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Montana applauds with great pleasure the progress of the nuclear disarmament project. What was done to Great Falls was a salutary lesson in just how atrocious they are for all in our region, and it is a sombre May Day with speeches of remembrance and mourning by the scarred and bereaved survivors of that awful day. And yet it is also a May Day of fundamental optimism. Every day our world heals itself just a little more, and in the fullness of time we will be a planet free of the scars of war. Whilst we must ensure our children remember forever why these weapons must be an unbreakable taboo, we must also be joyful that one day, our descendants will know this only from our records and admonitions. One day nobody will remember that sorrow, and the lands will be clean, the plants rich in their greenery, the animals healthy and fed. And lastly we note that this step continues to show that humanity can be better than we used to be. Although TNE technology has seriously reduced the danger from hostile nuclear powers it has not eliminated it completely. Those who argue we are endangering ourselves by doing this may overstate the case, but they are not wrong in principle. We are divesting ourselves of something we no longer need, but which still has utility - because it is right that we do so. Because the cost of using these things is so great that we forswear it. One day, we hope, we shall have the moral courage to abolish even things we believe necessary if they bring such great dangers and evils, and in the future we hope they look back at this May Day as an important step towards civilization.
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Giving myself a quick re-read refresher course of the thread and by the sound of itRedeye Flight posted:Chatlog, irc.fuber.net, #ChatAllNite (Eng. trans.) Merlin is waiting for some humble youth to pull the Sickle Excalibur out of the Anvil and be declared Chairman of All Britain
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Dec 18, 2023 00:41
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May 2, 1987 Life goes on. The Fraternal Order of Mars commission a cargo ship to service the new Earth-Venus route. They name her the Peaceful Atom.  Skeleton crews are still fitting out and preparing the aerostat complex for habitation. May 11, 1987  Although the corbomite-lattice shielding project has a long, long way to go before it is practical for military use, it does have other potential applications, with some of the project's work potentially useful for the Joint Committee on Artificial Gravity. The shield project team has been working with them on their first at-scale human testing, for deployment on Luna before the end of the year, with a woven lattice of corbomite built into the floor plates as a key part of the design. A young academician's star is rising. May 14, 1987  Disaster! A connecting umbilical between two cells of the Venus aerostat complex fails and one cell is exposed to the exterior atmosphere. Although the safety systems designed for exactly this eventuality work admirably, with automatic seals deploying and the crew inside the module quickly donning respirator masks, eight people who were walking through the umbilical at the time fall to their deaths in the pressure cooker below, and 11 more are unable to get their masks on before succumbing to hypoxia. One of the nineteen dead is a Major in the International People's Army's fledgling Corps of Engineers. Two investigations are immediately opened, one by MOSA, and one more discreet one by SPECTRE. To the public, it is a sobering reminder that space is still dangerous. May 20, 1987  Nuclear disarmament does not mean that nuclear weapons will become lost knowledge, and research into TNE-enhanced nuclear and thermonuclear weapons continues, although currently purely at the theoretical level. Most of the research is currently focused on how to detect such bombs, and how to defend against them, rather than about how to make them ourselves - but studying the former will inevitably involve some study of the latter. SPECTRE maintains a close eye on all involved in this work to ensure their political reliability. May 21, 1987 Initial investigation from the Ministry names a failure in the unfolding mechanism, which deployed the aerostat from its stowed travel position, as the likely culprit in the breach - one very slightly overpowered charge resulted in some undetectable micro-tears in the outer skin, which were gradually widened into a structural failure by the Venusian wind. SPECTRE is investigating this overgassed pyrotechnic charge as possible sabotage, MOSA is investigating it as a manufacturing defect or error. It has not stopped migration to the web of stations. There are over 100,000 people in the skies of Venus already. May 23, 1987  Earth Guard Command is developing a reputation in the cosmonaut corps for extremely rigorous and strict standards for training, maintenance, and discipline, even by the standards of the safety-conscious Ministry as a whole. In particular, the plague of maintenance problems with their first ships - which are still not entirely ironed out - have resulted in the rapid development of an institutional culture of careful and thorough preventative maintenance, with everything that could potentially break checked and monitored constantly. Earth Guard cosmonauts complain about it constantly among themselves, but when dealing with non-Guard cosmonauts, treat it as a point of pride. June 1, 1987 As the Pegasus diplomatic ship project continues - with yard retooling well underway, construction to begin immediately after, and the ship itself expected January of next year - our team at Minerva attempts to explain the concept of an embassy