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Option of premature death (being considered in UK now)
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 Option of premature death (being considered in UK now)It's not a government measure, but what we call a Private Member's Bill, sponsored by an MP without a government office. It is however understood to have the unofficial approval of our Prime Minister. It has today passed its first significant stage, where MPs have voted by a fairly slim majority to take it forward to a stage of detailed consideration and the possibility of amendment. It's only after that stage that the amended (or not) bill will face its final Yes/No decision. Some MPs have indicated that they are as yet unsure on the general principle but would like to have a debate on it, so they have approved moving the bill forward but might still reject the final version - thus the ultimate decision on it is still uncertain. Due to the complexities of our historic regions having devolved powers, apparently the bill if passed would not apply in Scotland, which will be taking a separate decision on the issue. |
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An important distinction The commandment is more accurately translated as "Thou shalt not murder," rather than "Thou shalt not kill." The original Hebrew word used is "ratzah," which specifically refers to unlawful killing or murder, rather than killing in general. The distinction is important because the Bible permits certain forms of killing, such as in warfare or capital punishment, which are not considered murder. Thus, the commandment prohibits murder, which is the unlawful or unjustified taking of a human life. |
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First, the common fear is that unwanted geriatrics will be 'encouraged' to take the option. This could be called 'incitement to suicide', and I have no doubt it would happen in some cases. But is that better or worse than the neglect that would likely happen in such cases? Anyone who would talk an inconvenient relative into 'voluntary' death might also be the type who would not gladly make his continued survival very comfortable. Second, how many people are aware of current practice in most jurisdictions? I have a friend who is a doctor in palliative care (i.e., care of the dying). It is not uncommon for painkillers to be administered to terminal patients up to the point needed to provide relief. If eventually that crosses the threshold it is investigated, but on the basis of whether the overdose was 'justifiable'; not whether or not it could have been foreseen to be lethal. I call this 'euthanasia by soft degrees'. Third, we should make sure we are not just looking at a 'Law' in the legalistic sense, but aware of the full context. Every law permits exceptions. You are permitted to kill someone if that person presents an immediate threat to the lives of others. You are permitted to commit property damage by kicking your neighbour's front door in, if the purpose is to rescue his kids from a burning house. God's laws are no different; they are generalities, meant to be followed unless some exceptional over-riding consideration enters the mix. Fourth, consider Samson. An over-muscled, over-sexed idiot. So much of what he did was not the finest example for young men to follow; but the one thing he is COMMENDED for is his suicide. (Judges 16:29-31) Fifth, it is a frequent news item that life support is 'turned off' in cases where recovery is impossible. Is this murder? In rare cases the unconscious patient continues breathing, at least for a while, eventually dying from the results of dehydration or some other 'avoidable' cause. Is this deliberate and culpable neglect? Sixth, there have been a few cases here in Australia where one spouse has brought about a 'gentle death' of his/her beloved, and then self-reported. A final act of love, and who is to say it was wicked or even misguided? Whether such new laws are good or bad is certainly worth debating. As much care as possible should go into minimising the scope for abuse while not being burdensome on those (patients as well as family) who are already being put through the wringer. But to say it must NEVER be permitted is an absolute in the face of Real Life that has more nuances than can be anticipated. |
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Belated follow-up I tend to think that in an ungodly society, such as we now have in most of the West, ungodly acts are going to happen. I'm not keen on getting obsessed with a symptom, such as assisted dying, when we ought to be trying to do something about bringing the society back to God, so that people make their difficult decisions from godly motives. |
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Colin |
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from one of my novels... Chapter Twenty Two 2 May, 2198 Dear Reader, My name is Rudi Fleischer, age sixteen Mars years, Technician second grade, specialist in External Activities. I have decided to keep a journal just in case the worst happens and we suffer some casualties in the weeks ahead. But if we escape that, which I think is a reasonable chance, at least this might be of some value in your understanding of us during these hard times. I might even make a Euro or two if I can sell it. I choose to write this longhand just in case we lose power or the computers become inoperable. Physical records from Ur have survived over millennia, but I doubt a computer file will last more than a decade or two. Specially if we have a power interruption. Three days ago we were swept by a meteor shower. Most of these were the usual grains of sand or smaller and burnt in