Day 15 of 30 2006
Day 15 of 30 2006Most everybody was very glad to have the help of the others up here, improving the chances of making life work in this strange inhospitable place all have found them selves in now. Volunteering duty accomplishment was adequate thanks for tasks each person did, at least for now. At least they did not have to have money to pay rent or for groceries, at this point; instead, they had to pitch in to make food grow and the place stay livable. So for now the question of how to create a monetary system was put off, there were too many other things that had to be done each moment, just to survive.
The couple who had taken on the task of getting the telescope working to locate their position relative to the space elevator tether location, had been plotting their position over a map of the globe, not unlike the appearance of the old photos of Houston Mission control showing path of the Space Shuttle, many decades ago, overlaying the Earth's globe of land and sea with sinuous curves iterated across the map, orbit after orbit. They did not know exactly where on the Equatorial Pacific Ocean the tether was, unfortunately. They had made some wide angle telescopic images of possible places it could be, that is, of the former floating oil rigs which were the artificial island the tether was anchored to. They showed Catalie one such photo of an object in the ocean. "Yes, that's it!" she exclaimed, a bit too excitedly, no doubt bringing back memories of adventures there a few years before. So the next time around that area, they got a close-up image of the object, along with data relative to their orbit. Catalie pointed out that it looked abandoned, just the three floating oil rigs lashed together, and no boats docked, no people on the rigs. Had the tether fallen already? The couple had also done calculations that showed that if the tether were exactly above that spot, that it would be in the path of their space station wheel during an orbit happening only 4 months from now.
"That eventuality could have been why they abandoned the space elevator project, even though it was looking so promising" Improy mused, upon hearing that news. In a survival contest for rights of occupancy of a specific piece of space, the enormous tensile strength of the carbon nanotube composite fiber tether, already stretched to limits of its working stress, would be no match for the impact of this mammoth mile-diameter wheel of a space station traveling at some 17,000 mph relative velocity when they met, hundreds of kilometers above the blue Pacific. "Let it go", Catalie urged, "we probably won't even know the contact happened." But Improy continued to ponder on and off during the following weeks, how to possibly save some of the space elevator structure, of which he had given so much of his life efforts to make into reality. Nevermind that Ownma Corporation had obviously expected the project to fail during construction, and Improy with it; and so surely had never expected it to be successfully built, let alone now survive impact from objects orbiting below GEO. The Space Elevator was just an abandoned, forgotten White Elephant to Ownma Corporation at this point.
The original pep talk given by Improy, set a model for what became a routine focusing on their mutual goals, once a week. Catalie usually came up with a theme for each meeting, but this next one had yet to have the light of inspiration happen for its theme. Improy showed up as usual, in front of the gathered staff, still without knowing what to say, so he improvised on his own, on the spot. "This difficult situation we are in" he began, " is a result of the ultra-corrupt thing that Ownma Corporation has become. It did not escape the old adage that absolute power corrupts absolutely. Yet, our efforts here are being done quite differently than work done under the slave masters of Ownma Corporation; we are making it work. Yet, could such scattered efforts have ever created such a thing as this pair of space station wheels? A Corporation ought to be a form of government that is focused on getting products to be created and put in the hands of those who need the products. And that is the kind of thing we need to do right here and now, to have our efforts not just survive for the moment, but also to go for an even better situation for all of us. Could we create a Corporation .... no, not like the Ownma Corporation ... a corporation that is product oriented instead of profit oriented?" He looked out on the faces, hoped he saw some of them shifting from angry memories of the bullying tragedies heaped upon them by the Ownma Corporation's elitist monkeybusiness, shifting to a more thoughtful look. "How would each of you design a corporation that got us to work more effectively together toward all our goals, and yet had safeguards built into the corporate structure so that it could not decay into the mess of Ownma? How would you do it? An Employee-owned and operated corporation, let's call it "Emplos Corporation" as it helps for something to have a name to become more concrete." So, that was the weekly meeting's assignment, to write how they would design such a corporation, in each person's individual words, whatever came up for them on the subject during the following week. It provided something to think about, besides how to do their still awkward tasks in such a strange machine world, so far from a home, and that home no longer had a welcome place for any of them. At least here they had food, shelter, companionship; and for now, had a tomorrow to look forward to. A tomorrow that perhaps they could influence its ways, too. Could it be?
posted by Unknown @ 7:24 PM
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