and formal diplomatic relations with our friends, using our gradually growing vocabulary. They respond with a request for an exchange of embassies, with a delegation of their own sent back to Earth with the Krusenstern when it returns. As the earliest this could possibly happen is well into next year, the offer is not urgent, and will be discussed at the regular session of the Congress. Whether it is even technically feasible is still unclear. June 4, 1987  The NOMAD asteroid mining experiment is paying dividends - not from the TNEs extracted, which have been minimal, of academic interest only, but from the valuable engineering, space science, medical, and sociological knowledge gained. The distant outpost is a laboratory as much as anything, for testing new methods of construction, of maintenance, of mining, of organizing a community. Multiple academic papers related to the project are already in various stages of peer review. June 6, 1987  A short summary document is being disseminated throughout Comintern government and security channels, titled Anatomy of an Infantry Brigade. It is a simplified, layman's-terms explanation of the table of organization and equipment for one of the International People's Army's new motorized infantry brigades, breaking down all of the equipment and personnel in the unit. Of note are elements of Trans-Newtonian technology beginning to work their way into frontline service, from the subtle (more powerful computers, more precise and sensitive targeting optics, better night vision) to the dramatic (lighter, yet far tougher, infantry armor) to the revolutionary (light railgun batteries for anti-aircraft and anti-missile work, and contra-grav reconnaissance vehicles utilizing experimental pseudogravity technology to hover above the ground, capable of moving at incredible speeds for land vehicles while carrying respectable armament). June 13, 1987  The completion of the Luna spaceport has made travel to and from the surface much faster and more convenient. Ships are not having to spend days in orbit jockeying for position and waiting to unload, accidents have been reduced to near-zero, and even casual excursions to Luna are now viable. MOSA crews can - and do - even take shore leave there now. The clean, austere, sterile spaceport lasted all of a couple of days. Lunagrad doesn't do things that way. The city was founded in organized chaos and in organized chaos it shall remain. The visitor arriving on the Moon will enter the passenger terminal to find murals and graffiti daubing every wall, cheerfully welcoming the visitor to the Lunar Socialist Republic in fifty different languages and every art style imaginable, illustrating episodes from the nation's brief history, or depicting a vision of a utopian future. Colored streamers of fabric sewn together from the remnants of worn-out old space suits dangle from the ceilings. It is not uncommon to find someone playing music at the train platform. New immigrants are met by welcoming parties from the collective they'll be joining, and the atmosphere is usually jovial, raucous. The spaceport's staff, appearing bored and tired, maneuver their way through the mess, keeping everything functioning. June 19, 1987  The Appalachian Academy of the International People's Army officially comes online. A new generation of officers and NCOs will be trained and honed here, in the rugged mountains of this war-torn region, and from here will help reunite the ruined continent. June 25, 1987  Ksana Shubin, the current temporary governor of Venus, grew up on a collective farm, then became a botanist, and is now dedicating nearly all of her time and effort to maintaining the aerostat complex's many, many plants, which are an integral and vital part of its life support system. She has no time for talk of possible sabotage, believing it to be ridiculous paranoia, and a distraction from the important work of establishing a self-sustaining settlement on Venus. She directs the engineering teams to focus on thoroughly combing over every last millimeter of the structure for any other possible defects, and for all connectors between cells to be reinforced. July 1, 1987  Cryptographic analysis of intercepted US FedGov and GiE transmissions from Dorothy has provided information about their military organization and structure, with the most interesting revelation being increased cooperation and coordination between the two, approaching a full merger in some areas. There is still quite a lot of disagreement that is making integration more difficult - most interestingly, a massive different in philosophy for how to apply their very limited TNE reserves, with the GiE favoring a focus on a few very large, war-winning TNE 'wonder weapons', and FedGov favoring focusing their resources on cheap, mass-producible infantry weapons. A design for a man-portable weapon, referenced with the codename 'Stiletto', is referred to as being viable, but no details of the weapon or what exactly it does are to be found in the intercepts. July 16, 1987  A small crew lands on periodic comet 14P/Wolf, establishing the third cometary mining venture.    All three are producing industrially significant quantities of TNEs, which are currently being sold on the global market, although output from any or all of them can be nationalized at any time at the discretion of the People's Congress. July 21, 1987  The actual work of commanding a surface-to-orbit railgun battery is mostly extremely boring, but it's also prestigious. They are one leg of what some refer to ironically as the 'anti-nuclear triad', alongside Earth Guard Command in orbit and the young People's Navy at sea. Commanding one, and doing well in that role, is going to look good when officers are being considered for promotion. July 26, 1987  The main engine for one of the surveillance ships orbiting Luna suffers a gimbal failure during a routine plane-change maneuver, locking the engine at maximum deflection and sending the entire spacecraft into a nauseating end-over-end spin until an emergency engine shutdown is ordered. Repairs are made using available onboard spares. While SPECTRE will investigate, interruption of sensor coverage was minimal, and sabotage is not currently suspected. July 28, 1987  The Cydonia archaeology teams, who have been working for over a year, have achieved a major breakthrough - they have translated one of the alien scripts. 