Blue Peril Part 5: Damage Control

 Before you say anything, I've never seen the show Scandal. But I do find the idea of somebody who specializes in fixing or covering up major screw-ups fascinating. Which is where Dr. Moore comes in to the Blue Peril series. We last left off with her arriving to the meeting upon the Helios station, but we never really got to see her character in action. Because of her interesting qualifications, Engineer with a masters in Mass Communication and a PhD in Forensics, I wanted to know more about about this character so I pretty much gave her the spotlight this story. So I give you Blue Peril Part 5: Damage Control.

Dr. Moore liked to carry herself tall for somebody so short. She couldn’t be taller than five foot three, but she stood at the head of the table as if she towered above everyone. Maybe it was the lighter gravity, Richard thought, the gravity on this ring is a little less than the surface of Mars. Or maybe because nobody in the room could accept the fact that the moment had arrived, the moment of admitting defeat. He liked the gravity answer better, it made sense.

“Lets get to the hard part,” she said addressing the room, “how fucked are we?”

Nobody answered.

“What are you, a bunch of pre-school children? I knew before I even got here the results weren’t good, so how fucked are we?”

“Fucked,” Richard said. Dr. Moore turned her who body to face him.

“Just how fucked, Dr. Isaacs?” She looked directly at him, her face was neutral but he swore he could feel her piercing his soul.

“As in two-hundred years of research and a Mercury Brain short kind of fucked,” he responded, his voice quivered as he spoke. “The optimism of the early days of this project died when the universe began, it is impossible to break the light barrier, no wormholes no teleportation no nothing. I hate to say this but Einstein was wrong, space isn’t just some fabric you can sow together on a lazy Sunday afternoon, it’s an immoveable object.

“It’s over, humanity is dead and we’re going to watch it happen as we slowly rot away from the inside.” He gave the IPS rep a stare as cold as the vacuum outside the portholes, he wanted her to absorb the calamity with her own eyes through his. He wanted no part in this anymore.

Dr. Moore turned away, “Now that wasn’t so difficult was it? Just like air through an airlock, once you let it all out it’s over quickly.”

“And then you die,” Ian said. He sat across the table, furthest from the door and closest to the port light, his face was half blue in the reflected light from their neighborhood gas giant.

“Precisely,” Dr. Moore said like a teacher does when a student gets a question correct, “and then you die. We at the Crisis Division already had a hunch the results wouldn’t be good, so I’m here for Damage Control.” She emphasized her last point with a snap of her fingers.

“Because lets face it,” the representative continued she spoke with her hands as much her mouth, “facts are facts, all of you know this more than anybody else, you have proof Newton would be proud of. But the average human can’t comprehend complex differentials or even basic calculus, they like simplicity and if there’s bad news they need a scapegoat. The last thing we need is our top minds to be persecuted like Jesus Christ. Thus Damage Control.”

“Why didn’t IPS you say anything about this before you arrived?” Ian asked, his arms were spread out across the table either from surprise or the urge to leap over and strangle the ISP rep. Neither would surprise Richard.

“There is no better way to approach a situation for the first time than in its unaltered purist state, and I wanted to see just how serious this situation was from your raw expressions,” once again she brought her attention to the full room. “I honestly thought my title and qualifications would have relaxed you a little. It’s that bad, huh?” Her arms folded across her chest and mouth like she had already begun thinking, she was a showman but an ammature Richard noted.

“Yeah, that bad….” Richard said his head sulked over the table as his fingers played catch with one another with the Helio’s logo. When his fingers caught it he would briefly shake it as to knock the virtual planets out of the preprogrammed orbit. “Humanity is fucked, we have everything on file for you to review but I could easily replace the entire report with a note saying ‘Fuck sentience and ambition, every intelligent species is fucked beyond their Oort cloud, signed The Universe.’”

“Jesus,” Dr. Moore said, “I honestly didn’t expect the great Dr. Isaacs to be such a downer. Is she always like this?”

