Building Up - jedcline's 2006 NanoWriMo

Day 25 of 30 Building UP 2006 JEDCline

Day 25 of 30 "Building Up" 2006 NanoWriMo - JEDCline

The "Three Musketeers Corporation" was an idea that caught on quickly, and became the favorite pastime of the Employees of TANFL Corporation, which seemed to not notice it. The specified workload continued to be performed by the Employees during their daily commute by foot into the vast holdings of the RichElite of TANFL city's Owner-Manager section, which occupied 75% of the city land. The Employees did all the physical labor, the menial tasks, for TANFL. When their daily tour of duty was completed, they headed to their homes for a meal, then headed to the Three Musketeers Corporation areas, which were being multiplied throughout the Employee section of the city. Computer terminal manufacturing facilities were being set up in several places in the Employee section, each one set up and run as a self-managed group united by the integrated education-enhanced light industry workstations network that they were manufacturing.

The Port of TANFL shipping facilities were a part of TANFL that was not within the borders of the RichElite. The port served the freighters that linked the Mega-Corporations that had formed throughout the world, as well as was the port berthing the former aircraft carrier now turned private yacht for the RichElite Owner-Managers. The port's operations were handled by Employees who were being directed via video links by the managers who were in offices over in the luxury part of the city. One of the major trade routes was to Ecuador to obtain bananas, routine daily runs on the powdered coal fueled freighters. The port of TANFL City usually had a pall of black smoke hanging over it, which particles caused widespread lung disease and neurological problems from the mercury and other metal particulates laced into the coal that was burned to propel the ships, and also to generate the electric power for the city. The pall of smoke was long a part of Employees' life, shortening their life spans a lot. Some of the TANFL Employees were the sailors that manned the freighters, which had the benefit of usually having better air to breathe despite the atmospheric wake of heavy black smoke they left behind them. Management was only interested in the bananas and other commodities they received from the shipping, so the rest of the freighter operations was done by the Employees mostly on their own. The new Employee education-workstation terminals caught on quickly aboard the freighters, and each one leaving the port found itself newly equipped with the new linking network between all of its crew's workstations, crew quarters and recreation areas.

When out of radio range of the TANFL Corporation City, the freighter's were able to occasionally get brief radio communications with the Emplos Corporation people at White Sands, bounce relayed by the space station whenever it orbited overhead. During those times, the freighter's education-workstations were integrated with the ones at White Sands Emplos Corporation workstations, sharing knowledge and enabling chat with new people during the brief time spans, something that was enjoyed by people both on the freighters and at White Sands.

Although the RichElite of Ownma Corporation, now TANFL Corporation, had denied internet connection for the Employees homes, the Employees did sometimes need to access the worldwide internet connection when performing some kinds of routine jobs for the Managers. During the breaktimes while working over in the RichElite section of the city, Employees were allowed to access the internet and play computer games, saving the results on CD's. Some of the Employees began to download knowledge databases on the internet, bringing them home on CDs and DVDs. Brought on board the freighters by Employees returning from shore leave, the CD and DVD knowledge from the internet was uploaded via the space station links, to the White Sands Emplos Corporation memory banks.

Back at White Sands Emplos Corporation, Improy and Catalie started sifting through the somewhat random areas of knowledge that was being accumulated via the freighter satellite brief links, and organize it into their knowledge network. They were seeking ways to turn around the civilization that was dying along with the worldwide ecosystem it had disrupted too severely. This, too, seemed like an impossibly difficult task, but they were getting used to taking on impossible-seeming tasks, and achieving some significant success at the efforts. What could possibly have such a huge effect to be able to rescue a planet and its human civilization? Catalie found some forgotten ways for recycling and conserving resources, but little that they themselves did not already have better systems for small closed-loop internal environmental life support, developed aboard the space station.

Then she found information on the Space Elevator which they had participated in building and operating a decade past; among the theoretical documents was a description of another kind of transportation structure which did not require the super-strength carbon nanotube matrix ribbon material to build. It had an entirely different technique for providing a transportation bridge between the Earth's surface and Geostationary Earth Orbit. It would utilize a huge hoop which entirely encircled the planet, a hoop which internally had mass circulating sufficiently faster than orbital velocity everywhere along the hoop to create just enough outward centrifugal force to support the weight of the hoop itself and whatever payloads that were climbing up and down the hoop between the earth surface at the low point of the eccentric hoop, up to the high point which would be in GEO, far above the opposite side of the planet. It had to be built in the equatorial plane, in its simplest version. The writer of the concept had proposed one of the possible earth terminal sites would be anchored in the Andes Mountains of Ecuador.

