Red Daddy: Ceres Station Pandemic

(Story dates from 8/2019)

Disclaimers:

Everyone in this story is over age 18 because that's mostly who my friend-base is when these events happen.

All the names are completely invented because life is embarrassing enough.

That said, my real name is Richard S. "Red" Dunbar, Jr.

The history of life on the Ceres Asteroid Colony is well known so you'll have to just accept my personal history as the truth even if no one else in-Colony is gonna say so.

== Chapter: Introduction ==

Having red hair is odd. At least I grew up with it being so. It's gotten to be more common, and it's not a coincidence.

To get to why, I need to step back in time a little.

My parents migrated to Ceres when I was 8, coming into the just-formed mining operation as low-g metallurgical and smelter operations engineers. Since they were married and already had two kids (my younger sister and I), they were sought after as a 'stable family unit'.

(Single people had to watch their lifetime cosmic-ray radiation exposure much more carefully; lots of people self-donated sperm and eggs before they left Earth for just that worry. Keeping a good colony-wide gender ratio was important, too, so premade families with two adult engineers and kids had subsidized transport costs.)

The colony was growing fast, but it was always growing fast. Living quarters were tight, but low-g areas held too many labs, automated warehouses, robotic factory floors, and mostly-automated greenhouses to count. The colony's mining and manufacturing meant nearly-free steel already formed into girders, plates, sheets, anything needed. At first, before we got there, they made living quarters from girders and boxes, but very soon assembly bots pulled these together onto spindles and spun them for gravity.

Of course, all this had to be set up somewhat below the surface in an immense set of caves for cosmic-ray protection. and clustered the surface operations at Ceres' north pole. If you put a massive rotating structure on the equator of a rotating body, you'd grind the bearings up quickly. Being at a pole let those stresses dissipate.

As the first huge structures were erected and spun up there were giant parties, usually because space was tight and more living area was very welcome. Despite sometimes having to hot-bunk (working opposite shifts and sleeping in the same bed), people still kept emigrating based on great pay and a chance to work on some of the most advanced low-g manufacturing there was.

Despite the robotics, there were things that only people could figure out and do.

Some families had it tough, having to hot-bunk, but my parents made enough as engineers to have pretty good quarters. Right after we arrived, we moved into the first big hab, a 500-meter diameter, 1000 meter long cylinder, spinning to give 1.1G at the outer layer.

By the time I started college, there were 17 habs (habitation cylinders), each big enough for 20,000 people, though I don't know for sure what our real population was.

Some additional living quarters were set up in the low-g factory spaces, though not many people stayed there for long. They were for people who had to spend some time out there babysitting a project, traveling to/from a mining site, repairing ships and equipment, or just being on the surface.

I heard numbers like Ceres having about 235,000 people at one point, but I'm not sure that was official or anything.

Each hab was set into its own cavern so an emergency in one wouldn't affect any others. We moved into a brand-new one, and I remember having to climb ladders all the time before they had finished all the interior spaces.

For those that aren't clued-in on spacer culture, having a living unit with some kind of grav to it was a Very Cool Thing. That is, it removed your time limits for being there.

Without grav, both bone loss and muscle loss would accumulate, other bodily systems (especially lymphatic ones) would develop faults, and you'd eventually lose the ability to ever return to any planetary (or reasonable moon-sized) gravity field. To be fair, it would take years to get that far, and nobody did that, but it was a constraint and everyone planned their work time around where they could get grav and to right-size their zog time ('zog' being spacer lingo for zero g operations).

Zog isn't bad, it just has to be less than a certain number of hours a day or your re-joining a normal society got to be super-stressful with weightlifting and constant medical monitoring.

Ceres was a mining and refining operation both since it had volatiles in abundance. Really great deposits of carbon, water-ice, magnesium, sulfur, silicon, iron, nickel, platinum group metals, and lithium deposits were all around, just sitting there waiting to be purified and shipped, or manufactured into useful things.

