Habitats

by Laurence Dahners

  “And the ‘neurotrode?’”

  “We put it on the median nerve. Of course we have no idea whether it’s going to work or not yet.”

  “No… but I have faith. Thank you Doctor.”

  ***

  Warren Newton said, “Ms. Varka, Mr. Marsden, Mr. Short, thank you for meeting with me. As you know the FBI’s main tasking for me has been to discuss how hardware modifications might be able to diminish the potential of your devices to be used for terrorism. Before we begin talking about that, I’d like to express my relief that you were successfully rescued after your kidnapping, Ms. Varka.”

  Vivian nodded at him. “We’d love for you to also advise us on how we might protect our employees from such temptations and threats.”

  “Well your little speech to your employees about ‘offers’ that seem too good to be true was a great step in that direction. I’d like to suggest that you offer a substantial reward for reporting such offers.”

  The three leaders of Portal Tech looked at one another, then at him, “Do you think that would work? I mean, I would think that avoiding the danger involved in getting mixed up in that kind of thing would be a much more powerful impetus.”

  “Imagine you were someone who’s been offered a large bribe to do something like steal plans, or circuits that haven’t been embedded yet. Or something similar? On the one hand, they have an offer of ten thousand dollars to sneak something out of the plant. Something they figure they could get out without getting caught. On the other hand they have, what?”

  3em">“We’ve already offered to match or better any offers someone might make… but I guess that was directed at someone offering them money to defect. You might have something there…” Newton leaned back in his chair. “Now about making ports safer, I think I saw that all the big ones have GPS in their electronics?”

  “All the ones over 5mm, yes. The GPS circuit is tiny but the little ports are often used for things where everything needs to be really small.”

  “Could the FBI give you lists of GPS coordinates for high risk terrorist targets like the White House and have you set the ports so they wouldn’t work in the vicinity of those targets without an FBI approved code being entered?”

  The Portal Tech people looked at each other with raised eyebrows.

  ***

  Carter watched again as the huge 747 based space plane crept up on the habitat. It had some of their first scientists on board as well as the scientists’ equipment and the hexagonal “work cells.” Like the “dorm” from the first trip, much of the equipment was too large to carry on the small space planes.

  Carter and his waldo team had been welding together an adaptor for the airlock at the other end of the habitat. It attached to the habitat via the airlock and had attachment points for tubes to go to the smaller “bedroom” habitats that would swing around the weightless one. The rotation would provide the living quarters with centripetal simulated gravity to prevent diseases of weightlessness in longer term residents. The adaptor they were building contained the bearings that would allow the rotation. They were constructing it from very heavy steel to withstand the large loads from the rotation.

  Chuck Lane and Annie Jones had been living on board the habitat since they had evaluated it earlier. They’d been trying out the facilities and had offered a number of suggestions for further additions to the habitat to make it more livable. Watching them, Carter suspected that the two astronauts were more than just friends and coworkers. They looked like they were truly enjoying their time alone in the weightless environment.

  Once he could see that the space plane had successfully attached to the habitat airlock, Carter jetted over and entered through the small airlock. A couple of the other waldoes followed him. Once inside they found Chuck and Annie waiting by the big airlock as well. Though they’d been having fun alone, they were probably going to enjoy having some other people there for company.

  Once the lock was open, the two astronauts took charge of shepherding the new personnel in and showing them how to use their reaction pistols to get around. A few of the new folks spun out and got sick but everyone had been pre-armed with vacuum ports to clean up the floating messes.

  Carter and the other waldoes brought in the new people’s luggage, taking it to the hexagonal living cell that had been assigned to each person. Once the belongings were put away, the waldoes unloaded the big bundle that would be tensioned into place and would contain the hex cell work areas.

  Carter’s shift finished about then and he passed on the work list to the second shift leader who took over his waldo. As he and Alex walked out, Alex turned to him and said, “Why are they sending actual people out there? There isn’t anything they can do out there that us waldoes couldn’t do better… and safer.”