'One of' is an important distinction - we have now identified at least eight different scripts in various parts of the Cydonia complex, but one is the most common. We believe the script in question, based on its use and structure, is likely a simplified constructed language designed for convenient inter-species communication, much like our own first contact language, although far more advanced. This script is used in most signage, and the interfaces for most of the computers and electronic devices we have interacted with so far. The most valuable find, though, the one which led to the breakthrough, is what our team is referring to as the Depository - a room beneath the Face filled with crates, which were themselves filled with actual documents, on a polymer-based paper. They are mostly scrolls, of all things, with some loose-leaf documents as well, and feature text in multiple different scripts. One scroll, referred to as 'Martian Rosetta', includes the same text in the Roswell script, the Minervan simplified alphabet (translated with the help of the Krusenstern and our Minervan friends), and, of all things, a previously unattested but still unmistakable dialect of Ancient Greek, bearing some resemblance to the Aeolic. Exploring the implications of this will have to wait, for now. The document, which also includes a pictorial chart which we have interpreted as a map of this facility, is a set of instructions for pilots operating out of this facility, including communications procedures, takeoff and landing information, some brief information about the local climate, and other information relevant to spaceflight into or out of this location. By itself this one document is a treasure, entire careers could be made out of examining it - but it's also the key that unlocked every door. A report will be forthcoming. For starters, there are two interesting revelations: - We know the name of the polity that governed this place, the Nespherenhet Clan (the word translated as 'Clan' here literally meaning 'family-of-families'). Other 'Clans' are mentioned as distinct polities, all under some sort of central authority, although the details remain unclear. - Combined with our years of research on the mechanisms of the pods, we now know with 100% confidence how the wake-up procedure works. We can awaken the remaining Cydonia survivors - human and alien - at any time.
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Jan 30, 2024 10:27
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Would love to read their information about the local climate. Did they think Mars was cold? Hot? Just right?
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Jan 30, 2024 12:29
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Does cross-referencing this with our own Martian climatological science give us any information about the age of the document? Regarding the cryotubes, we should avoid waking them all up at once. Set up infrastructure, fly in experts, sit down and really think about procedures and contingencies, and then start cracking them open a few at a time, process whoever comes out, and rinse and repeat until we run out.
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Jan 30, 2024 14:20
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The longer someone has been in cryo, the more careful and studied we will need out approach to be. It's going to be a 100 times worse for some of them than it was for the crew we rescued before.
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Jan 30, 2024 14:25
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I vote we crack open one of the alien-filled cryopods, being able to at least attempt to interview one of these guys will answer so, so many questions. Hell, maybe if we're lucky with our gacha pull, we get a high-ranked officer among their kind and they can tell that little survivalist bugger hiding out in the remote complex to stand down and report for debrief, the war is over, etc.
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Jan 30, 2024 16:34
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I'd hold off on any alien awakenings until we process this big breakthrough more, imo. Seems fine to start freeing our brethren if we're confident in the procedures and logistics though
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Jan 30, 2024 16:39
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ThatBasqueGuy posted:I'd hold off on any alien awakenings until we process this big breakthrough more, imo. Seems fine to start freeing our brethren if we're confident in the procedures and logistics though Oh fine, I'll wait for the full report before jumping straight to defrosting a Roswell, but it's definitely on the agenda. By God do I have a lot of questions though. Between the ancient Greek writing lying around, the vaguely Egyptian clan name, and references to "Ananga," this is starting to look suspiciously like an Ancient Astronaut Annunaki deal. I will say, the reference to a clan-based system of governance does offer some explanations for who destroyed this place and why. It's not like those sorts of arrangements aren't hives of internecine conflicts.
