of what had been witnessed. There they found another copy of the "In Case of..." message; his mother was hastened to her death, and robbery items placed among the few things allowed the witness as his inheritance, a frameup perfectly laid trap; gossip systems and store security networks spread fearsome attributes to him, had alerts posted with the guy's picture, as a potentially dangerous suspect to be watched in every store constantly. Abuse reports were placed on record, that the guy was a molester, and every action he took to find a mate was to be feared and reported. The Society obtained an injection tracking tag removed from a real abuser predator's cadaver, and had it injected into the witnesss without his understanding. The documentation from constant survelience, even in his tiny apartment, showed his bewildered slow crush, on and on. With no reason he could see, attractive women shrank from his touch and looked wide eyed fearfully at him; in every store, the security people were ever nearby obviously watching narrow-eyed, and the other customers fled, fearing involvement; so shopping itself became quite uncomfortable. No woman would have him, no friend was there in time of need, desolation was his life, and it all made no sense to him and no one would tell him what was happening.

How powerful, how pervasively unapposable, the Leroy Brown Society was! The audience pride and power was thick as they would raise their fists and gruffly chant Die! Die! at the image of the Enemy shown on screen. After that movie, a series of video clips of the still-alive "Enemies of the Leroy Brown Society and Nation" were projected on screen, and to each image of a person, the thousands of members would raise their fists and feel hatred while they shouted "Rat Fink Die, Die!" at the person's image... tests had shown that in some strange way, when that was done, the far-away real person could be observed to act oddly, even have accidents at that instant. The mysterious yet ever provable efficient Radionics devices at Society's headquarters, had the DNA "witness" obtained from each of the Society's "enemies" and the remote-acting devices were set not to heal, as they were designed for, but set to disrupt the person, such as "sending" castrate life patterns at their targets, further preventing the enemy from forming new love relationships with people who then might be at risk of really getting to know the person.

Rationallo left the weekly meeting feeling powerful, even deliberately aware of his powerful physical muscles rippling as he sauntered out, he an in-group member of this great group... yet, something also felt uneasy, what was it? No matter. But Guardiano smiled confidently even more than ever, saying something about justice being served against those who would break traditions that were sacred.

Idealiana had her two menses finally, and eagerly awaited lovemaking at long last, get on with making family. She had seen no physical human for over a month; and so when the door opened, her joy was surprisingly intense. Rationallo strutted in, smiling confidently, flexing his biceps so casually in his clothes model pose to excite her. And it worked, her eagerness washed over her with her lovemaking dreams pasted over the physical image of Rationallo, how handsome he was, what a great mate he was. Looking deeply into her eyes, in a smile, he placed the wrapped gift in front of her, turned and left, shutting the door.

Idealiana stopped breathing a moment, in shock, surprise, dismay. Then she looked at the especially beautifuly wrapped gift he had given her. Was it a wedding ring? She opened it with almost reverence. But when she opened the box inside, she only found a semen injector for artificial insemination, with instructions in three languages. And a battery-powered vibrator, enough for one hours' stimulation to enjoy. It was to be used along with an X-rated movie by Rationallo for his wives's use, during artificial insemination and whenever else they wanted. He did not want them to be lonely. The Rich Elite men risked no disease from their many women; only one was lover. Idealiana almost threw the injector into the trash, before she remembered what happened when a wife did not produce babies. She was not ready yet for the digestion vats. Imagination soared; and baby came.

Artisiana enjoyed her new job as a longshoreman at the port facility of 3Musketeers Political Corporation. She was adept at remotely handling heavy machinery that moved cargo on and off the freightors. That she was the lone survivor of the disaster to the main headquarters was unspoken, for her safety. Yet her role posing as the widow of one of the building's casualties, had to be filled too; the real widow staying in Europe. Artisiana's new double life just added more spice to her life, she felt. Occasionally she would attend the parties for single women held by the TANFL RichElite, and was able to learn about the harem structure and its great rewards of good life for those lucky women.... So just which harem now had her boss Idealiana? She bet it was one associated with someone who would parade ride in the truck with the stanchion for a flag. She was well past the marriage age of 15 and was among the most sexy looking and brainy women at 17, and her smile and sweet questions soon found out the car was of corporate leadership, often used by a leader named Rationallo and his friend Guardiano. Would she like to be introduced to them? They both have new wives but surely soon would be seeking more. Yes, but at some other time, thank you, she replied.

TANFL Political Corporation changed its long term strategy to that of being supportive of 3Musketeers' project to build a space escalator to GEO, and the applications which then would be possible, especially the ring of cities around the earth in GEO. However, the recent accident that had demolished 3Musketeers headquarters and manufacturing facility, had also destroyed the production of the hundreds of millions of electric motor sliding armature segments needed for the escalator's support. 3Musketeers always operated at the brink of financial collapse, and had no way to restore that production capacity in the near future. TANFLy would have to supply the lost production capacity, but how? The whole space escalator carousel project required countless innovations, thus was an abomination to the very principles of TANFL.

So Rationallo arranged to have a meeting with someone from the Prospective Wives group. He had learned of an attractive smart 17 year old woman who worked as a longshoreman at the city's 3Musketeers port facilities, and arranged for an interview as a prospective wife, but for a real purpose that was quite different; one new wife was quite enough to deal with for now. And he would need another job promotion to be able to afford another Haremspace model 14a Version 2.

Meeting with Rationallo for the first time, Artisiana's first impression was that he was a stunningly handsome powerful looking man with an air of absolute confidence; tall at 6 foot 6, the perfect image of the Leroy Brown icon. She had worried that an investigation into her past for marriage purposes would likely turn up her real past and double identity, yet she plunged on undaunted. Soon she realized that Rationallo was not being amorous, but had intentions of making a secret business deal which he wanted her to handle. He would declare her a wife-at-large, provide her with a small fortune which was to be used to rebuild the manufacturing facilities for producing the critical components for their space escalator project, but not tracable back to TANFL. The business was to be hers, not his; but he would be secretly available to advise and make the major decisions of the business. This was fine for Artisiana, since she had little urge to plan and manage, but liked the adventure of making things happen in the physical world in a dazzling way. What an opportunity, to get the space carousel escalator project going again! It was going to be great fun.

Artisiana started reconstruction of the ruined 3Musketeers headquarters manufacturing plant by having the old concrete and burned machines and bodies all bulldozed into a cube shape, having concrete cast over it and engraved with the names of the fallen stored within.

Then when the first section of the new plant was constructed, and new hires essentially without skills were all she could find, on the first day of work, she gathered her new staff in the room. “Welcome to the new beginnings of the great 3Musketeers Political Corporation’s headquarter’s manufacturing plant. we are going to great things here, you and I, all of us together. All for One, And One For All!

“We are going to sing the 3Musketeers company song, but the second stanza will have new words. The first stanza are those written long ago ’You load 16 tons of number nine coal and what do you get, another day older and deeper in debt. Saint Peter don’t call me, I can’t go, I owe my soul to the company store. “ To the same tune, the new second stanza words are: ‘You load 16 tons of 3 mm armatures and what do you get, another day higher and closer to orbit. Saint Peter don’t call me, I won’t go, I make my future with the company goals.”

‘Then we do a bit of cheery exercise before heading for our workstations. It goes like this: Still standing, shout ‘Ho, Ho, Ha-Ha-Ha’ while first lifting one knee and reaching across with the opposite hand to pat the knee with the first Ho, then put that foot down and lift the other knee and pat it with the opposite hand at the second Ho; then reach straight up over your head and clap your hands flat together, hands positioned in a mirror image of each other, while saying the Ha-Ha-Ha part. We do this several times, then stand relaxed and silent just feeling, for half a minute. then off we go to our workstations!”

She was not much at analyzing, planning, or engineering; she was great at getting things done. Right now, she was in great need of details about what she needed to make happen. In her new office, she stopped to evaluate her situation: all the people who knew how to make the things, those sliding armature things, had been killed in the sudden destruction of the building. At the same time, all the engineering specifications and drawings were also destroyed, all the machines needed for their manufacture were destroyed. Everything gone. What exactly were the things anyway? She thought back to the name on the boxes she had delivered as the final shipment from here to the port. Something like “3 mm sliding armatures, 1000 each” So she was going to have those people out there make make more boxes of thousands of whatever those things were. Sliding armatures. Right.

She wished the vending machine for those jelly bean stimulants had not been destroyed too.

----------------
Over in the TANFL Political Corporation HQ, Rationallo was having midmorning thoughts too. Had he really made a deal with the 3Musketeers, a teenage woman at that who surely would be better at making babies than making a manufacturing plant happen. And it all had to remain a secret deal. Not that TANFL Corporation was unfamiliar with making secret deals aplenty, but it had to be done according to the rules. And the rules did not say anything about mutual projects with The Enemy, 3Musketeers Political Corporation. He had told Artisiana that all she had to do was provide a 10% profit quarterly, and no questions would be asked of him by TANFL board members. She would be allowed unlimited innovation opportunity, but all those innovations must be confined within the manufacturing plant, and without any patents applied for, thus no word of them getting out.

Guardiano had been quite enthusiastic about the prospects enabled by a successful carousel space elevator that moved most of the population into temporary quarters built in GEO. At that point Guardiano would change their plans quite abruptly. But for now, there was the need to get the transportation structure built and running; even at moving one million people a day, along with their basic household belongings, it would take two decades to get them up there. Building the cities up there, mostly of lunar materials, at enough room for a million people a day also was almost unthinkable, too, but that was another later thing to deal with, and the 3Musketeers were going to have to do that, not him.

Those ‘sliding armature segment” things, what were they anyway? He brought up the wall vision screen and accessed the world knowledge base. He input “sliding armatures”. Reply was that it was associated with forbidden technology, info unavailable. Only by accessing old science fiction databases could he get any reply about the carousel space escalator’s basic idea. How much could he make solid plans for manufacturing the inner working parts, based on old science fiction stories? This was not at all to his liking.

Those science fiction stories were linked to some old web pages, which sketched out some ideas, both in words and sleazy graphics. It involved a hoop big enough to completely go around the earth, stretching far above the earth on one side, and its loop contacting the ground on the opposite side of the planet.

It was like the hoop was spinning around the planet, faster than orbital velocity, trying to stretch outward, away from the center of the planet. It was the insides of the hoop that continually revolved around the planet, that is; while the outside of the hoop remained motionless relative to the surface of the planet. The insides of that hoop were in constant motion, so fast that the centrifugal force they created as they revolved around the planet along the hoop's perimeter, was great enough to exceed the force of gravity on those high velocity masses, exceed it enough to push outward against the hoop hard enough to support the weight of the hoop. And those “insides” were the “sliding armature segments” that were the problem today. Those things slid along magnetic levitation tracks built into the motionless outer part of the hoop, and got sped up by electromagnetic pushes when passing through the ground terminal accelerator, and they did not bump into each other. Millions of the little buggers, all going at once. Who said this thing would work, even could be built?

Well, it was rumored that the 3Musketeers already had the beginnings of one already in working condition, and were in the process of using its current lift capacity to lift the materials for building a Solar Power Satellite in Geostationary Earth Orbit, by which it could thereafter power itself, free of the dwindling earth surface energy resources. Its ground terminal had been built within an east-west tunnel bored through high up in the Andes mountains, right along the equator in Ecuador. They were also preparing to start building another one, which would have its ground terminal in Africa.

And the insides of these hoops were going to consume prodigious quantities of these sliding armature things, billions of them maybe. Things that now no one alive knew how to build. Things for which the plans had been destroyed along with the engineers and technicians and manufacturing personnel that had made them. And the tooling with which they were manufactured. All gone.

And it was worse in that he knew he had helped create that destruction. Now he had to fix his mess. It was not a good day, so far.

day 04 of 30

Time began to pass for Idealiana as in a haze. Sameness of her surroundings both made her lose awareness of herself as separate from the Haremspace Model 14a Version 2. Its built-in instructions led her every moment’s activities; it kept her physically in shape, yet made no place for her emotions nor her beliefs and dreams. She could change channel on the Television, and access a selected few website data sources; otherwise, she had no way to use free will, and so it began to fade over the months. She produced a daughter, which she named Donna Bullguarde; and that kept her out of the digestion vats for now. Part of her mind lived in a dream land of her own making to some extent; otherwise, her mind was occupied with following the home care instructions of the Haremspace living quarters environment. No other living thing there, no pets, no houseplants, just her and now her baby daughter; and the rare short visits by Rationallo.

Her memory of her life as a top manager for 3Musketeers at headquarters manufacturing plant, making sure the sliding armature segments were made correctly and in correct quantities on time, sometimes recurred as in a dream when awakening in the morning, but quickly faded as irrelevant to the demands of Haremspace’s instructions to get get up and get on with the day’s routine: change the diapers, clean the floor, use the ski machine for exercise, watch TV one hour, etc.

