Konsk: The Great Takeover of the Place.

32. Feline Snitch.

Catherine Oldman walked slowly across the floor of the Alt-Tech Media Centre, glanced up at the Critical Events display, only briefly, now that it had only a simple, obvious message to convey, almost as if its purpose had been completed. The outlines of the individual countries on the Sub-Continental Peninsula had all turned black and were flood-filled in red. A window across the centre of the Peninsula proclaimed “Off-Line” in alternating red and yellow.

“Its a disaster!” Laurence had wailed, shaking his head at the enormity of the situation.

Catrin, mildly annoyed, had begun to contradict him.

“It's not the first time it's happened; plenty of reactionary governments have shut down systems to stop their own populations organising against them.”

What was unprecedented here though, she freely admitted, was both the multiplicity of failures of even supposedly redundant, fail-safe systems and the unlikelihood of reconnecting any time soon.

The satellite ablation event continued to spread, each additional collision increasing the debris field making further collisional cascading even more likely. Inevitable really, she thought, almost doomed from the start because no one had considered the need to keep things tidy up there, until it was far too late.

The situation had worsened considerably when an attempt to move a number of surviving, general communications satellites into higher orbits had brought about a further collision with an existing piece of space junk, thought to be a spanner "dropped" by service personnel on a space walk to repair an orbiting telescope, several decades previously. This had resulted in a disastrous cascade of material spreading into lower and higher orbits that took out the remaining GPS and network provision satellites devoted to the Peninsula.

Things hadn't gone well on the ground either, or at sea. Attempts to repair the undersea cable connections had been hampered by adverse weather conditions and various overt attacks. The only repair vessel to have arrived in the vicinity of the break in the SAT-9 connector had deployed a robotic tool to locate and retrieve the cable for repairs to be undertaken on board. They had then lost control of the AI robot, which, instead of locating the cable, had become distracted by a pod of whales, followed them over the edge of the submarine trench and disappeared.

The landlines were being destroyed faster than they could be repaired by a variety of intransigent groups, such as A-Prog and Nu Luddites as well as Earth's Fist, though the final link seemed to have been taken down by a squirrel chewing through the insulation on a critical cable. The resulting short circuit had fried some extremely expensive and difficult to replace equipment, as well as, rather sadly Catherine thought, the squirrel.

On top of that, radio transmissions were bring deliberately jammed by an unknown actor or actors on top of a more general disruption caused by the extreme weather that had also led to a massive increase in turbulence, meaning all air travel was suspended. Several airborne exploratory missions that had made it into the zone were abandoned due to onboard software and hardware failures, GPS inconsistencies and occasional missile strikes.

The remnant US had long since given up any attempt at policing the globe and no other governments were prepared or able to undertake any substantial investigation; with their own multiple challenges rolling in one on top of another and increasingly unsettled populations, they had more than enough to deal with already. The Peninsula was not renowned for resources valued by corporate powers so there was very little to gain from acting in such an unstable and now largely impenetrable theatre.

It was like watching the end of the world, she thought, or a premonition of it, the way they could all go down, the connections breaking up, smaller and smaller units left isolated to fend for themselves. With no longer any possibility of outside scrutiny, anything could be happening in there.

“Well,” Manson had drawled, “We'll see what our operative can pull out of the hat.”

And would that be a black hat or a white, she thought? There was no guarantee that this current operative would bend to Manson's commands, particularly if the INCO happened to be incarnating her long dead father. She shook herself; the thought was too weird, even if it was accurate. Then she had to suppress some anger at her own reaction. Keep it together, woman.

They'd watched a screen as the actor in question was taken to a transport area and given a self-driving vehicle. Catherine guessed that no one was prepared to travel with him on the journey to the departure site. There he would meet with a unit of Manson's personal militia, his Heavies. Air transport would then take them directly into the off-line zone.

She mustered her strength, her endurance, aware that she was repressing the emotional content the dry exchanges with Manson engendered, ignoring the suffering that was surely already taking place in the off-line zone. She imagined a brass fist, clenching on the pain as though to hide it, then hung the fist on a branch of her inner tree. The repression would demand some pretty intense personal work at some point, she admitted. But not right now. The calm became a mask.

The fact that Manson had given the INCO a vehicle suggested that her employer still considers his operative to be reliable, she thought. Though the rejection of sending him in with the old country's intervention posse and preference for an accompanying body of his own troops, implied that the trust was not one hundred percent. Something to be taken advantage of?

She avoided a bucket on the floor and a surrounding wet patch. The leak in the roof was obviously getting worse. It made her feel a bit better; not infallible, all this stuff, no matter how much money thrown at it.