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Jan 30, 2024 16:51
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On a different tack, SPECTRE's increasing paranoia is not looking good to me.
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Jan 30, 2024 19:34
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NewMars posted:On a different tack, SPECTRE's increasing paranoia is not looking good to me. As the author of the bill to put clamps on SPECTRE, honestly, their stance in this post looked pretty reasonable to me. Their job is to investigate and defend against possible covert threats, the main fear (at least for me) is them inventing new ones to look good. A mechanical failure on an aerostat causing serious loss of life (and possibly undermining faith in the space program) is a reasonable place to think "maybe there could be sabotage, we've had space program sabotage in the past", and look into the possibility. If nothing turns up, then nothing turns up!
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Jan 30, 2024 20:14
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Mister Bates posted:June 1, 1987 We'll avoid getting into the meat of this as it's up for later discussion, but can anyone see much reason to deny this proposal? As far as we can see it's a win from every angle you can look at it from. It would represent a huge improvement in our ability to talk to the Minervans on all topics, not just to conduct diplomacy but to exchange cultural and scientific information, and the actual practical implementation of a habitat safe for their long-term residence would give us a lot of insight into their physiology. quote:The Cydonia archaeology teams, who have been working for over a year, have achieved a major breakthrough - they have translated one of the alien scripts. Although I'm not optimistic about the possibility, I will note that it is conceivable 'clan' here is an affectation, or a relic of a since-abolished system of social organization. At any rate we will hopefully be able to find out a lot more through talking to the Minverans about it all and, of course, asking the other aliens directly when the time comes to awaken one. I'll propose that we establish two distinct and unrelated tracks for awakening people. One for our own people, one for the xenos. On the former, it would seem to make sense to heavily involve people from the Cyclops, because they're the ones with actual experience adapting to a new and very different time period. If we think anyone in the tubes could plausibly still be remembered by anyone else then I think we should prioritize rapid awakening for them. Say, anyone who looks to have been taken post 1900? Someone could have a relative who was a little kid then still alive today. Not very likely, but if we could give even one person a reunion with a long-lost parent or older sibling it would seem to be the right thing to do. Otherwise we're not really under a time constraint here and should work out a careful and considered system to awaken small batches of people at once and I agree with Innocent_Bystander. It may be that humans are extremely adaptible and it'll be an easy matter with few hiccups, but it may also be that the Cyclops represents very good fortune and other people will prove far more difficult to integrate back into humanity at large, hence the reasoning for small groups until we get a handle on that. With those people who have no possibility of being remembered by the rest of us we are under no particular pressure - it doesn't make any difference whether someone from 1550 gets woken up in 1987 or 1990 after all. Also, given that these people will inevitably be of absolutely immense and even immesurable value to historians, we may want to think about procedures to help connect the two groups without overwhelming our reawakened, or making them feel obligated to engage in the whole thing. I'm thinking we do something like tell the academic community at large that they can put in requests in the form of like "We wish to talk to anyone who was alive in England during the War of the Roses" or "We would like to extensively interview anyone with firsthand knowledge of sailing in the 17th century" and we simply leave these for the awakened to review at their leasure once they've started to get their bearings without any pressure to respond. They can then inform us they wish to reply to such a message or they can do so of their own volition once they're acclimated to the modern age. Better than them getting bombarded with a thousand requests for interviews before they know which way is up. The other track for awakening is obviously for the aliens, and we need to treat this very differently. I don't think we need to play hardball, at least not at first; once all the necessary measures are in place we can simply wake one of them up and have a talk with them about stuff. If they are willing to reciprocate, great; if not, we can start pointing out that it would make it a lot easier for us to consider things like repatriation if they actually work with us and give us some of the information we would need to know, on purely practical terms, to do that. Where they come from, how to talk to them, how to fly there, that kind of thing. Don't start out with an obvious interrogation is what I'm saying, and insofar as security and practical questions of biology allow it, treat them according as guests rather than prisoners. And as someone said, maybe we can use someone we wake up to bring the others in from the (literal) cold; it can't be a lot of fun for them scrabbling around in some Martian dust hole, so if we can get someone to call them up and say "Hey these guys are alright, you can come in and they'll treat you well, nobody's executing anyone or torturing us for information or anything" then maybe we can make progress.
