SSE
Copyright© 2013 by Gina Marie Wylie
Chapter 4: Planning
At first, Jake didn’t understand why they’d been so eager to agree to the fuel module. When he overheard some of the discussions, online and elsewhere, he finally understood.
The administrator saw this as a chance to reclaim American dominance in space. The Chinese and Indians were sharing a joint base on the lunar backside, and an American president nearly lost his job in the end of his second term when he offered to sell the space station to the Russians for a dollar. The American public wasn’t about to stand for giving something away that had cost them hundreds of billions of dollars and fourteen lives. The decision to scrap the space shuttles had been reversed until the civilian sector of space science could get people up and down.
The administrator was now narrowly focused on what amounted to a “Hail, Mary!” pass in space science. A lot of observers were worried that with so many varied components, there were too many failure points, but the administrator had gotten lucky there.
She had gotten into a public argument with one of her detractors at a Washington DC party. Her opponent had told everyone in a loud, bombastic voice that the mission was doomed to fail. She’d rounded on him. “The Mariner probes have been working for forty years! One of the Mars Rovers has been trundling around the Martian landscape for more than a decade now! The problem with the space program of late is too many people saying, ‘it can’t!’ when, in fact, it can and always has!”
“In the last ten years, we’ve had to shut down more spacecraft for lack of continued funding than we’ve lost in the last two decades!”
The fuss died down quickly after that, and, Jake thought, helped direct attention away from the exact truth about what was going on. His truth as well as theirs.
After the decision to include a fuel module, the days passed quickly, then weeks, and then months. There was always something more to be looked at, and Jake threw himself into the tasks at hand with a will.
The first obstacle he faced was the normal inclination of people who wanted to know who it was they were talking to. NASA was adamant that he not tell people his name. It didn’t take long for Jake to realize that there was a cabal in the upper echelon of NASA’s bureaucracy that knew what was going on — and a far, far larger group that didn’t know. Jake contemplated the data he gathered on things and decided that the administrator was the senior-most person who knew what was going on. No one else higher in the government was aware of what she was up to.
Knowledge is power, and while he was willing to use that power, he tried to keep the application of power as modest as possible. He spoke to the NASA Administrator about three weeks after his “enhancements.”
“I’m coming to you, ma’am, for direction. I’ve been interacting with a lot of people now who aren’t cleared for the entire mission package. Ma’am, I need a name. While I’d prefer my own, I understand why that’s not possible, and I’m more than willing to adopt another for this purpose. The question I have is what name?”
His own personal favorite was Pete Rate; but he was tolerably certain at some point someone would do the initial and the last name: “P. Rate.” That was too much of a hint of what he intended, and so he had to settle for something else.
Letting them think he was indecisive would fit in with their picture of him that he was trying to cultivate — well, part of the picture. The fact was that they had to be deliberately ignoring anything that didn’t fit their picture of a single-minded fellow who had some good ideas and who was willing to go along with this adventure without asking any embarrassing questions. This would stroke the woman’s ego and help fix their picture of him. A trivial price to pay for a name he would discard at the first opportunity.
“Goodness, Mr. Primare! I hadn’t thought of that! You’re right. Let me think on this. Is there anything else?”
“Ma’am, I’m an outsider; I’m not privy to a lot of the planning that has gone into this mission. I submit to you that the mission name isn’t all that good of a choice. A Phoenix is a bird that rises from the ashes of its demise. That indicates, at least to me, that the past wasn’t all that good.
“So, since I’m willing to let you name me, I was hoping you’d give consideration to my suggestion of a better name for the project: the Solar System Explorer Mission, America’s return to space exploration.”
The administrator was clearly taken aback, and then she literally clapped her hands in glee. “I hadn’t thought of that implication of the mission name, Mr. Primare! You’re right about that as well. NASA has always met its goals; it has been political will that has failed us. We don’t have to rise from the ashes of past programs — we’re moving ahead, resuming our voyage to explore the cosmos! Yes! A thousand times, yes! I’ll get right on this!”
“Don’t forget my favor.”
