day 15 of 30

NanoWriMo2005
J E D Cline

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.