Defiant

by Laurence Dahners

  “He’s the guy spinning the graphene out at the habitat, right?”

  Ell nodded.

  Fred asked with some excitement, “Is he going to build a space elevator? I’ve been waiting for one of those my whole life!”

  Ell blinked a couple of times, then began slowly, “Even though we now have the ability to make a material strong enough to build and elevator, there are a lot of problems with such a megastructure that would remain. First, hugely expensive to build. Second, a freaking nightmare to get permission to build it from the country where it’s attached. Third, remember that storms, meteoroids and satellites would eventually hit it and do some damage. Even if it were built with redundant strands, when a strand broke, the shock wave would travel through the broken strand at the speed of sound in the material. That shock wave would be followed by fiber fragments travelling at over a kilometer per second and doing their own damage. So, even with redundant construction, it might fail. Fourth, probable protests and lawsuits from the rest of the countries at the equator where, if it broke completely, the falling parts would land. Remember that a space elevator would be longer than the circumference of the earth so, if it broke at the right altitude, it would wrap itself all the way around the earth as it fell. Made out of graphene, it wouldn’t weigh enough to do much damage. It would only be on the order of kilograms per kilometer but, we’d still have protests and lawsuits over the danger of it falling. Finally, an elevator’s main benefit would be the ability to move material out to space at low cost.” She looked around the table, “We can already move material to orbit with ports and move people to orbit with non-polluting, port fed, oxygen-hydrogen rockets. Admittedly, we’re using oxygen-hydrocarbon rockets at present but the total amount of CO2 being released is still rapidly diminishing because of our other technologies, so CO2 isn’t as much of an issue as it used to be.”

  She glanced at everyone again, then shrugged, “I don’t see a reason to build a space elevator anymore.”

  Several of the people at the table initially looked stunned, but a dawning comprehension of the issues swept over them and several of them laughed. Fred snorted, “So you’re saying I’ve contributed to shooting my own dream in the foot?”

  Ell nodded solemnly. People began shifting in their seats preparatory to leaving the meeting. She said, “One more item?” When they’d settled she said, “I’m sure some of you’ve been giving this some thought already, but I thought we should discuss what might happen if the Blaustein bill passes?”

  “And you had to turn over the interstellar tech, you mean?” Ben Stavos asked with a frown.

  “Yeah... I’ve decided that I can’t do that. First of all, I don’t believe that it’s safe for a committee led by Dr. Ementhal to be in charge of first contact with any intelligent alien races. Second, I feel it would be unethical to turn one ended ports over, they have too much potential for devastating harm.” She shrugged disconsolately, “So, if it comes to that, I’ll be in violation of the law and may get arrested.”

  “Why protest by refusing the turn it over? They’ll just take it anyway.”

  Ell shook her head, “I’ve destroyed all the existing one ended ports and erased all the design data. They’d have to figure it out themselves,” she sighed, “which someone will probably eventually do. But it took some surprising serendipity to come up with the one ended version. Even though I thought of one ended ports first, the electronics are very, very bizarrely different, and much more difficult than the two-ended ports. So I’m hoping it will be a long, long time before anyone else comes up with them.”

  There’d been several indrawn breaths when Ell said she’d destroyed the information but Ben said slowly, “I’ve always believe in free dissemination of scientific information so I never thought I’d be saying this, but I agree. I’ve thought about the one ended ports a lot since they first were mentioned and the kinds of horrible things that could be done with them is just frightening to contemplate. However, I would think that you could just explain that to the government and they’d agree. Once they understand, I bet they’ll retract their fangs on Blaustein.”

  Ell sighed, “I hope so too. However, what I wanted to tell you is that, even if I’m in the pokey, I’m arranging for things to go on as usual here at D5R. Our investors have said they’ll continue supporting research and development at Quantum Research. Portal Tech and ET Resources are pretty much self-supporting so it shouldn’t have any great bearing on how things go with them but our investors will backstop them if there are problems. Even if I’m in jail, you’ll still be able to communicate with me.” She grinned, “It isn’t like they can confiscate my phone and AI anymore,” she tapped meaningfully on the implant under her ear.