  Carter had often wondered the same. “I think that a lot of people believe we need to get real people out in space to learn how to live there. Maybe for when we run out of room down here?” After a minute he followed up with, “You know, I’d kinda like to actually go out there myself sometime. Not to stay, you understand, but just to see what it’s really like. Try a reaction pistol in my flesh and blood hands.”

  “Hah,” Alex said, “you’re too late. Didn’t you see the reaction harnesses they brought up this trip?”

  Carter raised an eyebrow, “Harnesses?”

  “Yeah, it’s a harness that you strap on, has compressed air jets in a bunch of locations. A little “joyball” lets you move yourself around without having to line the pistol up with your center of mass. Twist the ball one way, you turn that way, move it a direction and you move that way. In fact, unless you’re purposely trying to rotate, the AI uses your jets to keep you in the same orientation and location you were in when you let go of the joyball.”

  Carter snorted, “Sounds like they took all the fun out of it.”

  When Carter got home Jenny met him at the door. “Hey Daddy, I need help with my science project.”

  Looking down at his daughter he said, “That sounds like fun. What are you doing?”

  She grinned up at him, “I’m making a model of the space habitat you’re building.” She tilted her head and looked at him with her typically serious concern, “Do you still like your job out there?”

  “Yes I do. But you know I don’t really go out into space, don’t you?”

  She shrugged, “I feel like you do.” She wrinkled her nose at him, then tilted her head and studied him seriously. “Is it a good job?”

  Carter nodded, not knowing how to tell her that not only did he love what he was doing, but that they paid him a lot more than he had expected. The excellent salary and Abby’s frugality were going to let them get his loans paid off in just a couple more years.

  ***

  Ell and Emma were walking over to the Quantum Research labs when Emma said, “Did you hear about Michael Fentis, the sprinter?”

  Ell shook her head, taken back once again to the time he’d been so rude to her at the Olympics.

  “Someone interviewing him for a Track and Field event asked whether he’d met you, ‘cause you know, you were in his last Olympics.”

  asked whedth="3em">“Oh?”

  “Yeah. He said no, but his face closed up when he did… Then he volunteered that he thought you’d, ‘just gotten lucky,’ winning those gold medals.”

  Ell grinned, thinking that she could picture him doing just that. Fentis was so arrogant. He would find anything that directed the spotlight away from himself and his own achievements really irritating.

  Emma glanced at her, “I can’t believe you’re smiling about it, the guy’s such an ass.”

  Ell shrugged. “Well he is arrogant, but he kinda has a right to be. He’s an amazing athlete.”

  “I think he’s an ass. I guess the interviewer felt the same way because he said, ‘Luck?! No one’s come close to replicating any of Donsaii’s new elements in the years since!’ In response, believe it or not, Fentis said he didn’t know anything about gymnasti
cs because he ‘didn’t really consider it to be a sport!’”

  Ell shrugged and grinned, “His prerogative, I guess.”

  Emma raised an eyebrow. “The interviewer jumped him for it though. He said, ‘I believe that analysis of the video of her run up to the vault showed that she runs faster than you do?’ Fentis purpled up like he was going to explode and said that ‘those videos had technical problems’ and besides, ‘everyone knew that gymnastic equipment was sprung to let gymnasts do things that couldn’t normally be done.’”

  Ell smiled again, “Well, that’s true, there are springs under the floor exercise area.”

  “But not the vault runway!”

  Ell chuckled, “No.” They came into the QR area and she turned her head, “Hey John, how’s it going?”

  Parker was sitting in front of a touch screen with pictures of the front and back of a right hand displayed. He held a stylus in his good left hand and every half second or so would touch a place on the displayed hand. Saying, “Halt,” to his AI, he turned. “It’s going good,” to them.

  Ell glanced at his right arm. He had on the new myoelectric hand they’d fitted him with over at the hospital. She nodded at it, “How’s that working?”

