the solar windmill - part two
The Solar Windmill. Part two
………………………………………….
The vast and empty main control: switches and lights in play, a private symphony in time to the music of satellites chirping out from the huge wall-mounted speaker system.
Her heavy footfalls should have rung out like hammer-blows as she crossed the chamber -
but there was no atmosphere.
She knew exactly the dimensions of the place, had studied the files and the blue-prints for hours even before uploading them into her cerebellum, but the scale she hadn't been quite prepared for; a glass box is just a glass box till you put an insect inside, and then it becomes...
Well, it was all perspective wasn't it? Looking over the flat banks of controls, the dead screens and the lively wall monitors she could sense how outmoded the place was, how unnecessarily large and unwieldy, the size was unjustified- and had been surely even then.
Designers free to create something more than a utility; a monument, yet another monument to mankind in the darkness, pitching up its tent and spearing the unknown with flags and ostentatious edifices.
…………………………
She was itching now to rip the bubble wrap from her head, to crack wide her face plate, to breath deep and let the nanos loose, she was feeling feverish with their excitement - as if they could sense the task at hand.
Ridiculous -
Yeah but who knew just how finely they were programmed, to what extent - and for what precise reason? She understood the principle of their manufacture well enough but who really knew the complex details of their construction and programming.
That was specialist knowledge - and you had to take that on trust.
Not exactly her greatest asset.
She remembered the Tokalmi chemical facility on Mars, remembered when she'd broken in.
Half way through that icy artificial canyon, her eyes smarting and her throat raw with the heady tastes of rust and ammonia, and she been flushed out like the flat footed newbie she was. Just a flicker, an instant to notice the burning eyes in the darkness and then she was surrounded.
It was a hard group of 'Lookers', break-ins like her. Recording devices aside, (because everyone of them was a human camera, that was the point after all, back then…) the ragged group were equipped mostly with rudimentary tools and devices, relying on their senses to guide them through.
Not the friendliest of crowds to run into, socially disaffected, and by the looks of them some at least were ex-military.
And they were armed.
She'd barely registered the metallic glint of their blades and trigger guards, had hardly heard the crude barking questions and felt the first jostling touch when she began to throw up with a melodramatic violence and then blacked out. When she came round it was to find herself chained to a storage rack and breathing hard with relief. The lights were on, the power was running, there was a security blare from some wall mounted speakers in an adjacent corridor.
Her mouth was dry, no saliva and her head felt clear but light.
It had been the nanos. Obeying some pre-packed subroutine they'd voided themselves from her and gone to work restoring systems in a place supposedly unused in 40 years. Having an abandoned chemical facility suddenly flare into life had brought choppers and a swat force with frightening but understandable speed.
She was lucky the mob hadn't killed her on the spot.
When the guards arrived she made out she'd been a hostage, forced to tag along filled with black market nanos and at the mercy of the group.
It was fortunate that her ID could be verified so quickly - and she owed the Astronautics Agency some serious favours for that.
So yeah, bad enough to be remembering that stuff, but the nanos in her blood right now were singing.
It was time to let them out. She tensed her jaw and squeezed the rubber hand pump collecting sweat, trace DNA and after a moment, blood. The filter tube extended and she wrote her name on the siding, daubing EVA LOKA
in a neat scarlet tag.
From the letters of her name the nano-bots would emerge and begin to work their way in. Absorbed into the metal, absorbed into the system.
EVA LOKA.
She watched the letters eat into the wall.
………………………….
And a place without language, God yes... She remembered being stuck in the tug when they were hauling migrants over the zone lines and none of them seemed to speak the same language.
At first there had been such mayhem, such babble as each person sort some connection some understandable reassurance 'look I exist!'... But the journey was long and cold and pretty soon everyone subsided into their individual thoughts and silence.
She'd watched two men trade a gold filling for a pass-card, right there with some home dentistry in the back seats, and all in silence.
When they made into port and Leb was busy doling out bribes and hot soup to the watch-guard and the cargo was being processed surreptiously in the freight dump a warden had come up and demanded to know who she was.
She was silence.