It was during one of those TV watching hours that her favorite program, one that she and Artisiana had sometimes watched at lunch break back in her former life, that she began to notice a painting on the wall of the soap opera. The painting was only in the background, part of the stage scenery, yet it looked a bit odd, not quite at the proper slope for its wall position. Looking rather dreamily more carefully at it, what was it ... an object instead of a flower vase... it was a... it was a sliding armature segment! What? What was it doing there? The soap-opera continued on as always; the people did not ever refer to the paintings on the wall.

She began to look forward to that picture on the wall of the soap opera set during her hour of TV watching. Each day the camera would briefly pan past that wall; and each day the armature segment was there, but was in a slightly different position each day. She wrote down each day which of the three positions the picture was in, and looked for a pattern in it all. Two positions were used most of the time, the third one only rarely, yet it occurred regularly, always after the same number of days had passed. Several months of this data collection passed, when she suddenly recalled the ASCII symbol code had that many bits in it. Accessing the web database, she found the ASCII code; and assigning bits 1 and 0 to the two more frequent picture positions, one of the two possibilities made intelligible words. Among them was the name of her former friend and coworker, Artisiana. What was going on? It was unlikely that anyone but her would have noticed the background photo as being a sliding armature segment, nor would notice its shift in position, the flow of the soap opera’s drama being the focus of attention of the show. Somebody knew she was here, and it was probably Artisiana! That girl had been outside the building when it was destroyed, and she may have seen the abduction of Idealiana and her secretary. And now was attempting to communicate with her. How could she communicate back?

She could not use e-mail, and there was no phone. And what would she say? She did not even know where her Haremspace living environment was located. Maybe the info that she was alive and in a Haremspace would be useful to that resourceful Artisiana gal.

What were her options in life? Besides to either make babies or go to the digestion vat. She could choose the TV channel she watched; she could look at a few website databases. The TV ratings would log how many people watched each program, yet hers would be one of billions. The web sites would also record how many visits were made to a site, too. Some would also show how many visits total were made to its website. Could she see the results of her own visits to web pages?

She found a website which gave rather dull statistics about TV shows, including her now extra interesting soap opera. It had a visit counter which she could observe. By logging on and off the page, she could see it increment. She could make a deliberate effect on the outer world!

So each day, right after the soap opera’s camera panned past the significant wall picture and she got its position identified and recorded, she would log on and off that website several times rapidly. 5 times to indicate an ASCII start signal; 4 times to indicate a “1” bit, and 3 times to indicate a “0” bit. She had sent the words “sliding armature segment” only once when the pattern of TV show wall picture changed from its routine. The new message, which took 3 weeks to send, was “Hi, how are you?” Idealiana sent back the message, "Haremspace Model 14a Version 2."

Idealiana began to dare to think that this egg-laying hen in the chicken coop might have a different fate than the others.

The next message was “Ours don’t slide well and they collide, how to fix it?” That Artisiana gal was resourceful, but practical, too. Maybe she wasn’t on a rescue mission after all, maybe she just needed info.

Idealiana thought back to the “disaster” that destroyed the 3Musketeers headquarters. All the engineers, designers, technicians, even assemblers would have perished, the engineering and production documents destroyed too. They must have started almost from scratch to re-create the means to make the sliding armature segments.

She wasn’t cognizant of the engineering details of all the designs and processes, although she had, at least at one time, a firm grasp of how they all interacted. How could she help them, in five easy words?

She sent back the message: “Show Rationallo advantage of setting me free.”

NanoWriMo2005 day 5 of 30
20051105 jedcline

The next time Idealiana was visited by Rationallo, she told him that she had a dream, that it was imperative that she resume her job managing the production of the sliding armature segments. And that he believed she knew too much to be allowed freedom, and was in a bind over all that. True? He grudgingly agreed.

So she proposed that he keep her daughter Donna Bulguarde as hostage against her revealing anything about the Leroy Brown Society’s caper that destroyed the 3Musketeers headquarters. She had been listed among the dead or missing, but if she could be secretly placed in Europe in some vacation disruption circumstance that would have prevented her return all this time, then be “discovered” there, she then could be returned to work at the new manufacturing plant, and hopefully be able to get the product made correctly again.

Rationallo agreed, but with an additional requirement: she would be fitted with implanted microdevices that would enable their constant monitoring of her every move and thought no matter where she was, and another one to which they could send a signal that would instantly kill her by a stroke, at any moment they chose, anywhere. Even think about betraying the Society and she was dead, right then and there. She would only go to TANFL doctors for any reason; and they would do any autopsy, too. And she would give up all connection to her baby daughter, to be given to one of his other harem wives to care for until she was 3, then would go on to the harem’s usual group raising process, and nevermore know of Idealiana.

A bit white faced, Idealiana agreed.

And Rationallo thought to himself that if the Society ever found out about this, they both were dead meat, and he far more uncomfortably than her. He understood that the only way for the planetary takeover which Guardiano had described to him would happen, required that the Space Carousel Escalator be built and used to get most of the world population “temporarily” in GEO space cities; and that needed Idealiana’s experienced help. But he also knew that the Society was implacable about the need to maintain their pure image to the public, and was merciless to any that might put them at risk of discovery.

---------------

It had been over a month since Artisiana had heard from Idealiana using their TV code link, and was a bit frantic for solutions to the production problem. Not one sliding armature they had made worked adequately, and she needed clues as to what to try next.

Then the news came that Idealiana was on her way back, she had been on vacation in Europe during a wreck and had been in the hospital in a coma ever since. She was enough better now to return to help the manufacturing plant on a consulting basis.

---------------

The manufacturing plant was not the one she remembered. There was that 10 meter concrete cube which had the names engraved on it, which had to be passed to get to the front entrance. The building was in the same place, but the people were different. Inside it all looked like something remade in a fuzzy dream by half conscious people; yet in ways, it all had some resemblance to the one she had known so well. The place where her office would have been was conspicuously an empty area. Next to it was Artisiana’s managerial office. The two looked at each other for a moment, silent. Then Artisiana, not one much for thinking too much, a lady of action, left her desk and motioned Idealiana to take it over. Then she took a side chair and watched, as her former boss come back to life, began to inspect the production flows that were built mostly upon Artisiana’s vague ideas about how it had all been before.

So this is a fuzzy dream made physical, Idealiana thought, as she began to set in motion the sharpening up of those fuzzy devices and systems, get some specific training going for whoever needed it. It all looked like it had potential, and that was what Idealiana enjoyed most, was to figure out how to make the details so the big picture would work.

First, why wouldn’t they slide properly? The armature segments were only meant to float along an inductive magnetic levitation synchronous track, at 10s of kilometers per second. The inductive energy went up as the cube of the velocity, and they were testing them here at a fraction of that velocity. In the real escalator structure, they were held above the tracks by external energy to support the armature segments until they built up to an adequate velocity to inductively support themselves. Here they had been attempting old rail gun type concepts, which would not work, of course.

But there were no engineers remaining who were capable of implementing such devices. All they had were essentially previously unemployed people who were willing to take the task on. They had been put on a strong On The Job Training system as part of their daily job, and continued with internet classes at home later each day, yet the experts who could have even really taught much of this stuff, had their remains out there mixed in that big concrete cube. The pressure had been on, the people in the production offices and manufacturing line looked haggard yet still determined. They were all working like heroes. She felt a moment of pride in the 3Musketeer’s motto, One for All, and All for One, and it was being practiced here incredibly in the effort to get this all to work, as part of what they felt was key to their future survival and that of their progeny. It would mean no more digestion vats, for one thing. And some of them were getting close to the age or situation where they would have to make that one way trip to the vats; they surely would not make it, but were doing their best for those who would remain afterwards. The will to succeed was there, but the knowledge and skills were not all there yet. When Idealiana took a moment to lean back and meditatively rest a few moments, she realized that this was the kind of adventure she liked.

Yet when things were still going sour, she remembered that long lost Far Side cartoon she had pinned up on her former office’s wall, the one showing a haphazardly constructed broken egg-shaped person lying below a wall, and the king’s men were saying that the horses wanted to have their turn at it again.

The other major complaint was that even at low speed, the armatures sometimes would bump into each other. They were too small to have collision avoidance systems built into them. How did that work, Idealiana wondered. On her desk were a handful of armature segments built before the catastrophe. Dissecting them showed them not too different from the ones that were now being built but which would not slide at high velocities nor keep from crashing together. There were some odd inclusions in the working ones that had been thought to be mere artistic design, and had been imitated only vaguely. For one thing, they were not all the same.

She learned of an interesting device being created by the technician’s wife on site at the early escalator’s ground terminal tunnel in the Andes in Ecuador, and requested one be built for Idealiana’s office too, even if still far from being fully developed. The Holovision device locked a person’s senses and brain waves into a virtual reality world which was an abstraction of the components of a system, all in 3D living color and sound, all the senses. Idealiana input all the parameters of the sliding armature segments in all their variations, and the magnetic track configuration, and meditatively locked her experience into it all in motion. What she first discovered was that the various shapes of armature segments would jostle themselves laterally like atoms grouping into a molecule, when bunching up together. And that most of the time they never had a chance to bunch up anyway, being synchronously position monitored by the intelligent magnetic levitation system, with little puffs of magnetic field ever adjusting their precise location, during the shifts and changes that happened due to changes in lateral forces on the structure and by passing live loads cruising between ground and GEO along the outer part of the structure, slurping a bit of kinetic energy from the segments as they briefly passed each other, or adding position energy to the whole structure in their decent back to earth surface.

She then input the parameters of the currently produced armature segments, and watched them mess up. Enabled by the Holovision device, she intuitively became each part of the system in turn, felt the jostlings done to a single segment input to a system of otherwise correctly operating system, and noted where changes had to be made so as to not be jostled anymore. Coming out of the experience, she realized that her Holovision instrument needed to be integrated into the whole production line, where she then could communicate directly to the managers and technician and manufacturing workers on their terminals, showing them the changes each needed to do, bit by bit.

As the weeks went by, she felt more at home inside the virtual reality, ever more unified with the incredible diversity of energetic beings that mimicked the real physical things of the production line. Then she realized there was a pattern to her responses to her response to stumbling over some change that needed to be made, and so she created a simulator in the system for those almost reflexively performed managerial responses. As the months went by, she realized that much of her own being was now copied into that system, that would continue to work even if someday she could not show up for work anymore. And she felt more at peace.

---

Meanwhile, Rationallo was having trouble with his implant monitors that were in place to stop Idealiana cold forever if she made a move to betray him or the Society. Whenever she went into that Holovision thing, his instruments sometimes would be overloaded with their echo of her essence as expanded by the Holovision. He had to personally intervene whenever the monitors went into alarm mode, to verify that she was just monkeying with some part of the production line hologram.

It became quite a challenge to him, so this side job as Idealiana’s virtual manager increasingly absorbed the energy that previously had gone into his participation in the Leroy Brown Society’s meetings, to counteract the boredom sameness of his otherwise perfectly predictable managed corporate system. Guardiano sometimes would look oddly at him during their meetings and adventures with the Society, both a bit worried and marveling too, that Rationallo seemed to be both frazzled and more powerful than ever. Yet it was not proper to ask of such things; the Society members were all very much “He-Men”, and most were literally Alpha Males having their own harems by now.

day 7 of 30

That she was working in a reincarnation of her old manufacturing plant, and aware that it could be destroyed as quickly and “accidentally” as was the former one, simply due to business-political mischief; and that she herself lived on the edge of death from the implants because of the same bunch of power-crazed mischief makers, had become a tough but tolerable environmental set of factors for Idealiana, as she continued to merge back into the role of manager. They finally had produced a set of new prototypes that had passed the test at the Ecuador Andes facility, and had made a test run around the Carousel to GEO and back without trouble. It was a Go for a manufacturing run.

Her application of the Holovision Presence monitoring system was multiplying her effectiveness on the job almost by the minute, and the temptation was great to allow it to be used at other 3Musketeers Political Corporation facilities; yet her agreement with Rationallo was that she could innovate without limit here, but it must not result in patents nor spread beyond the facility. She signed with sadness and frustration about that; yet she knew that innovation was really illegal under the regime of the TANFL political corporation, which had taken over the country as with a military battle assault using civilian techniques instead of guns and tanks; yet it was an accomplished fate, and she and the others were stuck with the situation. It wa only through some minor miracles that even she could use innovation now, and that only because of some unmentioned switch in TANFL policy toward 3Musketeers Space Escalator Carousel project.