Not that the manufacturing on Ceres was all that fancy, to be sure, but most activity was making ingots of purified metals. As I got older and the population grew, we got PV panel manufacturing systems, too. Increasingly, instead of just shipping purified amorphous or polycrystalline ingots, we could print our own.

Getting fancier equipment made us, as a colony, More Money! The big deal was getting to roll and assemble high-tech alloy rocket engine components, computer chips, toasters, and every other type of consumer good, but manufacturing sometimes required gravity, especially for the workers on an assembly line.

In junior high, my teacher told me we had achieved being self-sufficient.

I repeated this factoid to my mother and she burst out laughing, and then set me straight. We could make our own food, water, living quarters, and all manner of other essential things, she said, but not some other really important things, like complex pharmaceuticals, some kinds of industrial chemicals, chocolate, certain kinds of alcohol, and entertainment.

That conversation grew into a game of naming things that Ceres couldn't make, and figuring out how we could cobble it together. I wasn't old enough to know what Bourbon whiskey was yet (something yucky my dad drank), so I said we could make some from grinding up Carstil (my sister's brown toy). That phrase became a family saying, if you wanted something but couldn't have it, well, we'll just grind up Carstil.

Later, my dad explained that we did have bourbon distilleries, but the taste wasn't right; it lacked oak barrels. We had oak trees, but the wood was too precious to make barrels from, I think.

I never got much into bourbon. I liked rum better.

When I was 17 and started college (I matured early), I moved out of our family's quarters and moved into a student cub in a student room, nearer to my university classes.

Cubs were rectangular tubes that were what most people had for sleeping areas. I'd had one at my parent's place, but it was a lot smaller and was just a bed with a shelf. The college-student one was both wider and longer, with a mostly-soundproof door. Each room had 4 cubs, lockers for each for clothes, an outer common room with seating, a kitchen and small bar-table, and a two-space bathroom.

The student cub was about 1.5 meters high and wide, and 4 meters deep. The 'double' bed had shelves around it, a small drawer unit and desk area for studying, HVAC vents, and even their own Spot. A Spot, technically, is an SBT, "sink/bidet/toilet", but everyone pronounced it spot.

It's super-nice to not have to get out of your cub in the middle of the night, swing down if you're on the upper-level (thank goodness I wasn't), and pad across cold floors to the actual bathroom, which had no internal walls and thus no privacy.

With the low ceiling height, you had to be careful kneel-walking or rolling to get around, but it worked out. Let's just say, both space and privacy were limited and coveted.

This isn't to say that we were prudish in covering our every square inch of skin. There was little diversity of clothing -- mostly people had to wear a uniform pant, t-shirt, and jacket, for reasons having to do with safety and something about the colony technically being originally quasi-military.

There were fancy clothes, but they were expensive and the culture was very much conformist. We operated under the laws of New Zealand, so free speech and visual expression were allowed, but infrequently used. Sticking out was a bad thing, and social pressure was enormous to conform, not show excessive emotions, and get along cordially with neighbors. Anyone making a fuss created a crowd scene -- we didn't have lots of space to be loud, literally or metaphorically.

The governmental setup was an odd mix. We technically were under military law, but in practice we had a hierarchy of parliaments and local leadership. The military part was from way back when the colony was founded as a military outpost, research center, and strategic metals refining operation, run jointly by the Peru-Argentina-NewZealand Intergovernmental Expeditionary Science Squadron (Yes, it spelled 'panzies', but that acronym stood for a type of flower in Spanish and wasn't derisive like in English).

There were military facilities on Ceres and they were a part of the colony, but I'll get to that later.

I attended one of the 7 colleges, usually watching video explanations of new material, doing practical exercises in class time, and getting access to instructors when I didn't understand something.

In the Ceres culture, we were very formal with each other; I think this was an outgrowth of having so little space to grow and privacy about our persons. The colony was constantly expanding, and like so many others I took part in welcoming / orientation sessions for newbs who showed up and didn't know the layout, terms, or crucial facts. That formality, I always emphasized because lots of them didn't know it, was REALLY important, for culture, and for safety, so everyone knew the same safety stuff, the same way.