For a moment she enjoyed the simplicity of watching drips plink into a bucket of water and the simple radiating rings that reflected back from the side to produce more complex interference patterns. The movement matched the repetitive rhythm from the dome's PA of some bland globe-pop band who'd been slated to play at the opening ceremony of the first Enhanced Human Games.

Well that wasn't going to happen any time soon, she thought, and the old country must be told of Manson's plans, immediately. Hands in pockets, she touch tapped a message on switches embedded in the pocket lining. Deciding bold was best she made for the curve of screens where Laurence and his team were studying displays of the Sub-Con Peninsula connectivity issues.

“Any joy?” She asked him casually.

“Not really,” he admitted. “We've been trying to trace the sources of the last communications coming out of the Peninsula. We were expecting them to be fudged, with bogus server addresses, the real ones buried, many layers below, so deep It might be impossible to get all the way down...”

He looked confused, which did not surprise her but there was something else. Muscle reading his strained features, she felt that he was sulking, as if he resented not being informed about something, something important.

“But?” Catherine prompted.

“Well, it looks like the fudge has been going on for some time.”

Now he looked directly at her, decidedly accusatory. He thinks I knew about this, she thought in surprise and he's blaming me for keeping it from him.

“For a considerable amount of time.” Laurence straightened and folded his arms. His lower lip protruded and actually trembled. “For several years, in fact, possibly a decade or more!”

“Impossible!” Catherine snorted. “You can't fake something like that for that long. Unless...”

She broke off and instinctively turned to look up to the top gallery. Manson was looking down at them, or her, his arms to either side, resting on the rail. He raised his right and gave her a mock salute.

Unless you are extremely wealthy, she thought and control the technology and the media outlets.

Laurence had followed her look and now he too stared up at Manson.

“Let me have a look,” she said, pushing between him and the console.

With one hand still in her pocket, she deftly called up a communication link with nothing to show for it on the display. Not difficult when she had designed much of the system and held administrator privileges. It only took a few seconds to send the message. Now it was up to Grandma.

With her other hand she brushed through several screens to bring up a graphic of the stadium's media centre. The potential connectivity was considerable, direct lines to all the Peninsula's major conurbations and the various international cable connections, satellite up-links and multiple transmitters covering all frequencies across the radio spectrum. Yet nothing was working.

This is the source of the fudge, she thought, this is where it was all controlled form. Probably still is, for all we know, like trying to look into a black hole.

Laurence was nudging her elbow.

“He wants us up top.”

Now what, she thought and looked back up to the mezzanine and her erstwhile employer leaning at the rail, staring down at her and the blank screens that should have been displaying the World Enhanced Games Stadium, slowly filling with tens of thousands of ticket holders.

She felt a sudden chill. So soon, she thought?

Konsk: Appendices. How all things can fall down.

A satellite ablation event or collisional cascading, describes a single collision between satellites or space junk which results in an increasing amount of debris and leads to further collisions and yet more debris and collisions, rather like a chain reaction. Its also known as the Kessler syndrome.

Failure of undersea cables carrying internet connectivity is not uncommon and occurs for a variety of reasons including submarine earthquakes, landslides, damage from fishing industry and sabotage. Examples of failures.

Solar storms are capable of disrupting mobile and satellite communications and are highly unpredictable.

During significant emergencies, mobile networks can become overloaded simply by the sheer number of calls being made. In this instance, governments are able to restrict usage to just the emergency services. This is a facility built into every SIM card and was used during the London 7/7 bombings. Of course, governments can employ this technique at any time to serve their own interests and limit their population’s ability to self-organise.

The failure of GPS (the Global Positioning System) can result from the Kessler syndrome, solar flare or as demonstrated more recently, a deliberate act of cyber sabotage by an aggressive state or group.

A key culprit in the disruption of power and communications networks is of course nature in its many forms, not just extreme weather but also far humbler creatures, most notably, the squirrel.

Trueman's Critical Events principle suggested that a multiplicity of minor events, relatively insignificant in themselves, combine to produce a cascade of disasters leading to catastrophe. The Kessler syndrome in itself provides a good model for this behaviour in that very small, individual collisions multiply to create wide spread failure that is impossible to recover from.

Thus the old country folk employ a variety of distributed systems and networks to limit the consequences of large scale infrastructure failures. They also practice non-dependance on such systems in the first place which makes the cantrefi inherently resilient.

Thanks for reading. All images here from the public domain. Two more episodes to follow in short order. As always, comments, suggestions, additions or whatever are all welcome. Hwyl! Chris.