She went into the tiny cubicle where the HolovisionPresence device was installed, and turned it on. Her self-awareness expanded out to the edges of the cubicle, then the office beyond, then out into the manufacturing plant facilities, like the clearing of fog that had enveloped a city. She focused attention into the final test station of the “3 mm sliding armature segments” that were the primary product here. A group of 15 armatures moved in a fitted bunch through an opening of the shape of the perfect group; if any one of the segments was too big it would shove outward through the group of segments to collide with the opening somewhere, and the whole group would be sent to the re-inspection station, to find the defective one. She focused on one such reject: entering its presence, she found that spall fragments had pressure welded into its side; flowing back in time of that armature segment, she saw the collision that had spalled the armature, and where the other fragments went to. Chasing them all down, she activated dropouts for all those armature segments, and put in a request for burnishing of the fixture at one of the armature assembly stations, to prevent further spallings and subsequent failures. The space escalator Carousel had its own high velocity inspector for each of the armature segments as they passed through the accelerator at the ground terminal, but she would rather catch the defective units here.

day 8 of 30

Break time was mandatory, even for Idealiana. She leaned back in her office, meditated a moment, drifted into thoughts which ever clamored for attention when she had moments not intensely focused in management tasks.

Idealiana thought that the TANFL people were not bad people; they were much like 3Musketeers people as humans, but the TANFL people seemed universally infected with what might be caller winner-mania, or topdogitis. They did not pause, like she was doing now, to introspect, or evaluate their effects on the Big Picture. In fact, if TANFL people were to pause to introspect on their lives and ways, it might get scary, like they had a tiger by the tail, since the Golden Rule - directing to treat others in the same way as you yourself would like to be treated - the frenzy to win by beating the others at something and everything possible so as to get far more than their share of the goodies, more than they could possibly use themselves -- then the Golden Rule would direct that they themselves be eventually conquered constantly by those others. Quite a delima for them, and so no doubt it kept them at the mania to win by defeating others, ever distracting and probably hoping the others would get sent to the digestion vats before the Golden Rule gave those others their turn. Quite a tiger-by-the-tail it was.

Yet also the consequences keep multiplying, affecting the whole world, all people. She could remember when she was a teenager, when they declared war on the “wild animals”, saying that they were consuming resources needed by people, incubated diseases that spread plagues to people, and were carrying toxin load making them unfit to eat anyway. Seeing newscasts following the progress of the war: armies using AK47s on elephants, rhinos, giraffes; the adventurous hunt for the last of the polar bears which had not not succumbed to toxins in their natural food sources; the sonar-guided depth charges killing the whales. The airplanes strafing the flocks of ducks and geese in their migrations. The crop duster airplanes fitted with hundreds of automatic 22 rifles, strafing the duck ponds and nature preserves everywhere, lacing the environment with lead to poison whatever might be left alive in the wild nature world. And the hordes of businessmen that followed the war campaigns against nature, who bid among themselves for rights to the newly freed land resources, ever to make the most money possible in the dealings.

And she remembered newscasts of the groups that declared that the problem was not the irresponsible refuse-strewing predation on the world by narrow-visioned people; but instead that it was caused by too many people being alive, and those groups, sometimes led by intellectuals that could do Malthusian equations better than they could see the wider world, seeding diseases among people, and instigating war excuses between nations to get them to fighting each other, and growing paranoid fears requiring checking of individuals’ luggage during trips, and scans of their homes when gone, to make sure they were not possessing something “bad.” Its success depended on a generation that had grown up on cartoons and comic books, where it was expected there to be bad guys from far away lands, with weird names, that had the intent to destroy them... no reason needed to destroy, no more than there be reason for there to be the assaultive other team on the other side of the football field, or someone on the other half of the tennis court. “Suicide attacks” followed the rules that “dead men tell no tales,” and were used to get the games going.

At least the Red Cross’ ARK division had representatives along on many of the Nature War campaigns, that obtained DNA samples from as many of the carcasses as possible, storing them in archives, maybe to be resurrected somehow in the future. The rotating cities in GEO that would be made possible if the Space Escalator Carousel got fully built and used, there might be some Stanford-Torus type structures which were modeled after environments ranging from the African Savannah to the ocean depths, where that DNA might again become real animals roaming. And -- dream on -- from there back to a cleaned and recycled earth surface in the distant future, no more digestion tanks, no more hordes of winner-mania people running the world. No more women being captured by the TANFL polygynes to live the rest of their lives in Haremspace quarters, making babies until they went to the digestion tanks ... imagine, every woman free and having her own man as mate and companion! And it had been that way, she had read, long ago.

She realized it was not their fault. The educational system had taught the competition as part of getting educated, eventually focusing the studies entirely on “winning” at every aspect of life, because, like the introduction of Mono Sodium Glutamate into foods, the ones that did not have it were not as “exciting” as those without it, and so the ones that focused on just learning what it took to be doing a fine job lost out, since few of the TANFL corporations would hire them.

Another moment indulging in the playing of the game of “what-if”: what if people had built the Space Escalator Carousel and used it to build the solar power satellites, the total recycling plants in the GEO environment, the high spaceports in GEO for travel to far places in the solar system in style, the building of a few cities in GEO ... it could have been done way back then, and none of the Nature Wars nor the digestion tanks feeding dual quality grocery supplies, no need for her to be here with implants in herself that monitored her every move and sent the info to an implacable businessman with his finger on the death button in her brain. But no, what really happened was that the Carousel was “Not Invented Here” category for the corporations back then, and their scientists in the space field only knew action-reaction space travel. Sure, the Escalator Carousel would only work for ground to planetary orbit transportation use, but that is a critical place where rockets with their massive take-along load of fuel were quite inefficient. Launch vehicles would be much more useful starting from GEO spaceports, after being lifted cheaply to there electrically by the Carousel.

And so now back to reality: her own struggle to manage the re-creation of the critical sliding armature segments for the Escalator, that was where it all was now; and it was end of her break time, back to work now.

Some things were especially interesting. The chemical that resonated with the Holovision Presence device, luckily was quite durable, and so she had it incorporated into every armature segment they built, every fixture in the manufacturing plant, every manager’s office walls and terminals. If it were not somewhat toxic to people, she would have had it put into her coworkers' caffeinated jellybeans.

She spent more and more of her time in the Holovision Presence nook of her office, routinely checking through the progress of her factory literally from the inside out. And she decorated the system with whatever she found that was beautiful and friendly. It became a place almost of escape from the bitter realities of the physical world.

day 9 of 30


She spent more and more of her time in the Holovision Presence nook of her office, routinely checking through the progress of her factory literally from the inside out. And she decorated the system with whatever she found that was beautiful and friendly. It became a place almost of escape from the bitter realities of the physical world.

When a month had passed without her having to solve a crisis on the production line, and several full shipments of sliding armature segments had gone to Ecuador and had been incorporated in the latest tracks without a failure, Idealiana suddenly woke up to the thought that she was somewhat expendable again. And a risk to Rationallo that maybe was no longer necessary in his mind. She had a batch of jelly bean stimulants made up with the presence chemical, toxic or no, and she tried some. In her next Holovision Presence system examination session, she discovered she herself was also shown in the system, as were the two implants, including the one in her brain intended to cause her death by stroke if she so much as thought of betraying Rationallo. She was not intending that, but now she had more info on the subject, in case of need.

And over in TANFL Political Corporation’s main office, Rationallo was indeed worrying. He was not a man who took chances normally, nor dealt with managerial duties where there were any unknowns in the system. The outlawing of innovation had made management quite a bit more predictable, and life had been built around that predictability for over a generation. Now he was into his fourth month of worrying that any minute Idealiana would betray him, and have his world go into ruin around him, the Leroy Brown Society turning on him with their merciless terror that was the technique by which their effectiveness was so powerful, the power behind the TANFL throne. And it tolerated no traitors. While Rationallo was no traitor, he had far overstepped his mandate by releasing Idealiana, even to get the production line going again for those essential armatures for the 3Musketeers’ space access project.

He was monitoring idealiana by the monitor implant when she was in that Holopresence thing, and again his readings became erratic, as usual when she was in there. It seemed even more erratic for the past week. Did he need Idealiana to get the production line going anymore? He needed clear thinking time to prepare for the next Board meeting, and this distraction had gone on too long. No, he did not need her anymore. He reached over and pressed the Stroke implant activation transmitter button, noted Idealiana’s monitor signs go wild and fade out. It was time for him to go relax;. he felt like his old self again.

-----------

The 3Musketeers sliding armature manufacturing plant’s doctor found he had an emergency on his hands. Their top manager had a stroke, and was now on the operating table. Yet he knew she was too young, too fit, to have had a normal stroke. She was still alive, but what to do now? He took some of the new jelly bean stimulants that she had issued just that morning, he needed extra clarity of thought. and suddenly, he was part of the Holovision Presence system, which included Idealiana on the operating table. And it was obvious she had two brain implants, where did they come from? And one had been a tiny bomb, that had gone off and caused the stroke. Her brain, bone structure all was in full detail there, and rapid operating removed both implants and sealed off the stroke area; the Holovision Presence even showed where to put in a few microtubes to get normal blood flow going to damaged brain areas. The task completed, and now somewhat amazed by the whole thing, the doctor sent Idealiana to the recovery room. And he requested guards to be always present there, and no word get out about her condition.

-------

Idealiana awoke with a very bad headache. She noticed she was as if in the Holopresence nook of her office, then realized that the chemical she had put in her jellybeans, the same one that was in the armatures and walls, everywhere in the manufacturing plant, when combined with imbibed chemicals, made the whole building a Holopresence terminal. And she saw her physical body here too, headache and all, the surgeon’s work so well done. It had worked, she had managed to get the chemical into the doctor’s jellybean stimulant supply just in time. Rationallo must have decided she was expendable and a nuisance no longer needed. And she was still alive! And she saw that both implants had been removed by the doctor, which meant that Rationallo no longer was getting biological and covert speech data from her anymore; he probably believed her dead. So let him think that.
-------------

With the Idealiana tasks behind him, Rationallo was better able to resume his normal evaluations of the TANFL Political Corporation’s profits. He found they had been sliding downward an the past several months, not fast, but a trend that would be noticed by the Board, and answers would have to be supplied as to why and how to fix that.

He had watched, via the implant in Idealiana, how innovation was able to provide ways around problems, instead of brute force making them work as in the past. Innovation was outlawed, yes, but his was an old corporation, and engineering had notebooks going back, way back. And the TANFL law had frozen innovation long after those engineering notebooks had been accumulated. If he kept to technology that existed before the laws against innovation were put into effect, he could have the contents of those old engineering books revised a bit. He could proclaim that solutions had been found in the old records, and put them into effect legally, or so it would seem.

And it worked; by the time the board meeting convened, the profit of TANFL Political Corporation was fully recovered, even a bit better than had been projected.


day 10 of 30

In their conversation at the nightclub usual celebration after they had participated in the weekly Leroy Brown Society meeting, Guardiano brought up the subject of the 3Musketeers’ abominably innovative project they called a “Space Escalator Carousel” wanting to know more completely what it was, how it worked, and how it would affect the traditions by which people lived. He knew that it had to do with building big things high up in orbit, things that could not even begin to be economically done with conventional rocket launch vehicles, not even nuclear powered launch vehicles; and therefore was not permitted by TANFL’s puppet government. Yet the 3Musketeer people were still going ahead on it, claiming it was about all that could “pull the fat out of the fire” for humanity, at this point. How could they be so stupid? Didn’t they know that they were the losers, game over for the 3Musketeers, and the TANFL RichElite people were all that would survive into the future? Maybe it was time for the Leroy Brown Society to arrange another raid into the 3Musketeers’ pantry, to speed the process up a bit.

Rationallo was more relaxed than he had been in months, having received telemetry from the two implants that had been implanted into Idealiana’s brain, indicating that they had gone into the digestion vats. He felt powerful, one more big problem sent to moosh. Yet the intense competition activities that were ever stimulating the TANFL Political Corporation people so as to keep them in shape and ever on their toes, focused his thoughts even now, shaping response to his friend Guardiano’s questions.

Rationallo had done deep research into the 3Musketeers carousel-escalator-thing project. Turns out it did not need super innovation technology, as it was mostly based on electromechanical principles used long before the ban on innovation. In fact, the description of the project had been made in obscure papers even before the turn of the millennium. Yet was all too far from the mainstream of moneymaking at the time.

Guardiano was rattling on about escalators. They are either there or they are not there when we need them, end of subject. Use the stairs, elevator, or better yet, don’t bother going up there. Why think more about escalators? He did not have the knowledge or the facilities for building an escalator somewhere even if he needed it. The whole thing was the domain of others, who would only build an elevator if it was going to make them substantial money. Plain good sense. Why build an escalator up to nowhere, where nothing much was?

