Friday, November 24, 2006

Day 24 of 20 2006

Day 24 of 30 2006 Building Up - JEDCline

The next day, despite the storm ongoing outside, Improy went out to get started on two projects. One was to capture and store as much of the currently downpouring rainwater as possible. The other project of the day was to get started on building the rectenna to capture the solar-energy derived microwave electrical energy that was being beamed down from the space station whenever it orbited past overhead.

Rainwater was being captured and sent to downspouts from the old Ownma Corp buildings, an easy starting point for gathering rainwater. He and a volunteer crew willing to endure the battering of the storm, searched the buildings for any kind of container that was empty and could hold water, and set them under the downspouts of the buildings. They also put some tarps out that they had found in the buildings, to also gather rainwater and divert it into some storage containers. Some of the crew stayed to move filled containers to places out of the weather, and to empty the ones that looked like really clean water into the agricultural areas, then returned those containers back to where they had been getting water from the downspouts and the tarp's runoff. They needed water to expand the useful parts of the agricultural areas, particularly the fish tanks. And since they would no longer be a fairly closed ecosystem, with people going in and out of their homes and the partial station's arc facilities, they would be losing water to the hot desert throughout the long desert summertime.

The rest of the crew went with Improy to move the energy beam's target transmitter a bit further from their little settlement, then they set up the rectenna sections which they had built on the space station and brought down during their evacuation of the facility. The rectenna grid was mounted two and a half meters above the ground, permitting freedom to move around under it. Although it was only about ten percent of the full size rectenna array they intended to build eventually to capture most of the incomming energy from the Solar power space station, it was something the could get going quickly. They ran wires from the rectifying antenna over to one of the return modules that had been abandoned in favor of living directly in the unfinished partial space station wheel in which they had the agricultural areas starting to function. The pre-test space station wheels had always been powered by the coal powder flash boiler turbine s driving electrical generators, but the reserves of that energy supply would later be more needed to power their vehicles.

They had to find ways to efficiently utilize the brief periods of electrical energy from space. They measured about a megawatt peak power each pass of the space station, varying with the angle from which it was sent. Their few industrial processes that could use DC power directly at high voltage, were set up for this power source first. They tapped some of the DC off to be used in a DC to AC power converter, and voltage controlled it provided conventional energy for their fixtures, at least for 10 or 15 minutes a pass. They set up an electrolysis facility to use the DC current to convert some of the water that they were catching, into hydrogen and oxygen, gathered in separate bags for now. These gases could then be burned later at will for some industrial processes, and to heat a flash boiler steam turbine electric generator that had formerly been powered by burning powdered coal. This was not very efficient, but it did make it possible to utilize the energy whenever it was needed, all the time, such as for interior lighting and operating their computer system and small appliances, any time day or night.

Catalie set up a system that monitored the performance of each of the electrical power systems, creating a data base that could be used to make decisions for what to invest their resources for later fulfillment of their electrical power needs. Improy bemoaned the loss of the prototype Satellite Solar Power Station that had been set up in GEO on the former Space Elevator, as it would have been nice to have its steady electrical power beam to maintain an even supply of electrical energy for their use. Meanwhile, they were thankful for what they were getting from space, such as it was. Soon they sectioned off parts of the rectenna grid, so that during 80% of the typical energy input time, the voltage would be high enough to power a DC to AC converter mounted under the antenna on a support pole, and then send that directly useful electrical energy to the facilities. Catalie set up a sequence program for typical daily needs, so that heavier loads would be connected when the beam was coming in more intensely; then those shutting off while the others, such as lights, stayed powered for as long as enough energy was being received to power just them; this scheme had good efficiency while it ran during each pass of the space station overhead.