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Jan 30, 2024 21:23
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"Historical people" could easily be its own third "track" from aliens or people with any possible living relatives. Actually it might be best to have several tracks based on the known level of general scientific knowledge of a time period. Getting someone from 1850 AD up to speed is going to be easier than doing the same for someone from 1850 BC. (Or maybe not, given the Ancient Greek writing!)
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Jan 30, 2024 21:32
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GunnerJ posted:"Historical people" could easily be its own third "track" from aliens or people with any possible living relatives. Actually it might be best to have several tracks based on the known level of general scientific knowledge of a time period. Getting someone from 1850 AD up to speed is going to be easier than doing the same for someone from 1850 BC. (Or maybe not, given the Ancient Greek writing!) That's a fair point, but I was thinking that people without any possible living relatives would probably need to be done in small, bespoke groups for that reason anyway, and it's more that those who do have possible living relatives are the exception
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Jan 31, 2024 01:45
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Scrolling back in the thread we don’t have that much to worry about : quote:It'd take hours to sweep the whole room but you do notice quite a lot of uniformed men - the further you go into the room, the earlier the occupants seem to be chronologically, and the vast majority, probably more than 70%, of the people in the first few rows are uniformed soldiers from various nations, with uniform styles and insignia appropriate for the period of the First World War. The most notable are a group of 22 black soldiers in French Army field uniform, their insignia indicating they are from the same unit. The remainder are people of assorted age, gender, and nationality wearing variations on the theme of civilian clothing, or, occasionally, no clothing. The Cyclops crew, who have been here for a year, have gone all the way back, and from their uneducated guess based on clothing styles the oldest batch probably dates back to the early 1800s. So no ancient civilization builders and the like, shame for the historians but luckily we won’t need to interrogate people whose language we barely speak.
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Jan 31, 2024 02:20
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Yeah I don't see a reason to reject a Minervan embassy provided we have high confidence of being able to provide for their well being, which seems likely.
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Jan 31, 2024 02:34
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Pirate Radar posted:Scrolling back in the thread we don’t have that much to worry about : Completely forgot that had already been well covered!  Well, getting a good chat with Victorians and Regency people is still going to be immensely interesting to the historian types - these are folks who likely go as far back as remembering the French and American Revolutions - but it's very probable everyone speaks something we still speak just fine and should be comparatively well able to adapt to the modern world. Better than some poor bastard who got nicked from Saladin's army or who was working on his Nazca Lines or whatever, at any rate.
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Jan 31, 2024 02:49
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the idea that Earth was under observation by unfriendly eyes for at least two-hundred and fifty years is unsettling to say the least.
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Jan 31, 2024 03:00
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paragon1 posted:Yeah I don't see a reason to reject a Minervan embassy provided we have high confidence of being able to provide for their well being, which seems likely. Okay but how are we gonna equip the Krusenstern with a Star Trek IV style giant aquarium to accomodate them for the trip? Are they offering to install all that crap for us? I don't think we ever designed the ship to be able to land and take off on a planetary surface, how are we gonna get the thing into a drydock to let the Minervans do the retrofit? Unless they want to like, try and siphon some spare gas from our tank and take one of their own ships to Earth?
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Jan 31, 2024 03:11
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Maybe they have environment suits? For EVAs and whatnot. Could just come aboard in one of those.
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Jan 31, 2024 03:30
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We probably couldn't carry them over with the current ship. Much more work would be required to prepare the right conditions for bringing them to Earth. Would/could we even bring them to Earth itself, or would it have to be an orbital station? I forget what the gravity is where they are.
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Jan 31, 2024 03:56
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Pirate Radar posted:We probably couldn't carry them over with the current ship. Much more work would be required to prepare the right conditions for bringing them to Earth. Would/could we even bring them to Earth itself, or would it have to be an orbital station? I forget what the gravity is where they are. Well, they're the ones who volunteered, and if anyone is gonna be a judge of their capabilities, it would be them. They are at least a facultatively aquatic species, so in theory gravity shouldn't be as big an issue with their body being supported by buoyancy. Higher gravity should just mean that pressure increases faster with depth compared to Medusa, so they can't go as DEEP here as they could there, but it's not like we're gonna stick them at the bottom of the Marianas Trench anyway.