And space was high up, wouldn’t it take super strong materials to build something that big? And how could it all be economically feasible, it was obvious by watching the powerful launch of the immense rockets that were needed to put a small communication satellite into GEO, that it took incredible amounts of energy to put a little bit of mass into GEO. It was all harebrained, the whole thing. Solar power satellites, total mass-spectrometer type total recycling plants in GEO, spaceport facilities for conventional rockets at GEO, even cities built in GEO. They were all nuts. Yet the word was to support the project covertly, in the long run it would give TANFL the whole world, for free. So, what was it all about, he asked of Rationallo.

Analysis was one of Rationallo’s things. Escalators were transportation structures that made movement to a high level almost as easy as walking on flat ground, and thus it opened up the land area to almost twice what it had been previously limited to, by the casual movement of shoppers and businesspeople. Escalators were good business, fairly simply multiplying usable real estate area.

As for needing super strong materials to build something so tall with, think about using stored energy for strengthening support. Actually, all strength of materials was through stored energy, that of intermolecular forces within the component materials. In this case, even more energy was input to a structure, and in a dynamic manner that was perfectly formed to support the weight of the structure in the particular environment it was in: the inverse-square-law gravitational field of the planet. The transportation escalator structure would encircle the planet, enclosing stored energy in the form of high velocity mass continually going around and around the planet, the thusly generated outward centrifugal force of the circulating mass being set to be slightly greater that the inward force of gravity on the earth-stationary part of the structure with its loads. Thus the weight of the hugely high structure was supported mainly by the dynamically stored energy within itself. It did not need superstrength materials, in other words. It could be built of plain ordinary strength materials.

Even so, Guardiano stated, it took too much energy to put payload into GEO from the ground. Hadn’t Rationallo seen videos of rocket launches? Absolutely immense amounts of energy obviously being expended there. What is the matter with him, anyway?

Rationallo was still in a good mood, and took another sip of Brewstim. It was a good day, and he was in control.

Think a bit about how much energy it takes to lift something, Rationallo said. Sure, climbing a mountain or even a dozen stories of stairs in a building, put reality perspective on it all for a person. Yet, numbers purified the problem, separating out such things that were not intrinsically involved, like if one had had too much to eat before starting the climb.

Back in the 1950’s, it had been shown to the layman that the energy needed to lift something up through the gravitational field of a planet out to an infinite distance away, could be simplified to be equal to that needed to lift the something to a height equal to the planetary radius... 8,000 miles in the earth’s case ... with a constant gravitational field equal to that at the planetary radius, the surface, ground level. For comparison, it is the same energy as needed to impart “escape velocity” to the mass; 25,000 mph in the case of the earth, he pointed out. Anyway, to find out the energy needed to lift only up to some altitude lower than infinity, one needed to do the same kind of calculation, only this time using the “planetary radius” equal to that other altitude, 22,300 miles + 8,000 miles in the case of GEO, and using the gravitational acceleration at GEO as the constant force for that simplification. subtract the energy need to go from GEO to infinity, from the energy needed to go from ground to infinity, and you have the energy needed to go from ground to GEO. Easy as that. There were equations if one wanted to crank the quantity out that way. To the energy needed to lift from ground to GEO, one needed to add the energy needed to speed up the mass to get it going at orbital velocity at GEO, so as to stay up there. The sum was the energy, or work, needed to move from the ground up into GEO. And that amount of energy was 17.2 KWh per pound, and for perspective, at an electrical cost of ten cents per KWh, that is an energy cost of $1.72 to put a pound of something into GEO. Cheaper than the cost of moving it across the country, he pointed out.

Sure, there were lots of variables not considered, like the efficiency of the magnetic levitation track, along which the masses circulated at high velocity within the structure. Lots of variables. Yet, that the energy cost was not intrinsically a problem, was his point here.

And besides, once the thing was up and running and had lifted the construction materials for building some solar power sats up there, some of their energy could be beamed down to the ground acceleration site to power the structure itself from then on, no need to buy energy from somebody else, at their price.

So, he asked Guardiano, what can you build economically when the energy cost of transportation is around $1.72 per pound? It is not rocket science, he added. In fact, quite literally not rocket science, that was the point. And also was the problem, because the industry was based on rockets.

On the table’s computer terminal, Guardiano had been clicking out the numbers for the calculations, following along with Rationallo’s chatter, The numbers were correct. And it was plain sense. Uncomfortably too plain. What would come of the business world if all that new business “real estate” plopped on the market? He used the terminal to order some more Brewstims for each of them.

After a moment, he thought of the basic problem, the huge amount of fuel needed on the vehicle to lift up to space. But Rationallo said that the whole point of the escalator was so that no fuel was needed at all for the trips up and down the escalator. All the energy was delivered to the point of need by the transportation structure itself. In a store escalator, the energy was delivered to the step upon which the person stood. In the case of the space escalator carousel, it was delivered to the spacecraft riding the outside of the structure, which electromagnetically dragged against the high velocity upward moving armature segments, transferring some of their momentum to be upward momentum for the spacecraft with its contents. The spacecraft lifted no fuel at all, no weight of fuel to be lifted by the spacecraft! The energy was all put into the sliding armature segments by synchronous electromagnetic mass accelerators at the ground terminal of the structure, the enormous mass of the earth being pushed against in the speeding up of the armatures passing by. Electrical energy was used, which could come from any electrical power source. And, he repeated that eventually it would come from the solar electric power satellites it itself made possible in GEO, thus in control of its own power source, which ultimately was derived from the constant energy flowing to there from the Sun.

Guardiano pointed out that the whole thing was an abomination, against the laws of business constancy upon which TANFL was founded. So why were the orders coming down ordering them to quietly support the 3Musketeers abominable space access project?

Grinning, Rationallo had figured that one out, too. It was the cities they would build in GEO, he said. Lots of cities, mostly built of structural material from the Moon, and supplied with other material like water, from the usual earth resources. The 3Musketeers nuts were going to have everybody abandon the planet to temporarily live in those cities up there, and then do a drastic makeover of the earth’s ecosystem, then replant the species that had perished, from DNA saved back then. They were going to restore the earth, they thought, and then return everybody to their homes. It was a truly crazy plan; there was nothing needing restoring. Business was good, so long as nobody rocked the boat. So here was the secret, he leaned closer to Guardiano to whisper: when almost everybody was up there or on their way to live in GEO space cities, the Leroy Brown Society was going to raid the women about to leave, and put them in their harems; then lock down the escalator, preventing those billions of people from returning. The world was then all theirs, they win! The Leroy Brown Society would own all the resources of the whole world, for free. What a prize! So that was why they wanted the 3Musketeers crazy project to succeed.

So, Rationallo continued, it was time to also begin the planning for that new world of theirs, how to keep it running with so few people, while their harems built up a population big enough to fully do the job. To plan the way their traditions will be so purely applied to control the whole world, forever more. He took a big slurp of Brewstim, and sat back, satisfied. Life was good.


In his optional time over the next few weeks, Rationallo began to think about what was involved with the 3Musketeers’ escalator carousel projects applications. There was opportunity for business beyond his dreams. Someone had to build the infrastructure to bring components for the cities made of lunar sourced materials. It would be a robotics factory that extended from the Moon to GEO, all of which would be opportunity for shrewd businessmen to squeeze for big profit. So what if it would all go to waste, when the escalator was blocked after the people had all gone up there. The profit would be in the bank down here, in his pocket. However, how would he weasel in on 3Musketeers business?

Artisiana, that is how. She was still a wife of his, a wife-at-large, who had set up the new manufacturing facility that Idealiana had gotten to work again. Artisiana was his secret in with the 3Musketeers bunch. A whole world of new possibilities began to open up to Rationallo’s planning.

Artesiana was coping with her return to the directing manager’s office, so recently vacated by her friend and boss Idealiana. She was cognizant that something big was in the works, that she herself was going to have to get important things done. That Idealiana was still alive but not to public announcement to anybody, especially that could get to the TANFL people’s ears. Ears that were everywhere; TANFL left nothing to chance, they got data all the time from anything and everything, even over here in 3Musketeers part of town. They all were going to have to proceed as if Idealiana no longer existed.

Yet Idealiana did exist in a way. She had left a legacy not just in a factory producing copious amounts of sliding armature segments that worked, but also the weird Holovision Presence thing. Walking into the office, she saw the place was strewn with a few things, scattered as Idealiana had made a frantic dash to the door of her office after the stroke hit; a coworker had seen the door open and Idealiana fall, and had called for the infirmary doctor.

Now, a bag of jellybean stimulants lay on the floor. Picking them up, Artesiana looked over at the mysterious Holopresence device’s nook in the office, which had been added here since the office had been hers. She walked in and sat down in its chair, activated it. A sudden deluge of sensory impressions came seemingly out of nowhere; she touched the table in front of her, found it also in the new world of impressions. In moments she integrated the visual and kinesthetic physical world impressions of the nook and its contents, together with the weird extra sensory-like impressions. So this was what it was like, a real trip. But what was it good for? It was a lot of work and expense just for entertainment, an escape from reality at break times. Idly, she turned on the terminal that accessed the manufacturing plant’s monitoring systems, to catch up on the production data. Why was the terminal in here, instead of on the main office desk? As the terminal sprang to life, showing the schematic of overall production flow, she discovered that her new sensory impressions expanded into vast new worlds, which flashed into being as her eyes scanned over the parts of the production plant’s schematic on screen. It was like the details of the area in which she focused her eyes, became pictured all around her in a time flowing three dimensional complex world all around her. There were grayed out areas, getting denser at the incoming material receiving dock, and gradually getting clearer the further down the production line the material went, until at one stage the armature segments suddenly sprang into being, when their material was combined with something in one of the production steps. And from then on, she could track that armature segment, no matter where it went. In fact, she could sense bunches of the armatures beyond the plant, in delivery vehicles ... ships in the harbor ... in Ecuador ... and suddenly she could see them in a huge loop string, all around the planet, touching ground area in Ecuador and circling around back to Ecuador site again, on the way reaching high into space on the farside of the planet. So this was the space escalator carousel! And she could see it, somehow sense it, even from here. Amazing. There was another bunch of detail around the earth terminal site, lots of stuff. Apparently to be seen in this system, things had to be painted with something; but after that, it was everywhere visible. Quite a show; she had not guessed that Idealiana had a craving for movies. She deactivated the device, and went over to her desk. It was the same desk she had before the miraculous return of her former boss. A boss now again almost as mysteriously gone again.

And she, Artesiana was now boss again. Manager of a production plant that had totally frustrated her before, making armatures that had not worked. But they worked now, thankfully. All she now had to do was make sure it all stayed the same, kept working, kept churning out those “3 mm sliding armature segments” that had gotten so much of her attention in the past year or so.

She sighed, managing was not her thing. She was a woman of action, a person that made things happen, and if possible excitingly, even artistically if possible. This office stuff was a drag. But it had to be done by someone, and she was the one to do it now. She resigned herself to a boring life from now on.

Going out to her other office to bring her belongings back to her new office, she found that the secret communication system had a message for her from her “husband”, she being one of Rationallo’s wives-at-large. What did he want? She moved her old office stuff in and merged it with the new office, then activated the secret communication link. And she discovered that her moments of boredom were to be few, as Rationallo had things for her to do. Big things, worthy of a woman of action, she could tell. For starters, she had instructions to go out and buy up all the land she could get nearby, to total 2 square miles. That was a lot of city space in which to do something.

She was paying more money for property than most of the residents had ever seen before, and they were eager to sell. And besides, better yet, she had promised that a new equivalent of their living space, stores and small manufacturing plants would simply be given new quarters as part of what was to be built there next. The area had been mostly slums and dismal stores and factories, populated by malnourished people fed by the secondary output of the digestion vats, laced with heavy metals and toxins which were not easily removed in the digestion process filters. The people ate it, rapidly accumulated the toxic stuff, died early, went to the digestion vats, and the metals and toxins thusly released went on to the next people to eat the stuff; a repeating cycle.

Before the bulldozers demolished each slum dwelling, Artesiana personally went to visit the original dwellers there, provided them identification as owners of a new home to built somewhere in the new complex, and paid for temporary shelter until that new home would be given them. Same treatment for each store owner and small shop; each had a ticket for an equivalent (or better) facility as part of what was to be built there, although probably on an upper floor.