Soon they had enough steady electrical power to provide lights, air circulation and the computer workspace education terminals for everybody. This brought everybody back into their familiar linkage with everybody els and with all of what was happening at the moment everywhere, a powerful sense of belonging and contributing. Their Emplos Corporation was now revived in the new setting, delivering the knowledge needed to do each task at hand, and instructions for simulating the skills that would be needed for the next job coming up for each person. Knowing how they each fit into the big picture, and the daily voting to adjust that big picture, utilized each person's activities well, in a self-guided group coordination, as the flow of jobs progressed and passed between the people's workstations. They resumed their 12 hour workday schedule, with frequent breaks for relaxing and doing exercises designed to integrate the body-mind system, and chatting among themselves via the computer linking. They had no significant commute to do, which gave them much more time to achieve things.

Most of all, it greatly multiplied their ability to achieve great goals. And they indeed had many great goals they intended to achieve, somehow. One of their top level goals was to get their form of corporate function into action by their kind over in the Employee sector of the mega-corporation controlled world. They realized that such an activity would not be welcomed by the owner-management wealthy elite, probably thinking it an effort to unionize the employees against their bosses. The counted on acceptance when it showed improved productivity by the employees, therefor more wealth for the managers, and so an acceptance.

There was a transportation problem. They were 900 miles from the southern California coastal area into which the TANFL Mega-corporation had condensed as the environment died out from under them, inadequate biodiversity remaining to cope with the increasing toxic loads of civilization's waste products. The space between the two areas was littered with the waste materials of a dying civilization on a dying ecosystem planet, as they coalesced for a last stand. Emplos Corporation faced a difficult challenge indeed, just in getting over there, and then convincing the Employees to take up the Emplos ways, while fending off the hostility from the powerful owner-manager elite who considered the employees little more than cattle to be farmed for profit.

It was not that TANFL Corporation was unaware of the dire overall situation, having had to retreat. It was just that they had from the beginning chosen the proverbial "eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow will take care of itself" attitude, ever reveling in their bully-gained wealth, sustained by cunning and brutality; they did not care which. It worked for them.

Emplos would have to be careful not to look the slightest bit like challenging the TANFL elite's position, but only to increase the wealth of the TANFL Corporation. Hopefully that would placate the Owner-Managers, while also improving the lifestyle of the Employees.

And all that, after figuring out how to merely get over there from the White Sands facility. They held a brainstorming vote on how to achieve those things from where they were at right now. They retrieved the photos their telescope had taken of the TAANFL-Employee city from the space station, It showed that the management lived in 3/4 of the city area, yet had very few members; while the remaining 1/4 land area was occupied by the many millions of employees, in crammed living space. They recalled the formal announcement of TANFL that their borders were closed to all outside immigration or abandonment by employees; TANFL like to keep things constant, made managing easier that way. From space, they had not figured out by what means the city perimeter was maintained; but that it was done so rigorously, was evident. Whatever it was, it surely would make egress by Emplos difficult.

Or maybe not, if the perimeter was maintained merely by limiting life sustaining utility access to just within the perimeter, no way to gain water, power, or sewage processing beyond the perimeter, would make life untenable beyond the border.

The more Emplos thought about it, the more they decided that was the means for maintaining the perimeter of the Employee area, and therefore might be easy to enter from the outside. Those of the Emplos Corporation who had become life prisoners and sent to the space station prison, had their implants removed, thus were non-persons as far as the system cared, thus unable to receive food, water, or shelter, and could not exist for long. But Improy, Catalie, and the others of the original space station still had their ID implants. No doubt as soon as setting foot into the Employees' area, the omnipresent security sensors would identify them, and TANFL would instantly have the knowledge that somehow they had returned, along with what that implied. So, the egress would have to be made by members of the former prison. Nearly all of them offered to volunteer for that task. The ones that were chosen were those who were fairly certain they would have family and friends still alive among the remaining Employee population.

Catalie activated the link with the telescope aboard the space station, and had it send digital pictures of the Employees' part of the city down to Emplos terminal network. What they found was that the occupied city perimeter was an artificial one, probably maintained by the desolation and lack of life support systems beyond the perimeter. So it seemed likely that if they could supply their own water, power, food and sewage functions, they could form an extension along the edge of the existing city. And Emplos people were experts at making an inhospitable placse livable, for sure.

