Day 21 of 30

NanoWriMo2005
J E D Cline
Title: “The Ark of 1984’s Future”

Day 21 of 30

Eventually Rationallo realized that Idealiana was clearly alive and even far away at the new lunar StationBase1, and many people knew that; yet also she was keeping silent about her life disruptions caused by him. So for now she was a difficult target, and not as essential to immediately eliminate as he had thought. Her doctor, too, knew too much yet also keeping a silent low profile. Well, if he could continue to keep them heads down in the trenches, for now he could deal with other things, backing off on the disciplinary actions toward them.

In fact, his chats with Guardiano last night had again brought up the point that the sooner the 3Musketeers got the GEO Habitat Ring civilization built and populated, the sooner Tanfl could initiate its great plan for owing the whole world easily. That meant that any disruptions Tanfl made, even disciplinary ones perhaps, would slow the project for merging civilization into Earth orbit constructed resources. When Tanfl suddenly took over the whole Earth with all its resources, that would be final disciplinary action. So, don’t rock the boat, for now, despite the sense he had that he was being challenged by Idealiana and her doctor; retribution would come later, in due time.


It was not his way to leave things to chance. The tradition was to eliminate any witness “accidentally” along with a lot of bystanders, so it can’t be determined in court that the one person was the actual target of a designed accident. In this case, it would work out beautifully: A Tanfl patrol cruiser would be quickly assembled at SpaceDock1 and on its maiden voyage, a few months from now, it would launch a missile aimed at a vulnerable section of lunar StationBase1, making it look, to the wandering news TV cameras outside the facility, like a big hole from a meteor hitting it, pity it happened during a sleep cycle and all air was instantly lost from the entire facility, nothing survives alive. The Tanfl spacecraft, manned by Leroy Brown Society operators, would heroically speed to the lunar base, only to find everyone there expired. Examination of the facility will show incompetent management and Tanfl takes facility over to get it running correctly; and any trace of information by Idealiana will be methodically destroyed, of course. Problem solved, and big wins besides. It was great to be such a manager of events. He flexed his biceps, checked his trim in the mirror; it was time to strut down to his office to excite all his secretaries, their admiration of him was part of his successful energy, and had to be cultivated. He would also change to a new shirt style, to set a trend to sell more shirts in his stores, good business all the way around.

Meanwhile, at lunar StationBase1, idealiana had finished her chore of feeding the pet farm’s inhabitants. The mice had succeeded in having babies, the first creatures born on the Moon, raising their population by four. She had learned that one kind of her pet couples here had become the last surviving members of its species; it would take a lot of effort to bring back the species from the few here, but at least they had a chance of avoiding extinction, and maybe go on to populate areas of the GEO Habitat Ring, and when earthsurface environment was jump-started back to a long term viable system, their progeny would again walk the earth.

Relaxing in her quarters, she examined some of the belongings left behind by the crew member who had so generously swapped places with Idealiana to enable her escape from Rationallo’s surprise inspection visit. That crew woman had been a graduate of Carousel Tech, a small college set up by 3Musketeers to educate people who would become as familiar as possible with the space carousel escalator when it was being built and then operated, then used for construction of the applications in GEO and here on the Moon. One of the textbooks was titled “Relativity in Human Reality”, and had some basic principles, like “every individual human's reality is unique” and “since a human’s presence intercepts the sensory data stimulating ongoing experience, no other person can exactly experience any other person’s reality”. They resembled the physical laws that declared that no two objects can occupy the same space at the same time, and that the act of observing something always alters the observed, making the thing not truly knowable.

She set up the bioscanner to herself, and found that a few Ascaris parasites had taken up residence in her body, no doubt received from somewhere in the pet farm. She relaxed back in her chair, connected the electrodes to her wrists, and set it to send a 10 volt peak pulse train of 408 kHz into herself for several minutes to resonance-disrupt the Ascaris parasites wherever the signal could reach, then switched to the EBV frequencies of 380 and 375 kHz, as she carried it permanently as did most people, and could only get at the virus that was moving around in the body fluids at the moment. Then she set the instrument to 4.9 Hz awhile to prepare herself for good sleep. The efficient electrohealing technology was perfectly suited for out here where no significant medical facility could be built and staffed for many years, and so the crew was expected to monitor and care for their own well-being as a routine thing. She intended to bring some herbs in to grow here, but other than a few air-cleaning plants inside the facility, grown by artificial lighting, they did not yet have proven facilities to grow plants on a large scale.