“Only when it’s the dawn of armageddon,” America spoke up. Out of everybody in the room she looked the most calm. Calm in the sense that she held no expression to read on her face, just a constant stare into oblivion no matter where she looked, like a soldier who's seen one too many of his buddies stepping onto a trip mine. The last time she gazed into the infinity’s eyes happened shortly after her wife left her for a gay man, who she proudly got a STEM treatment to be with. Richard saw her staring contest with emptiness as melodramatic, but who was he to speak?

“As I suspected; it became apparent after the IPS began receiving a bunch of fluff reports this close to Escape Rope’s deadline.” Dr. Moore began pacing around the room. She would bobbed up and down almost like she was skipping in the jaws of cthulhu, her motor cortex’s aversion to a low g environment, a sign she didn’t travel often. “What I didn’t expect was a bunch of melodramatic scientist, the greatest scientists to ever live for that matter.Yet,” she walked over to a port-hole and looked out, “I guess even gods cower when they gaze upon oblivion.”

And she’s calling use melodramatic, Richard thought stopped playing with the H looking around the room to see if anybody else had noticed. Al looked at him, then Moore, then back to him and rolled his eyes. He could tell by the silence it was their cue to speak.

“So what exactly is Damage Control?” Richard and Al asked in unison.

“Many years ago my father, Henry Jacob Moore, won the seat as the Mayor of Armstrong City,” she spoke to the port hole, “he was a brilliant politician, everybody loved his carefree attitude yet serious demeanor when the time called for it. Because of him Armstrong became the modern Singapore, he opened the ports to anyone and everybody with a ship, no more ten year wait list just to just to get a confirmation that your business is under consideration. Nope, if you had a ship you got a job and you were set. The economy boomed and the historic city made its mark once again upon human history since Neil Armstrong first took step on its soil.”

She began pacing around the room again, but the bouncing had subsided, she began walking normally. “I was a recent graduate from Luna working back on Earth for ZeroK. My job duties were less than exciting, mostly consisting of basic calcs for orbital maneuvers and landings, or asteroid dances and hugs as they call them. Four years of advanced antimatter propulsion, the dissection of general relativity down to its very core, and statistical fluid dynamics went to waste as I spent my first two years doing rudimentary calculations. I wanted more. I wanted something challenging, I wanted to work here on the Helios as a member of the greatest thinkers. But everything felt routine, until my father’s secrets came out.

“He was a fraud, a corrupt politician who opened the ports as a catalyst to expand Orsis’ control outside of the orbitals. They said he was taking bribes of not just money but of illicit substances, the most notorious being hyperhead, and women. He denied everything, showing proof he was a family man with values with pathetic messages, videos and senseputs of times before he was a politician. Anytime he ventured into the public he never went unhumiliated. And you know what? They were right.”

Ian and America gasped.

“That’s where I came in,” she looked at Richard, he discarded her eyes and returned to tossing the H around. She continued on. “After his former campaign manager screwed up, and trust hanging by a thread with the whistleblower anonymous and still at large. He only wanted family in on the case. So that’s where I got called in, personally by him for his first message to me in three years. I gladly took the offer, with some resistance at first. But once I learned the truth, that he was a liar and immoral is when I finally felt alive. My head was rushed with ideas faster than a Tier 7 antimatter craft slingshotting around the sun.

“So we began our little clean up. Starting with making falsified claims that he wasn’t being bribed by the Osiris but threatened and the money was there for compensation. We leaked a senseput file onto the metasphere of me being raped by an Osiris governor and his men through MY point of view. You may recall the famous video clip of my father broken into tears over the experience of his own daughter being raped and beaten because his refusal to cooperate initially with the Osiris. All completely fabricated. It wasn’t easy by a long shot, making it convincing on both sides, paying off actors and learning to act myself, but it got the job done and within a few months he was back to normal. Armstrong still has open ports but increased security winning him over even to this day. All thanks to me. I am Damage Control. Any more questions?” She said finishing just short of the port hole where her speech began.

Richard raised his hand halfway off the table, his attention still focused on the icon.

“Yes Dr. Isaacs.”

“Yeah, just how many times did you practice that speech?”

“Ummm,” Dr. Moore snapped her head towards the ceiling then back down to Richard, she must of caught his game, “never. And it wasn’t a speech, more of a reason.”

“Right…” Richard leaned back in his chair, “so when do we begin Dr. Damage Control?”