day 8 of 30

NanoWriMo2005
J E D Cline

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.