  ***

  Shan offered Ell one of his potato chips, but she shook her head. “What? Are you suddenly too health conscious for a potato chip?”

  She shook her head ruefully, “No, it’s just that my mouth’s too sore.”

  He frowned, “Why is your mouth sore?”

  “Well I’ve been backing up my implanted comm system. I’ve been meaning to tell you anyway. I’ve put some more ports just under the tissue surface in the roof of my mouth and inside my ear canals.”

  “What was wrong with the ones you had?

  “Well, they only connect to one other port each. So if someone were to destroy my AI and the port attached to him, then I wouldn’t be able to communicate any more through that port. I decided I needed some spares.”

  Shan tilted his head, “A backup comm port isn’t going to help if they dismantle your AI. You wouldn’t have an AI to communicate with.”

  Ell shrugged, “I’ve backed Allan up too. I bought more hardware and hid copies of him in several locations that all cross connect to keep each other updated. Someone trying to cut me off would have to find and disable all of them.” Apologetically she said, “I’ve even connected myself to your AI so that if they found all of mine, I could use yours in a pinch. That connection is through a microphone port in my little finger and speaker port in my thumb though, so I’d have to hold my hand up to my head to use those.”

  Shan looked at her measuringly for a moment, then said, “Jeez, you’re really worried about this aren’t you?”

  Ell snickered, “Yeah, I’ve probably really overdone it. I’ve buried connection ports several places on the farm and out in the countryside. I’ve hidden devices in multiple locations that can deliver materials to my implanted single-ended ports. I’ve set up systems to restock the materials automatically and, if necessary, for you or Amy or Emma to restock them for me. Sometimes I think I’m excessively paranoid.”

  “When are you doing all this?!”

  “After you go to sleep. You know I don’t need as much beauty rest as you do.”

  Shan winked at her, “Only ‘cause you have beauty to spare…”

  ***

  Research Triangle Park, North Carolina—D5R announced today that, through President Flood’s negotiations, they had awarded control over a rocket in the Alpha Centauri solar system to Dr. Leo Jans of JPL. D5R is the parent company for Portal Technologies. D5R delivered the rockets to Tau Ceti which have allowed us to learn about the teecees who live on the third planet of that system. Dr. Jans says that, even though life on the planet circling Alpha Centauri appears to be unicellular, we have a lot to learn from it. One of the first questions will be whether it is DNA-based like the teecees and ourselves. Jans also wants to confirm whether chlorophyll is responsible for the green color of much of the life there and determine the concentration of oxygen in the atmosphere. He says it is far too early to speculate on whether Alpha Centauri might be suitable for human settlement.

  Of note, D5R appears to be thumbing its nose at Dr. Francis Ementhal and the Blaustein bill he helped to sponsor. The bill was designed to force Ell Donsaii and D5R to turn over all control of their apparatus for interstellar exploration to a committee headed by Ementhal. By turning over control of the rocket in the Alpha Centauri
system to Jans prior to passage of the bill, D5R seems to be doing somewhat of an end run…

  ***

  Ell had a free morning, so she took a virtual tour of what was new in the company by looking out through some of the waldoes that belonged to ET Resources. ETR had recently finished a new waldo control center with hundreds of controller setups and room to expand with more. She considered going over there to look at the center, but it was just so much easier to log in to different waldoes using the controller she already had in her office.

  For the most part she simply watched through the virtual eyes of waldoes being run by other operators. She observed for a while as the low earth orbit waldoes finished positioning another weightless module to be attached to the habitat. So far they had three of the large weightless modules chained together. At the junctions between each pair were hubs around which pairs of living modules swung on 250 meter long tubes, producing 0.3 gravities of acceleration to maintain the inhabitants’ health.

