Moondance
Valerie’s excitement bubbled over once she received notification of the delivery of her package to Aidan in Colorado. She knew he would install it as soon as he could, but she was also aware that he was very busy with his own projects and it might take a little while.
The one time she visited Harmony, Valerie was amazed at the entire settlement. The technology, as well as the civil engineering, truly excited her as she and Aidan toured various projects in all manner of disciplines. When she met Constance, Valerie had too many questions to count about how the town began and what it took to integrate the bleeding edges of science and technology in such an out-of-the-way location.
Valerie was surprised when Constance extended her an invitation to settle in Harmony. Aidan urged her to do so, then they could collaborate a lot more closely on each other’s work. To her credit, she gave it serious consideration. At the time, she was well short of being as independently wealthy as she was today, but she had a growing national reputation in digital image processing. The prospects for her future were just too exciting to settle where she believed that her focus would be turned to the community’s needs first and her own research and development second. But she did stay in touch with Aidan and consequently they did end up working on several projects together.
Aidan was working in the community data center when his package was delivered to the general store. Harmony’s store harkened back to times a century or more back when a town’s general store was the hub of commerce for an entire community. However, despite the old-time nature of the store, Aidan was informed of the package’s arrival via text message along with an accompanying photo the moment it was received. The data center was housed in the largest building in the settlement, with many people hanging about working on their own projects or playing games. The data center was open to everyone in the community, secured with a keypad lock to prevent anyone from outside of the community getting into mischief. In addition to the server room, the building also housed several classrooms, a gymnasium, which also doubled as the community’s town hall and recreation center, so there were usually people about, even more if classes were in session.
Aidan was training two high school students on the community’s network architecture and its connection to the two fiber optic cables that digitally linked the community to the rest of the world. With the notification of his delivery’s arrival, he finished the technical discussion about their heuristic anti-virus scanner application that monitored all the traffic coming into and leaving the community, ensuring no malicious bugs wormed their way into Harmony or were let out. He then excused himself and left to pick up his package.
Unlike American society at large, distinctions between genders were almost completely absent in Harmony in terms of jobs or careers. The closely-knit community wasn’t a microcosm of American life at all. First, everyone was black. Second, there were no “male” or “female” jobs per se, if someone took a liking to some particular undertaking, or wanted to learn from the community’s expert, all they need do was ask, then “ghost” them on the job. And, if anyone needed to study where the best work was being done away from Harmony, arrangements were made to accommodate them whether it be at a college or university, or, if possible, a leading private company.
The work being done in Harmony was at the leading edge in agriculture, animal husbandry, computer science and a several other disciplines. Harmony’s high school test scores were consistently among the top in the nation.
A handful of African Americans like Constance were leading a quiet revolution in black self-determination in the United States. The numbers were still very small and no one in those few communities knew what the backlash might be if the greater population found out about communities that excluded whites. Those communities exploiting cutting edge technologies had the most to lose. Authorities had a habit of coopting that which they coveted. And, if the need was great enough, the government had no compunction over killing to achieve their goals, and that’s what drove Constance to conceal the true nature of Harmony from the outside world. There were regular deliveries, the odd vendor or two here and there, some government agricultural inspectors, even some consultants, but no outsider got a good look at the entire settlement. Self-determination was at the top of the list of unalterable goals Constance would not compromise. She knew of the other settlements, making time for the opportunity to video conference with those other community leaders to compare notes. The support they gave each other was important, knowing that they were leading a quiet revolution right under the nose of America. Stories had been written about black separatists in the past, but they were marked by some measure of violence perpetuated to claim land or to maintain America’s white power structure. The real revolution would come unnoticed and hopefully, undiscovered.
One of the major issues was the means with which they could avoid complete dependency upon America’s banking institutions. For commerce, they were all locked into standard banking transactions for paying bills or purchasing goods and services because for all practical purposes, there was no real barter economy. People who made large cash transactions were automatically investigated by law enforcement and the Internal Revenue Service for money laundering. There were also highly speculative discussions about contingencies should anarchy break out across the country. How would they preserve their communities and protect them from harm? Even in the best of times, jealousy, anger, imagined transgression and false perceptions set crazies off all the time. Leading a community and maintaining its safety was more complicated than most could ever imagine. Although there were several brands of crypto currencies, various governments and law enforcement agencies were closely monitoring them in the hope of catching criminal activity by tracing funds back to their source.
