Tether Stories

Tether Stories - 2021-09-11

You don't see all the trouble, the problems, the desperation from up here.

Clouds mostly, when you take a moment to stop working on a feed pipe, or tether plating or patching the most recent micrometeorite strike, which, let's be honest, wasn't a meteorite. It was some screw left over from a century of neglect of debris. Wispy clouds, long streamers of white from the tropics to the higher latitudes like smoke flowing to a leak.

Storms too, huge spirals of anger plodding slowly across the oceans building up heads of steam to smash into the continents, bringing familiar problems to the desperate seventeen billion below who can't even aspire to your job, stuck in a sweaty, oily, rubber suit hanging on to a tree trunk that disappears into the sky, taking the wealthy to a haven away from the used up husk of the Earth.

It's almost peaceful. Until your radio crackles and you're heading down tether to scrape some unlucky soul's final remains off the rail before the next car comes up-well. Too many fall. Or jump. No one tries to find out which is which anymore.

"Got another smear," the foreman says, sending you down-well.

There should be robots to clean up the mess. There should be robots to fix the tether. They told us when we were young that there'd be robots. There aren't though. Not anymore. Cheaper to hire from the desperate and replace us when we end up a smear on the tether, or a briquette from reentry. You'd think robots would be cheaper. But they aren't.

Tether Stories - 2021-09-14

There's precious little to stop subatomic particles at the two-three station on The Tether. Twenty-Four thousand kilometers above Columbia the free electrons treat your suit like a whisper of protection. We work outside eight hours a day. I gave up on the idea of children when I was lucky enough to win the lottery. No place on The Tether to raise kids anyway. Doesn't stop people from trying.

"Says he froze his swimmers before he came up, no worries about genetic degradation." Mitchell says to me over the comms. His voice is a reedy annoyance inside The Tether, in an atmosphere, it's unbearable on the suit headset.

"Uh huh."

"You ever think about it?"

You wouldn't think hauling a high voltage line in low gravity on the skin of a lift to the stars would call for small talk. Mitchells nervous.

"Daryl's swimmers? No. Not really."

"Kids." He's fifty meters down-well of me, just at the lip of two-three, where it turns to merge back into The Tether proper. I let out a bit more slack, and he secures it to the station with a rivet gun. I can see the little puffs of nitrogen glimmer in the dark as he secures the line.

"Nah. No kids got me my lottery shot. Hormone replacement sucks though."

"I suppose it's different for you."

Yeah. It is.

"'Nother twenty meters?" I ask.

"'bout."

It happens so quickly. He stoops to pop a rivet. Instead of the puff of gas to stabilize him the gun explodes. I don't hear it. It's just a bloom of nitrogen and metal. It's almost beautiful, the lights of Columbia shining through it, some yellow-green flower of death. His radio doesn't even work. His suit alarm goes off, everyone on this side of the station can hear it. Decompression alarm.

Who in their right mind would want to bring a child into this?

Tether Stories - 2020-09-18

The Columbia Tether is the oldest, more than a hundred years older than the Malasian. If it were a spacecraft, it would be ancient, probably retired. It was built with first generation technology, before they learned to bundle the nano-tubes. I read that somewhere. They don't actually tell you about how The Tether is made when you sign on to work on it. It's just the magic bean-stalk to space. We replace parts, patch holes, clean up after the rich people heading up the rail to someplace better than Earth.