#3 - Garrison Rides the Bullet. Thoughts on the construction of The Space Docks and The Bullet Tubes

As the rain diminished, Garrison could see one side of the sloping weave-work in the far distance, rising up and disappearing into the heavens. The tether cables connected to the Dock, out in space, but extended beyond, and came together to form a net-like construction that held a captured asteroid—the rock in the sock. These “rocks” were fitted with orthogonal and tangential thrusters and they made continual adjustments acting as the station-keeping components for the two space docks. Mass drop-off and uptake at these counterweights modulated continually as ships came and went at the docks. These asteroids were sized according to each of the two stations’ different masses. Like a stone being whirled in a sling, their additional weight balanced against gravity and kept the stations from sinking back toward Earth in their 400 km low orbit; very slow at about 1700 kph. Taylor had made some mention to Garrison about concocting some stunt that had to do with the steering asteroids. He had stayed silent—he couldn’t imagine how she thought she was going get out to one of those rocks to pull off any kind of stunt that far out, in cold, hard vacuum, but any negative reaction tended to encourage her, and mostly ended with her deciding to proceed. He worried that she just might kill herself one of these days. The conical, net-like array of Gravity Rejector modules created a composition of La Grange fields—areas of gravity cancellation. This mountain slope of nullified gravity caused the dense moisture in the air outside of this zone to move upward, creating a dry, false high-pressure area that surrounded each Tube station. The weather stayed out and the interior of these zones were calm desert regions. The Gravity Rejector, developed fifty years earlier, heralded a new day for humans moving into space. It allowed the construction of elaborate space elevators, first to Cylinder Alpha, being constructed simultaneously, and later, to Toroid Alpha. The stable weather region was crucial for safe Bullet transport and laser alignments along the Tubes. The Rejector discovery came in the wake of the Obliteration, as an effect of the redistribution of war chests. First expense: the painstaking radiation clean-up of the nuclear solution that had been used to deal with the disaster. Then, over a century-and-a-half, in a war-free environment, monies were slowly redirected into emergent areas of science, including secret military endeavors in the Rejectors’ parent tech: particle acceleration. Garrison’s view from the Bullet train, approaching the Cylinder Alpha’s Space Tube Nexus (Earthside): The tube was just distinguishable in the clear air around the Gravity Rejector net. Within the net, the fragile-looking tendril punched up to the vanishing point through a deeper blue circle inside the net boundary: a dust-free atmosphere, with less light refraction to disguise the darkening of space. The crysteel tendril, coming up from the planet, drew the eye when it glinted with sunlight. Invisible from this perspective, Garrison knew the tube slightly arched back due to earth-spin and some atmospheric friction. At the end of the tube was a big glob of metal, crysteel, and plasteel: a Dock, also invisible until night fell. In both of the (earthside) Tube Nexus Stations, a technical holovid display showed the cables and tube highlighted; the low earth orbit stations were perched above the Earth at the apex of the great, conical spider web that was the Rejector net, extending down to Earth. From a space approach, the net’s tether cables were invisible to the eye from any distance, so the view of the elevator tube and the station gave the impression of a large, silvery, donut or cigar-shaped creature drifting out into space on a fine silk thread. After permanent tethering of the initial station skeletons and their counterweights, the stations’ orbit engines were mothballed and the semi-rigid elevator tubes were begun, with raw materials coming from the moon refinery. Starting from the docks in their geosynchronous orbits, they progressed downward, right into the center of the weather stability where the Earthside construction of each Nexus had been completed. With the holovid’s speed at full, the construction process was reminiscent of a classic sci-fi vid: a flowing image of big tubes dropping out of the clear blue sky, like an alien invasion. Reciprocal additions to the mass of the rock-in-the-sock kept the growing constructions at their constant altitude. Private enterprise and a few military-based craft still used propellant technology for heavy payloads, prohibitive as always, but the space elevators were used for most cargo and all personnel transport, public and military. With the connection of the Tube, for the cost of a plane flight, easy transportation between Earth and space was established at long last. As ships dock or depart from a station, orbital mass loads at the counterweight altitude are picked up or discarded, in motion, to keep the changing station mass balanced against its counterweight rock-in-the-sock. Garrison aboard the Bullet to space. The Obliteration backstory: To pass the time and mitigate his discomfort, Garrison dug into his flight bag and pulled out a semi-speculative historical account, printed on hempayrus in old-style book format. It was centered on The Obliteration and was something that would normally hold his attention.

…self-replicating nanobots, nano-pathocytes wrought their havoc with great and accelerating rapidity, triggering the action dubbed the Obliteration.

Nanotech was, and remains, something in which the military is heavily invested. After study of the nanotech that went bad, the newly formed global military, the Multi-Military Patrol, emplaced restrictions enforced by threat of the death penalty and took absolute control of that entire technology. Replicators are one example of the surviving tech, with food replication on the horizon.

In the turbulent years before the total collapse of oversight, which led indirectly to the Obliteration, Chinese and Indian regimes were in control of the greatest share of the world’s resources. The government of the U.S. had pulled in its weakened power base as its own fanatical religious factions grew. For a time the leadership was controlled by far-right influence. The Moral Mass Majority—Tri M, as it became known in the media—served as an extension of the U.S. Government’s power. This benefited the ends of those in authority: the fostered perception was that a moral backbone had taken hold in the country and 'The People' would be more self-governing, responsible, and honest. In truth, this accord became responsible for more crimes against personal freedom than the drug and anti-terror enforcement policies of the previous decades.