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Jan 31, 2024 04:15
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Asterite34 posted:Okay but how are we gonna equip the Krusenstern with a Star Trek IV style giant aquarium to accomodate them for the trip? Are they offering to install all that crap for us? I don't think we ever designed the ship to be able to land and take off on a planetary surface, how are we gonna get the thing into a drydock to let the Minervans do the retrofit? Unless they want to like, try and siphon some spare gas from our tank and take one of their own ships to Earth? Ask them if they have the formula for transparent aluminum?  We could add a modification to the diplomatic ship being built right now, as a more serious answer.
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Jan 31, 2024 04:36
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Mister Bates posted:One scroll, referred to as 'Martian Rosetta', includes the same text in the Roswell script, the Minervan simplified alphabet (translated with the help of the Krusenstern and our Minervan friends), and, of all things, a previously unattested but still unmistakable dialect of Ancient Greek, bearing some resemblance to the Aeolic. Exploring the implications of this will have to wait, for now. Sea Peoples: Space aliens after all?
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Jan 31, 2024 05:02
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I doubt they would have these, but it wouldn't hurt to ask if they have design specs for what their ships were like? If nothing else, we could get their input on designing living spaces for their ambassadors.
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Jan 31, 2024 06:33
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NewMars posted:On a different tack, SPECTRE's increasing paranoia is not looking good to me. GLADIO sabotage of space assets is, uh... a rather well known phenomenon at this point. And it's literally their job to look for it. Of course they look for it when there's sudden major space accidents that cause serious loss of life. I'd be I guess a tiny bit slightly worried if they were going off about the Proton engine failure as well, but they're not, they looked into that and determined it was a routine maintenance failure and moved on with their lives. They're not jumping at shadows, they're doing their job in a professional and effective manner.
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Jan 31, 2024 06:50
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Is it wise to defrost extraterrestrial people? While we might, and I stress might, be able to provide a breathable atmosphere, how about food? How do we provide for their social needs? What do we tell them as a debriefing? We barely understand the wider picture ourselves. With a workable embassy with the Minervans we might tackle their prisoners/hostages/specimen (?) together with them, although they might be equally displaced in time and their colony might lack the facilities for proper care.
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Jan 31, 2024 18:50
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Would we be able to safely re-freeze any people, human or otherwise, who turn out to require facilities we can't supply? That would cover for a lot of unknowns re: aliens.
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Jan 31, 2024 20:42
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Also, we have no way of really knowing who is on the level when we defrost them. Right now, we're taking the Minervans at their word since there's really nothing else to go on, but there's no way to know if they were actually the hostile party and got left behind as a mistake (or a "mistake"), and we have no reason to think that whoever we defrost will be truthful either. Anyway, it probably wouldn't HURT to see if we can leave a message for our space buddy now that we have a Rosetta Stone, to try to emphasize that we really want information more than anything else, and we would like to offer them the chance to at least have communications with us. We could at least offer things that they ask for in exchange for information, if they aren't going to believe in generosity. Edit: I'm also getting Viltrumite vibes here from the Roswells and their conflict. This could have been a galactic community that fascist grays decided Must Not Be Permitted because it is Species Mixing. Volmarias fucked around with this message at 03:08 on Feb 1, 2024 |
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Feb 1, 2024 02:59
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Volmarias posted:Also, we have no way of really knowing who is on the level when we defrost them. Right now, we're taking the Minervans at their word since there's really nothing else to go on, but there's no way to know if they were actually the hostile party and got left behind as a mistake (or a "mistake"), and we have no reason to think that whoever we defrost will be truthful either. Well now we can at least ask these Martian guys and see how their stories compare. To that effect, I recommend that if we DO defrost any of these guys, we 1) don't tell the Minervans we did it, and 2) don't tell the Martians we have contacted the Minervans. At least not right away. We can get less censored intel if both parties think they're our only sources of information and aren't self-conscious about contradicting or implicating each other.
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Feb 1, 2024 03:06
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Volmarias posted:Also, we have no way of really knowing who is on the level when we defrost them. Right now, we're taking the Minervans at their word since there's really nothing else to go on, but there's no way to know if they were actually the hostile party and got left behind as a mistake (or a "mistake"), and we have no reason to think that whoever we defrost will be truthful either. Sure, but there's still plenty of useful stuff to learn even if we assume everything they tell us is bullshit. Regardless of what the future holds or what the galactic political scene looks like, it's going to be necessary to have a working understanding of their languages, emotional expression or its absence, do they treat us with disdain, all that stuff. It's not like various human intelligence services are unfamiliar with having to treat information with caution/suspicion, either. Even so surely as socialists we must make some level of assumption that we can establish dialog even if anything further is premature. We have to believe any species that can reach the point of interstellar travel is capable of rationality. So I think we can safely wake some, talk to them, see what they say, and then see what can be verified through other means and how the two species contradict or compliment each other's claims. Then we decide how to proceed based on what we've learned.