the atmosphere, but some were quite large. Several the size of a golf ball have been found and one the size of a football. It is probable that some were even larger as they struck the upper atmosphere and then fragmented, because many of the strikes appear to have come in clusters. As a result of these strikes we have lost air pressure in most of our domes. The second habitation dome was punctured in several places and all four garden domes were severely riddled. The first machinery dome was also severely affected. The damage to the domes themselves, although severe, is not the problem. A strike from time to time was expected and they were designed to be able to be patched quickly and easily. And in any case they were only ever intended to be temporary, until we could build our underground quarters. The excavation for the first underground garden and habitation module is only a few years away from completion now, despite the disastrous lack of machinery. Only a tenth of what was promised was ever sent from Earth. But they have problems of their own, I know, and it's been more than a year since we last heard any message from them. It looks like we are on our own. But I’ve just come back from my third double-shift on a repair team. The Commander decreed that we should concentrate our immediate efforts on Garden Dome Two, the least damaged, and try to get that back to operational as soon as possible. One habitation dome is enough to house those from the damaged domes. It was an excellent piece of work that got everyone out of the punctured domes alive, considering it took less than an hour. It was a big risk to over-ride the safety interlocks so the connecting airlocks were continuously open. That allowed a much faster transfer of people and saved lives. But it did mean that the undamaged dome was also starting to suffer depressurisation as well. A couple of people suffered blackouts and headaches, but putting the key control personnel into their pressure suits ensured that there would be those who could close off the damaged dome before things got too bad. Once the evacuation seemed complete the airlocks were sealed and reserve oxygen was used to restore partial pressure to comfortable breathing levels. The nitrogen buffer was held back at first. We can do without if we have to. Anyway, the garden dome is now repaired and is being brought up to pressure and temperature. This is being done by sharing the atmosphere from the remaining two domes and the reduced total pressure has been partially compensated for by more partial pressure of oxygen and from our nitrogen reserves. Others now have the job of repairing buildings and equipment. But from what I saw of the crops below while I was patching the skin, we might have to dip into our food reserves for a while. My guess is that not much food will be salvaged from what looked like a few hectares of freeze-dried vegetables. 4 May, 2187 Nothing new to report yesterday. But today we just had some bad news. Every plant in our gardens is dead. So what? You might ask. We have plenty of food in reserve, and we can re-plant the gardens from stored seeds. The problem is that it will take a couple of months to get these new plants up to maturity. Until then they will not be able to recycle our carbon dioxide into oxygen as efficiently as the full farm could. So what? you might ask again. We have plenty of oxygen! Yes, but what do we do with the carbon dioxide? Two percent of carbon dioxide starts to degrade performance, especially mental competence. Four percent really takes the edge off. Six percent can reduce a man to a drunken daze, even death if held there for long enough. We External Activities workers were taught all that as part of our pressure-suit qualifications. Without the gardens to scrub this poison out of our air we could be in trouble. So the Commander has ordered that only essential repairs are to be carried out for the moment and 'essential' has been limited to what's needed to get the carbon dioxide under control. Everyone else has been told to exert no effort, preferably stay in bed. 6 May, 2198 The boredom continues. I was allocated a shift in the gardens today. Planting still hasn't commenced. When the dome was punctured not only the crops were frozen but also the soil. And not just icy-cold frozen, but Mars-cold frozen. I didn't realise this before, but soil isn't just dirt. It has all sorts of microbes and beasties in there that plants need to be healthy. These can survive temperatures of perhaps twenty below freezing like might happen on Earth, but Mars can go another fifty degrees colder again. So the first step is to rehabilitate the soil. The first shift started yesterday, basically ploughing the ground and breaking it up so it could warm all the way through to a decent depth and to mix in the various stored vital chemicals and bacteria and so on that were lost during the depressurisation and freeze. The second shift continued this overnight and then my shift this morning. Although most of the people in the base have been told to stay inactive, the garden dome is being worked around the clock by triple-crews to get things up to scratch as quickly as possible. 