Homecoming

Homecoming

    Good morning ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to Clarke Down Station.  I am Dr. Pamela Diaz-Singh and on the behalf of Sol-Synch and Eden-Earth  I have the honor of  giving you your Earth-side orientation this morning. The Eden-Earth Corporation currently leases Clark Down for the administration of all visitors to planet-side. This gives Eden-Earth lobby influence in the Sol-Synch democracy process according to the performance of their contractual obligations.

    I want to take just a few minutes to review the briefing you received yesterday at Up Station. The crew of the Colony Research Vessel Hudson is the third to complete the return voyage to Earth.  We have found that short term memory loss  is significant for round trip passengers using cryopods. Be assured, your memory functions will soon return to normal. To assist in that, clean out remaining toxins, and rebuild muscle and bone loss for a terrestrial gravity environment you were injected yesterday with nanys. You'll probably experience some discomfort over the next couple of days so we recommend that you take it easy and rest in the guest quarters assigned you here at Clarke Down when not attending seminars. You may run slight fevers. Starting Thursday you will probably feel up to using Eden-Earth facilities and will be given passes to go any where you wish planet-side. Transport to a point within about a hundred kilometers of any destination on the planet via Entanglement Pads will be made available. Just use your ID badge at the EPad kiosk.

    As you've been told, your voyage from Bernard's Star has been highly successful. There was a 97% recovery rate. We sincerely regret the loss of  the Hudson's junior communications officer Lawrence Kelsey. There will be a memorial service in the Clarke Down chapel at 16:30 this afternoon.  Directions are in your handouts and will also be available  through the link.

    I know you were all hoping to make an important contribution to mankind's knowledge of possible human colony habitats but, as you were told yesterday, the scientific information you brought back with you is obsolete. A practical model of the Alcubierre drive was perfected 73 years after the Hudson left Earth. The SSV John Muir arrived at Benard's Star about 3 years into your return home. The information you carried including sample materials was brought here over 56 years ago by the Muir. All of this information will be available to you over the link as your nanys come on line over the day or so. We've scheduled a seminar on link use for 13:00 this afternoon in this conference room. Rest assured that your sacrifices have not gone in vain. As your individual nanys become operative (they will tell you when they are ready) we'd like you to spend an hour resting in your assigned quarters. At that time your subjective experiences will be added to the link models of many different fields including cryo-biology,  planetary formation, inter-stellar vehicle design, exo-zoology, and so on.

    I want to spend a few moments  in refresher on the salient points of earth history in the 172 years since the Hudson left Earth can be enumerated as follows:
1) At the time of the Hudson's departure increasing planetary temperature had released a number of extremely virulent pathogens from Antarctic ice where they'd been frozen since the age of the dinosaurs
2) Over 80% of Earth's human population was affected and unprecedented mass extinctions occurred in species world-wide
3) The development of successful nany technology in 2137, some fourteen years into the Hudson's outbound journey,  provided the mechanism for the inoculation of human and many other key species.
4) One specific type of nany with the ability to manipulate it's directional opacity provided for a mechanism clouds of nanys to  regulate the Earth's weather. The mean terrestrial  temperature has been reduced by 4 degrees since your departure.
5) The completion of the 5th beanstalk in Kiribati in 2142 provided sufficient orbital lift capability that mass migrations off planet to the O'Neill habitats, Luna, Mars, the belt and the outer planets began shorly afterwords.
6) During this entire time span incremental breakthroughs in chaos engineering provided the understanding to model and restore terrestrial eco-systems to park like conditions.

    Most of you will be concerned that your qualifications for employment are obsolete. While this is true, let be assure you that it is no cause for concern. First of all, no one in the Sol system needs to work unless they desire to do so.  As you have now discovered goods and services in the Sol system are not acquired by any medium of exchange.  What was called "money" no longer exists in any form as the nanys can manufacture any conceivable object on demand. However, most residents thru out the system do find some form of work fulfilling and over 98% are engaged in some employment. Should you find any field of employment that interests you, you can learn all the necessary skills for an apprentice position thru the link in a week or less. An increasing portion of Sol system population is currently engaged in arts and crafts. This form of employment now occupies over 50% of the population. I know you heard all of this yesterday at Up so forgive any boring repetition.

    Sol-Synch has automatically granted all of you citizenship for the duration of your stay in system should that be for a short time or in perpetuity. More on that in two seminars tomorrow on the Sol-Synch democratic process and on Corporate Entities such as Eden-Earth.

    I'm excited to tell you now of my own job. I'm one of the few thousand lucky people who currently have permanent residence planet-side. My job allows me Down residence and though any Sol-Synch citizen is welcome to come Down,  most only come for brief visits.

    I am, what would be called in your departure era, an ecologist.  My actual title when such rarely used things come into play is Senior System Ecological Engineer for the Greater  Grand Teton Area. It's located in the northwestern corner of what was Wyoming, U.S.A. My officious title is pretty pedantic.  I think a much more accurate description would be gardener or steward. I am happy to be one of half a dozen workers in the Grand Tetons area.

    As I said, I'm honored to have been selected to give you this briefing on the mores you'll be expected to follow while Down. Most of these involve mitigating interference with the control structures used downside and most are self evident. Firstly listen to the cautions given to you over the link. Don't kill, obstruct, or otherwise intentionally interfere with any life form. This includes things like swatting mosquitoes. For the first few days of your visit you will probably be bitten when you go outside in many areas. We are initially monitoring your blood chemistry thru the link. Some area's are fallow areas and you won't be allowed to enter them without prior approval. Some technological devices are proscribed in certain areas. As an example of this, my husband, who works in undersea engineering, is not permitted to use SONAR in several places even tho it would aid in his work.  We think that it's most unlikely but should you choose to intentionally disregard link cautions the link will, depending on circumstances, prompt you to exit Down. We haven't had a case of forcible ejection for over 30 years.

