Building Up - jedcline's 2006 NanoWriMo

Day 27 of 30 2006 - Building Up

Day 27 of 30 2006 JEDCline

The freighter, normally empty when it left the Port of TANFL to go get a boatload of bananas for the RichElite, this time had brought a lot of equipment belonging to Emplos and The Three Musketeers, and five of the original landed ID-less former prisoners had come along too as unregistered passengers, since their work was done in initial setup of the Emplos ways in the Employee sector of TANFL City. There were also three of the ship's crew that would be listed as missing and presumed dead during the voyage; a typical trip would lose that many of the crew anyway, back before the Emplos crew showed the Employees, and ship's crew, better lifestyles.

Idealiana had to be back on board the freighter by the time it was ready to leave with its freshly loaded cargo of bananas, so she said goodbye to her parents and the people who had made the one-way journey here with her aboard the freighter, and headed for the boat. She was looking forward to collecting more knowledge from the Emplos main group over at White Sands, during the brief moments the space station was above, they all could exchange chats and knowledge bases while at sea, but did not dare to do that when near TANFL City for fear the Owner-Manager masters might intercept the messages.

Catalie's focus was now on how to get the local Ecuadoreans to become involved in the new project. The country had not escaped the general economic and environmental failures that the higher latitudes had experienced, and had little government remaining and few people, but some natives were sticking it out to the end up here in their homes. It was hoped that they could become interested in the Emplos ways, and join in. The nearby town of Cayambe stil had over a thousand people struggling to live there, all of which would be very welcome members of the immense enterprise being started here, with such high hopes for helping mankind and the world ecosystem.

They negotiated ownership rights to part of the Cayambe mountain peak area, from the owners of the land, best they could determine in the circumstances. The village of the same name as the peak claimed ownership of the mountain area including the peak. THe villagers acted as if nobody who was sane would want the peak, however; but granted rights to part of it anyway, as requested. Improy's crew had determined the lowest part of the peak that was at least 200 meters higher than any other area in Ecuador or Brazil along the equator, centered that location on the western slope in alignment with the peak in an east-west direction, and started digging eastward into the mountain. There was a deep channel that led from the town of Cayambe right up to the site, which was as an extension of that valley. It was quite a hike up there from the town, but it was fairly direct. Having marked the location of the western end of the tunnel to be, they returned to town, and again negotiated for some land property, next to the place where the spacecraft had glided to a skidding stop; it was hard to move and was needed to be their initial home and office. They built a greenhouse for their usual mini-farm, populated by the grains and animals descended from those that had been in the space station wheel. They bartered again for some nearby dwellings, some of which were then set up to be computer terminal sites, and all the locations were linked by tight beam, forming their usual local network configuration. The moved off a few hundred meters and set up a targeting transmitter and a small rectenna array, so that when the space station was above there area and not beaming to White Sands site, it would beam them microwave energy derived from the Sun. They used the same storage techniques developed for use at White Sands, and so had a small amount of continuous electrical energy to operate their computers; and occasionally had a large input during which they could also run power tools directly.

Among the villagers were some engineers and other well educated people who had retreated up here as their normal world disintegrated in the dying world economy and world ecosystem. Catalie invited them to examine their instant education workstation setups, and invited them to participate by adding their knowledge to the system while having access to all knowledge already in the system, and delivered such that it was just was what was needed to do whatever job they specified at the terminal. The educated folk had their old interest in learning rekindled by the terminals functioning, and soon were gathering around 24 hours a day for their turn at a terminal. As now a familiar pattern, the first workstations were focused mostly on preparing to build more such workstations, identifying the raw materials and instructions for building up from there, each step presented after the preceding one was declared achieved. They had to partially cannibalize the spacecraft for some of the materials, as equivalents were not to be found quickly locally. The rectenna was enlarged to utilize a larger part of the microwave beam delivered occasionally, as the requirement for electrical energy at the Cayambe site increased.

They used the native's techniques as much as possible for providing clothing and shelter, and some metals, so as to put their high-tech materials to use in making more education-workstations. Some of the natives of the village learned of what was going on and wanted to be shown, and soon some of them were inputting their language translation and local lore into the expanding database. The workstations had text onscreen, graphics on screen, audio, and tactile-kinesthetic simulator input-output transducers, so a wide variety of kinds of knowledge could be input, including weaving of decorative baskets and preparing native cuisine. Since the school system had long since failed, the villagers appealed to let their children use the terminals to become educated. The agreement was always to trade knowledge for knowledge, so the network began to accumulate knowledge about how to play children games and find local fauna and flora. As the Ecuadoreans began to comprehend the whole system, some chased down the energy source to operate the computer network and terminals, and found it ended at the rectenna. They asked the terminals about the rectenna and discovered the whole larger picture of an abandoned dual wheel space station was orbiting the planet up there and when convenient it would beam some electrical energy down to the rectenna for their use. It also had the history of the space station, and the knowledge that it was slowly being towed to ever higher orbits by a solar powered ion thruster. It al was a bit hard to believe, but the electrical power that would suddenly appear at the rectenna site was an indication that it likely was true. So then the question came up, why had they come here, to this inhospitable location? Were they just still practicing at coping with inhospitable locations, or did they have something else in mind?