One side of the newly purchased area bordered along one of the gateways between theirs side of town, and the RichElite side of town. The gateways were opened at 6 in the morning and processed over 3 million workers crossing over to work in the RichElite factories, or as menial workers in homes. And the same gateways let them pass through at night, closing by 9 at night. Going through to the RichElite side, they were searched for weapons; going back to their side, they were searched for possibly stolen things. It was a dreary wait in line each morning for the crowds of workers waiting to get through the inspection gateways.

So Artesiana moved the shops and stores that were being built anew as part of her purchase agreements, to be placed along the route the workers had to stand to cross over each morning. The caffeinated jellybeans were a popular item bought by the waiting crowd. A place was provided freely where amateur musicians could play for the crowd, entertaining them. The replacement residences were built over the top of these small businesses. And in her overall design for the manufacturing facilities space per Rationallo’s requirements, she added more living space on top of them, for more residents. She had an idea that Rationallo would eventually want more land bought, and more local workers to staff them, and she would need immediate homes for those workers and displaced people.

If Rationallo wanted to make a manager of her, she would be a Go-Getter type manager, she told herself.

But then, the managerial decisions suddenly got harder. Rationallo wanted a new gateway to be built, directly into the new facilities where it bordered with the RichElite part of town. The new gateway would operate in the opposite direction, to let engineers and managers come to work from the RichElite side of town. Artesiana did not think that the 3Musketeers Political Corporation was going to like that.

At the next meeting of the Board for the 3Musketeers corporation, Artesiana discovered she had new status. And lots of questions were asked of her. No longer just content with relief that new money was flowing to their side of town, questions were being asked as to purposes of what was going on, where was the money coming from, were there strings attached to that money. Artesiana told them that she was a wife-at-large for Rationallo, and was supplied with money to make a profit making venture over on the 3Musketeers side of town. So far, it had raised the standard of living for a lot of workers, and had enabled the sliding armature segments to be built again, essential to the escalator carousel’s success. She did not know what the new facilities would be used for, however; she had not yet been told. But she pointed out that she had steered the facilities to provide for the displaced residents and shops, and that she intended to insist that kind of thing be continued. All in all, it seemed a good deal for all concerned.

But the 3Musketeers board of directors were quite suspicious. Why would their arch rivals suddenly try to make them a success? Just to make them a better sport for their supremacy games? Was a kind of takeover in the works? Autonomy was one of the few things the 3Musketeers Corporation had been able to retain during the struggling years, and they would not accept loss of it. It would not be the first time that easy money from the rich had been used to lead the impoverished to their downfall. And it looked to them like Artesiana had a lot of easy money with which to play.

Then she told them of the demand to build another gateway, one that would allow TANFL engineers and managers to directly enter the new 3Muskateers manufacturing facilities, to provide engineering and management beyond the skill level of available 3Muskateers people, for a large new manufacturing capacity of undefined products. That threw the meeting into an uproar; they saw it as an invasion by the enemy, to destroy them from the inside out. No way, they declared. No way!

Back in her office the next day, she felt stumped, defeated. Resolving obstinate demands from opposing sides were not her thing. During break time, she wandered into the Holopresence terminal’s nook, and activated it, lacking clear path for something to do about the situation. Her expanded sensory system, now somewhat familiar with the ins and outs of the thing, wandered around the schematic of the systems and facilities of the building. She noticed that it extended to the infirmary, even to an odd area a bit through and beyond the infirmary. She discovered there were people in the holopresence! One was the company doctor. The other was ... her missing boss! Idealiana was clearly aware of Artesiana’s intrusion, and she simply sat there and pointed at something, a bag of jellybeans. Stimulant break time? Artesiana remembered there was a sack of those things that had been dropped on the floor; she got them, and munched a few, while attempting to understand what was going on here. They had a slightly odd flavor. And so, within a few hours, she became part of the Holopresence system too. And there, she could talk directly to her old boss.

They discussed the current situation. Idealiana said that it did not surprise her. Clearly, TANFL Political Corporation had some top people that were secretly hurrying along 3Musketeer’s space escalator carousel project, for unknown reasons. It was reasonable that lots of things would need to be built to be sent up for construction of the many facilities to be built in GEO, once the carousel was fully sized. Should they look a gift horse in the mouth?

Make a deal, she said. Put up a little fight. Request being given that which it would take to educate 3Musketeer people to become capable engineers and managers as soon as possible, even to quickly take roles in the new facilities while they had on-the-job training to be fully capable engineers. Request that the new facilities be built such that all workers always had new training in job skills beyond their current tasks, and education to broaden their knowledge, their perspective of the larger picture. And request that some jobs be created for some of the most impoverished and currently unemployable people among the slums of the 3Musketeers side of town. Use the opportunity to raise the standard of living and the skill capacity of people on this side of town, as part of the deal with TANFL.

Artesiana put the agreement before the 3Musketeers Board of Directors. What did they think? A lot of grumbling went on; they were quite battered from years of arrogant hazing by TANFL “winners.” A tiger did not change the color of his stripes. Yet they already had seen a huge improvement in the lives of hundreds of 3Muskateers people, due to the sliding armature reconstructed facilities. People would be angry if they had to forfeit all that. They began to see some wisdom in Artesiana’s proposal: if they got people educated, higher skilled workers, as part of the deal, and a faster construction of the GEO facilities, they were willing to take quite a bit of risk of deception by TANFL. They agreed; now it was up to Artesiana to convince TANFL of the terms.

Again, this dealing was not her thing. She took time out, got away from it all, while taking the special paint that Idealiana had pointed out to her, and painted areas of the new, still empty, manufacturing facilities with it. It was at least doing something physical, even though it quickly became a bit dull to do. Eventually she tired of it, and went back to tackle the job of convincing Rationallo, a man who normally controlled everything, almost compulsively.

It was easier than she imagined. Rationallo seemed a bit distracted; he had a full time job over there, and was willing to let her do more of the managing; if the 3Muscateers crowd wanted higher skilled employees made of their own, it would make it easier to get the huge upcoming tasks done. It was a deal.


The new gateway portal was built, breaching through the wall that had long defined the boundary between the wealthy and the poor. It was built right into the new manufacturing facility, a special entrance made for the engineers, technicians, and managers that were starting to come over to work in the new 3Musketeers production facilities.

These new employees did not all look happy about going into 3Musketeers territory. At first they marched into the huge empty new buildings, sketched out plans for their offices, and per agreement, for each of their offices, was an adjacent one for an essentially ignorant 3Muskateers employee, that was going to learn to be an engineer, manager, or highly skilled technician. Part of the deal was that each of the TANFL engineers and skilled personel was going to be a tutor, a teacher, for a companion 3Musketeer person. Many of the TANFL people considered it disgusting, degrading, even unpatriotic, to be teaching the “enemy” how to “win.” But Rationallo and Guardiano paid them well, and made clear those extra teaching duties’ importance.

Offices took shape, terminals set up, engineers sat in them wondering what next. 3Musketeers insisted on building anything they were capable of making, instead of importing from TANFL territory. One of those things was the paint. The 3Muskateers people painted everything with their own paint. It covered everything, the office walls, the desks and chairs, shelves. TANFL employees considered the 3Musketeers compulsive painters; a bit weird, but harmless.

Thye new huge buildings were sectioned off. The first one was assigned to design and build the next generation of sliding armature segments, for the next layers of the increasing girth of the carousel. 6 mm sliding armature segments, these. It was not quite merely a matter of scaling up the size of everything. The mechanical properties of the component materials remained unchanged, while the overall dimensions did change. Magnetic fields were limited by the saturation levels of the component materials, and distance the fields had to traverse got greater. Shape of the designs thus had to change: the sliding armature segments had to become flatter, to adequately couple their vfields to the magnetic levitation tracks, and to the couplers of the spacecraft that tapped momentum from the high velocity armatures. They too got the paint, except that it was modified and migrated into the armature surfaces, not just painted on.

Artesiana paid them all visits. She liked making the rounds, talking with peon and engineer alike. And she always seemed to have new suggestions for improvements, corrections for the fledgling designs being created.

Another section of the building was set up, this one for the tube tracks for the armatures. They had the magnetic levitation tracks built in, all an integrated assembly, with the sensing and control electronics for synchronous interaction with the passing of every high velocity armature segment sliding through on their way to beyond.

They kept track of the trends of changes needed with increase in sizes of components, which was used when the next increase was requested, 12 mm armature segments. These were quite flat, and were to be the final outer layer of the carousel structure, along which the huge traffic was to move someday.

Initial vehicles were next designed and built in more parts of the huge building. These vehicles had to operate at high speeds both in the atmosphere and in the hard vacuum of distant space, so they were streamlined. And until more confidence was established, each were designed to be a lifting body heat shielded glider, and had chemically fueled maneuvering thrusters built in, in case they had to be released from the carousel in emergency, and make their way back to the earth surface on their own, with their precious cargo.

There were limits to the sizes and weights of anything that they could build. The carousel could lift vehicles of limited mass; and the pathways up the Andes mountains to the tunnel where the earth surface terminal was located, were limited as to capacity. And this all established the sizes and mass of anything that got built to be sent up the carousel for construction purposes.

Next were built facilities for building more solar power satellites, scaled up from the original ones that now powered the carousel, and were supplying electrical power to a few parts of the world for a good price. The carousel was finally providing pay back for the investment, at least a little bit.

Components for a prototype mass-spectrometer type total recycling plant was next most urgent. It was first used to recycle some of the most toxic of the digestion vats sludge accumulation, and its component elements were completely separated out, including the heavy metals. Most of the thusly purified chemical elements were shipped back to the earth surface for new manufacturing uses, but some of the raw hydrocarbon components were saved and used in sunlit optically illuminated experimental chambers, where lichens, bacteria, and algae were putting the raw elements back into more complex hydrocarbons from which food could be made, free from all toxic contamination; this foodstuff brought the highest prices from the best restaurants in the RichElite section.

A small version of a Stanford Torus space Settlement was next built, using technology created for the earlier processing of biologicals for food; this first space city was mostly agricultural. Yet it also was of immense value in debugging the interaction of the myriad mechanical and living systems intermeshed in the slowly rotating city, a 1/2-gee inner surface only, due to its smaller diameter. Yet that artificial gravity was enough for people to walk in the gardens, plants to grow “upward”, and toilets to be conventionally useful.

It was time to look to the Moon, once again. The science that had piggybacked on the space race to keep the Moon from being used as a launch site for nuclear rockets aimed at other nations, back in the 1970’s, had found raw material elements including those useful for making structural ribs, wall plating, glass windows, the major large components for full sized stanford Torus space cities of 10,000 people each, to be built not in L-5 but in GEO instead, appropriately modified versions of them anyway, first designs. The carousel itself would be quite busy bringing up people and their household belongings; so the major structural and passive shielding materials were best to come from the Moon, maybe eventually some materials from the asteroids. The first GEO spaceport was built; from there the first manned lunar landings since the 1970’s were launched.

Lunar habitation had long been discussed, and so were built. Getting the lunar materials to the site of construction was a different task than that envisioned in the 1970’s; O’Neil’s mass launcher and catcher buckets were only one of the delivery systems considered. A wayward flung mass striking the carousel could be a great disaster indeed, however. So competitive designs were made, including the O’Neil mass launchers, the Mooncable anchored fiberglass space elevator through L-1 toward the earth, and a modified space escalator carousel design for lunar use.

There was tremendous pressure for what to do next with the transportation capacity of the carousel. People all around the world wanted more solar power satellites, to beam abundant cheap clean electrical power to them, to power their digestion vats for cleaner foods, as well as power all their daily life things. Others wanted more total recycling plants built instead, to clean up some of the most offensive waste accumulations on the ground; even to provide materials for a fantasized totally clean livingspace area the richest elite wanted built, and now theoretically possible. Others wanted to finally make a manned Mars expedition, fully equipped in huge vehicles efficiently launched from the high GEO spaceport. And still others craved to get going on building the full 1-gee interior surface self-sufficient cities in space.

A dozen years had gone by. The entire 3Musketeers quarter of the city had become built over by the manufacturing complex, with fine living space homes built atop the manufacturing levels; every person in the previously poverty stricken city was now educated to their best capacity and multiply skilled, and no end to the demand for their work.

Day 11 of 30

With the 3Musketeers Political Corporation’s huge financial success quite obvious, as it began to sell high quality clean abundant electrical power to several countries around the world; and payment for total recycling of some particularly noxious toxic industrial wastes; and even providing nutrients for food that did not come from the digestion tanks and sold to the RichElite who could afford it, the TANFL political Corporation also decided to get into the space resource businesses.

Since the transportation fees that 3Musketeers charged for lift to GEO along their space escalator carousel were low, TANFL had the makings of a free-fall hotel hauled up into GEO, and soon were getting a good return on their investment by visits from the RichElite who went there for the unique experience of staying a few days in free-fall and cozying up in view of the universe night sky from GEO.