“Hah! No, I won’t. I’ll get back to you very quickly.”
An hour later, she was back. “How about ‘Jacob Steerman?’”
Jake would have clapped in glee just like the administrator had, if he’d had hands to clap. “Yes, yes! That’s a good one! Let’s go with that!”
“I thought you’d like it, considering the title you wanted for yourself.”
“Exactly right, Madame Administrator!”
So after that, he was Jake Steerman, which suited him just fine. Everyone at NASA was aware that he was using a pseudonym, and it amused Jake at what the guesses were about who he really was. The most common one was that he was really a science fiction author who was also a scientist or engineer who was banging the administrator and who’d been given extraordinary access.
It was too ironic to try to correct, and now and then he’d mention science fiction novels he’d read, and, on top of that, talked about some of the personal foibles of some of the “other” writers. He’d attended any number of science fiction conventions growing up, until marriage and a family had claimed him. When he lost his family, he’d lost most of his desire to associate with people who knew his history and who would commiserate with him about his loss — so he’d continued to stay away.
He hated faux sympathy from outsiders, and now, well, now was now. There weren’t that many outside of his medical team who knew of his plight, and they weren’t talking. As doctors, they seemed to deliberately build barriers between themselves and their patient, which was just fine with Jake.
Six months before mission launch, the project was announced to the public. At least a sanitized version of the project, lacking any reference to the fact that there would actually be a human intelligence “along for the ride.”
Jake wasn’t part of the publicity and hadn’t expected to be. He just kept plugging along, trying to extend the capabilities available to him as far as possible. He was pretty sure that some of the NASA engineers at least suspected what was going on, but they didn’t say anything, and that was, after all, the goal.
For the first few months, he limited himself to modest queries about the design and spent more and more time working on a symbolic set that could represent concepts. It was, he thought, something close to Chinese ideograms, although it also resembled something like the APL programming language, where certain symbols represented entire concepts, not simple words. Eventually, he hoped that he could build an entire language based on the concept.
He had no idea what the researchers thought of his periods of work on the language; they never mentioned it, and he wasn’t anxious to see how much, if any, of it, they understood.
He poured over the information that he’d gotten on fuel cycles that had been proposed for Mars missions from Brad Weaver and that had gotten his attention. He went on an extended learning binge after that. Chemistry hadn’t been one of his interests in school, but he’d had both high school and college introductory courses and wasn’t totally ignorant of the subject.
He realized that he wasn’t sleeping as much as he had in the past, but it was still a couple of hours a day. He didn’t want to rock the boat by explaining to any of the doctors that he had no idea if he was dreaming or not at times. There was so little external input that usually the first thing he did on a new day was engage whoever was on duty with his telemetry in idle chat for a few minutes.
One of the times when he wasn’t sure if he’d been awake or asleep, an idea came to him. He had access to some powerful computers. If he wanted to learn chemistry, what he could do would be to build some computer models of the equipment that he thought would be useful and then see if he could find a couple of collaborators who would help him with the parameters. It wouldn’t be the same as the real thing, but it would be a significant improvement over letting someone else tinker with it. Plus, he would learn a great deal about chemistry and chemical engineering!
At six months before launch, they’d already had three shuttle missions to put the external tanks in orbit and get working on the modifications to them that needed to be done.
Two special Delta rocket launches took place in the days right after the announcement. One carried a nuclear reactor and its controls to orbit, and the second was the fuel module.
He’d found a half dozen collaborators on the fuel reactor-modeling project, mostly from the Mars Society and the National Space Society. Some of them were amateurs, but he didn’t think that disqualified someone — after all, he was going to be a professional based only on being drafted.
Brad Weaver and some of the other engineers at NASA had helped a lot as well. Brad was one of those Jake was sure had cottoned onto the fact that there was something going on, and there was a reason for all of the robot access paths all through the mission, even in places where there wouldn’t normally have been any mission access. It was a risk, and he knew it was a risk — there were a lot of engineering changes being made on relatively short notice.