After getting absolutely no response despite trying seven different interrogative languages, the watch had prodded her out into the city, out into the night.
The first of many spent wrapped in a plastic waste sheet.
Eventually she was spotted by two men she'd helped smuggle through on the bus and they returned the favour showing her their crash and hooking her up for some work.
Eight months she spent working the base levels, pulling basic wage for physical labour, taste of chrome on her tongue, sleeping in a mig-bunk under the jaundiced gaze of some drug burned wanna-be's. Following the money might have told her more - but she had no inclination to do so.
They called her The Mute, The Dumb-One, and she didn't correct their impression. And she never spoke.
Eight months.
Except that that never happened.
She had simply gone up to security wall, pressed her face to its metallic coolness and counted to a thousand. Then she turned and walked meekly back to the shuttle.
A loss of nerve, there was little consolation. She had simply gone up to security wall, pressed her face to its metallic coolness and counted to a thousand. Then she turned and walked meekly back to the shuttle.
A loss of nerve, there was little consolation except that she'd made a choice. That was important.
That was her freedom. And all the Migs she helped smuggle in and set loose into the city, was that bestowing freedom on them?
It had been more palatable to think of it like that, to paint the truth in idealistic colours but she wasn't stupid, at the end of the day the Migs would find themselves together again, working for whoever found it profitable to use them.
So, no - she wasn't setting them free, she as just another trafficker selling them on.
But still, it wasn't exactly silence. The city.
And places had voices, a lot of people believed that. A place had its own tongue and the will to use it, sing to you given half a chance. Lot of finders and breakers, lot of couriers and runners believed that.
Eva didn't. It was just the same old same old, people hearing something more than there was building connections where there weren’t any, dealing with places as relationships.
She wasn't looking for that.
Listening to the insistent arctic wind, the groan of the vents, the sparking of old wires and the distant drip of whatever chemicals were slopping about the base, listening to the music the place was making with its metal plating, its grates and vanes, its cables -
Eva had decided there and then that Space was the answer. And here she was.
And it was little different.
Dextrously twisting the old manual handles and placing patches on wires and clicking the switches on power units and junction boxes.
At least being here required the kind of blending mind and instinct that she did enjoy - that and the sense of rightness, of order.
Asperger's was no longer the hip upgrade of the cultural cognoscenti that it had been, enjoying a far wider popularity now. Naturally enough Eva had avoided it but people often mistook her inclinations for genetic affectation.
She didn't mind, it was enough that people HAD a sense of order and an understanding of systems even if such radically subjective constructs were so often wildly at odds.
After all, it was Boden's Law; "An intelligent system must be able to keep sight of the way abstract formulation maps onto the real-world details."
Was she mapping herself then - the thought nagged at her, was that what everyone was doing and those like her, Break-ins, Lookers and Fixers, simply an articulation of the fact?
………………………….
And the main conduit finally, it was difficult going, a claustrophobic closet filled with wheels and wires, gyros and counter-balances, no room to manoeuvre among the cogs and wheels and ancient hydraulics.
But it felt good to grapple with the mechanisms directly when so much of the machinery was essentially invisible and embedded in the plastic skin of the walls which even now her nanos were busy crawling over and burrowing into.
Her gauntleted hands drifting down with the aggravating slowness of zero gravity to tweak and adjust - she almost lost one of her slender key rods as it missed its target and bounced away and for a moment she thought it was heading for one of the stabiliser pads which would have been disaster.
She took a moment, forcing herself again to relax, relax, relax... tried to ignore the tension in her limbs, the itching of her skin and the sweat pooling under her arms in the dark material of her vest-top.
Relax.
Her fingers flexed, guiding the key-rod home. One of the wheels twisted on its axis bent down to kiss another which in turn rotated ever-so slightly to fit against another and to touch the conductive stripping that ran wild amongst the disparate parts. She drew down a small but wide handed lever and a series of tiny LEDs glowed in sequence from within the cables.
Everything was ready. She reached up. The ceiling was unfurling with a hesitant motion, opening like a reluctant eye still heavy with sleep
and staring into space.
………………………….
end of part two ...........
next: rewinding, repairing and reawakening
..................
this one's for V.