Although for quite different reasons, both TANFL and 3Musketeers wanted those big cities built in GEO, to provide living space for the earth’s peoples. The escalator carousel was running at capacity already, and would be more needed just to lift people and their household belongings to GEO, if there were new homes there for them to live in comfortably. The political complexities ongoing in Africa had so far precluded the construction of a second escalator connecting there, so the decision was made to make the Moon the primary source for materials for constructing the ring of Stanford Torus type cities around the Earth in GEO. The RichElite of TANFL Political Corporation were well educated already, although they did not have much real job experience as there was little for most of them to do in their part of the city. So TANFL decided to take on the job of providing lunar-sourced components for the construction of the primary structure of the Stanford Torus cities in GEO. Clearly, there was lots of money to be made by creating and selling that real estate in GEO, where people could live in well designed total recycling mode, and even create pristine environments for re-created nature settings, presumably to be used as seed stock for replanting a cleaned-up earth surface. This became the dream not only of 3Musketeers but of most of TANFL people too, to create this new kind of Ark to re-seed the renewed earth with life in future wholesomeness.

The Leroy Brown Society part of TANFL had its secret other purpose, of course. Yet it too needed that ring of cities built up there, and as quickly as possible. So, essentially everybody was united to this task.

There was to be much robotic assistance involved with the mining, materials processing, and subassembly manufacture, all to be ready to be roboticly plugged together to form the hollow wheel shell for each 2-mile-diameter Stanford Torus city, to eventually be home for 10,000 people each, much as the earlier 1976 design intended for use in L-5 envisioned. So TANFL converted over most of its manufacturing facilities in 3Musketeers part of the city, to the design, prototyping, manufacture of components for those wide-variety robotic assistants to be used in space and on the lunar surface.

Getting those subassemblies from the Moon to GEO was another task yet to be solved. A lunar escalator carousel could only loop around the Moon from its farside to only as high as L-1 without going into a structural mode involving tensile stress in the lunar-stationary part of the structure. The stationkeeping tasks for catchers involved in the O’Neil type mass driver materials delivery from the lunar surface had not yet been resolved. An escalator carousel anchored to the lunar surface on the earthward side of the Moon, would be able to reach to an altitude higher above the Moon, but not beyond the balance point where the centrifugal force from the moon’s orbit around the earth equaled the amplitude of the combined earth and Moon gravity at that point, without the structure needing to use tensile strength of its stationary track materials.

So the decision was made to build an anchored lunar tether space elevator through L-1 (the balance point between the Earth and the Moon), and build facilities at L-1 for fabrication of the larger subassemblies there in free-fall balance between the Earth’s and Moon’s gravitation pull forces. From there, the large subassemblies wold ride on down toward the Earth, carried on captive tractors that electromagnetically braked along the tracks attached to the tapered fiberglass tether, which would convert its kinetic energy into electrical energy poured into the conductive tracks, which would then be conducted over the tracks to the lunar side of the tether, to assist in raising up the materials for more manufacturing at L-1. Reaction engined powered freighters from GEO would rendezvous with the subassemblies as the were released from the tether’s captive tractors, and the freighter would then use rocket power to deliver the subassembly to the ongoing construction site in GEO.

The whole task seemed enormous, yet doable in the immense space environment. There would need to be an ongoing construction of those space cities in GEO of huge proportions. To get the major part of the world population up there within 20 years, the space carousel escalator would need to move a million people a day, with their cherished belongings, up to GEO; and the lunar-sourced construction of the basic cities for their homes would need to be built at the same rate of a million homes per day. But robots could be built in space of almost any huge size, and the energy pouring out from the Sun up there was ever ongoing, capturable to the task of powering those robotic construction systems.

Transporting a million people a day from all over the world, to be funneled into the Ecuadorian Andes tunnel embarkation port to GEO, was also quite a task, especially to a world which had been energy starved for decades prior to the startup of the escalator-emplaced solar power satellites. Now abundant clean energy was returning to sites all around the world, yet the devices that could use that electrical power often had been discarded or simply worn out, and so they too had to be manufactured.

Slowly, the world began to look again like an energy-wealthy world, but it took time to do so.


There was too much going on that was new and unfamiliar to people, all this manufacturing of new kinds of things for use in space, and the doings out there, some even beyond GEO. The making of unfamiliar objects, from the tiny “3 mm sliding armature segments” to the curved panels with integral rib sections that fit together that made a hollow wheel two miles across, and inside was 600 feet across, were not the arenas of thought, even a decade before. There was a lot of sending back of pieces that did not fit together correctly, for example. Two of those huge panels had collided during assembly, bending both of them beyond any way they knew how to repair, up there in free fall without a solid place to stand and a hard vacuum awaiting nearby. So they had no way to send them back either, so they were set aside until they could be sawn up into small enough pieces to go through the solar powered total recycler.

The Holopresence monitor was ever a way to intimately check how things were going, as its special “paint” was now used on all things in the system. Yet even it was not adequate for the time when a steering thruster ran out of fuel as a freighter was bringing a load of panels from the lunar plants to GEO. It was quickly clear that a collision was going to take place, but there was no rocket fuel where needed at the moment, so all the Holopresence could do was show the rapidly new inevitability. It showed the projected trajectory, it was going to ram one of the full sized solar power satellites in GEO which was beaming power to a customer nation down below. A message was sent to that nation to sound alarms and shut down machines and vehicles that depended on electric power, open doors that would only open electrically; little of it got noticed in time, however. The freighter with its loads of panels rammed the power sat and bounced off, both shedding fragments and knocked out of orbit, headed toward the ground. Down on the ground, suddenly a nation found itself without power to do much of anything. Worse, the trajectories of the freighter and the ruined solar power satellite were projected as best possible given their ragged shapes and tumbling. Their meteoric fireballs were visible far away as they plunged to ground on the nightside of the planet. They hit at the eastern shore of Brazil near the Equator, one on land and the other just offshore, one creating a local tidal wave and the other a mushroom cloud fireball, setting the jungle on fire for miles around the impact crater.

Reparations to Brazil and its people took a chunk of what would have been profits. But most of all it clearly showed the problems of huge things being built up there, which eventually will surely reach ground, if only in hundreds of thousands of years. How to deal with that problem? Preventing orbital decay was the new focus of attention; some push on a solidly connected ring all around the planet in GEO could couple some of earth’s rotational energy to maintain the angular velocity of the habitat ring, yet that ring would be flexible, and so orbital decay of the cities far from the escalator’s site had to be prevented more directly, by a bit of reaction motor thrust, very small but requiring loss of a tiny bit of mass in doing so. Hundreds of thousands of years would use up a lot of mass, however, and besides, the reaction thrust system mechanisms surely would not work autonomously that long, none of them failing. Would someday in the far distant future, all their huge cities in space, the big power satellites and total recycling plants, all come tumbling down on a sleepy unsuspecting earth all around the equator? Would it spread a dust storm far and wide, disrupting the weather system like a huge volcano and worse? These things were pondered mostly by the 3Musketeers people, since the TANFL people only considered the cost of things that get dropped in the very near future.

Would it be wise to design the big structures in GEO to break up and pulverize high in the atmosphere, becoming dust and small fragments to cloud the world’s air; or would it be better to design them to stay mostly in a solid lump that would go wham and make a crater, throwing up dirt into the air along with fragments of the impacting machine?

They finally settled on a design philosophy that drew from living things, ones that continuously had circulating nutrients, which as in the human body rebuilds nearly all cells over once every seven years. If all the space cities and power plants, everything up there, were designed to be continually taken apart and rebuilt over and over again, the designs could be made better with experience over time, and if a time came to abandon the ring of cities, then they could be taken apart bit by bit and brought down the escalator gently and rationally stacked out of the way.

So a major redesign was begun, to implement this new basic philosophy of continual take apart in place and rebuilding on the spot, bit by bit, on and on. It was full structural maintenance, requiring that at times things be moved out of one area to another. Eventually it was decided that not all things would need to be taken apart every so many years, if it was still certainly in serviceable shape, yet all parts had to be capable of being taken apart and taken to the earth’s surface gently and intelligently.

Day 12 of 30

Back when the first GEO SpaceDock became operational, it was first used to build the initial spacecraft for the return to the Moon. It followed in the footsteps of Apollo, as it was the first manned landing since the early 1970’s. There had been some talk about a return to the Moon as part of a Mars adventure previously, but it was set 20 years in the future from then and so had been forgotten in the world energy crises, especially when someone in Congress had pointed out that the fuel for even one launch would consume the fuel that would heat the homes of 3,000 people who would therefore freeze to death, the talk of a Lunar and Mars project was mentioned no more.

But Apollo had a pattern that was being followed now, in that there were to be portions of the first expedition that would stay in orbit around the Moon, while the rest traveled in a separate vehicle to the surface, did their work, and returned to the orbiting spaceship for return to Earth. But it was very different from Apollo in that it started from GEO level, and the trip would end there too, no fiery reentry involved. Twelve people would descend to the lunar surface, while a token two would remain in the transfer craft. Since the energy change from GEO to Lunar Orbit was very little, the mother ship was immense, unlike Apollo that had to lift all from the ground.

Idealiana was one of the two to remain in the mother ship in orbit, while Artesiana was one of the twelve making that first return-to-the-moon landing; Artesiana would not miss that adventurous opportunity for anything; she claimed that she deserved to be on that expedition as reward for her work getting the sliding armature segment production going again.

The lunar landing craft was immense, too, as compared with those of Apollo days. All but the transfer shuttle was to remain as their initial Station Base 1 when they left, and had been built to serve as a shirtsleeve environment for the crew when they were not out working on the surface. It had facilities built in nooks, ranging from a Holopresence station, to gourmet cooking kitchen, to a copy of the library facilities nearly equal to that on Earth, in case of severance from Earth for awhile, they at least would have access to the best of knowledge so as to survive. Besides, there would be unknowns to face, despite all the prior research and thought done previously.

Outside, the crew set up high capacity com links to GEO SpaceDock 1 and to Earth directly. Then they put up a mirror solar focusing furnace set, for several temperature ranges and crucible sizes. Solar cell panels were set out to supply electric power directly to the facility, mounted sufficiently high so that most of the dust kicked up would not find its way to them. Three-fourths of the solar panels power went to storage, for the long Lunar night’s functioning, maybe sheer survival if things went sour.

One of their purposes was to raid one of the old Apollo sites for technology that had been lost. The intent was to leave the other sites alone for historical reasons, and even this one would be kept to some extent. But there was technological knowledge built into the gear left behind by the Apollo astronauts, devices that had been built with knowledge and technology, even some materials, that was now unknown. Some of the recovered hardware was to be evaluated in the engineering facilities of BaseStation1, the rest to be taken back to GEO SpaceDock1 and from there to the earth surface for more reverse engineering to be done on it.

Next to the StationBase1 landing craft, they used a lunar back hoe to dig a trench sloping away from the craft’s base, then dug a huge pit 7 meters deep. In this pit they laid a flooring of basalt blocks clear across the pit. More basalt blocks were laid up as walls that were formed as connected domes, to form compression structures, as they had no metals refining ability yet for roof beams. Once the blocks had been assembled, their junction edges were sealed by a molten glass bead, welded by a high power laser onto the basalt, inside and out. An arching tube went from the larger dome, to under the StationBase1, and was connected through airlocks. The inside of the closest dome was sealed against leakage, and soon was part of the shirtsleeve environment of an expanding StationBase1; it was buried under lunar regolith, becoming a haven from high energy particulate radiation, especially when the Sun might have sunspots acting up as it did periodically. It was still unshielded on the end where construction was still going on, but being in a deep pit to start with, there was adequate passive shielding.

Soon after most things were built there, the special Holopresence pain was applied to them. Up in the orbiting mother ship, Idealiana spent all her time in the Holopresence nook, continually flitting her consciousness around in the growing lunar base station, sampling this and that with virtual senses. occasionally she also would flit her awareness around in her own mostly vacated environment, making sure all was well there too. One of the reasons she stayed on the mother ship in lunar orbit, was that TV cameras were sending newscasts to the people on Earth, like in Apollo days that similarly had eager eyes to share in the adventure.

But the orbiter was considered boring, no newscast cameras there, and so Artesiana felt safe from recognition there. She had a new identity on record, but it was conceivable that Rationallo was watching the Lunar adventure newscasts and might have recognized her. Even though the entire space effort was conceived and for the purposes of the 3Musketeers people, it took the educated personnel and wealth of TANFL people to make it happen. Although this venture of 14 people were all 3Musketeers people, most of the equipment had been paid for by TANFL, and they expected a return on their investments on the project. Once it was established that the lunar StationBase1 was a safe and comfortable place to live, TANFL people were going to start arriving to share in it, making sure their investment was going to be a continuing success. And to have new adventure to brag about when they returned home.