One thing he’d made sure of: everything he needed to stay alive was there in quintuply redundant systems. The tanks with his nutrients and gas supplies were spread out as well. In theory, one accident shouldn’t be able to take more than one or two items out at a time. He knew the doctors went through any number of system reviews to make sure that the worst of the risks were covered; he did the same thing, only with ten thousand times the attention to detail than they did.
All of this entailed more and more contact with the outside world. He had no idea how much or how often they monitored his conversations; he used the working assumption that they all were monitored.
Still, he had to make two calls in particular. A few days before the mission announcement, he signed on to a teenage gamer’s PC that the young man left on all night. The teenager lived in Chicago and was sound asleep when Jake used his system to send an email to Tom Ford, his friend and, since the accident, his conservator.
All Tom had was the word of the doctors and the NASA Administrator about Jake’s condition ... supposedly, Jake was in one of those “persistent vegetative states,” and while he was alive, his condition was too precarious to permit visitors.
So he sent Tom an email from “Jake” saying that he was up and about again, but the only phone number he remembered was Peggy’s, Tom’s wife’s work phone. Could Tom be there the next day at noon, and Jake would call him?
He had expected a measure of disbelief and wariness; he wasn’t prepared for the normally ebullient friend to be so somber. “Jake ... I thought...”
“Yeah, well, the news of my demise was a little previous, Tom.”
“You were in a coma?”
“For a while, Tom. I’m awake now.”
“When are you getting out of the hospital? Do you know how much they are charging your trust fund for your care?”
“Yeah, about that. Tell them you either want to see me face to face or they have to renegotiate.”
“I tried that once, but the court disagreed. Your medical condition was too precarious for visitors, I was told.”
“The reason you lost the negotiation was that you didn’t use the right tactic. Next time, tell them that if they don’t say, drop a zero from the amount you pay, you’ll get a court order and get in to see me. Tell them you’ll sue them, and in discovery, they’d have to let someone in to see me. They’ll cave in a heartbeat if you threaten to go public.”
There was a pause from the other end. “Is there a problem, Jake?”
“That kind of depends on your idea of what a problem is, Tom. Tom, I’m a quadriplegic.”
“Ah, Jake! God! You sure as hell better not be someone shining me on! I’ll kill you — you don’t sound at all like my friend Jake, you know.”
“Yeah, that’s another problem. I lost my eyes, ears, and vocal apparatus as well in the accident, Tom. My memory is fine, though. I remember once we were fly fishing along the Verde River near Phoenix, and you were so wrapped up in what you were doing that you lost track of where you were and where I was. You whipped your rod back, intending to flip it forward. Regrettably, you’d snagged my over-large nose. It required three surgeries to fix.
“I can’t believe you ever told that story to anyone, not even my sister Peggy. You were as embarrassed as I’ve ever seen anyone.”
“No, I’ve never told anyone, Jake. Gosh ... you’re sounding well then for someone who is deaf, dumb, and blind.”
“Tom, if you were actually paying half of my medical costs, you’d be adding a zero to what you pay, not taking one off.”
“That bad?” he whistled. “I have become too familiar with that whole -plegia thing myself this last year. Sondie...”
Sondie was his teenage daughter. Jake did the math; she’d be sixteen now.
“She got hurt?”
“Yes, but thankfully not as bad as you. She was ejected from a friend’s car when it flipped on an icy road. Sondie landed on a rock the size of her head, right at the base of her spine, just above the coccyx. She’s paralyzed from the waist down.”
“Tom...” Jake didn’t know what to say.
“It’s an education — as evidently you well know, Jake. She hates it when she needs help — but there are things she just can’t do for herself. Right now, she’s in the dumps. It comes and goes.”
“Well, if you want, I can talk to her. Trust me, my story is much worse than you or she can imagine.”
“Were you in much pain, Jake? Sondie was at first, but they did a little surgery, and it’s better.”
Jake laughed. “I had third-degree burns from the top of my head down to my navel. I fell out of a burning airplane and splashed down in San Francisco Bay at 120 miles an hour, shattering my legs and my spinal column. You have no idea of what the pain was like, Tom. And I wasn’t really in a coma — I was catatonic, running away from the outside world because it hurt so much. Even when it stopped hurting, I ran away from the memory that such pain was even possible.”