………………………………………….
The vast and empty main control: switches and lights in play, a private symphony in time to the music of satellites chirping out from the huge wall-mounted speaker system.
Her heavy footfalls should have rung out like hammer-blows as she crossed the chamber -
but there was no atmosphere.
She knew exactly the dimensions of the place, had studied the files and the blue-prints for hours even before uploading them into her cerebellum, but the scale she hadn't been quite prepared for; a glass box is just a glass box till you put an insect inside, and then it becomes...
Well, it was all perspective wasn't it? Looking over the flat banks of controls, the dead screens and the lively wall monitors she could sense how outmoded the place was, how unnecessarily large and unwieldy, the size was unjustified- and had been surely even then.
Designers free to create something more than a utility; a monument, yet another monument to mankind in the darkness, pitching up its tent and spearing the unknown with flags and ostentatious edifices.
…………………………
She was itching now to rip the bubble wrap from her head, to crack wide her face plate, to breath deep and let the nanos loose, she was feeling feverish with their excitement - as if they could sense the task at hand.
Ridiculous -
Yeah but who knew just how finely they were programmed, to what extent - and for what precise reason? She understood the principle of their manufacture well enough but who really knew the complex details of their construction and programming.
That was specialist knowledge - and you had to take that on trust.
Not exactly her greatest asset.
She remembered the Tokalmi chemical facility on Mars, remembered when she'd broken in.
Half way through that icy artificial canyon, her eyes smarting and her throat raw with the heady tastes of rust and ammonia, and she been flushed out like the flat footed newbie she was. Just a flicker, an instant to notice the burning eyes in the darkness and then she was surrounded.
It was a hard group of 'Lookers', break-ins like her. Recording devices aside, (because everyone of them was a human camera, that was the point after all, back then…) the ragged group were equipped mostly with rudimentary tools and devices, relying on their senses to guide them through.
Not the friendliest of crowds to run into, socially disaffected, and by the looks of them some at least were ex-military.
And they were armed.
She'd barely registered the metallic glint of their blades and trigger guards, had hardly heard the crude barking questions and felt the first jostling touch when she began to throw up with a melodramatic violence and then blacked out. When she came round it was to find herself chained to a storage rack and breathing hard with relief. The lights were on, the power was running, there was a security blare from some wall mounted speakers in an adjacent corridor.
Her mouth was dry, no saliva and her head felt clear but light.
It had been the nanos. Obeying some pre-packed subroutine they'd voided themselves from her and gone to work restoring systems in a place supposedly unused in 40 years. Having an abandoned chemical facility suddenly flare into life had brought choppers and a swat force with frightening but understandable speed.
She was lucky the mob hadn't killed her on the spot.
When the guards arrived she made out she'd been a hostage, forced to tag along filled with black market nanos and at the mercy of the group.
It was fortunate that her ID could be verified so quickly - and she owed the Astronautics Agency some serious favours for that.
So yeah, bad enough to be remembering that stuff, but the nanos in her blood right now were singing.
It was time to let them out. She tensed her jaw and squeezed the rubber hand pump collecting sweat, trace DNA and after a moment, blood. The filter tube extended and she wrote her name on the siding, daubing EVA LOKA
in a neat scarlet tag.
From the letters of her name the nano-bots would emerge and begin to work their way in. Absorbed into the metal, absorbed into the system.
EVA LOKA.
She watched the letters eat into the wall.
………………………….
And a place without language, God yes... She remembered being stuck in the tug when they were hauling migrants over the zone lines and none of them seemed to speak the same language.
At first there had been such mayhem, such babble as each person sort some connection some understandable reassurance 'look I exist!'... But the journey was long and cold and pretty soon everyone subsided into their individual thoughts and silence.
She'd watched two men trade a gold filling for a pass-card, right there with some home dentistry in the back seats, and all in silence.
When they made into port and Leb was busy doling out bribes and hot soup to the watch-guard and the cargo was being processed surreptiously in the freight dump a warden had come up and demanded to know who she was.
She was silence.
After getting absolutely no response despite trying seven different interrogative languages, the watch had prodded her out into the city, out into the night.
