Building Up - jedcline's 2006 NanoWriMo

Day 11 of 30 2006: Building Up

Day 11 of 30 2006 jedc "Building Up"

Idealiana made a call to them, saying that she was fine, that everyone in Girl Scout camp was fine, although some had started to get sick but had used the electrical signals to their hands, even though it seemed strange to them. She had built the basic 30KHz pulse generator, and had used a small computer to get it to run at the 77 and 91 KHz signals. Some of the other Girl Scouts had told their families over the internet chats about the electrical thing, and a few of their parents were building the gadget, already getting a bit sick; and then also more of the parents started arriving at the mountain camp to get to use the gadget that Idealiana had built and used, as word was out by then of the worldwide epidemic, and no pills or shots had been yet found to fix it. In fact, she and the other kids there had decided to not leave camp to go back home yet, as things were really bad elsewhere. Since there were no more computers adaptable to controlling the frequency settings, she and a few of the other Girl Scouts there built a bunch of single-frequency signal generators, which were used by folk who sat or stood in a line, someone calling out time of 7 minutes each, then each person passed the signal generators to the next person; keeping the same handholds until having done all three signals, discarding their wet paper towels, handing the conductive pipe handholds to someone else, done with it for the day.

Another thing that saved thousands of lives was that an old mountain man had remembered that several brands of old survival kits had contained an electrical thing whimsically called a "Zapper" that was part of a combined flashlight, radio and emergency signal transmitter and which was powered by a small hand crank, which at least provided the 30KHz basic first aid part of the system, at one time had been considered as essential to remote emergency first aid as were aspirin and bandages. He directed people to the collapsing old site of a former Forest Service warehouse facility, where hundreds of the kits were to be found, thus eventually saving thousands more lives in the current widespread emergency.

"So it looks like we already have earned our keep" Improy commented to Catalie, "by finding out a way for saving millions of lives in the epidemic." Catalie replieded a bit distractedly that the Ownma management personnel were taking credit for the healing technique, never mentioning them or that it had been first used up here. She continued "Ownma Corporation management people really do believe that all good ideas can only come from themselves, not from employees like us; and in fact much of management believes that ideas come out of thin air and therefore have no value." In fact, since all corporations like Ownma were based on sifting all communications between unsuspecting people, searching for anything usable for profit or power over people, Ownma Corporation routine snooping had snagged the messages Catalie had sent to her daughter about the electrical gadget, and later those from the station's doctor, and immediately had the devices built and distributed to corporate management personnel and their families, thus none of them perished. As usual, they did not keep records of where they had gotten the knowledge; they just made it theirs. Their belief in their superiority over employees was so stratified it had been made into something like a religion, where they are taught that their corporate ancestral father was a great bull of a man, who declared that all his male decendants were chosen to own all that there was to be owned, causing all other people to fade away in destitute servitude, rightfully so because he said so. How could anyone doubt it, since their obvious great wealth and power's luxurious living was there for all to see? Facts are facts, unquestionably. Therefore there was no need to give credit to anyone other than themselves, for anything. Including the idea for the unorthodox use of an electrical gadget to heal people during time of epidemic crisis. "Catalie, my love," Improy implored,"think of it this way. Ownma Management people have little to do in the way of work, except to monitor all our doings, including sifting through all the records of our conversations and all the recordings from the videomonitors which are everywhere. The little tidbits they find among the vast fields of our conversations and doings, is little different to them as it is to us when we wander in a field of wildflowers, picking the best for ourselves as if they belonged to us, and not to the flowers that bore them." "The Ownma Corp people have just as much brains as us, they are different in what they do with their brains" he went on, "it is what a person does with one's knowledge, is what makes the difference. We utilize out knowledge and skills to directly cope with the needs of life; but they have genes that predispose them to use their knowledge and skills to wrest the goodies away from others who created them, politely if possible, as usually they do to us nowadays. They have lots of isolated groups like us who actually create the things, and Ownma Managemtnt just uses what it gathers from us to augument what other groups do. And they are ever mildly assaulting each other, like the pecking order of older creatures' social systems work, which hones their abilities and inclinations to assault as a solution to everything. Those of us who show signs of being unhappy about that, have the DNA-resonant communication system targeted on them, so as to have a communications channel to find out the intentions of the person and to switch their focus at key junctures of their life activiies, endlessly causing them extra weird struggles in daily life and thereby making them ineffective, thus no further problem to the Ownma Managers exclusive right to rule. They rationalize excuse for such subtle-level harrassment by fantasizing claims that their target person is a thief or child abuser or some other ugly motived person. So be careful, don't let them get the idea that you might be antagonistic to them, or they will put on the list for such hazing, too." Catalie just stared at him briefly. He went on "The effect on the target "blackballed" person is that the person trips himself up on and on, as if struggling with opposing purposes. Life seems to not be able to work out, and they appear a bit sedated, slower than normal. The hazing is kept up until the person is on their knees, no will remaining to oppose anymore. And it is all done remotely, the abusers out of sight; a clever technology originally designed for a somewhat more honorable purpose, that of behavior modification of persons with addictive disorders. But it works just as effectively and bafflingly on anybody they choose."

"You are just being bitter. Get used to the situation, and roll with the punches." he later said to Catalie, "That which is more useful is for us to go bring down the rest of that last shipment of supplies, and see what goodies Ownma sent us. It is likely the last supplies we will receive for a very long time." So they and a couple of the more recovered of their co-workers retrieved the containers from the net securing them in the free-fall of the hub area, and moved them down to the supply receiving area of the wheel's rim. Among the goodies was a small polymer casting, extrusion, and weaving facility, "I wonder if we can make fabric usable for space worksuits with this machine?" they said almost simultaneously. They headed out to find a couple of people who would become fine fabric makers, and they would all spend some time figuring out how they could use this machine with what resources they had for making raw material for it, focusing on making material for space worksuits. Its extrusion capability also looked like it had potential for making spacesuit joints that would be far better than making them out of empty food containers.

They scavenged raw material from the cushions and seat belts from some of the one-way space bus modules that were lashed outside the station's hub. And some of those empty plastic food containers were beginning to look better for use in making spacesuit parts, once processed by the machine.

Among the containers in the last shipment were found one contaminated with a half dozen of small tan-colored cockroaches. "Wait, don't kill them!" Improy shouted, as one of the workpeople was about to squash them in revulsion. Staring in wonderment at the little beasties, Catalie added "Cockroaches can be raised cleanly in confinement, like snails are for Escargot; and they have a fine protein composition that could augment our nutrition, which is now limited to a few grains, vegetables, fish and quail." "And cockroaches have a hard shell material which might be useful for making spacesuit material, who knows" Improy chimed in. "The cockroaches can be used to recycle much of our agricultural wastes, and they can be cooked and ground up for additive protein in our soups and quailburger."

posted by Unknown @ 3:55 PM