But for now, it was all 3Musketeers personnel that had their lives on the line, making the project happen. Many of them had intense education in the sliding armature engineering facilities, OJT alongside paired up with a TANFL engineer as tutor. Now they were on their own, out here on the Moon.

As the heavy construction phase wound down, smaller projects became online. One of them had been created by Idealiana, and Artesiana herself took it out onto the lunar surface and activated it. Shaped as a half-section cylinder, half the cylinder was transparent glass, through which sunlight would flow; from the opaque half of the cylinder, a shield would rotate over to block the glass, during the long bitter cold lunar night’s 2 weeks at a time. An airlock was at one end, through which Artesiana entered once the structure was assembled and pressurized. In it were Quinoa seeds, planted in soil from their native environment on Earth. It was a miniaturized space farm, to see if vegetation could really be grown on the Moon, even in the best of conditions. Quinoa was able to repair its own DNA when damaged by radiation, enabling its survival in the high mountains of its native habitat. It also was considered the mother corn from which domesticated varieties sprang. What would it do here on the Moon? If it survived and propagated in this enclosure, some of the resulting seeds would be put in a similar enclosure, but using a soil derived from the lunar regolith. Where it would all go would depend on what happened in the previous steps, and it all would take time to explore, that is how the project got authorized.

Their real food supply, as now normal on Earth, was to be from a digestion tank that was soon set up in the subsurface igloo system’s facilities, and into it were placed their accumulated organic wastes, and even the wastes that had been left at the Apollo site long ago, was added to it, nothing going to waste. A large tracking periscope mirror system brought sunlight to the tank during the lunar day; then most of it would be shut down during the lunar night, just a biological start small area of the tank would be kept growing by battery powered lighting during the 2-week night. Most of the food had been brought from Earth, sustaining them until now, and so the digestion tank would only be needed for the 4 people who were to remain staffing the facility while the other 8 people would return to the mother ship and all would return to GEO SpaceDock1, according to plan.

After several months, the TV watchers on Earth tired of watching the now routine construction and operation activities of the lunar station, and so all but some of the external news cameras were shutdown and packed for return to GEO SpaceDock1. To them, adventure was over, back to their usual watchings for news.

Things were happening on earth, too. Rationallo became head of the new TANFL Space Enterprises, for one thing. And he had an urge for some adventure, and learn about his new business first hand. Several smaller orbital transfer vehicles had been built at GEO SpaceDock1 after the lunar expedition left, and Rationallo gathered a crew of three, announced he was going to visit the lunar expedition’s mother ship, and find out what it was like first hand. They would occupy the 4 spaces vacated by the four people who were going to remain at the lunar base, when the mother ship returned to GEO.

Word of this impending visit quickly got to Idealiana.
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The various works in progress at the lunar StationBase1 were quickly brought to a stable point, and it was decided to head back from the Moon. All 12 of the station personnel rode up to the mother ship in orbit around the Moon, where they all had a great farewell party. Then the lunar transfer spacecraft returned to StationBase1 site. But this time one of them was different. Idealiana would stay at lunar StationBase1; one of the original permanent staff would instead return to GEO. That way, Rationallo would not discover her, she hoped.

Rationallo arrived at the lunar orbiting mother ship to find it already full of the staff from the newly built lunar base, who were ready to return to Earth. He had to content himself with a tour of the mother ship itself, and meeting with the staff and crew. Surprised to meet up with Artesiana, one of his wives-at-large among them, it was opportunity to catch up on news of how she was doing. He had last seen her when he gave her the responsibility to rebuilt the factory that was needed to build the 3mm sliding armature segments; she clearly had done wonderfully on that assignment. It had been key to making this very adventure possible.

He had wanted to tour the lunar facilities, but the timing was wrong for that, the transfer vehicle was already back on the Moon. He was irritated; timing was normally perfect for him, a sign of his management powers. Something was a bit odd. His tour of the ship found a curious nook, that Artesiana said was her personal space. It appeared to be an information terminal of a type unknown to him. He always made a point of making everything known to him: there were to be no surprises, definitely.

Show him, he demanded of Artesiana, of the Holopresence nook. Artesiana had only the day before arrived at the mother ship, and was improvising on pretending to have been doing the tasks so recently vacated by Idealiana. The Holopresence nook had always seemed a magical strange place to her, and no way to make it into something else now; or was there? She explained that it was a break time entertainment device, by which she could escape from the awareness of the drudgery of the day’s tasks. What was it to him? Surely he had no time for frivolities that the 3Musketeeers could indulge in. She offered him a bit of wine that they had been able to make, another of their frivolities, she said.

Well, OK, a bit of wine, he agreed. The wine downed and felt, he again felt curiosity at the entertainment nook. He could only make love with his number one wife, and so Artesiana was off limits; but he wanted a bit of this new entertainment device, best he could arrange for now, he decided. Turn it on, he said, show him some entertainment on it.

Artesiana complied, and sat in the nook, to search for something, she said, that might interest Rationallo’s intellectual powers. Activating it, she found herself aware throughout the mother ship, and more, also throughout the lunar station far below. And idealiana was there, in its Holopresence terminal. Aware of what was going on in the mother ship, Rationallo and all.

The library, Idealiana advised Artesiana, connect Rationallo to the library, where the Apollo science was stored, all about the elemental composition of the lunar regolith, for example. Idealiana would be the hidden librarian from then on: put Rationallo on, she said.

Here is the library on our heritage of lunar materials science, Artesiana said, as she positioned Rationallo in the Holopresence terminal, and activated it.

Rationallo thought that this indeed was good wine, and the entertainment very well done. In In fact, he had never before found information on lunar regolith so full of presence, so lively. He was really getting into the experience of being a process for extracting aluminum from lunar regolith, when it faded and he found he was in a curved structure, looking out through a window on the lunar barren wastefulness; yet inside were some small plants, growing, soaking up the sunshine. Suddenly he was a Quinoa plant, a creature that knew how to grow stem, leaves, even in a high radiation situation, like here on the Moon. And it felt of the joy of life.

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Rationallo woke strapped into a free-fall sleeping bag. His head hurt a bit. Wine, yes, he had too much wine last night. Other people were getting out of their sleeping bags, time to get the day going.

He marveled at the efficiency that these 3Musketeer people displayed as they prepared the orbital transfer mother ship for the return to GEO SpaceDock. Weren’t they mere 3Musketeer scum? And actually, he suddenly realized, his life was in their hands, as he and his crew of 3 were along just for the ride. He paid more intense attention to their doings.

Three days later he was at GEO SpaceDock1, and in another 6 hour’s ride on the space escalator carousel, he was at the Ecuadorian Andes Terminal, back on the ground.

Guardiano met him there. Guardiano would not go into space; he declared that he was intended to be a man of the earth, and would stay there. Yet he acknowledged that space was a place, a resource that affected the Earth. And now not just as a source of solar energy and a place for communications satellites to hang out, but a place of busy commerce, up there. So what, he asked to no one; it all is just a gameboard. And the traditions are the finest of rules, and he was not sure that the space ventures were fully in compliance with the rules.

Didn’t Rationallo understand that it was a world of people, he asked, a bit too much alcohol imbibed. Glad to see his friend Rationallo again, and in their favorite nightclub meeting place, Guardiano pursued his point. It was a world of people, and all else mere stage props, of no intrinsic value. It was only people that counted, and they had to establish a hierarchy among themselves; that hierarchy was the map of this world. The map showed the paths from anywhere, anyone, to anyone else. That is the playing board, the world of what really counts, all made of people. Who does what to whom, is the only law of this social land. And the social land, the hierarchy, is all the difference there is between raw nature and civilization. Do you understand? ... he demanded of his friend Rationallo, who was again a bit bleary eyed from a bit too much alcohol These drinks, they were getting to overwhelm him, he thought.

Rationallo was of the opinion that it was not so much the people that counted, it was the knowledge they had accumulated, and their ability to utilize that knowledge to control the world. Guardiano’s opinions were a valid part of that body of knowledge, true. And so were people and their aspirations.

He thought of Artisiana, her world of physical doings; that was what counted for her. To thrive on this earthly place, full of action, yet in an intelligent way, that was the spice of life, she portrayed. And carried that on into space, wherever there was stuff, and things to do with it, she could make life happen.

Yet here was his best friend, Guardiano, declaring another world. Was the world of people really the world for him? Nothing else in it except props? Artesiana’s world of vigorous physical thrivings; his own world of the powers of knowledge and planning. And maybe there was some substance to that wench Idealiana’s world of imagination too, it took all the pieces of a pie to make a pie. And yes, the world of people’s status relationships, that too was a powerful place, for without it, only nature ruled: the waves lapped on the seashore, the wind howled in the canyons, the beasts hunted in the night. People surely decorated that scenery quite interestingly.

day 13 of 30

There were a lot of things to do for the four who were now staffing the Lunar StationBase1, yet mostly was monitoring the experiments set up by the larger crew. However, the need to suddenly leave the Moon, due to Rationallo’s impending sudden visit. left several major tasks yet to be set up and started. Most important perhaps was the aluminum extraction and processing system; structural components for the GEO space cities were to be mostly built out of aluminum coming from here on the Moon.

In fact, the task was such that it was to require six people out on the surface at once, to carry and set it up. So all four of them left the station to be outside at the same time, a situation felt quite unwise, yet the only other choice was to fail to have that important experiment set up and going, waiting until the next expedition here. Rationallo, among others, would demand to know the sequence of causes of the failure to speedily get that experiment going.

So all 4 were out tugging and pulling on the wheeled apparatus, an automated chemistry lab that would putter along the landscape, scooping up lunar soil samples and subject it to the two lunar ore processing paths built into itself. It first had to be gotten out onto the landscape and into the sunshine for power, and aimed generally in the direction it would continue to go. They were all out there, fairly exhausted but successful in positioning the huge ore processor and activating its startup sequence, when someone remembered that the station’s airlock had to be activated from the inside of the station.

It had been assumed that the station would always be manned, and that the station manager on duty at any given time would need to coordinate the opening of the airlocks with whatever else was going on at the time. But as of this moment, no one was in there, to activate the airlock sequence.

The aluminum ore processor having been started up and now moseying on its way, the four space suited people searched around the station’s airlock door, but no, there was no opener that no one knew about. Usually 3Muskateers made things to operate in multiple ways, as they realized they could not cover all contingencies; but this case, no redundancy could be found. They all retired to the Quinoa experiment hut, which had its own small air supply system, though mostly to extract oxygen produced by the plants when they were growing well. At least it was something Artesiana had created with extra loving care, a place to go to relax at times. The four conserved their space suit oxygen supply, relaxed in the warm sunlit greenhouse with the tiny Qinoa plants. All thinking, thinking of what to do next.

After a couple of hours, one noticed a light blinking; it was next to an audio plugin. Connecting to it, it was Artesiana, now at GEO SpaceDock1. “Just out of curiosity, may I ask why all four of you are wasting so much time in my greenhouse?”, she asked. She had spotted them there when during break time she thought to use the Holopresence nook to look in at her cherished experiment, and found them there. “Can you remotely activate the Station’s airlock from over there?” they asked a bit frantically. No, the activation switch was a manual pushbutton, inside the Station. Artesiana was able to use the Holopresence to explore through the now-deserted lunar StationBase1, even though all the TV cameras had been removed from inside. Artesiana also warned them that one of the TV camera robots was slowly headed their way, and soon would be in position to peer inside the greenhouse; apparently one of the news services had spotted their somewhat odd behavior, and was going for the news.

All were now physically rested up, so it was decided that two would remain to be seen tending the garden when the TV robot arrived, and the other two would be over by the airlock to the Station. The TV robot could not be in both places at once, and hopefully would not notice the two looking a bit forlorn at the airlock that was not opening for them.

Artesiana was working on getting the robot floor sweeper in the Station, to get over and bump into the airlock door switch. If she succeeded, someone would have to be there to get in immediately, thus the need to stand around there by the airlock door.

Artesiana was coaxing the robosweeper into action, depending on its decision making ability that normally was used to decide what needed to be swept up, vs what was legitimate stuff there. She could use the Holopresence to create flitting shadows in the view of the sweeper, and was trying various patterns of shadows to ascertain which ones got attention enough to initiate movement. Eventually she had the robosweeper weaving along the floor generally in the direction of the airlock switch, back and forth; it had its own ideas as to how to respond to the shadows, however. Eventually, she got its handle to bump into the airlock door pushbutton, and initiated an opening sequence. The airlock opened, the two waiting people scurried inside, took their space suit helmets off, and breathed a sigh of relief. One called the Quinoa greenhouse, advised them of success, and to stop putting on a show of gardening tediously for the robot TV’s amusement. Time to casually make their way back home, the candle was lit in the window and the door would open for them.