So then they were ready to be told that a horizontal tunnel needed to be made through the mountain peak near there, running in an east-west direction. And into that tunnel would be built the ground terminal of an energy supported structure that would encircle the whole planet, reaching up to GEO above the opposite side of the planet, from where little could be seen except ocean and little bits of land on the edges of the round disk. That place would be the construction site for the immense machines that perhaps could save their civilization and make it possible to take mankind's load enough off of the planetary ecosystem as to enable its resurrection as much as possible, based on whatever species that had been saved at that time. It all required a level of cooperation among all peoples, however. They did not know how to deal with the TANFL Corporations who had only interest in accumulating wealth, not in saving the system which provided wealth. All they could hope to do is provide the technology, the means, the transportation system and the machines up there in GEO to provide all the electrical energy people could possibly want, and without having to damage the ecosystem while doing so. Then they said they hoped all of the people of the village would join in on this effort with them, to whatever extent each was willing and able to participate. Because at this point it was mostly a volunteer activity.

The people of the village exhibited an amazing enthusiasm for the project, and in their spare time and when not on the education-workstations, were busy making a pathway up the valley to the site of the tunnel entrance marked location, and were building a dwelling there out of local materials.
They made the dwelling an outpost of the village; and powered by a hand crank generator, installed one of the newly built education workstations there, linked with the others by a tight RF beam, as the others were, but of a bit higher power. Some people began staying there for days at a time, hiking up there with food and water, then using the education-workstation in between using pick and shovel to begin the tunnel through the mountain. They had caught the enthusiasm of the Emplos Corporation, taking on a project even though it seemed nearly impossible to do; if the purpose was valuable enough, it was worth the struggle, they had learned, and so they were whacking away at the rock of the mountain chip by chip, preparing the way for a pathway to Geostationary Earth Orbit, place to build that which civilization needed to survive and even eventually prosper on a world again blooming with life.

One of the village refugee engineers had been a mining engineer, and knew of some mining supplies which had been long abandoned, but possible useful. So a group made the journey to there on foot, returning with the supplies, and soon the progress on the tunnel was being driven quite rapidly. More trips were made to the old mining site, bringing back the old tram that had been set up there, cables and all, hauled by some burros. Once it had been set up, the weight of tunnel debris in the downward buckets lifted people and goods up the us side of the tram, no motor required.

Meanwhile the banana freighters had been bringing down material from the Three Musketeers Corporation, who had access to the abandoned remains of the wider city around their outskirts for all sorts of materials as starting points for the building of the space transportation structure. It had been stockpiling at the Ecuadorean dock facilities, and eventually word got to Improy of the stockpile's existence, a crew from the village took on the task of getting it to Cayambe. It also made it a lot easier to build the education-workstaations, so much work was done to make them and install them in every home in the village that wanted one, which was most of the dwellings. These were powered by hand cranked generators, so they were operated only a little bit of each day, but it was a high point in each household where that was happening. Kids could do their schoolwork on the education-workstations, one would crank on the generator while another would use the terminal; then they would switch places.

Part of the charm of the education-workstations was that its data presentation was in a form that was cheerful and easygoing, as well as concise and integrated to the context of the work being done at the station at that instant. And the user had choices of preferred formats, including some were anthropomorphic, while others were more abstract without the personification of the significant items. This made it blend in with various ways peoples' brains were wired.

Word about this traveled to neighboring villages, and when weather was permitting, people were showing up at the villager's homes, asking to see the thing. Many of those people wanted the terminals too.The Cayenbe villagers by then were fully capable of building the terminals themselves, and easily looked up how to run a relay beam across the rugged terrain to other villages, and the system was expanding. They were bartering for supplies, materials and labor, as o currency was functional there anymore. In those terms of wealth, the village was becoming wealthy, materials which they hoped would help build the new transportation system as well as make their own more immediate existence better.

The dream of the new space transportation was spreading along with the education-workstations, too. And with it hope for the future. Catalie put out onto the network a request for people to save breeding populations of any species they could preserve, somehow keep them going for another decade or two, then things might have turned around enough to release them back into the environment in an orchestrated way. But they had to be alive still at that time; extinct would not work. Diversity was needed to give a re-seeded world its best chance to recover.