    While I was thinking of how to give this presentation on how we administrate Down, and why we do have some control restrictions,  I concluded the best way would be to give you a journal of a typical day for me. This is my story for June 23rd, three days ago local time.

    I began my day at 0700. Chandra, my husband, was already up and had made coffee for me. A quick kiss goodbye and he was off to work via telefactor. He's currently installing geothermal generators for the Eastern Pacific in the Marianas Trench. We're close enough that the machinery Moon, my husband, works with is not affected by lag and we're able to live at a nice location on Jenny Lake in the Tetons.

    While I was in the kitchen for my coffee that morning,  I noticed that a number of ants had exceeded the bounds of the desired attractor orbital and were crawling on my counter-top rather than scavinging at night on the floor. So I began my work day in my office by reprogramming the nanys I use to talk to the queen of the nearby ant mound. I instructed her via link to slightly adjust the amino acid ratios in her eggs. This caused the resulting workers to give a greater precedence to chem trails in the plane of the mound rather than chem trails in the up direction. By six that evening all of the ants had left the counter. Altogether this took about an hour and a half. I then uplinked the updated code to Sol-Synch. It will be then sent to a number of O'Neill habitats where it can be used as needed in their control systems.

    I then ran my daily monitor survey looking for any indicators of out of constraint parameters thruout the Jackson Hole area. Most everything was well within acceptable constraints but there was a minor problem with bighorn sheep over-grazing several meadows to the southeast of Mt. Moran. About two hours modeling told me that this was likely related to a lightening strike that caused a 20 acre burn-off on Paintbrush Divide two months ago. Since it wasn't a fault in the control structures for the sheep, I didn't do anything to change the programming of their nanys. We prefer to use minimal technological interferance  and completely organic controls whenever possible. This is why the burn had occurred in the first place. If you are at all familiar with chaotic systems, you will know that slight changes in initial conditions can cascade into unexpected consequences. This is not to say that chaotic systems are random, they're not. They still tend to stabilize around strange attractors. My task was to introduce the minimum control to re-stabilize the grazing of this particular herd of bighorn. I could have overlooked the over-grazing but we've been trying to reintroduce a spectacular extinct species of wild flower, the wood lily, to that area and I wanted to cut the possibility of seedlings or mature flowers being trampled by the sheep.

    As I mentioned, the preferred method of our management program is to use organic controls. It's an art form as much as a science. I decided that the best option I had to stop the over-grazing was to introduce another predator into the area. This would thin the herd slightly and could also be used as an incentive for the herd to re-adjust its grazing pattern to the southwest where there was more forage available. It's quite common to use apex predators in this manner as they are generally more intelligent individually and easier to communicate with.

    To this end I contacted an old friend. Felix is an eleven year old mountain lion whose range was centered 20 kilometers north of the area where the overgrazing had occurred. His ancestors were successfully re-introduced to the Grand Teton area around eighty years ago from frozen ARK stock. Felix had just finished siring two cubs with Felicity. Having an overlapping range with a nursing female would soon begin to cause problems anyway (as mountain lions tend to be solitary) so it was time to move him. I should mention at this point that, should you choose to visit our area, you can observe Felicity's cubs from an excellent maximal stealth vantage a quarter mile off the Whatever Ridge Trail. They are adorable and will remain with their mother in the area thruout the next year.

    I contacted Felix thru the link. I found him napping in a shaded niche between three granite boulders about 4 kilometers from Felicity's den. I began with a link to his audio nerve. I told him I wanted him to move and gave the direction south. Cats are a quite independent family of creatures but quite capable of understanding simple verbal instructions. Felix  was in a restless mood due partially to his instinct to move farther away from the den. Naturally, he balked at following instructions but I was quite ready for this. I used the nanys to stimulate hormone secretions in his brain increasing his desire to move while reinforcing the verbal connection to the direction south. I then triggered previously mapped brain areas that contained memories of our bonding sessions so that he associated these commands with a positive experience. For anyone interested in these bonding sessions feel free to join me this afternoon. I'm going to be working with a pair of black bear cubs in Paintbrush Canyon while their mother takes a siesta. I'll leave here for home via Epad at 15:00 and take a stealth lift into the canyon from there. The bonding session will finish around 17:30.

    Around 11:30 on the day I'm describing I broke for lunch with Moon and a short nap for myself. At 14:00 we both went back to work. I checked to see that Felix was, indeed, traveling to the southwest. I linked with my assistant Josh Spears who was camping near Holly lake while gathering data for wood rat modeling and asked him to keep an eye out for Felix later that night.

    Around 16:00  Moon and I took a tea break. At 16:30 we went for  short hike past Hidden Falls and up Cascade Canyon. I noticed  a large build up of downed aspen from beaver harvesting in the area and sent a link mail request to Josh that he look into that problem when he returned while I was here at Clark Down. Moon and I  returned home about 18:30 for a light meal. We spent about 2 and a half hours in and interactive fantasy VR that we both enjoy.  Around 22:00  I spent an hour analyzing the day's nany data and another half an hour uplinking all the results to Eden-Earth headquarters and to Sol-Synch. Then off to a good night's sleep. Which concludes the story of my day and my part of this seminar. I can't tell you how much I love my work and life. I assure you that such opportunities are available to each of you as are opportunities in larger, more human interactive projects such as my husbands.

    Thank you for your attention during this presentation.I hope it's given you something of an overview on how our home planet is currently managed and hope you've enjoyed it. I'm now going to turn you over to my apprentice, Will Carol, for a brief question and answer period to be followed by lunch.

    Again, on behalf of Eden Earth, welcome to paradise.

    Welcome home.