Defiant (an Ell Donsaii story #9) (11 page)

Later Stockton apologized, excusing her behavior as an example of how strongly she feels about the issues. Others, however, have noted that she is easily angered, shoots from the hip, and is slow to reverse course when she is proven wrong…

Ell entered the little conference room for their regular D5R meeting. Almost everyone was already there and having little conversations of their own. Ell spoke to Fred Marsden for a couple of minutes. When Braun arrived she looked around the table and then said, “Thanks for coming everyone. I’ve asked Vivian to bring you up to speed about a recent terrorist incident.”

Vivian explained the two incidents in New York and their realization that they could monitor wire ports for fluid flows to prevent such in the future. “We’re hoping that this, combined with the limitations on the ports that
are
designed for fluid flows, will reduce the incidence of terrorist events in the future. We’re very lucky that both of these incidents occurred at night when people were not in the buildings. Of course it would have been pretty difficult to release a large quantity of flammable gas or liquid into a populated building because people would have smelled them, but we figure these terrorists were going to graduate pretty soon to setting them off just as people arrived to work in the mornings.”

After a pause she said, “We’ve also had another idea. Instead of selling ports that wires can be passed through, we’ll start selling ports that already have a jack and socket mechanism built into them. When they’re turned on, the jack would automatically extend itself through the port into the socket to make the connection. That way the port wouldn’t have to be held open all the time. The customer could just hook up to terminals on each end of the port and the jack mechanism obstructing the port would make it impossible to pass other items through the port.”

Braun waved a finger, “I know you’ve got volatile sensors in ports made to transfer water, or air like the snorkels we all got, but what’s to keep terrorists from passing a tube through them?

“Well we do still have a problem with ones we manufactured some time ago, but the new ones have screens on them to prevent that. Remove the screen and the port doesn’t work anymore.”

Braun nodded.

Vivian continued, “If they figure out that they can do it, we might just ‘recall’ all the old air and water ones that don’t have screens. After a bit we’d disable the ones that hadn’t been returned.”

When their turn came, the ET Resources group reported that their new asteroid mining procedure was working great. Ben said, “We’re doing five hundred tons a week now and still scaling up.”

“So that’s what? Six million dollars worth of metal?”

“Yeah, sale price, but there’s the costs of mining, separation and then costs for transport. It isn’t all profit.”

“Transport costs? I thought you were using portals?”

“Well yeah, but it does cost something to hold a big port open and send metal through it.”

“Good,” Fred laughed, “as long as you aren’t paying to truck the stuff!” He frowned, “How long will your down time be when you’ve used this one up and have to move to a different asteroid?”

Rob grinned, “Now that we broke it in half, the two pieces are each about five hundred meters in average diameter. That’s an estimated 490 million metric tons apiece. They should last us for a
little
while, in fact at the 10,000 tons a week we’re shooting for it would last almost 270 years.”

A chuckle ran around the table.

Ell said, “At our next meeting I’m going to be inviting another player. Gary Pace, who most of you have already met, is doing some cool things with carbon allotropes. So we’re going to form a third subdivision of D5R under him. It’ll be called ‘Allosci,’ short for Allotrope Science.”

“He’s the guy spinning the graphene out at the habitat, right?”

Ell nodded.

Fred asked with some excitement, “Is he going to build a space elevator? I’ve been waiting for one of those my whole life!”

Ell blinked a couple of times, then began slowly, “Even though we now have the ability to make a material strong enough to build and elevator, there are a lot of problems with such a megastructure that would remain. First,
hugely
expensive to build. Second, a freaking nightmare to get permission to build it from the country where it’s attached. Third, remember that storms, meteoroids and satellites would eventually hit it and do some damage. Even if it were built with redundant strands, when a strand broke, the shock wave would travel through the broken strand at the speed of sound in the material. That shock wave would be followed by fiber fragments travelling at over a kilometer per second and doing their own damage. So, even with redundant construction, it might fail. Fourth, probable protests and lawsuits from the rest of the countries at the equator where, if it broke completely, the falling parts would land. Remember that a space elevator would be longer than the circumference of the earth so, if it broke at the right altitude, it would wrap itself
all
the way around the earth as it fell. Made out of graphene, it wouldn’t weigh enough to do much damage. It would only be on the order of kilograms per kilometer but, we’d still have protests and lawsuits over the danger of it falling. Finally, an elevator’s main benefit would be the ability to move material out to space at low cost.” She looked around the table, “We can already move material to orbit with ports and move people to orbit with non-polluting, port fed, oxygen-hydrogen rockets. Admittedly, we’re using oxygen-hydrocarbon rockets at present but the total amount of CO
₂
being released is still rapidly diminishing because of our other technologies, so CO
₂
isn’t as much of an issue as it used to be.”