8 May, 2198 I have to admit it. I am impressed. It would be hard to come up with a bigger threat to the colony than what happened two weeks ago, and it now looks like we’ll cruise through without any serious problems. But to explain the situation as it looks now ... The Commander circulated a Fact Sheet today. Including what's in storage, we have enough oxygen to last us for two hundred days. The total volume of our three functioning domes, divided by the number of people (including refugees from the damaged domes) provides just over two million litres of air each. That's a lot of air! The problem is carbon dioxide. A typical human goes through about five hundred litres of pure oxygen a day at standard pressure and temperature. That translates to almost a thousand under our conditions of half-Earth-normal pressure. Every litre of oxygen consumed produces a litre of carbon dioxide. That's a thousand litres a day per person. So to get to one percent concentration in a volume of a million litres would take ten days. Two percent would be twenty days. Four percent, which is where it starts to be dangerous, would be forty days. But the expectation is that the vegetables planted today, which were specially-chosen for fast growth and carbon dioxide removal rather than for food production, will start pulling in respectable amounts within a couple of weeks and should be able to match our production of carbon dioxide within forty days. The projections are that concentrations will peak below three percent and then fall. And that’s not counting the option of flushing one of the domes entirely if we need to vent some carbon dioxide and then replace that volume from nitrogen and oxygen reserves. We have enough stored oxygen and nitrogen in reserve to do that in case of accidental deflation, and we are constantly producing more. Meanwhile patching crews are being organised for the second garden dome. Even though we don't have the volume of atmosphere to pressurise it at the moment, that's not a problem long-term. Right from the beginning the colony has been pulling nitrogen out of the Martian atmosphere as a buffer gas. Although the rate of production isn't high, nitrogen is never consumed so it accumulates and we already have some in reserve. The next step after patching the dome will be warming it, pressurised or not, so we can get to work thawing the soil and preparing the soil cultures for re-planting. This preparation work doesn't need full inflation pressure but it would be easier. 15 May, 2198 Where did that week go? Oh, yes, I spent much of it patching the second garden dome and then breaking up the soil. Carbon dioxide levels are rising as predicted, almost 2 percent this morning. The guys in the first garden dome are a bit worried. The vegetables planted over a week ago are a bit slow in coming through. No-one knows quite why. The biologists are working on it. All the more reason to get the second dome productive as soon as possible. The chemistry team have come up with an idea. They have proposed a chemical process to combine the iron oxide in the regolith with carbon dioxide in the domes. This process will apparently require a great deal of energy to drive it, but we have more power than we need now with only three domes. But the big benefit is that it not only produces more oxygen but also fixes carbon dioxide. Their throughput will be small but every little bit helps. It also enhances morale, so the Commander has given it the go-ahead. Another boost to the morale was another Incoming. Word was put out that it would land in less than two days’ time. This would be a two-kilometre job, adding about five billion tonnes of mostly greenhouse volatiles. Carlo is one of the team who remote-guides these things. I’ve watched him capture a comet and set up his thruster on it all by remote control, helped by onboard artificial intelligence. He needs that help. The lightspeed delay in communications is typically fifteen hours there and back. This will be the eleventh to be delivered, and the whole fleet is now in full swing. We expect one every three years on average but they do tend to bunch a little, like this new one coming so soon after that big one in the last days of April. In a few hundred years’ time we should have an atmosphere warm enough and with enough pressure that only an oxygen mask would be needed, and an ocean in the Northern Plains as the water-ice in the soil and at the South Pole melts. So my training will be obsolete by then. But I’ll be long dead anyway. Then will come the next step of replacing the carbon dioxide outside with oxygen and providing alternative greenhouse gases that won’t poison us without masks. We already have the plants to produce the oxygen but our descendants will have to prepare the soil for them. 17 May, 2198 The biologists have figured out what's wrong with the vegetables. The seeds have been sterilised by radiation. No-one knows how. The best theory I've heard is that when the colony was in transit from Earth these were among the stores that were packed closest to the fuel for the old fission reactor. Apparently no-one realised the consequences. But whatever the reason, about ninety percent of what's been planted isn't germinating. The gardeners are now going through the vegetable beds re-seeding by hand so they don't damage the plants that have come through. They expect that they might have to go back again a few times, depending on whether it was only a small batch of seeds that were sterilised or a significant proportion of the whole. So long as we can get through this first growing and harvesting cycle there should be no shortage of viable seeds next time through. The engineers have come up with another idea to control the carbon dioxide level. They’re proposing that the other machinery dome be repaired but left unheated and linked to the habitation dome. As air cycles through it and cools, all the water vapour will fall out of the atmosphere. Then that colder dryer air can be fed into another cooler to chill it enough to produce dry ice. The exhaust from that process will be blown back into the habitation dome to avoid short-circuiting the freezers, but this will be ducted through the compression side of the heat pumps doing the freezing to provide an efficient temperature