Hundreds of volunteers showed up each day to help do something. Most of then brought picks and shovels for digging in the tunnel, but since only a few could do tunneling at any given time, the volunteers chose to widen the foot trail up the channel, making it wide enough for two way traffic of wheeled motorized vehicles. Optimism was a characteristic of those who had been using the education-workstations with its database for whatever they needed doing, and were seeing it as a way out of the big mess things were in.

But they were ignoring the fact that at the present time, they were forgotten, left to die in the middle of nowhere, by those who were masters of collecting the wealth of others. Sooner or later, it was likely that the Mega-Corporation Owner-Manager masters would show up and rip it all off, having no regard for what it was needed to do, obsessed with accumulating their own wealth without end.

Life does proceed on when possible, so they continued to dig tunnel through the mountain, and improve the road to the tunnel, having gotten the dream of what it was for. Meanwhile they were continually getting a combination of education and skill simulation practice on whatever was interesting to each individual, on the education-workstations that they were now themselves also building, mere months from their peasant life in the high altitude refuge village state of life and mind.

The miners worked day and night, disregarding the stormy weather that sometimes made their trip to and from the construction site quite uncomfortable; yet they came and worked. And one day they broke through to the other side of the mountain, and looked out across the rugged canyons below them off toward Brazil. A milestone had been achieved. Through this tunnel would pass a structure which would reach GEO above the opposite side of the planet, as it looped around to the other side of this tunel. It would happen right here, in their home.

Word spread far across Ecuador and Brazil, about the education workstations and the transportation structure that was being attempted to be built. Donated materials began to come in, hauled on the remaining trucks that were powered by pulverized coal. Some of them carried sections of aircraft from an abandoned airport. Improy and Catalie used some of this material and the remains of the glider spacecraft that had brought them here, and built a new kind of spacecraft, one that had the same cast foamed aluminum wings, nose cone and underbelly, but was only a two seater and was equipped with a rocket engine. A former large solid fueled missile was found and brought over, its warhead removed, and set up to be a launch booster for the manned part of the vehicle. The rocket also carried a huge bobbin, wound with a tiny fiber that had rigid hydrogen-filled pockets spaced along it, and small magnets also periodically embedded along the fiber, and was overall lighter than air, designed to float at 15 kilometers altitude.

One end of the fiber was anchored inside the tunnel, then the fiber was strung down the mountain and out to where the launch vehicle sat atop its booster rocket; the fiber was kept taught so it was at a steep angle, well away from the exhaust plume that would come from the vehicles during launch. As soon as the vehicle was fueled and ready, Improy and Catalie climbed up the ladder and into their seats in the cockpit, again wearing their space worksuits. The solid fueled booster fired first, kicking the main vehicle vertically until it ran out of fuel, then dropped away; the bobbin's fiber had been madly paying out all the time. Improy ignited their own engines and kept heading up, a little toward the east, soon out over Brazil, and the bobbin was gust a blur of motion as layer after layer was pulled off, as the fiber was payed out behind them. They tilted more towards the horizontal, then their engines ran out of fuel. Then they began the now familiar bounce and skip across the upper atmosphere, coasting around the planet, leaving the trail of fiber behind them. Out across the atlantic ocean they went, bounced and across Africa, bounced and across the Pacific Ocean, losing speed and latitude. As they approached the Ecuadorean west coast, Improy used swung the glider to yaw to the side and the vehicle shuddered as it lost velocity and dropped rapidly toward Cayambe mountain. Beginning as wing around past the peak, he jettisoned the bobbin with the remainder of the fiber on it, then he circled until losing enough speed and altitude to once again come into a skidding landing on the road where that had landed before, that time back from a visit to the space Station.

Crews had already headed off to where the bobbin had landed, and eventually brought it back to the west end of the tunnel Inside the tunnel they joined the two ends of the floating fiber, now a strand that encircled the whole world, somewhat raggedly in shape, winds blowing here and there. They had not time to waste, so they placed the now continuous loop into the linear electric motor stator they had built through the tunnel, and powered by a coal-burning electric generator, the magnets along the fiber where alternately pulled and pushed by hall-effect-sensing driven magnetic pulses. Not too fast so as to bunch up, nor to over tension the part of the fiber off toward the west. the accelerated part was like a pulse of energy that traveled around the fiber, all the way around the planet, and when it had reached Ecuador from the other direction, the electric motor was speeded up again. And so the fiber began rotating around the planet, adding a centrifugal force component to its lighter-than-air urge to altitude.

Eventually the fiber was traveling at the fastest it could go, with the electric motor's power being expended by air friction losses, it all reaching a balance.

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posted by Unknown @ 2:00 PM