She glanced at everyone again, then shrugged, “I don’t see a reason to build a space elevator anymore.”

Several of the people at the table initially looked stunned, but a dawning comprehension of the issues swept over them and several of them laughed. Fred snorted, “So you’re saying I’ve contributed to shooting my own dream in the foot?”

Ell nodded solemnly. People began shifting in their seats preparatory to leaving the meeting. She said, “One more item?” When they’d settled she said, “I’m sure some of you’ve been giving this some thought already, but I thought we should discuss what might happen if the Blaustein bill passes?”

“And you had to turn over the interstellar tech, you mean?” Ben Stavos asked with a frown.

“Yeah... I’ve decided that I can’t do that. First of all, I don’t believe that it’s safe for a committee led by Dr. Ementhal to be in charge of first contact with any intelligent alien races. Second, I feel it would be unethical to turn one ended ports over, they have too much potential for devastating harm.” She shrugged disconsolately, “So, if it comes to that, I’ll be in violation of the law and may get arrested.”

“Why protest by refusing the turn it over? They’ll just take it anyway.”

Ell shook her head, “I’ve destroyed all the existing one ended ports and erased all the design data. They’d have to figure it out themselves,” she sighed, “which someone will probably eventually do. But it took some surprising serendipity to come up with the one ended version. Even though I thought of one ended ports first, the electronics are very, very bizarrely different, and much more difficult than the two-ended ports. So I’m hoping it will be a long, long time before anyone else comes up with them.”

There’d been several indrawn breaths when Ell said she’d destroyed the information but Ben said slowly, “I’ve always believe in free dissemination of scientific information so I never thought I’d be saying this, but I agree. I’ve thought about the one ended ports a lot since they first were mentioned and the kinds of horrible things that could be done with them is just frightening to contemplate. However, I would think that you could just explain that to the government and they’d agree. Once they understand, I bet they’ll retract their fangs on Blaustein.”

Ell sighed, “I hope so too. However, what I wanted to tell you is that, even if
I’m
in the pokey, I’m arranging for things to go on as usual here at D5R. Our investors have said they’ll continue supporting research and development at Quantum Research. Portal Tech and ET Resources are pretty much self-supporting so it shouldn’t have any great bearing on how things go with them but our investors will backstop them if there are problems. Even if I’m in jail, you’ll still be able to communicate with me.” She grinned, “It isn’t like they can confiscate my phone and AI anymore,” she tapped meaningfully on the implant under her ear.

***

Shan offered Ell one of his potato chips, but she shook her head. “What? Are you suddenly too health conscious for a potato chip?”

She shook her head ruefully, “No, it’s just that my mouth’s too sore.”

He frowned, “Why is your mouth sore?”

“Well I’ve been backing up my implanted comm system. I’ve been meaning to tell you anyway. I’ve put some more ports just under the tissue surface in the roof of my mouth and inside my ear canals.”

“What was wrong with the ones you had?

“Well, they only connect to one other port each. So if someone were to destroy my AI and the port attached to him, then I wouldn’t be able to communicate any more through that port. I decided I needed some spares.”

Shan tilted his head, “A backup comm port isn’t going to help if they dismantle your AI. You wouldn’t have an AI to communicate with.”

Ell shrugged, “I’ve backed Allan up too. I bought more hardware and hid copies of him in several locations that all cross connect to keep each other updated. Someone trying to cut me off would have to find and disable all of them.” Apologetically she said, “I’ve even connected myself to your AI so that if they found all of mine, I could use yours in a pinch. That connection is through a microphone port in my little finger and speaker port in my thumb though, so I’d have to hold my hand up to my head to use those.”