The safety material had been taught already, everyone got that quickly or they got shipped out again fast. They had to be taught the Ceres-specific stuff, though, like social and leadership hierarchies, meaning getting out of the way fast for blue shirt security or yellow shirts medics.

Newbs always had trouble figuring out how to take turns, looking for nonverbal body language about who was supposed to go next. Hesitating and not going when it was your turn messed everyone up and meant people would come up to you all day and ask why you didn't take your turn correctly. The pressure was, as I said, sometimes oppressive.

Gender separation was normal for most unmarried living quarters, but you could do what you wanted once you got to be over 18, technically. Not many of my guy friends lived with their girlfriends, though, since changing rooms was complicated and a hassle once you got used to your roommates' oddities.

Long term bf/gf couples (or any couple, really) could put in for a private room, but those were super expensive and changing rooms too often would get you put lower on the list. Incentives were strongly towards status-quo and encouraging marriages. Any child born was one less person that had to be shipped out from Earth.

Classes were about equal numbers of men and women, guys and girls, however you want to say it. There was one college on Ceres that had segregated-gender classes, but none of my friends knew why that place existed.

In the classroom and out, formality was a helpful thing. We didn't show too much emotion since yelling would carry a long distance down hallways and wake up babies, and then everyone had to listen to the baby or babies cry forever.

Another oddity for newbs to adjust to was walking in formation. It has become second nature. We did it in school and it helped large groups move more compactly, which let us get through crowds without 'friction'.

The formation thing was also a safety thing, since it kept people doing known-things and away from panic mode. A lot of the safety factors in movement were getting a group of people from danger to safety, and walking or running in formation would save your life if your area was depressurizing.

Low Pressure - Lopress - was a frequent drill. It also happened in real life.

Getting out of a rotating section (when going to another hab, for instance) required coordination of a group, acting in unison to jump from the rotating bit to less-rotating to low-grav. This was Totally Everyday at the end of shift-changes, getting on and off the rotating sections, and it was a dance that had to be coordinated or the newbs would plow into people and knock down or injure old people and kids.

From our earliest ages, we learned to respect the will of the people around us, follow the law, and attempt to alleviate discord by ensuring emotion was removed from situations wherever possible.

We were far from humorless, though. We did play jokes on each other, but they were kind-hearted and very limited in scope. Learning what scale of joke you could pull on a specific person was part of the way we discovered how social conventions worked.

I wasn't all that great at dismissing my emotional context at a moment's notice, not like the kids that were born on Ceres. I was an old-timer, technically, but I didn't arrive until I was in early elementary school, so I didn't quite get all the socializations that those born on Ceres did.

This brings us to the Important Events that changed forever the life of the colony, and that's the reason I'm writing this.

All social interaction is context, I've been told, and section has been context for... some pretty massive changes, as I'm sure you'll see. Mostly, you probably already know this stuff, but this is my first-hand account. Since I was born with a really good memory, and my parents got me Eidetic-Memory medications when I was young, I'm somewhat more capable than others to relate it all.

I MUST WARN you, though: I've been encouraged to be as honest as possible in this description, candid to an extreme that is quite unusual by typical writing standards.

I asked, and was told, I had to relate every feeling, emotion, sensation, and even suspicions of what others were feeling along the way. They said someone would edit out my prurient content later so schoolkids might get a chance to read it, but in the meantime, it was Highly Important that I be accurate and complete.

Well, since this is for future generations to analyze, I will be. The 'be complete' directive is one I'll take to whatever extreme I can, no matter if it results in utterly prurient sex-filled descriptions.

I should mention that like most Cerians, I've always kept a diary. Even though I remember well, sometimes my memory is shaded by subsequent events and it's helpful to keep track at the time. I will supplement this description with diary entries wherever I can. I might rewrite sections to add detail or make it flow well, but it's basically the same info.