With public- and self-delusion, money was diverted from policing programs as readily as it had been diverted from social programs in earlier times. To the rigid-minded, things appeared to be taking care of themselves, and the freedom protests went unheeded.

These funds now went to military research applications—if they made it past the pockets of the various agencies' hands through which they passed. With ever their interests being the gain of power, the United States and other’s militaries of the time were highly focused on nanotechnology. Unfortunately, this research led to the worst fears of the detractors of that branch of science—self-sustaining, self-replicating nanobots, intended to be intelligent components making up larger structures.

The fear was that, should they run amok, without a guiding design, they could earn their nickname, “grey goo”, as they mindlessly rebuilt every cell of any structure encountered, into a basic, conforming component. It wasn't a big leap to lose control of the little “bugs”.

With devious foresight, the U.S. facilities for this research were off the shores of a foreign collaborator’s country. It was believed that water would be an insurmountable barrier to the invisible bots, were they to somehow get out of control. It worked as long as the safety procedures were followed to the letter. As it happened, it was too easy to miss the truth that all was not well—the root cause being microscopic, acting slowly at first, then more rapidly following geometric progression—until it was too late.

The best reconstruction of the initial events is summarized7 as follows:

A laboratory aide had traveled back to the mainland. An unseen hitchhiker, likely on the sole of his shoe, somehow makes it past sensors tuned to the nano-bugs genetic markers. By the time the aide walked off the short flight, he would have had the impression that he'd stepped in gum somewhere. Seeds of destruction were sown with every step he took. When he reached the curbside taxi stand—a new vector—he would have had terrible pain in his foot and a ‘melted’ hole in his shoe.

Sketchy remnants of records indicate that it was serious enough for him to request that the taxi driver take him to the nearest hospital. He died a horrible death in the backseat as the nanoparticles literally ate him, doubling their numbers in their geometric march, and spreading to the seat of the taxi. The driver apparently escaped for a time, but none on the tip of that continent were safe in the end.

Before the cause was known to the afflicted people, teleweb reports of an unknown, fast-moving, flesh-eating plague flooded the infosphere prior to servers going black. The U.S. military knew immediately what had happened, and many other governments drew the correct conclusions without having to be told. Some of those governments’ territories were doomed already.

Because the contagion had come through an airport vector, it spread quickly to nearby destinations. But due to the speed at which the bots did their damage, many international flights simply fell out of the sky before reaching a farther hub. While this spared a dooming impact to that next terminus, it created new ground-zero points of contagion in countryside locations.

The U.S. was one such destination and, after dozens of flights had landed—introducing the techno-plague to homeports—military escorts greeted the remainder before they could land, or as they entered U.S. airspace. The fighters were not there to escort them to safety, but rather to herd the airplanes over unpopulated areas and force the flights to maintain an airborne quarantine. They circled until nearly the last of the fuel was used; if no in-flight contamination became evident, the stressed crews were allowed to bring their distraught passengers to the ground.

If the plane fell out of the sky in a nano-event, the fighters were ready to bomb the remnants into a fiery hell. Using incendiaries, they carpet-bombed any potential debris field to the required temperatures known to destroy the nanobots.

Culpability for the world-altering disaster would have been laid at the door of the U.S. by the stronger governments. But because the annihilation happened so fast—the unaffected parts of the globe taking drastic and terrible measures to remain uninfected, and the infected parts disappearing into non-existence—there wasn't a significant, involved power left to point the finger at the U.S. The work had been top-secret so, as far as anyone was concerned, the blame might have been with the nation that was first destroyed.

In any case, to meet the threat, the United States military, in hasty agreement with what was left of the U.N., and hand in hand with any remaining foreign militaries that possessed nukes, took to the skies in a last-ditch offensive dubbed Operation Obliteration. A nuclear solution was taken to the hearts of these countries’ affected cityscapes, fast becoming colorless, gray wastelands. Small tonnage hydrogen bombs were dropped over the saturated, ground-zero points; mini-nukes and napalmed incendiaries in the concentrically expanding perimeter, up to two hundred kilometers into the uninfected territory. There could be no mistakes; every one of the microscopic bugs had to be eradicated. Incendiary production was cranked up to supply the massive amount of weaponry that was needed to lay waste to the concentric perimeters. The incendiary campaign helped to restrict greater, low-level nuclear fall-out and damped down the frag blow-off of the bugs into the surrounding pristine territories.

The aftermath was unimaginable: worldwide misery, with a large percentage of the Earth’s landmass destroyed; massive radiation poisoning for otherwise untouched populations, regardless of attempts to minimize it. Medical missions brought radiation sickness medicines to the affected areas, but no restitution was made or offered. The “casualties of war,” it was said by the remaining powers. The victims would be made comfortable, that was all.

The Tri-M had lost its footing and no longer dictated morality. Assisted suicide was not only re-legalized but was mandatorily provided as one option and made available side-by-side with the other medicines. There was a secret hope that those suffering the greatest misery might choose to leave the planet, easing both the burden on care providers and the weight on the witnessing conscience of surviving members of the race.

The civilized world had been reduced to a patchwork of humanity in the less densely populated areas of the planet. Fires were kept burning in the borderlands as precautions. Unaffected lands filled with refugee populations as they shrank away from those zones, a new, microscopic horror haunting the collective psyche.