In reality, no community within the United States borders could exist in total isolation from the rest of the country, nor should they. Citizens had to vote, taxes must be paid, the commons like roads, railways, emergency services and the like had to be maintained. U.S. Department of Agriculture inspections and the Environmental Protection Agency could, and did, stop by in the course of exercising their duties. Unfortunately, Constance and the other community leaders were finding that there was only one sure way to escape the influences of the rest of the country, and the world. However, only a handful of people had ever done so: the colonists in space. The best Constance and the other community leaders could do was to keep their heads down, maintaining a low profile and not rocking the boat.
“Here’s your package, Aidan,” Samuel said, retrieving the shoe box-sized parcel from behind the counter. “New toys?” he inquired.
“Yep! Some new graphics hardware for virtual reality programming, games and videoconferencing. Can’t wait to try it out,” Aidan replied.
“Need anything else before you head out?” asked Samuel.
“I’m good. Might stop in before you close for some ice cream. We’ll see. Thanks for the package, I’ll catch you later,” Aidan said, waving as he headed out the door. He threw the package in his bicycle’s basket and set off for home. Once he arrived, he took the time to make a sandwich and brew up some iced tea.
He opened the package and began to read through the installation instructions while he ate. They were very straight forward. The add-on was a dual controller, managing the compression and decompression of rendered scene’s data coming across the Internet as well as the display of the scene itself. Installation looked straight forward, the hardware accelerated the rendering of the scenery sent across the network from another computer and the software processed that same scenery data at speeds not seen up until now.
Aidan placed his dish in the sink and took the package to his basement workshop. The room was completely open, with one corner painted in reflective white. Hanging from the ceiling were two wide screens that when pulled down made an almost seventy square-foot enclosure. In the middle of that enclosure was a platform, the same type of virtual-real
ity platform Valerie had in her VR studio.
Installing the new processor took less than ten minutes, and once Aidan’s system was booted up, he ran the installation software. When his system was ready, Aidan checked to see if Valerie was online, then opened a video window.
“Hey there! I’m guessing you installed the processor,” she said.
“With your instructions it was dead easy. Busy?” he asked.
“Not at all. Here, log into my host and we can go full-on VR,” she instructed.
Seconds later the small video window disappeared, and Aidan’s display painted the full 360º scene around him, with Valerie appearing life-sized before him.
“Very nice!” said Aidan. “And that’s the real you! It’s not a simulation at all!”
“What do you think? Pan around and see how smooth the render is,” she suggested.
Aidan “walked” on the platform, the rollers underfoot making the scenery projected on the wall scroll past as if Aidan was walking around inside the simulation. Moments later, Valerie appeared right beside him as if they were strolling along together in her virtual neighborhood.
“How’s that looking? Any edge effect or render failures from your end?” she asked.
“None at all! This is amazing. As far as I know, no one can do this in a three-sixty wrap-around!” he gushed. “Anyone else seen this yet?”
“No way! Count yourself lucky, you’re the first! I wasn’t really sure if it would be this smooth across the Internet. The possible applications are nearly endless.”
“No kidding. You’ll make a bundle in online gaming alone. Are you going to try to sell the tech to the military?” Aidan asked.
“Probably. I didn’t patent the designs so they’re going to be a little harder to steal. Did you notice the design of the processor when you installed it?”
“Damn, skippy. A data solid that can’t really be deconstructed without ruining the electronics. I take it the firmware is encrypted as well?” Aidan asked.
“Yep. Even the NSA would take over a hundred years to crack it. Trouble is, the encryption slows down execution of the code. If I had left it raw, I’d be getting maybe twice the processing speed out of the unit. Do me a favor, start jogging around the neighborhood and let’s see how the render holds up.”
“Which way?”
“Surprise me.”
Aidan took off down the street, making random turns here and there. The level of detail was incredible.
“Hey! This is your actual neighborhood! How’d you do that? Drive around like those mapping companies?”
“I have a mini-convertible. So, I built a rig that had six cameras mounted around the car, avoiding my head, the windshield and everything else. I drove around here for six weeks to get enough footage to edit out other people, cars, buses and the like. Then I digitized everything and stored the entire neighborhood on the host here,” she explained.
“How far out have you digitized?”
“Just over two miles around my house. Any lag in the picture by you?” she asked, excited that everything was working as she thought it would.
“Not a shimmer or a hiccup at all. Val, this is spectacular, you should be very proud!”