“Yet, here you are talking to me. Rationally talking to me.”
“Tom, for what it’s worth, you can’t tell anyone about talking to me, or tell anyone anything about my status. I’m an official government guinea pig that they’ve been spending money on like they owned the printing presses.”
“There’s been a lot of that in the last dozen years,” Tom said with feeling.
“And now I’ve contributed my bit. This is important, Tom. It’s important to me and to a lot of other people, only a few of whom are clowns. There’s a lot riding on not rocking the boat. Please, don’t speculate, don’t talk about it ... above all, don’t try to intervene. Demand to see me if you want; they’ll cave in a New York minute. But don’t actually force the issue.”
“I’m going to need to think about this.”
“Tom, I haven’t discussed much with the government about money. Right now you could say I’m working for room and board, but, all things considered, that’s not a trivial sum. This isn’t a trivial thing, Tom.
“I made this call in the off chance that you might try to change the status quo in the next few months. Please, Tom, don’t do anything.”
“I have to say, Jake, that I’m feeling a mixture of curiosity and anger here. You’re a guinea pig?”
“A voluntary guinea pig, Tom. Don’t ever forget that, no matter what you hear or think. Tom ... they offered me my heart’s greatest desire — at least the greatest one that was actually deliverable. Nothing will give me my wife and daughter back. But this ... this is something I don’t want to talk about yet. There will be plenty of time later, and I promise I’ll talk your ear off when the time comes.”
“I get the impression you’re telling me that you won’t be talking to me often, between now and whatever or whenever ‘then’ is.”
“I know they listen to some of my conversations, Tom. I don’t want to give them a reason not to trust me. This conversation is about insurance and assurance, Tom.”
“Jake ... I’m going to be a bastard, okay.”
“Tom ... please, please don’t.”
“No, not like that!” He laughed.
“Listen, I’m scared silly that Sondie is going to do something stupid. Please, could you talk to her? If she can talk to someone who is coping and who is in worse shape than she is — maybe it will get her out of the worst imaginable purple funk. It will give her some hope for the future.”
Jake wanted to cry. “I’m not a very good poster boy for coping, Tom. First I ran away. Then I woke up and now I’m doing something that very few people would contemplate for anyone, much less themselves.”
“Please, Jake. If you do this for me, I’ll do whatever you want.”
That gave Jake pause. Tom and his wife had understood, at least a little, what he had gone through when his wife and daughter had been killed. Tom had hugged him and told him that he’d do whatever Jake wanted — even if it was never mentioning his sister and niece again.
“I’ll do it, Tom ... but like I said, this could backfire. It could easily backfire.”
“Then, Jake, don’t lie. I never lied to you, did I?”
“No, you never did. And I’m not lying to you now, either. I’m not telling you everything, but that’s not the same.”
“No, it’s not. Can you give me a number so she can call you? It pretty much has to be on her schedule.”
“Sure; give me her number as well, and if her schedule doesn’t include me within a day, I’ll include her.”
Tom laughed bitterly. “Yep! You’re the Jake I know!”
“Tom, when we were college students together, we contemplated our first week of finals and we agreed then that the world sucked. We were callow young men back then, but now we’ve seen more of what really sucks in the world than we’ve ever wanted to. I will do what I can for her, Tom, but I warn you now — this may not be the favor you think it is.”
“I settle for the thought, Jake.”
Jake wasn’t surprised when he didn’t hear from Sondie, so a day later he openly called her. “Sondie, this is your Uncle Jake.”
“Go fuck yourself,” she said and promptly hung up.
Patiently, he dialed her back. “Give me a minute, Sondie.”
“I don’t want to hear about how much worse it is for you than it is for me.”
“Why would you think I want to share how much my life sucks with anyone else? Are you going to tell me about yours?”
“No,” Sondie said uncertainly.
“Once upon a time, Sondie, something terrible happened to me. My wife, your aunt, was sitting on the aisle of the bus, my daughter was sitting at the window, and I was in the middle. Then somebody fired machine guns at us.