differential. This will make the coolers more efficient as well as reducing the heating power requirements in the habitation dome, so less power will be lost. Then just throw the frozen carbon dioxide out the airlock. This will demand a lot of power from the system, but their calculations show that once carbon dioxide concentrations exceed three percent it would remove more carbon dioxide per gigawatt-hour than the iron carbonate idea from the chemists. Also, we have the heat pumps already on hand by salvaging the existing heaters from the damaged domes. The chemists are objecting that by throwing a hundred kilos of frozen carbon dioxide outside we are also throwing out more than seventy kilos of oxygen locked up in it. It also means that a whole dome can't be used to grow vegetables because of the cold, and that workers in the dome will need to work in thermal suits. But right now carbon dioxide is the problem, not a shortage of oxygen. So the Commander has told both groups to build their systems. Power will be allocated on the basis of computer modelling to see what technique offers the best results as circumstances change. So it looks like we will try to repair the second machinery dome but not heat it. We felt the impact from the Incoming this morning, and some who were outside at the time saw the thruster whiz past towards the sun, to whip out and collect his next comet. It must be a bit like being a dive-bomber in the old movies, except you have a whole planet to aim at instead of just a ship. 25 May, 2198 Carbon dioxide is almost three percent now. I'm not feeling it, probably because of my suit training. But some say they feel short of breath. I was right. The second machinery dome has been repaired and is now in operation as a carbon dioxide sink. The extra volume to pressurise it was made up by releasing yet more nitrogen and oxygen into the existing air to maintain 50 kPa overall and 20 kPa partial oxygen. Having to chill a thousand litres of air just to extract thirty litres of carbon dioxide is chewing up a lot of energy, even if the energy to reheat it comes free from the heat exchangers and even with the engineers rigging up a duct system to minimise by-pass and wasted energy. There's been some limited joy from the gardens but not much. Seven days should have been enough for the second plantings to germinate but there has been precious little result. I hear that a third round will begin tomorrow, again seeding by hand between successful sprouts so as not to disturb our current gains. I’ve heard that the biologists are working on some hormone treatment that should bring on flowering at a younger age, so we will have another generation of seeds as soon as possible. The word is that treating just a small section would give us more than enough seeds to do a complete re-plant of guaranteed viable seeds, without risking any unexpected side-effects to the current crop. It’s good to have so many geniuses working on the problem! 28 May, 2198 Third planting in the garden dome is now complete. Hopes are not high, but eventually we will come out ahead even if it means waiting for the first crop to mature and reproduce naturally. The Commander has ordered everyone back to rest except for essential work. Not much work is essential now. We have no need to make good another dome just yet, the specialist biotechnicians outnumber their work by a good factor, the chemists are converting regolith into carbonate and the engineers are pushing both generators at full nominal power and sucking as much as they can into their freezer in the machine dome. Everyone else is just sitting around. Except a few of my gang are taking turns at bringing in the regolith and taking out the carbonate and dry ice. The carbon dioxide level is still going up, even though the slowly sublimating pile of frozen carbon dioxide outside seems to be growing. But is it growing fast enough? 15 June, 2198 You might have guessed that not much has happened over the last two weeks or so. Carbon dioxide levels have kept rising. The amount of dry ice that the engineers have removed is staggering, but it has still made little difference to the situation. After fifty days the concentration is just over four percent. The ‘do-nothing’ projection was almost five percent by this time, and the original expectation based on the new plantings being ninety percent effective was for two percent by now. But the crops are only marginally effective. Who can tell how much of this three-quarters-percent difference is due to the engineers and chemists, how much is due to the plants and how much was just plain error in the initial estimates? We had two more cycles of plantings, all of them with meagre results. Completely different vegetables were tried these two times, those which were thought would be second-best and third-best choices after the failed first crop, just in case these seeds had not been treated so harshly. It’s still too early to assess the last plantings, but the previous efforts had produced a total of perhaps twenty-five percent capacity. The biologists tell us that the system was designed so that any two domes could support the colony comfortably. These high-carbon atmospheric conditions probably allowed carbon to be processed even more efficiently than in the design case, but the experts say we still have only one eighth of that coverage and probably one fifth of photosynthetic output. Perhaps that's the bonus fraction of a percent in the figures. It’s going to get a lot tighter before it starts to get better. 