Improy got excited about this prospect, as it looked like it was something that could be initially built small cross-section and then scaled up to whatever size filled a give transportation capacity need. The upward sides of the circulating mass within the hoop could electromagnetically drag spacecraft up between ground and space, so the energy for transportation was thus distributed all along the structure, so no inefficient lifting of the weight of fuel was used in the transportation process. Scaled up big enough, it could lift the construction materials needed to build enough solar electric power stations in GEO to beam down clean electrical energy anywhere in the world that wanted it. The burning of the petrochemicals could finally stop thereby, they hoped, beginning a turn around of the situation which was finishing off the killing off of the ecosystem upon which civilization existed. And with such a transportation capacity to GEO, they could build larger versions of their mass-spectrometer type total element separator plants up there, with which to convert otherwise unrecyclable toxic industrial materials and byproducts, back to useful pure chemicals again, powered by the Sun. Yes, it looked like they had found a way to possibly turn around the dying planet. And the mountain peak named Cayambe in Ecuador looked like the place to build it. A horizontal tunnel through that mountain in an east-west direction would be the ideal location to anchor the planet-encirclng structure, at least ideal in this hemisphere of the world. And Ecuador was a major destination of TANFL freighters, going for bananas.

The Three Musketeers Corporation was also going to Ecuador, but not for bananas; instead they were going there to try to save their planet's life.

Improy and Catalie chose to make side trip on the way to Ecuador. They set up another of their return spacecraft modules fitted to a set of cast foamed aluminum re-entry glider airfoils, like were used to land the group of Emplos people onto the freeway near TANFL city, but it was just going to be themselves, the space worksuit they had brought down, and some equipment they had built. They were traveling light, because they had to go far and fast. They rigged their spacecraft under the airbreathing pilotless booster which had been fitted for carrying such a vehicle, as well as using its landing gear to take off as well as land later. Improy was going to remotely pilot the drone booster from inside its own payload, then transfer remote piloting to the White Sand control center when they were done with it. They also had modified their spacecraft to have a set of guidance thrusters which had been removed from one of the spare habitat modules, along with the thruster fuel supply.

Strapped into their seats, they readied for takeoff down the runway, Improy piloting and Catalie navigating. The huge turbine jet engines roared into life, brought to operating temperature, brakes were released, and the dual craft leapt down the runway, the booster having much less than the load it was designed to lift through the atmosphere. Quickly airborne, the temporary biplane headed almost straight up, barreling toward space. at the greatest acceleration the two could tolerate. Catalie locked her navigation console onto the signal from the small transmitter they had left attached to the bottom of the tether pulley. It was higher now, having been lifted along with the space station during the dropping of the mass of the return spacecraft a year ago. Now, they were making a leap to grab onto the pulley assembly as it swung by overhead, tethered to the dual wheel space station far above it. Their timing had to be nearly perfect, and so the onboard computer continued to update their trajectory and adjusted course to optimize that, using its ailerons and rudder. Then the big jet engines began to have insufficient ozygen to continue to run, so they throttled down those engines, unlatched the conection to the airbreather booster, transfered piloting over to the White Sands ground control, and the drone was headed back to the landing strip. Meanwhile, Improy and Catalie continued coasting upward along a section of a parabolic arc that, onscreen, intersected with the path of the dangling end of the tether. Their direction finder kept locked onto the transmitter signal from the tether, and Doppler shift of its frequency gave them relative velocity data. The end of the tether hove into sight ahead of them, then Improy's skills honed on a simulator they had been using for months, used the docking thrusters to nuzzle up to the tether's latch from which they had been last to unlatch only a year past. Now they were again hanging on the tether. They sent the signal up to the space station to start cranking on the tether, bring them back up again. They did some stress relief exercises, munched the lunch they had brought along, and went along for the ride.

Improy had to use the docking thrusters again to get positioned to dock, then they were attached to the Embarcadero's airlock. Improy put their one spacesuit on, and they used a canister of pressurized air to make up for the air used to fill the airlock as Improy went into it and sealed the outer hatch. Once it was sealed, he opened the inner hatch, went into the Embarcadero control center, and normalized the air in there. Then he opened both hatches of the airlock and Catalie came in. They were back home again, at least one of their homes, they felt. Improy sealed off the airlock leading to the shady side wheel, and normalized the atmosphere and temperature in their wheel, and then made an inspection tour of the facility, particularly the agricultural section, recording how it had fared under automatic control.

The grain had expanded quite a ways into the vacated part of the matrix, and the quail population had doubled in size, feeding on the abundant grain. The cockroaches were as always balancing their population with the available resources.The temperature and humidity were a bit high, so Catalie adjusted the automatic controls based on the time span it took to balance at those higher levels, refining to gradually re-balance at the optimum temperature and humidity. There were enough there to feed the two people for a month and still have plenty of population members to restore their numbers easily.