  He looked down at it and opened and closed the hand. “It’s a mixture of amazing and total crap. You see that the hand just hinges open and closed which means that it really doesn’t fit a lot of objects you might try to pick up. It has a little sensory feedback built into it, but that’s so limited that if I pick up something soft I’ll likely crush it because I have very little idea how hard I’m squeezing.” He held it up and looked at it with some loathing. “At least this is the new model with the power coming in through ports so I don’t have to carry batteries around.” He shrugged, “Also it’s pretty cool that they make these gloves to go over it. Look, they’re printed to match my other hand so I don’t look like such a freak.”

  Ell didn’t say anything for a moment and Emma saw her staring at John’s prosthesis, her throat working. Emma said, “It looked like you were registering sensory points for your neurotrode?”

  “Yeah,” John said, sounding more enthusiastic. “Ryan apparently has some kind of math genius roommate that ran up this software program in no time. Ryan’s neurotrode feeds a signal to one of the axons in my nerve and then I just mark on the screen where I ‘feel’ the sensation. The stylus has these little buttons that I press if I feel pain, or cold, or heat rather than just touch. Some of the axons give me weird sensations that the finger’s moving or suddenly in a different position. Right now I’m not identifying them. Just trying to write down what kinds of feelings I get from them. Then, after we’ve come up with a list of the ‘position sensations’ I get from them, I’ll go back and note those sensations on the ones that I skip this time.”

  “What happens when it stimulates the ones that control muscles?”

  “Oh, I already identified those. Really, that was easy. The program showed me a finger moving and I tried to move that finger the same way on my ‘phantom hand.’ Then it identified the axons that fired to try to cause that motion. Now, since the program already learned which axons control muscles, it isn’t trying to stimulate those axons during today’s session.”

  “Phantom hand?”

  “Yeah, amputees have the sensation that their hand is still there after it’s cut off. It’s called a ‘phantom hand.’”

  “Sounds pretty cool.” Emma said.

  “Yeah! Watch this.” He turned and picked up his modified “waldo” hand. “Control hand,” he said, evidently to his AI. Suddenly the waldo hand started curling some of its fingers down. John raised his eyebrows, “Pretty cool, huh.”

  Emma looked at her own hand and wiggled her fingers around, then narrowed her eyes, “It seems like you should be able to do more movements?”

  John grinned, “I’ve only got the median nerve hooked up so far, remember? The ulnar nerve controls most of the little muscles in the hand and the radial nerve controls the muscles that straighten the fingers back out. Without them, the hand is really clumsy. I have an appointment Monday with Dr. Hanson. Hopefully I can talk her into installing neurotrodes on the other nerves then.”

  ***

  Frank Alston felt like getting up and doing a little jig when Donsaii actually entered the studio. She virtually never did interviews and he’d just about given up on getting one before he’d had the idea to get the Olympic committee to ask her to do it. The committee was very interested in promoting next year’s Olympics and getting an interview with the elusive Donsaii on the sports newsfeeds would really grab attention. Despite the fact that she had competed for only one day in, not the last Olympics, but the one before that, she had greater name recognition with the public than virtually any other athlete. His eyes ran over her. She had on tights and a little skirt. She had on heels, though they were much lower than he’d thought at first. Slender, short strawberry blond hair, brilliant green eyes, perfect comp [ pels, lexion, pixie face, no makeup. My God, he thought, she’s just as beautiful in person as in all those photos I’d thought were retouched.

  He stood, “Hello Ms. Donsaii, thank you so much for coming in. An interview with you will really help in promoting the coming Olympics.”

  She shrugged, “I’m not at all sure that’s true. I wasn’t even in the last Olympics.”

  “Trust me; you have better name recognition than any other athlete in the world.”

  Donsaii frowned, “That can’t actually be true!”

  “It is, it is,” Frank said, ushering her into the chair. Once they were seated and the camera people were happy, he began by asking background questions that he knew the answers to. They’d splice this stuff together later. Next he got her to comment on the upcoming Olympics which she said she, “looked forward to.” He had a feeling that she wasn’t really as interested as most sports fans, but she put on an enthusiastic air for his cameras that should serve the US Olympic committee’s purposes.

