day 05 of 30

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.