Shan looked at her measuringly for a moment, then said, “Jeez, you’re really worried about this aren’t you?”

Ell snickered, “Yeah, I’ve probably really overdone it. I’ve buried connection ports several places on the farm and out in the countryside. I’ve hidden devices in multiple locations that can deliver materials to my implanted single-ended ports. I’ve set up systems to restock the materials automatically and, if necessary, for you or Amy or Emma to restock them for me. Sometimes I think I’m excessively paranoid.”

“
When
are you doing all this?!”

“After you go to sleep. You know I don’t need as much beauty rest as you do.”

Shan winked at her, “Only ‘cause you have beauty to spare…”

***

Research Triangle Park, North Carolina—D5R announced today that, through President Flood’s negotiations, they had awarded control over a rocket in the Alpha Centauri solar system to Dr. Leo Jans of JPL. D5R is the parent company for Portal Technologies. D5R delivered the rockets to Tau Ceti which have allowed us to learn about the teecees who live on the third planet of that system. Dr. Jans says that, even though life on the planet circling Alpha Centauri appears to be unicellular, we have a lot to learn from it. One of the first questions will be whether it is DNA-based like the teecees and ourselves. Jans also wants to confirm whether chlorophyll is responsible for the green color of much of the life there and determine the concentration of oxygen in the atmosphere. He says it is far too early to speculate on whether Alpha Centauri might be suitable for human settlement.

Of note, D5R appears to be thumbing its nose at Dr. Francis Ementhal and the Blaustein bill he helped to sponsor. The bill was designed to force Ell Donsaii and D5R to turn over all control of their apparatus for interstellar exploration to a committee headed by Ementhal. By turning over control of the rocket in the Alpha Centauri system to Jans prior to passage of the bill, D5R seems to be doing somewhat of an end run…

***

Ell had a free morning, so she took a virtual tour of what was new in the company by looking out through some of the waldoes that belonged to ET Resources. ETR had recently finished a new waldo control center with hundreds of controller setups and room to expand with more. She considered going over there to look at the center, but it was just so much easier to log in to different waldoes using the controller she already had in her office.

For the most part she simply watched through the virtual eyes of waldoes being run by other operators. She observed for a while as the low earth orbit waldoes finished positioning another weightless module to be attached to the habitat. So far they had three of the large weightless modules chained together. At the junctions between each pair were hubs around which pairs of living modules swung on 250 meter long tubes, producing 0.3 gravities of acceleration to maintain the inhabitants’ health.

Deciding she had nothing to contribute there, she moved on to the asteroid mining program. There she watched ETR’s waldoes cutting chunks off the asteroid that slowly fell into the big funnels. The chunks fed into the “chopper,” as they called AJ’s series of big ports that cut the chunks up into tiny fragments so that they could be economically ported back to earth. A couple of waldoes stayed pretty busy breaking jams with long poles they stuck in through holes in the funnels. No easy way to prevent the jams occurred to Ell. At least they were easy to unjam in the low pseudogravity.

From there she moved on to watch a couple of waldoes that were unloading observation and surface radar systems out of one of D5R’s space planes. They were attaching the systems to a geostationary frame that would stabilize their orbits so they could be treated like one huge satellite. The array of radar antennae could act like one enormous radar array, allowing very precise imaging of Earth’s surface. Each satellite had its own set of heating and cooling tubes that would maintain them at an optimal temperature even out exposed in space. With ported electricity they no longer needed the huge solar panels that had decorated previous satellites. Once they had deployed these satellites, Ell knew that the waldoes would go on to their main job nowadays, which was to shepherd old telecomm satellites. Almost completely replaced by PGR technology, the old satellites had become “space junk” to be removed before they collided with something important. The teams would attach a few port fueled rockets and an AI would slowly transform their orbits until they wound up at D5R’s habitat system where there were plans to begin reclaiming and recycling materials out of them. They contained a lot of exotic and expensive metals that were anticipated to make the cleanup profitable.