They agreed that one of the needed next steps was to put at least a hidden airlock switch outside the Station. It would have to be a radio operated switch, since there was no way to bore a hole through the basalt blocks, through which to run wires to the outside. And for longevity, it had to be a battery operated transmitter, charged by solar energy during the lunar day, to be useful all through the 2 week lunar night if necessary.

day 14 of 30

However, the Radio Frequency signal would have to be coordinated with other base operations, to make certain it did not cause glitches in commands or data acquisitions. Perhaps instead was a “911” kind of system that could operate even without humans inside the station?

Idealiana got in her Holopresence nook and initiated a holographic design processor, and began to create a schematic of the new 911 system. As virtual hands and eyes manipulated the virtual drawing tools and analytical math systems, with subroutines continuing to operate when the attention moved beyond their setup, a space-time equivalent of the new equipment quickly arose in the Holopresence chamber. It had to be built with the spares on hand, which factors progressed through the design. That which could be created with available resources was highlighted, and that which could be made possible or better, showed what needed to be requisitioned to be brought in subsequent supply missions to the lunar StationBase1. Fortunately, with cheap electrical lift to GEO, the transfer vehicles from GEO to the Moon could be absolutely huge, lotgs of cargo space for all kinds of things, including a variety of animals and vegetation.

Artesiana found time to relax in the station’s pet facilities. Long before, it had been decided that animals and plants were necessary for companionship of people in long term residency far from earth, maintaining a deep kind of psychological health for the crew. Letting the creatures reproduce within controlled conditions, provided data that would be important later, too, including levels of needed genetic diversity. They had species diversity, although no ecological balance was a particular concern with these; just to have freshwater tropical fish in a tank, toads in a small pond, an ant farm, several parakeets and quail, green iguanas, minature lop-eared rabbits, housecats and small dogs. The carnivores were separated away from edible neighbors. This experiment was not to supply food, although data from it would be useful later when livestock were imported for food. The Quinoa greenhouse was the initial setup for vegetation, other than a potted vine in the living quarters; one of the things to be built soon, based on early results with the Quinoa greenhouse, was a large greenhouse to grow fresh veggies, and grain for some of the pets.

The basic hydrocarbon waste processing was still being done by the standard Digestion Vat process. They had only the basic food processing facilities so far, drawing from the raw moosh of the vat, and growing from several cell cultures, including beef muscle, turkey muscle, watermellon fruit, peach fruit, corn kernels, grapes. A bit of beer and wine was fermented from these as secondary food products.

day 15 of 30

In the Holopresence nook, Idealiana pondered the way the holographic system was created. It was not a linear process; maybe most things weren’t either. In this case, it began as a search for ways to define holopower: the overall energy and influence under the control by any given person at any instant. A person piloting a spaceship, for example, has the kinetic energy of the craft and its velocity direction, and potentials for course and velocity changing, and potential effects of those options. A person walking from one room to another room has the kinetic energy and velocity vector of his/her own physical body, plus all possible things he/she could do or say at that instant and their interactive ramifications with the surrounds including social world. The search for ways to describe those comprehensive potentials, resulted in the early forms of that which became depiction of totalities that eventually were used in the holopresence technology.

She pondered the elegant solutions that were made during the creation of the Holopresence technology. Solutions to a problem can be so perfect that its applicability is so instantly apparent that the person hearing of it instantly forgets that he/she did not know of that solution before; it is as if surely all people must have known about it all along. Unfortunately, this means that the one who derived that elegant solution, often gets no recognition for the achievement. Particularly so if it was a spontaneous, unassigned, problem that was solved; and if the problem was to have been solved by a “superior” then the achiever of the elegant solution is likely to be considered as obnoxious or worse, by the “superior” and ilk. Sometimes she thought there was a “social world” in which some people lived in, devoid of physical materials or even imaginative essences. Just people, and people’s doings within a hiearchy pyramid, organization charts being all that was real to them. The rest of reality was mere gameboard to those people. Could that really be?

The wife of the technician at Ecuadorian Terminal was Idealiana’s source of the technology, and had probably been a major contributor of those elegant solutions. What a severe environment to be raising a family and being technologically creative too! that early high Andes Mountain tunnel, so early in the creation of Earth’s Station. The immensely complex interactive systems that were involved then, while so many things were being tested on the space carousel escalator, with all its monitors and automatic reflexive safeties. How to comprehend them all to the human mind? She had the inspiration, and her husband’s technical expertise put it to use, and away it went. It took a lot of testing and confidence-growing before it replaced the huge racks of old electronic equipment monitors permanently. The ability to interface with the holistic part of the human mind was perhaps the greatest part of that achievement. The special paint that radiated the presence of whatever it was on or in, an accidental discovery that to most people would have been a bit strange but quickly forgotten, instead of seeing the potentials in the somewhat odd events then. How fortunate humanity was to have such people in it, and the sufficiently supportive surroundings to enable their insightful explorations prosper.

Severe environments ... the one she was now living in, surely could be called that. The lunar landscape had hosted a few brief visits by pairs of men long decades ago, but otherwise had not been blessed with the presence of life, as far as anyone had found. No one had ideas about putting an atmosphere and oceans on the lunar surface. Yet she believed that life could dig in here, maybe better luck than the Mayflower folk.
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Was the big problem that people were never naturally able to all go gung-ho to work together to make something happen? Unfortunately, it seemed that there were always lots of guys who simply could not see beyond the “who is better than who” endless contests. And the “bully” urge to gather a bunch of others around subservient to the bully, had been reproductively successful for vast eons of times, and its modes maybe were genetically wired into those people; and all they saw was power games, and let others do the maintenance of survival stuff for everybody ... including for the bullies who seemed to have no comprehension of their responsibility to provide for everybody’s long term survival. “Parasites!” she scornfully thought to herself, once more, re bullies.

That circle of thought was one she had gotten trapped in as if a whirlpool many times before. She wandered back to the pet farm,

These little creatures did not ask to be here. Was she doing them a service by bringing them to this place, from which there was no possible escape to a livable haven, out there in the lifeless barren hot-cold airless waterless lunar landscape? She had insisted in only taking animals that were leaving behind siblings, in case her venture did not survive. There were very few animals still existing, since the big famine that resulted after the collapse of the environment, and people all over the world ate anything they could get. There were no cattle, sheep, elephants, or their animal kingdom brethren alive in the wild anymore; most of the zoos had their animals eaten too by the starving hordes, and only a few animals that had been house pets of the wealthy had survived. There were cell DNA banks for cattle and many other creatures, saved in desperation, yet no real plan to bring them back to life on the earth surface was in place. So Idealiana had this little animal pet farm created, and she had dreams of return of livestock and agriculture galore in the Stanford Torus cities planned for construction in GEO, largely from lunar structural materials. So she hoped there would be room for her animal friends there too, and this was a tiny ark for a few of them, just in case things got worse on the earth. Yet her justification for bringing them along on this initial lunar establishment was not acceptably based on the psychological benefits to people, nor the preservation of genetic material, but rather she had convinced the powers that be that it was a viable way to bring along well balanced hydrocarbons for the digestion vats. She thought it would be one more tragedy if that were to actually happen here, except for the end of their natural life spans.

She was still in the pet farm after the station shut down for its earth-normal circadian cycle sleep time. Her parakeet friends were flying loose; there were six of them. Suddenly she thought about the three-dimensional awareness mode of birds in flight. What would they do if they imbibed some of the holopresence paint? Would it sicken them, too? One male parakeet liked to sit on her wrist a lot, and she idly offered him a bit of paint-added birdseed. She put him in a small box and carried him through the darkened passageways to her Holopresence nook, closed its door, and set him free.
At first the little bird acted with alarm, all the unfamiliar things suddenly in view. But then he realized Idealiana was calm, and began to courageously move around in the merged physical and holographic world superimposed. Soon he was making chirpy comments about places he saw that he had been to see physically. And when it connected to Artesiana in far away GEO SpaceDock1, as if here, he seemed joyous to greet her, as she had put together the little pet farm herself. And when he was shown how to peck at the controls to guide the flow of place to holographically be, the bird’s territorial brain quickly became at home there, off on his own explorations. From then on, Idealiana brought him there as a buddy, when she was using the Holographic presence nook to check out the station’s multiple systems; and occasionally he spotted an inconsistency before she did. Then she set him up in a well-fed and watered cage to stay in the nook even when she was gone, having trained him to peck at an alarm switch that would alert her to something needing her attention right away. This little guy was now functioning as a crew member. Maybe some of the other animal pet farm critters could use their characteristic natures and the “paint” to also perform valuable duties, that would free up some human attention. Hadn’t dogs once performed watchman functions way back in human history? And cats ... if she could program the holopresence to have process flow malfunctions resemble mice to be caught ....

A few days later, telemetry from the wandering aluminum ore processor indicated that it had succeeded in making an aluminum ingot that filled the experiment’s chamber. There was no provision for ejecting the ingot out onto the lunar landscape to be lost, so someone had to go find the thing and retrieve the aluminum sample. But going outside the station, it was found that the machine had gone out of sight, too far to walk in a reasonable time.

So they decided to also restore the old lunar rover that was part of the nearby Apollo lander site, which had been selected for cannibalization, while resolving to preserve the others. They had a small machine shop and mechanical assembly area, but had minimum spare materials stock with which to build. Much of the old lunar rover was already designed and built to do just what was need now; so they installed their new battery, re-lubricated its bearings, unfroze some of its moving surfaces, and away it went. Two of the crew rode it to follow the tracks of the wandering aluminum ore processor, which had succeeded in finding the best ore source in the vicinity, at least for one of the two kinds of processors that was on board the machine. They removed the aluminum ingot, and drove the rover back to StationBase1, where they soon sent its chemical assay results back to Earth. It was a go for a pilot plant to produce aluminum on the Moon, to be delivered in the next supply mission to them.

And then they took the ingot to the machine shop, and made a fitting out of it. The filings and scrap pieces were taken out into the lunar vacuum and melted back into a smaller lump by focused reflective sunlight.

More good news: the next supply ship would also have the prototype mass-spectrometer total recycling plant. It would be debugged here on the Moon, an easier place to tinker with it, that in GEO where there was no place to stand solidly while adjusting connectors. And it would be left here, for their use. Although it would only operate during the lunar day here, a lot could be done then, including experiments in total recycling of the lunar soil directly, and they intended some experimenting of total recycling of the sludge that typically collected in the digestion vats.

The Total Recycler took everything apart and saved its elements in buckets. A companion processor for their use, also using the abundant vast hard vacuum on the lunar surface, was for the opposite purpose: take those purified elements and assemble them by scanning beams, building up a shape and chemical molecular composition directly from scratch. It would be slow, yet if it worked, it could be nanominiaturized to operated at teraHz assembly speeds, approaching the rate at which living systems built molecules from DNA. But this machine would build devices native to the harsh lunar environment. And there were enormous things needing built here to provide the structural sections for the huge Stanford Torus shells, built ready for robotic assembly when delivered to GEO.

It looked like a formidable task, to be building those cities in GEO eventually at a rate enough for a million people a day, a hundred cities a day, when going at full swing, and sustain that for two decades. Yet, the beginnings of those processes were shaping up here already.


Day 1 through 15 of 30

The TANFL Mega Political Corporation board room was bland as the day’s have become, Rationallo thought; the Corporation had too well lived up to its acronym principle of There Ain’t No Free Lunch. The Corporation had succeeded in its profit raising project by eliminating R&D expenses, and by mutual agreement of its member corporations, no innovations would happen to shift the balance of power between them. So the money that would have gone into R&D went into the salaries and pockets of the investors, sure, but that had started 2 decades ago, and so sameness was everywhere, consistency was law, predictability was maximized, few surprises happened, all the ducks were kept in a row. Yet the downside was it was boring, bland. His job was easy; even he, the son of one of the founders of the Tanfl Political Corporation, had to work for a living, it was the law, everybody works or get sent early to the digestion tanks. His job was to count the virtual money that the corporation made each day, and post it for membership to use to see how much money they would have extra for the day’s spending among the Elite Rich.

Now it was workday’s end, and he hurried to meet up with his friend Guardiano. Eager to change to doing something adventurous and not boring, the two went to the secret weekly meeting of the Leroy Brown Society. The secret auditorium was crowded, the air of excitement high in the room, as they saluted the flag and sang the National Anthem, then followed by the organiz