  Deciding she had nothing to contribute there, she moved on to the asteroid mining program. There she watched ETR’s waldoes cutting chunks off the asteroid that slowly fell into the big funnels. The chunks fed into the “chopper,” as they called AJ’s series of big ports that cut the chunks up into tiny fragments so that they could be economically ported back to earth. A couple of waldoes stayed pretty busy breaking jams with long poles they stuck in through holes in the funnels. No easy way to prevent the jams occurred to Ell. At least they were easy to unjam in the low pseudogravity.

  From there she moved on to watch a couple of waldoes that were unloading observation and surface radar systems out of one of D5R’s space planes. They were attaching the systems to a geostationary frame that would stabilize their orbits so they could be treated like one huge satellite. The array of radar antennae could act like one enormous radar array, allowing very precise imaging of Earth’s surface. Each satellite had its own set of heating and cooling tubes that would maintain them at an optimal temperature even out exposed in space. With ported electricity they no longer needed the huge solar panels that had decorated previous satellites. Once they had deployed these satellites, Ell knew that the waldoes would go on to their main job nowadays, which was to shepherd old telecomm satellites. Almost completely replaced by PGR technology, the old satellites had become “space junk” to be removed before they collided with something important. The teams would attach a few port fueled rockets and an AI would slowly transform their orbits until they wound up at D5R’s habitat system where there were plans to begin reclaiming and recycling materials out of them. They contained a lot of exotic and expensive metals that were anticipated to make the cleanup profitable.

  Next Ell tapped into one of the waldoes that ETR had landed on the moon and leased to NASA. As opposed to the waldoes in space, which only had jets on their lower half, these had legs so they could walk around. They also had jets strong enough to fly them from location to location in the weak lunar gravity. As she looked out through the waldo’s eyes, she realized that it must be near one of the poles. Long shadows stretched out from the rim of the shallow crater the waldo was walking through. Actually, bounding would be a more accurate description of the waldo’s mode of progress in the low gravity.

  Suddenly a voice came over the waldo’s link, “Hello! I see I’ve picked up a hitchhiker in my little trek across Amundsen crater. Who’s there?”

  Ell’s eyes widened, Phil! “Well, Lieutenant Zabrisk, this is your old girlfriend stalking you. You doing anything on the moon besides just walkin’ from place to place?”

  “Ell?”

  “Got it in one.”

  “How did you find me?”

  “Lucky accident. I’ve just been logging in to see what D5R’s waldoes are doing. I happened to hook in to your data feed when I wanted to see what you NASA boys were doing on the moon. How’d you know I was watching?”

  “Oh, we have an open feed for the public and quite a few people log on to watch what we’re doing. We get a notification if someone is ‘eyes on’ so we can talk to them if we’re not busy. Good PR.”

  “You get married yet?”

  “Uh, next month. Would you like to come? I’m not very smart about whether it’s OK to invite old girlfriends to your wedding.”

  “Hah! I think that’s pretty frowned upon. But…” Ell had a little catch in her voice, “I wish you well, even if you did break my heart.”

  “Oh, don’t you say that. If there’s even a chance you’d marry me…”

  Ell interrupted him, “Don’t go saying something you’ll regret.” She sighed,

  “Better if we don’t spend too much time wondering about what might have been. Tell me what you’re doing. Surely they don’t have you highly trained astronauts just walking waldoes on the moon?”

  “Well… not usually. You know, you screwed the moon up for me too.”

  “What, just because you’re here as a waldo instead of in person?”

  “No, I always dreamed that I was going to help colonize it. Then we’d mine the moon for various exotic metals, Helium 3 for fusion reactors and water for colonization. We were going to build a mass driver to launch the stuff we mined into orbit and it would be so cool. Then, some damn woman came along with these ports that make it cheaper to get water from earth, metal from asteroids and power from space. We don’t need any of those vaunted moon resources I was going to dig for, so there isn’t any reason to build my colony. The space habitats someone’s building mean that we probably don’t even need the real estate to solve overcrowding on Earth. Who wants to just sit around on the moon doing nothing?”