Catalie assembled the other space worksuit around her, and they went outside again, this time down through the shady side wheel hub airlock. Using material from the huge collection of material from the space busses and supply vehicles, they made the arm for the tether upper pulley into a "V" with a second arm which attached to another de-spun bearing on the Embarcadero's end of the hub.

In the next few weeks they had built another of the solar-concentrator plasma generators like was used in the mass spectrometer type total recycler, and instead of its high velocity vaporized material output going around past a magnetic field, it was just magnetically focused into a reaction beam. They set up a chopper on the space station to methodically cut up the unused section of the space busses, left over from when the return spacecraft were made partly from the habitable part of the lift modules. These chunks of aluminum tank material were brought down the tether to the plasma generator on the lower end of the tether, slung on the pulley. They set up a remote position monitor and directional control on the plasma generator, to be controlled from White Sands when they were done with testing. They started up the tether moving, now functioning as a conveyor belt for the chunks of aluminum tank material being delivered from the space station down to the end of the tether. The chunks of aluminum were vaporized in the intense focused solar energy, ionized and escaped through the exit aperture as a high velocity stream of mass, in effect a rocket engine. Gimbaled to swivel back and forth somewhat randomly, the average thrust vector was controlled so as to be able to tow the huge space station, over a period of about a year, until it reached GEO, where it would be set to have the wheels rotate in the earth's equatorial plane. This had to be done so it would not be a hurtling big object below GEO, which eventually would collide with a structure that extended from the ground up to GEO. To make possible the original Space Elevator tether, Ownma had to first launch boosters to put the old long abandoned Freedom Space Station hulk up into GEO, to get it out of the way, too.

Saying goodbye, probably for the last time, to their little automatically tended agricultural facility in the wheel, the grain and cockroaches and quail, Improy and Catalie wore both space worksuits as they left the Embarcadero's airlock, re-entering their return winged spacecraft vehicle. They attached it to the descending side of the tether conveyor belt, joining the buckets of chunks of aluminum on the way down; however, they used their thrusters to guide them after release several meters above the solar powered rocket motor which was swung on the tether belt's lower pulley. They stayed far clear of the blast of vaporized aluminum headed downward, soon were out of sight of the end of the tether, and began their second bounce and skip across the upper atmosphere, losing velocity and altitude while staying reasonably cool inside their vehicle, much as they had done about a year before.

But this time, their destination was not White Sands. It was Ecuador, as close to Cayambe as they could land safely. They dropped below the speed of sound high in the atmosphere, then continued their glide on their big wings across the equatorial Pacific Ocean, past the little floating island made of oil rigs where the former Space Elevator had been anchored to the earth's watery surface, and then across the coastline to circle the huge white-capped peak called Cayambe in Ecuador. they continued to lazily circle like an eagle looking for prey, spotting the section of straight dirt road which they could see had been blocked off at each end by Three Musketeers personnel for the landing. They came in low over the heads of some of the astonished natives, and touched down, skidding down the dirt road's ruts until finally stopping. They took a few minutes to calm their heart rates, unhooked their seat belts, popped open the nose hatch, and stepped out into the Ecuadorian high altitude sunshine.

Among the Three Muskateers staff which had gathered at the nose of the spacecraft to greet them was a young woman, who cautiously said "Catalie? Improy?" to them. Catalie affirmed it was indeed them, back safely on the ground again, glad to be so greeted. The young woman said "I am Idealiana, your daughter, and I am so thankful to see you again!" as she rushed over to give them a big hug.

Idealiana had learned from rumors at the Three Musketeers Corporation meetings that Improy and Catalie were going to come to Ecuador, since they could never come to TANFL City because of the ID implant problem. So Idealiana had volunteered to go to Ecuador aboard a freighter, to prepare for the expected arrival of her parents, and so here she was. She would soon have to leave on the freighter to return to her job in TANFL City, as most of them there would also. The crew could report only a few crewmen had died on the journey each trip, as had been common anyway before the Three Musketeers had come into existence. The presumed dead personnel would then never be able to return to anywhere there were TANFL ID pickups. Idealiana had a job to do in TANFL City, two of them, actually. One was her usual job serving the TANFL RichElite masters, then her second job at Three Musketeers Corporation, building computer terminals, and now to prepare to make components for the new space transportation structure to be built here at Cayambe peak. She now, at least, had found her parents again, so long lost. And Catalie and Improy had found their daughter again, last seen when she was only 8 years old, that was 11 years ago.

Copyright © 2006 James E D Cline

posted by Unknown @ 7:22 AM