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Feb 1, 2024 04:20
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It bobbed slowly down the brown river, jerking to and fro in the current as the chain beneath it scraped along the uneven bottom. Snagging, stopping, catching on obstacles that could hold it for a moment before the size and bulk of the great device wrenched it free again to drift along. If it wasn’t for the obvious, foreboding shape of it, it would have looked almost comical. Kyle Flaherty leaned over the side of the dock, watching the bobbing bomb. “Too much to ask the stupid thing to go off on its own, I guess.” His CO, Tom Placer, shook his head. “Would have happened by now if we were that lucky. I’m glad enough it’s caught up in the eddies rather than bookin’ it down the middle. So we gotta do it the hard way before it gets down to the Vicksburg crossing.” “poo poo, Sarge, do we?” Flaherty gave him a look. “I like shootin’ things as much as anyone, but why’ve we gotta save bacon for the Afrikans? Doubt they’d do for us.” Placer gave him a look that said “shut the gently caress up, Private”, but all that came out of his mouth at first was a sigh. “Private Flaherty, did you join the Corps of Engineers to NOT solve problems?” Flaherty winced. “No, sir.” He turned his attention back to the drifting mine. “I joined to keep Nawlins above water. I jus’...” He sighed. “Tired, sir.” Placer nodded at that. There wasn’t much else to say. Any government job in the National Reconciliation Committee Alliance was deeply thankless, but the Corps of Engineers’ was one of the worst. Having to deal with a thousand little petty fiefdoms of corrupt mayors and fat sheriffs, jumping borders and building levees with safeties off, on a budget that seemed to get smaller every year. For one of the whole points of having the NRC around, it felt like a losing battle. Placer had been with the Corps for six years; he couldn’t think of a single person who’d been in it before the War. Turnover was sky-high. But if the Corps goes, then the whole thing goes with it. The bridges they’d managed to fix. The levees they’d kept in place with the Mississippi bucking against them. The port walls and cranes they coaxed and begged to give them one more year’s work. The whole drat thing. Reconstructing America. Placer sighed again. Couldn’t even get a drat field gun into place in a timely fashion. There was no nice and tidy way to deal with a thousand-pound Mk. 52 naval mine. Dropped from the air, the Feds and the Gnats had loaded the waterways of America down with them over the years. And when so many of those waterways fed into the Mississippi, eventually, they all came down to his territory. Damaging docks, cracking bridge piers, sinking barges and riverboats and ferries. Placer’s six years in Louisiana, Tennessee, and Arkansas had seen dozens of the things. The only way you could realistically handle a thousand pound mine was to blow it up while it wasn’t near anything you cared about, which meant shooting it with a big gun. But getting a gun over what was left of the roads along the Mississippi was an ask. Regardless of what it was doing, a 75mm gun was a military weapon, and that made it a valid target. Even if you weren't at war with whoever saw you dragging one around, the mere sight of it made most people leery. If you WERE, well... Placer had gotten very good at quickly brandishing papers and shouting about drifting bombs over six years. The whine of a jet engine slowly filled the air, and reflexively, both Flaherty and Placer tensed up, scanning the sky. Wrong tenor for a military jet. After a moment, the shape of some kind of jetliner cleared the treeline behind them, heading east in the direction of Atlanta. Both engineers sighed, and then returned to their vigil. “Well, where’s the ferry, then?” Placer jumped. The engine’s whine had masked the sound of someone walking up on them. The voice was deep and rough, with a thick Texas twang to it – familiar, somehow. Turning around, Placer beheld a man; tall, rake-thin, about fifty years old. He was wearing hard-worn traveling clothes, a black cowboy hat and boots, with some kind of large case slung on his back. His face was sharp, pointed, with deep-dug lines and long gray hair hauled back into twin braids– Oh, you gotta be making GBS threads me. Placer blinked. “Are– you gotta be kidding me.” The man chuckled and raised his hands. “No way.” “That’s MY line. What’s someone like you–” Flaherty gave Placer a look. “Sir, who the hell is this?” Placer openly gawked at him. “Private, you are NOT telling me you don’t know this man.” “Never seen him in my life!” Flaherty shook