  “So what are you doing?”

  “Well, we’re exploring. Seeing if there actually might still be something on the moon worth doing now that the mining idea is a bust.”

  “Really? And you’re going to learn that leaping across Amundsen crater?”

  “No.” Phil sounded embarrassed, “I fell and broke one of the lifting rocket nozzles on this waldo so the only way to get it to the pole where I’m supposed to be sampling the lunar ice is to walk.”

  “Oh, that’s rich. So all those accusations you were making against me a minute ago were merely an attempt to distract me from the fact that you’ve been breaking our waldoes?”

  “Um… yes Ma’am,” he said contritely…

  ***

  Washington DC— President Flood has conceded the election to Senator Edith Stockton. Though the presidential race was relatively close, President-Elect Stockton’s Democratic Party has also achieved a substantial majority in the House and a small majority in the Senate. This unusual loss by an incumbent president is being attributed to uncertainty among working class Americans over the new PGR and port technologies. These technologies have resulted in extensive upheavals in the business world as some former economic powerhouses have been shuttered and new industries have exploded onto the scene. Many voters apparently felt that Flood did not do enough to diminish the economic disruptions wrought by these changes.

  Though the market penetration of these technologies is limited as of yet, almost everyone can see the writing on the wall and fear is rampant. New industries based on this science are replacing existing plants that are being closed; however, workers’ anxieties regarding the changes have been enormous. Retraining for new jobs is expensive and personnel that get the new jobs often complain that they aren’t being paid as well as they were by their previous employer.

  Recognizing the depth of popular concern over the new tech, Stockton took what many felt to be a politically risky tactic by criticizing Ell Donsaii, the genius responsible for discovering the principles involved. Though she’s well-loved and highly respected, many seem to feel that she also should have done something to keep their lives from being overturned.

  Despite the apprehension over their effects on employment, demand for the products of these new technologies is at an all-time high…

  Shan opened the door to his parent’s home and called out, �
�Happy Thanksgiving. Your guest of honor is here.”

  In response, Shan’s dad Malcolm called, “Ell, welcome ye guest of honor!”

  As Shan came around the corner into the family room, he placed a hand on his chest, “Oh, I’m hurt! The prodigal son returns and his family welcomes his wife instead?”

  Malcolm raised an eyebrow, “Shouldn’t have married such a pretty girl then.” He gave Ell a little hug. Morgan and Lane had risen from their spots on the couch and they came forward to greet Shan and Ell as well.

  Shan looked seriously at his father, “Hey Dad?”

  Malcolm turned from watching his family greeting each other, “Hmm?”

  “Uh, I never call Raquel, Ell, unless I meet her in her role as Ell somewhere in public. Don’t want to get a bad habit that leads me to say the wrong name someday somewhere.”

  Shan’s sisters and mother had also turned to listen and his mother said, “Oh, that’s a good idea.” She turned to smile at Ell, “Well, Raquel, come on in. I’ve got some hot chocolate brewed up for you.” She winked, “And you must congratulate Ms. Donsaii on her recent Olympic wins for us…”

  At dinner Malcolm turned to Ell, “What are the results of the new election going to mean for your company?”

  Ell looked at him, “You mean, because Stockton won after bashing the new tech in general and Donsaii in particular toward the end of her campaign?”

  Malcolm nodded.

  Ell shrugged, “I don’t think the election will affect D5R and its subsidiaries very much. We’ve already been slowing the release of the tech per an agreement with the government. They may ask us to slow it further, but I don’t think they—or anyone really—wants us to stop production.” She grinned and, rubbing her hands together, said in a low voice, “We’ve got ‘em addicted to the new technology.”