  Finally Alston got to the little ‘T-bone’ he’d been working up to. Crashing in from an unexpected direction he said, “So, what do you think of Michael Fentis’ recent comments?” He hoped to get a rise out of her. Nothing like a little controversy to spark viewing.

  Irritatingly, Donsaii smiled sweetly, raised her eyebrows and said, “What did Mr. Fentis have to say?”

  “Well first, he said he hadn’t met you. However, we’ve found video documentation of the two of you speaking during the opening ceremony.”

  “Oh yes, but at the ceremony, I just asked for his autograph. No reason he’d remember that, he gets asked for autographs all the time.”

  “So, you have a ‘Fentis autograph’?”

  “Well… no. I don’t think he signs very many.”

  Alston felt disappointed. He’d so hoped that Donsaii would call Fentis out for being a jerk. Sports journalists hated him, but couldn’t take someone of his stature down a peg without losing future interview prospects. It would be great for someone like Donsaii to put him in his place though. “Then Mr. Fentis opined that you’d just ‘gotten lucky’ in winning four gold medals and that ‘gymnastics’ wasn’t really a sport.”

  Donsaii only grinned.

  After waiting a little longer for her to explode, Alston raised an eyebrow, “You’re going to let that comment stand?”

  “Well, Mr. Alston,” she said pleasantly, “I was incredibly lucky to win those medals, and, certainly we’re all entitled to our own opinions. Obviously, I think gymnastics is a sport, but I doubt I’ll convince Mr. Fentis of that.” She didn’t appear the least discomfited by Fentis’ comments.< [ > think/font>

  Alston leaned closer, as if revealing a secret, “The interviewer pointed out that the video record shows you running faster than his top speed during your run-up to the vault.”

  Donsaii raised her eyebrows, “Does it really?”

  Alston knew she must have heard that, it was all over the news back then. “Yes it does. However, Fentis b
lamed that on faulty video recording and ‘sprung gymnastic equipment.’”

  Donsaii smiled sweetly again, “Well the vault runway is much shorter than the 100 meters. He’s probably right don’t you think? It just doesn’t seem reasonable that a girl could have outrun him. He is the ‘world’s fastest man’ after all.”

  Alston almost barked a laugh; butter wouldn’t melt in that girl’s mouth! He obviously wasn’t going to get a rise out of her but, he had a feeling that with the right title for this vid clip and some incredulous responses from other interviewees, he could bring in more views than if she had gone off on Fentis like the bastard deserved. Alston wound the interview down and effusively thanked Donsaii for coming. Just before she took her mike off he said, “Is there any chance you’d enter next summer’s Olympics?”

  “Oh, my goodness Mr. Alston,” she winked at him, “I’m much too old for that, don’t you think…?”

  ***

  Stacy’s heart beat a little faster. They were making ports for small jet engines today. They’d pass flammables like Bart wanted for his hot rod. She checked her assignment. Yes, she was a “final inspector” today! This was the day she’d been waiting for with a mixture of dread and anticipation. All she’d have to do was down-check one of the ports that came to her station, then toss it in her purse. She could just place her purse next to the discard bucket so it would look like an errant throw. It would go home with her and if they caught her, she could be all wide eyed about how she’d just missed the bucket. Of course the down-checking of a perfectly good port might be harder to explain.

  But really, how could they catch her? And Bart had more money than he knew what to do with. The fact that he was offering five grand for a port for his hot rod proved that! If they paid her more for this damned job, maybe she wouldn’t be tempted.

  Stacy tried to ignore the fact that they were paying her more at this job than she’d ever earned before. On top of that, she’d been unemployed for a while before they hired her. As she settled into her workstation she wondered about turning Bart in for the reward Portal Tech was offering. At ten grand, it was double what Bart had offered her after all.