Day 29 of 30

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

Day 29 of 30

By the time Artesiana got to her office the next morning, she was not surprised to find a small desk in its back, and workmen finishing installation of a partition between it and the larger front part of the office, much as she had seen going on at the other offices along the way there. There were two of those huge burly Tanfl men, handsome and clothed in the best of casual business styles, standing in her office. One was Rationallo himself, she recognized. “Your desk is the one in the back, and this one in the main part of the office is my desk,” Rationallo said to her without a greeting. She noted that her Holovision nook was not in her new part of the office, it was on his side. And that she would have to pass through his part of the office to get to what was left of hers. These Tanfl folk sure do move quickly and effectively, she thought to herself, and they don’t care what they have to do to others to make their intentions happen.

“This is Ratiogorgino, one of my 35 brothers and is by the same mother, who is to take my place here while I am away”, Rationallo continued. “You will supply him with all the information he requests, and do exactly as he tells you. We are going to get this space project back in operation immediately, and we won’t mess it up with incompetence like you 3Musketeers did. And I remind you that you are still one of my wives-at-large, and if you do not fully comply with this directive, you will be immediately delivered to one of my HaremSpaces to finish your days of life being artificially bred before you go to the Digestion Vats.” Turning to Ratgorgino, he told him “Keep me informed of your progress here; immediately start construction of the full sized lunar carousel escalator. The previous one provided all the engineering data for the scale up to full operational size.”

Rationallo turned and hurried out of the office. He was eager to get back to the Earth surface Tanfl headquarters, get his daily 15 minute formal job done; and this evening was the weekly meeting of the Leroy Brown Society, followed by his get together with his friend Guardiano. Besides, tomorrow it was time to artificially inseminate one of his HaremSpace enclosed wives.

Artesiana inspected her new office. It was bare except for the small desk, and a minimal computer terminal. She made a note to bring in some food and water and other survival necessities, as she also had observed that her office door, spring loaded shut, was unlockable only from Ratiogorgino’s side.

The Tanfl Political Corporation management personnel were powerfully efficient there as usual, even if more experienced in clothing manufacture and department store operations management than in space project management.

Although Tanfl managed the space operations thereafter, the actual work was still done by 3Musketeer personnel. And much of the Tanfl directives were of the nature of “go make it happen”, letting the experienced 3Musketeers team actually figure out how to do the job, and to make it physical reality. And to take all the risks.

Artesiana made no effort to struggle to retain her position as general manager of the GEO space operations. Instead, she pleasantly slid into the role of Ratiogorgino’s secretary. When she made a bit of nuisance of herself walking through his office to go use the Holovision nook, which she had reminded him that was part of her secretarial duties to do the filing of data in that nook, he had an extension of her office built so as to enable her access to the nook without going through his office a dozen times a day.

She spent her break times in the Holovision nook thereafter, connecting with Idealiana over in lunar StationBase1, which was subsisting on the greenhouse food, digestion vat product, and using their two total recycling units, as well as the prototype lunar prospector-ore-processors to bring ingots of aluminum and other materials back for their use occasionally, forgotten in the huge push to get the GEO space cities built as fast as possible.

Based on the latest observations of realities of Tanfl philosophy in action, Idealiana updated the Holovision’s model of the human factor. Whereas the 3Musketeers’ ways tended to involve the ongoing of the tribrain stack of three creature’s worlds in loose interaction, the ongoing of the Tanfl people tended to be a world of bullies interacting. The model was updated to include the mode where people could be obsessed with continually measuring up to each other to determine whose was better than whose. The “better than” was measured in many ways, from wrestling to playing chess to running track to gaining PhD’s to carrying on captivating conversation. A hierarchy was ever updated as per the ranking established in the “whose is better than whose” comparisons ever ongoing, and the hierarchical position determined the fraction of the goodies of life that were supplied them, particularly those of family inheritance and employment income; yet more fundamentally it generally determined their individual share of the prestige, wealth, and rights of mating to the best of women.

This modified Hololovision working model of social reality also loosely connected with the tri-brain form of social interaction, in that the bully’s hierarchy considered any individual that achieved something, through hard struggle on the sidelines on something for years alone, and then openly showed his achievement publicly, that person was to be considered out of his place, thus a fake, a phony, and surely a thief of the achievement which surely must instead have been done by the bully hierarchy as a product of their status reaching. The out-of-place person was therefore to be put back in his humble lowly status, branded a thief and a person who could not stay in his place, and the achievements were either destroyed or ascribed to have been done by one of the high hierarchy members. Thus stability was restored, all was well for the bully hierarchy again. This revised model of human reality now was added to what the Holovision used to process its whole picture display for Idealiana and Artesiana.

The two women also created a small portable version of the Holovision nook, a space helmet with specially "painted" goggles and earpieces and air aroma supply, that could be worn anywhere, the connectiveness retained with holistic space-time, although only on those three sensory levels; but it was at least some part of awareness that could perhaps be useful in some future coping with Tanfl’s capers.

The new lunar StationBase3 was built right next to the ruins of StationBase2, as it too had to be built in the plane of the Moon’s orbit around the Earth. Under Tanfl’s watchful eye, a new L2 facility was built, this time for the full sized lunar carousel escalator, and built to be used as the manufacturing site for the full sized ribbed panels for construction of the Stanford Torus space cities to be built in GEO.

Robotics were used for nearly all the work at L2, partly because of the immense size of the objects they built there and moved around during fabrication, but also because it had to proceed mindlessly efficient around the clock, day after day, year after year, for the next 20 years, producing and shipping the huge ribbed aluminum panels. People were needed only to maintain the robotics, and had to stay out of the way of the immense computer controlled robotic machines that had no awareness of human presence among them.

Since everything was ultimately powered by solar energy, even the reaction engine driven delivery of parts from L2 to GEO had to be thusly powered. Those engines used photovoltaics to produce the electricity which further accelerated lunar dust that had been converted into a plasma by focused solar energy, producing a combined very high specific impulse, although dependent on the solar energy quantity that the reflectors and photovoltaics could intercept from the Sun; those power gatherers had mass which added to what had to be moved and maneuvered, and so formed an effective limit on how big a load could be moved. So a standard aluminum ribbed shell structure section was determined, a 150 meter 90 degree arc structure, of a 300 meter portion of the toroidal outer circumference requiring 400 of the sections to form the whole toroid. The solar powered propulsion units made a one-way trip to GEO, their photovoltaics becoming incorporated in the GEO space cities electrical power supply, and the focused plasma generators being incorporated into each city’s Total Recycling plant. Therefore much of the manufacturing done on the lunar surface and at Lunar L2 SpaceDock was to build the propulsion units.

Eventually production was ramped up to the steady pace of building 100 cities in GEO per day, and the internal outfitting of them to make the structures into homes, agriculture, and light industry for 10,000 people each, soon began to make the new real estate available, first for those who wanted to live there permanently, then for those who would be willing to take up temporary residence there while the Earth surface ecosystem was scrubbed and jump-started with replacement organisms from what had been preserved from the past before the Great Energy and Food Famine age. Some of the cities in GEO would be used to create various special environments of the earth,such as snow areas, hot desserts and ocean areas, fresh water lakes, all great vacation areas for the people of the cities in GEO.

And Rationallo, Guardiano, and the rest of the Leroy Brown Society secretly solidly set in place their own plans, their vision’s accomplishment to own the whole world clearly now in sight. And Rationallo’s sleepy dreams floated around the character of Turl in “Battlefield Earth”, while Guardiano’s dreams were around the character of Jack in “Jack and the Beanstalk.”