Improy and Catalie had been spending a lot of time learning about how to restore launch facilities for the space buses. One purpose was to see it the airbreathing booster could be modified to get high enough to latch on the space station's tether, if they needed to access the dual wheel space station for some reason in the future. The other was to see if the airbreather booster could be used to transport people and goods over to the TANFL city perimeter. The booster as now configured was a drone, no pilot nor passenger space. And it was designed for vertical launch strapped to a habitat module filled with fuel, and then make an auto-piloted landing after it finished its part of the early launch phase. It was all wings, fuel tanks and huge engines. Unlike the cryogenic fuels needed for the main fuel tanks for the launch, the airbreathing booster used liquid hydrocarbon fuel like JP-4, and plenty of it remained in the underground tanks at White sands.

Not far from one part of TANFL City perimeter were some freeways that were fairly free of abandoned vehicles. So what they decided to do was to reconnect some of the return glider vehicles to their foamed glider wings, use the airbreathing drones to fly in the night to near the city, drop the gliders at low speed to easily land on the freeways, and set up the vehicles as homes and basic survival facilities not far from the Employees section of the city. The first landing would be focused on clearing a larger space free of abandoned vehicles a bit closer to the city for the next vehicles to go here.

They were able to observe the progress of the first landing's crew, using the space station's telescope. It went as they hoped. Then a group of half a dozen more gliders were landed on the newly cleared space on the freeway. They then set up their computer linking by beamed communications between modules, and so a mini-Emplos was established on the outskirts of the Employee section of TANFL City. Progress was being made toward their goal.

When the first foray was made to the edge of the city, what they found was that indeed there was no physical barrier there. It became clear that the Employee section of TANFL city was actually shrinking, as people died from deprivation. The survivors were moving closer to the Rich-Elite section border, as people died off. So the Emplos found the edge of the city was still supplied with the basic utilities of power, water and sewer, but no food. It required a ID implant that was on record as still being productively profitable to the corporation owner-managers, to receive food and thus survive.

So the Emplos team moved into the area which seemed most recently abandoned as the perimeter was shrinking, in the process having to clear out the corpses which had been brought out and left there. It was an unpleasant job but they got it done; then installing their computer linking systems in some abandoned buildings, and setting up their mini-agricultural systems to receive sunshine to grow some grains for food and for their quail and cockroaches, all in a fairly closed recycle system to preserve resources as was developed in the space station. They spent a few weeks there, avoiding any contact with the people of the city, until they had a going system functioning.

They found that the TANFL monitoring of the Employees out here was done entirely by sensors activated by the implanted ID devices in each employee, and did not bother with video or audio monitoring, as far as they could tell. Lacking ID implants, the Emplos people could wander as they pleased, essentially invisible to the Management monitors. They had clothed themselves in clothing taken from some of the corpses they had removed from their new quarters, so they looked like normal people, they hoped, to the average person among the Employees. And they had no intention of going into the Rich-Elite part of the city, where surely there would also be video and audio tracking of everything that went on.

Eventually they were able to locate trustworthy relatives and friends. It turned out that none of them knew why they had vanished, or even for sure that they were gone. So they were spared the effort of explaining they had been imprisoned in space, returned on spacecraft gliders and were trying to save the employees ... no, they were glad they did not have to try to convince anybody of such an implausible thing. But what they could do is bring some of their family and friends to observe their setup, their self sufficiency, their terminal continual education workstations, their computer interlinked team. And some of the employees liked that, wanted in on it.

The Emplos foray team had brought along a bunch of spare education workstations, for the purpose of training new people, and so this was done. In the employee spare time they came to learn how to interact with the combined education and productive work method of progress, and some even moved to be near the Emplos group. An old abandoned light industry factory was located nearby so they turned it into their first factory for producing the computer terminals, and for training new people how to use them. It was really popular with the employees and used it for their off-duty recreation time, far more interesting than watching old DVD movies on dying DVD players. Then the Emplos team suggested that the Employees form their own Corporation over here; TANFL philosophy was founded on the premise that Corporations were righteous by nature. So the beginnings of the re-trained Employees had a vote on their newly built computer work-education terminals, and chose to name themselves the "Three Musketeers Corporation."

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