“Proud and excited. One of the ideas I have is worth about a hundred million dollars. It’s something I think we should talk about. I’d like your thoughts on the idea, but face-to-face. What’s your schedule like? I can come there, or I’ll fly you out here. Think it over. I think combining our work is going to make a difference that no one will see coming”
“This sounds serious, Val. I don’t know whether to be excited or scared. Let me get back to you tomorrow, okay?”
“Sure thing. Tell Constance I said hello, will you?”
“Absolutely.”
“Okay, gotta run. I have a working dinner on another project. Call me tomorrow night, I’ll be in.”
“Sure thing,” Aidan said as Valerie popped out of existence. He chuckled at her usual insistence at never saying goodbye.
He walked around Val’s neighborhood for a while, zooming in and out on various buildings and other objects, marveling at the level of detail. He walked to her house but could find no way to enter the structure. After another ten minutes of exploration, he disconnected from her host and shut down his VR rig. For a moment, Aidan toyed with the notion of locking up Valerie’s hardware, but in all the time he’d lived in Harmony, there hadn’t been any crime committed, though as far as he knew, everyone did have locks on their doors.
Aidan decided to see Constance. He was also going to give her a heads up about a possible trip out to San Francisco as well as to convey Valerie’s greetings.
* * *
Genesis, the colony’s A.I., kept watch over tens of thousands of news stories, scientific progress, and advancements in military hardware all around the Earth. In some cases, the information gathered was aggregated into status reports presented to the colony’s ruling council, or sometimes routed to a specific colonist whose interests ran parallel. Of particular importance to Christopher were advancements in the study of the weakest of the four forces of nature, gravity. He worried constantly that someone on Earth would stumble onto the same discovery he made into the fundamental nature of gravity.
One person Genesis followed closely was Dr. Martin Harris, the inventor of the gravitational detector capable of locating gravitation anomalies throughout the solar system. His detector recorded one of the colony’s ships malfunctioning flying over Iraq at the beginning of the new millennium. Further refinements permitted the detector to track every location where Christopher’s technology was in use, on spacecraft and the various space stations built by the colonist’s engineering departments, including the space station in Earth’s lunar orbit. Harris’ original detector, housed deep underground, was duplicated in several other underground military installations for redundancy and backup.
Genesis had penetrated every host computer on the globe. The colony’s A.I. was one of Lola’s invaluable tools in keeping up with current events. She engaged Lucius and Sydney in discussions about policy and culture they observed, before they moved to the colony through to the present. As one of the first people born while the colony was still embedded under the moon’s surface, she had never visited Earth, and only knew of the planet from Genesis. She also had an interest in the law library books Lucius brought, as they were practically the only bound volumes in the colony.
Most of the colonists had little or no interest in the doings of Earth. They had made peace with the fact that they left family and friends behind and focused their time looking forward. But Lucius believed that watching over America was important, necessary even, in order to continually assess the current climate and culture. Collectively, the colony did not want to develop a culture with the kinds of customs that had led other societies into moral and ethical decay. One way they did so was by eliminating the need for money or any other medium of monetary exchange. From the beginning, when something needed to be done, people just stepped up and did it. The colony didn’t even have an official name, adults and children alike simply called it Home.
One of the things about Earth that Lucius was particularly interested in was the progress the nuclear weapons club were making in total world nuclear disarmament. If, or when, all nuclear stockpiles were destroyed, the colony was going to have to decide on a new policy. The first thing they would have to do is lift the embargo keeping Earth men from outer space as promised, then decide just how much latitude they were willing to grant Earth in their travel into space. Would they allow colonization of other bodies in the solar system, or confine them to near-Earth space?
Lucius had numerous conversations with Phillip about the prospect. Phillip’s arrival at the colony was the result of a favor Lucius granted his lifelong friend to save the life of Phillip’s wife, diagnosed with incurable cancer. Lucius confronted Christopher with the news and a request to have Phillip and his wife Alma brought
to the moon to undergo treatment with the colony’s life extending retrovirus. Christopher immediately agreed. Once Alma and Phillip arrived, she immediately underwent the treatment. It was touch and go for weeks, but eventually pulled through. When the people of Earth got wind of the colony’s treatment, the collective demands on the governments of Earth to duplicate the treatment, or to steal the treatment from the colony, were unrelenting. But just as with the colonist’s abilities to control gravity, Earth was just as much in the dark about how the medical treatment was developed by that extraordinary community of blacks.
Quarantine Page 8