his head. “What’s so special about this guy?” “What’s–” Placer stammered. “Private–” “Easy, easy.” The man walked up to the railing, staring out at the river. “This IS the landing for the Helena-Lula ferry, right?” “Yessir.” Flaherty nodded. “Can’t run right now, though.” The man cocked an eyebrow. “Why’s that?” Flaherty gestured over at the mine. “That thing. Loose mine. Can’t have anything on the water ‘til we get rid of it.” “Which we can’t do ‘til they get here with that drat field gun,” Placer added, finally collecting himself enough to speak. “That’d do it, yeah.” The man sighed, guitar case shifting on his back. “Burnin’ daylight, but, well, guess I’m not in a rush.” Flaherty cocked his head. “Most people drive up to the ferry. You walkin’ somewhere, mister?” The man nodded. “Columbus.” “Col–” Wheels turned in Flaherty’s head, working furiously. The man looked back out across the water at the mine. “Kind of a drat fool idea, really. Not as young as I used to be.” Now it was Flaherty’s turn to gawp. “Wait…. You’re–” “NOW it gets through your thick-rear end skull, private.” Placer snorted, clapping a hand on the engineer’s shoulder before turning his attention back to the man. “Sorry to hold you up, sir.” “Hell, nobody’s fault, is it?” The man sighed, looking up at the sky. “Not yours, anyway.” A moment of silence passed, before Flaherty turned back to his boss. “poo poo, Sarge, I didn’t know you liked his music.” “You kiddin’ me, Private?” Placer gave him a side-eye. “Who can’t?” “Well, he’s just…” Flaherty shot another look at the man before turning back. “He’s so pinko.” The man snorted aloud, a sound almost like a horse. “And PROUD, son, don’t you forget it.” Placer dragged a hand down his face as the man chuckled. Flaherty looked back over at him. “They want to control us, though. Control everythin’. I didn’t think you thought like that.” “‘Cause I don’t.” The man grinned. “I’m an outlaw, sonny, not a lockstepping goon. But that’s always been who I am. And it’s how a lot of them are, too, and always been that way too.” Placer opened his mouth to speak, but then the man pulled his guitar case off his back. Leaning the case against the dock railing, the man opened it, carefully, and lifted out a battered guitar. Though it shined with the dull polish of care and attention, the front of it was rent as though it had been ripped, writing scratched into the rosewood frontboard, a hundred thousand little scrapes wearing away above the bridge to where a hole could be seen clear through. Both engineers shut up hard. The man lifted the guitar, standing back from the railing. “Got a new one I’m going to try out in Columbus. See if I can convince someone.” For a moment, there was nothing to be heard but the burble of the river rolling past them. The sleepy town behind them offered no noise. Even the birds seemed to be holding their breath. Then the man started to play. Soft, and gentle, the acoustic guitar rang out across the dock, echoed back up the streets, rolled out across the river and through the tree-lined banks. Four bars, and then he started to sing. “Give us your tired and weak, And we will make them strong! Bring us your foreign songs, And we will sing along!” He bowed his head, eyes shaded under his hat. “Leave us your broken dreams, We’ll give them time to mend. There’s still a lot of love, Livin’ in the Promiseland.” The two engineers just stood there, not saying anything, watching enrapt as the man sang, a song that could only be about one place in the world. A place that no longer existed on a map, but which he could trace every inch of in his heart – and in the hearts of every man, he was certain. The song had long ended by the time the rest of the Engineers rolled up the field gun to the ferry dock. The roar of the gun would have buried it. The terrific blast as the thousand-pound mine exploded, the ragged cheers of the engineers, would have obliterated its sound from the air. Yet Tom Placer and Kyle Flaherty both found that for days afterwards, as the man walked across the South, nothing they heard could drown it out of their minds. = = = = = Associated Press newswire, May 15, 1987 posted:
Redeye Flight fucked around with this message at 07:02 on Mar 5, 2024 |
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Mar 5, 2024 06:58
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Just finished this thread now that I've registered and the paywall is down. Love it. Wonder what will happen to Texas when LBJ dies. He barely made it to '73, so it shouldn't be long now.
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Mar 24, 2024 13:33
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