“I was, they told me, lucky. The bullets went on either side of me, killing my wife and my daughter, but as the Egyptian doctor assured me, ‘Leaving you unscathed.’ Doctors lie, Sondie. They do it all the time and in a lot of different ways.
“I remember a somber eleven-year-old girl who came up to me when I got home and hugged me tight and told me that if I ever needed another daughter, you’d be available because your parents didn’t understand you.”
Sondie barked a harsh laugh. “I’d forgotten that. I said that, didn’t I?”
“You did. I didn’t say it at the time, because I was too wrapped up in my own grief, but I should have thanked you for the thought — and gotten a rain check.”
“Uncle Jake, you promise not to try to cheer me up? That you won’t tell me how much better off I am than you?”
“Sondie, you’re learning how to deal with this, even if you don’t want to admit it. The secret is not to dwell on things you can no longer change. What is, is. The alternative is empty nothingness. I know I said I wouldn’t talk about how much worse it was for me, Sondie, but for months I hid in a shell, afraid of the world, afraid of the pain. I ran away, in simple terms.
“Now, I cope. I cope the same way you have to: there are things I can do and things I can’t. I let them do what has to be done because there is no viable alternative. If you dwell on what others have to do for you now, it’ll drive you crazy.”
“I hate it.”
“Who doesn’t? I was a self-sufficient person growing up; your father and his sister were my only good friends. I thought your mother was a snot. Who needed anyone else? I sure didn’t! Then I lost the two most important people in my universe. Trust me on this, Sondie — there is no comparison between how much that hurt and how much this hurts. That was worse, far worse.
“I take the help I need because there is no alternative and because no matter how badly I feel about what’s happened, it isn’t the sum total, end of the universe.”
“My parents want to do too much for me.”
“I’ll talk to Tom, Sondie. You were good for me, that day so long ago. You said what had to be said and didn’t go any further. I expect that you appreciate what that means now more than ever.”
“Yes!”
“Look, we share something. You don’t want to talk about it, and I sure don’t. Read any good books lately?”
“I discovered Tamora Pierce. She writes stories aimed at young women. Fantasy stories with swords and sorcery — and the women can do both.”
Jake flashed back to a long-ago memory, and things he used to do with his wife and daughter. “Sondie, those are some good stories.”
“You’ve read them?”
“None of the recent stuff, but before ... I’d read them to my daughter.”
“Why don’t you ever say her name?”
“None of us is perfect, Sondie. We all develop coping mechanisms that let us deal with what’s on our plate. There is nothing fancy about most of it — it’s sheer avoidance of pain. Any of us, faced with people poking at a sore spot, get a little testy.”
“Uncle Jake, I’m sorry about what I just said.”
“And I’m sorry about the testy comment. Now and again, you need someone to knock you upside the head to focus your attention on what you’re doing that doesn’t help. Libby, Libby, Libby. See, I can say her name.”
“Dad said I wasn’t to ask what you’re doing now. Uncle Jake, what are you doing now?”
“Besides talking to you? I interact these days with the rest of the world via computer enhancements. I can ‘see’ using a pair of video cameras in one of the offices here. I hear anything said around the microphone in the aforesaid office, and I speak via the output of a computer. They have a bunch of gizmos that hook me up to a computer. All computers, all the time!”
“Are you going back to work?”
Jake laughed. “Already have, Sondie. I’ve been dabbling at a lot of things. I’m going to be a cracker-jack chemical engineer, just like I was a super-hacker.”
“A chemical engineer?” Sondie sounded mystified.
“Let’s just say that my life these days revolves around the timely arrival and departure of chemicals. Once I started looking into the subject, I found it was utterly fascinating.”
They talked for a while about mutual interests, post-accidents, and then Jake finally had to tell Sondie that he had to go.
If they were monitoring his communications, they were going to notice that conversation. It wasn’t the longest he’d had, not by a long shot, but it had been long, and it wasn’t with someone working on the project.
Still, no one said anything.