Here goes:

== Chapter: The Start of Something Wrong ==

Jan 3rd, Sunday, night. Diary. Saw the Transport Elfin-10 crash today. It's the first time I've ever seen something, live, where I knew someone was dying as I watched. It's pretty freaky, knowing that. I was in organic chem class, when someone got a message and threw the vid feed on to the wall. The transport was coming in too hot. They'd had some kind of malfunction. We all figured they'd find a way to fix it, but of all surprises, no one could help them in time, so they crashed. The wreckage wasn't that far from the colony, maybe 20 klicks. Still, if it had come down on top of us, it might have hit a surface structure we needed, so I guessed it was a good thing that they hit where they did.

Jan 19th. Had a very odd thing happen today. When I went to racquetball, one of the guys playing had very odd stripes down his back, dark, not red. It was odd. He had gotten some ribbing about it but laughed it off.

Jan 23rd. General Alarm!

I'd only ever heard the general alarm a couple of times, and only during alarm tests. It's pretty scary. Mom and Dad taught me right, though. I was in history class. We all knew what to do and we did it.

CONTEXT: Kids are taught very closely what to do, where to go, at every age. We drilled frequently on how to react to various alarms. The General Alarm ("GA") meant doing a specific list of things. That list was the same as the specific alarms like room-air-bad or air leak in the water drains.

It was still scary to hear the alarm sound, though. We were tested on the checklist in school, too, and everyone had to know it 100% or we'd get bad marks as a group. The safety protocols mostly encompassed locking down everything, closing hatches, sealing the air, water supply and drains, switching room power to GA mode, render first aid, and a whole lot of specialized stuff if we were in tricky areas like engineering spaces.

The buzzer sounded for 'hold stations' and then the PA said, "Stand By for Ceres Provost".

The Ceres Provost guy was kind of a dick. I never liked him much, he always seemed kind of smarmy, like he knew he was getting away with something but was doing it anyway. And, like a ship captain, he used his power. I was coming down a ladder once into a ModuleCommons and he yelled to me to sweep the floor and wipe off the windows up there. Everybody knows that you can't see through those windows unless you're coming down the ladder, and since it makes you dizzy to look out of them, we don't.

But, there were some grownups in the commons, and they heard him, and I heard him, so I had to do what he said. It was a giant hassle, and I got a little motion sick doing it. I had to focus on my hand and squint so I didn't look outside too much.

Of course he didn't stick around to verify I'd done the job, he just gave the order and left, and I happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. One of the adults, when I finished, told me to take a vid of the clean windows and send it to the Provost's office or he'd get pissed later and pretty soon everyone would have to be cleaning windows. I learned some important things that day. First, you can't avoid Provost orders, ever; second, everyone else knew he was a dick, too.

The PA shifted to the Provost's voice, kind of gravelly, but also kind of nervous-sounding.

He said, "Biological containment protocols are now in effect. An unknown pathogen, uh, disease, has spread to various people, and we're trying to track down who has come in contact. Each SAG ['survival area group', a fancy name for whoever you're in the room with at the time the alarm goes off] will perform your normal SAG report -- location, number of persons in the group, visible damage. Visible damage in this case means listing the name of each person in your group and whether they show symptoms, yes/no."

We looked at each other, wondering. We didn't know about any worries yet, this was out of the black (a surprise).

"Symptoms seem to be, at the moment, wide red or brown lines, usually on the torso, and usually vertical. Every person shall disrobe completely and submit to inspection by all other SAG members. Persons are not to touch each other if possible. Use of force to ensure compliance with this order is authorized but spilling bodily fluids is discouraged for obvious reasons. Once we have a handle on the scale here, probably in several hours, we will revise. Note that taking a medical history of the red markings would also be helpful. That is all."

So, we were in lockdown, in class, nowhere to go, not much food to eat, and the socially unpleasant task of inspecting each other loomed in my mind.

Egads.

We were going to have to get naked in front of each other!

This was upsetting, to say the least. Everyone was looking at each other. We hadn't even done the 'suss-up', figuring out who was boss. Whoever got it, was going to have a big set of instructions to give.