The first of many spent wrapped in a plastic waste sheet.
Eventually she was spotted by two men she'd helped smuggle through on the bus and they returned the favour showing her their crash and hooking her up for some work.
Eight months she spent working the base levels, pulling basic wage for physical labour, taste of chrome on her tongue, sleeping in a mig-bunk under the jaundiced gaze of some drug burned wanna-be's. Following the money might have told her more - but she had no inclination to do so.
They called her The Mute, The Dumb-One, and she didn't correct their impression. And she never spoke.
Eight months.
Except that that never happened.
She had simply gone up to security wall, pressed her face to its metallic coolness and counted to a thousand. Then she turned and walked meekly back to the shuttle.
A loss of nerve, there was little consolation. She had simply gone up to security wall, pressed her face to its metallic coolness and counted to a thousand. Then she turned and walked meekly back to the shuttle.
A loss of nerve, there was little consolation except that she'd made a choice. That was important.
That was her freedom. And all the Migs she helped smuggle in and set loose into the city, was that bestowing freedom on them?
It had been more palatable to think of it like that, to paint the truth in idealistic colours but she wasn't stupid, at the end of the day the Migs would find themselves together again, working for whoever found it profitable to use them.
So, no - she wasn't setting them free, she as just another trafficker selling them on.
But still, it wasn't exactly silence. The city.
And places had voices, a lot of people believed that. A place had its own tongue and the will to use it, sing to you given half a chance. Lot of finders and breakers, lot of couriers and runners believed that.
Eva didn't. It was just the same old same old, people hearing something more than there was building connections where there weren’t any, dealing with places as relationships.
She wasn't looking for that.
Listening to the insistent arctic wind, the groan of the vents, the sparking of old wires and the distant drip of whatever chemicals were slopping about the base, listening to the music the place was making with its metal plating, its grates and vanes, its cables -
Eva had decided there and then that Space was the answer. And here she was.
And it was little different.
Dextrously twisting the old manual handles and placing patches on wires and clicking the switches on power units and junction boxes.
At least being here required the kind of blending mind and instinct that she did enjoy - that and the sense of rightness, of order.
Asperger's was no longer the hip upgrade of the cultural cognoscenti that it had been, enjoying a far wider popularity now. Naturally enough Eva had avoided it but people often mistook her inclinations for genetic affectation.
She didn't mind, it was enough that people HAD a sense of order and an understanding of systems even if such radically subjective constructs were so often wildly at odds.
After all, it was Boden's Law; "An intelligent system must be able to keep sight of the way abstract formulation maps onto the real-world details."
Was she mapping herself then - the thought nagged at her, was that what everyone was doing and those like her, Break-ins, Lookers and Fixers, simply an articulation of the fact?
………………………….
And the main conduit finally, it was difficult going, a claustrophobic closet filled with wheels and wires, gyros and counter-balances, no room to manoeuvre among the cogs and wheels and ancient hydraulics.
But it felt good to grapple with the mechanisms directly when so much of the machinery was essentially invisible and embedded in the plastic skin of the walls which even now her nanos were busy crawling over and burrowing into.
Her gauntleted hands drifting down with the aggravating slowness of zero gravity to tweak and adjust - she almost lost one of her slender key rods as it missed its target and bounced away and for a moment she thought it was heading for one of the stabiliser pads which would have been disaster.
She took a moment, forcing herself again to relax, relax, relax... tried to ignore the tension in her limbs, the itching of her skin and the sweat pooling under her arms in the dark material of her vest-top.
Relax.
Her fingers flexed, guiding the key-rod home. One of the wheels twisted on its axis bent down to kiss another which in turn rotated ever-so slightly to fit against another and to touch the conductive stripping that ran wild amongst the disparate parts. She drew down a small but wide handed lever and a series of tiny LEDs glowed in sequence from within the cables.
Everything was ready. She reached up. The ceiling was unfurling with a hesitant motion, opening like a reluctant eye still heavy with sleep
and staring into space.
………………………….
end of part two ...........
next: rewinding, repairing and reawakening
..................
this one's for V.