Two days later, he found the next opportunity that he’d been waiting for. Michael Rattray-Taylor was chatting with a friend on the phone, and the friend put down the phone for a moment to answer the door.
“Mike, this is Jake. Sorry to barge in,” Jake said hurriedly, unsure how much time he had.
“You were monitoring my call.”
“Yes, in the sense that when you’re waiting to talk to someone important who is dealing with something else, you listen to whether or not the parties are done talking.”
“What is it you want?”
“The same favor as before. Tomorrow they make the formal announcement of the mission. Please, Mike, withhold judgment and action. Let me do this. Don’t upset the apple cart.”
“Even if I think that what is being done is unconscionable?”
“Mike, that’s your judgment; it’s one I don’t concur with. I just sent you an email with a PDF attachment. Read it. Draw conclusions; think, think, think!”
“I have my own sources, Jake. I know why you’ve included that last Delta launch in your plans. Do you know they agreed to it as a cheap way to placate you?”
“Do you know my name, these days?”
“Jake Steerman.”
“That’s right, Mike. Some people can be real bums.”
With that, Jake cut the connection.
A few days later, he was talking with Sondie again — she had called him. “Uncle Jake, I’ve been thinking.”
Jake laughed. “As a measure of respect I hold for you, I won’t make any of the jokes about that statement I otherwise would.”
“Okay, you can’t see it, but I’m sticking my tongue out at you. Take that!”
Jake laughed harder. “I can take all of that that you can give.”
“You found something to interest you; it wasn’t at all like what you were interested in before. If I decided to do something, say, like wanting to learn to debate, is that a good choice, for someone like me?”
Jake smiled inwardly, pleased that he could at least do that.
“Sondie, debates are competition, by their very nature. No one likes someone who games the rules; and frankly, no one likes someone who just games the debate.
“The bottom line, though, is winning. You have a power chair? Can you stand up on crutches?”
“I have a power chair, and I can stand up on crutches if I have braces on my legs. So far, they keep saying there’s a chance, a very small chance, that they can fix my back. They’ve been saying that for six months. The braces work okay, but the crutches hurt, and the braces hurt more.”
“What you do, sweetie, is roll up to the podium in your chair, lever yourself up without help, and make your way to the podium and deliver your statement.”
“I don’t want to take advantage of my condition.”
“That’s silly, Sondie. You won’t be. You’re handicapped. You can’t walk far; you need a chair. That said, you can stand on your own two feet to deliver a speech. Why, most people would say that’s heroic, not taking advantage. Debates are won or lost based on the perceptions of the judges. And that’s whether or not everyone walks, crawls, or is dragged screaming for mercy to the podium.
“You aren’t responsible for other people’s perceptions, Sondie. That’s their problem, not yours.”
“I was going to say that’s not fair, but I just punched my leg. I couldn’t feel it. I don’t suppose that is fair, either. Perceptions: I feel things differently than I used to. Other people see me differently, too.”
“It would be unfair if you pretended, Sondie. Do what you have to do as best you can — that’s what’s expected of you. Don’t delay, don’t dwell, do what you have to do, as quickly as you can.”
Sondie was silent for a second. “Do you follow the news, Uncle Jake?”
“Some, not a lot. A great deal of what used to interest me no longer does.”
“In the last years of President Bush’s second term, he started spending money like it was going out of style. The guy whose father will never say his name was worse. That president got his political chimes rung and was pretty much powerless after his second year, even if he got reelected. The guy after him this term — he’s back to spending money like it’s going out of style. The recession continues, and he’s once again trying to ‘stimulate the economy’ by spending money we don’t have.”
“That’s a lot of politicians’ favorite way to solve a problem — throw more money at it,” Jake opined.
“Yeah, well, they have to cut this and that to make a pretense of fiscal responsibility. Yesterday they announced a number of sweeping changes in what ACA is going to pay for. No more power chairs for the disabled, so sorry. If you want a power chair, you pay for it yourself or use the wheelchair ACA will supply. No more of a lot of things.
“My dad is rich; he can afford to make up the difference, but a lot of people I see all of the time at therapy are going to have to return to wheelchairs — if the government can afford those.
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