18 June, 2198 The garden dome ripped again. There was a storm blowing outside. The atmosphere on Mars is so thin that you could stand in the middle of a storm with your eyes closed and not notice the push on your body. But a dome is much bigger than a human body and the shape tends to generate areas of concentrated pressure. The domes and the fabric are designed for this, of course. But something went wrong. Some of the patches cracked and these cracks extended past the area of the original patch. Instead of just puncture holes the size of a football or smaller, we had tears that extended for metres. The wind got into these and tore them even wider. Naturally, the connecting airlocks closed automatically. Most of the people in the garden dome made it to the airlock to open it and survived long enough to close the door and re-pressurise. But thirty didn't make it. Rips big enough to depressurise a dome that quickly are not supposed to be possible. Konstantin suited up and retrieved a piece of the fabric. This showed a brittle fracture in the patch under the initial damage, and then the tear extended from that into the base fabric, breaking through the cross-fibres that are supposed to make this sort of failure impossible. Today we were told what had happened. The patch material wasn't treated to be UV resistant! The original manufacturers expected that any holes would be so small that the patch would only be required to plug the hole, while the structural loads would be taken by the base fabric as a ring tension. Well, they were wrong. UV had made the patch brittle, and when it cracked the ends of the crack concentrated all the tension into one point in the fabric. And because the original holes were so much bigger than expected, the load at the tip of the crack was that much greater. It tore through the interrupter fibres, so that the load on the next set of interrupter fibres was even greater. Thus we lost our garden dome again, including those specific plants which offered our best hope of a fix in the short term. The plants being treated with that hormone therapy were included in the losses. The second garden dome had been sown with plants to much the same degree of non-success as the first was enjoying, but sixteen days behind and with less promising varieties of plants. There's still hope but suddenly things have become a lot more difficult. 21 June, 2198 I'll say this for the Commander. He thinks quickly and doesn't give up. As soon as the storm dropped away and we found the cause of the problem we were ordered up onto the outside of the remaining domes to inspect the recent patches. Every penetration, crack or hole was to be completely painted with a UV-resistant goo, and then patched externally to protect the goo, and then that outer patch was also painted. Even if the outer patch became exposed to UV due to sand blasting over time and became brittle, it would still protect the inner layer of goo from wind abrasion, and this would protect the inner patch and ensure the dome remained sound. Not a permanent repair, but likely to last well beyond the time we move underground. But re-pressurising the garden dome was another matter. This took the last of our nitrogen reserves, and even using them we were still down to 35 kPa total pressure, only a third of Earth Standard. Almost all our oxygen was used to bring partial oxygen pressure up to 18 kPa, still short of Earth Standard, and carbon dioxide now three percent again (yes, it dipped slightly, mainly due to dilution when the garden dome emptied and had to be re-inflated). Almost everyone is finding it harder to perform for long periods of time, either mentally or physically. Before this, we thought we had all the nitrogen and oxygen we would ever need. Not so any more! The option of flushing a dome has now been lost. The Commander has ordered that the freezing of carbon dioxide be suspended for the moment and the power directed towards bonding iron oxide to carbon dioxide to form siderite, the chemists' favoured process. This pulls four carbon dioxide molecules out of the air and replaces them with one oxygen molecule, so the result is to replace some carbon dioxide with a smaller amount of oxygen. A good result in regard to the balance between oxygen and carbon dioxide. But it does push the total pressure even lower, even if not as much as freezing the carbon dioxide out as in the engineers' scheme. 2 July, 2198 The percentage concentration of carbon dioxide continues to rise. In fact, it's going up faster now, since the total pressure was dropped back to 35 kPa. The late-sown crops in the second garden dome are doing no better than those in the first dome had. The soil in the first dome has been reconditioned again and re-sown but nobody expects anything worthwhile for a few months. The make or break is likely to come long before then. There's been a proposal to use some electric power to split water for more oxygen and to vent the hydrogen to the outside. The chemists looked at this and did the calculations, but decided that locking away carbon dioxide with siderite production was a better use of the energy available at the moment. We can survive with a few percent less oxygen, but not with a few percent more carbon dioxide. The power to the nitrogen separators has been cut to direct more power to the siderite processing units, carbon dioxide being more critical than low total pressure. The present projections are grim. If the new plantings perform to the same level as the original effort, and if we continue breathing at the same rate as now, carbon dioxide content will peak at 10%. Obviously this is nonsense. If the concentration gets above six percent, a lot of us will not be breathing. But it does show the situation we are in. We can only hope that we have now got rid of all the sterile seeds, and everything from now on will work smoothly. 12 July, 2198 Today the Commander announced that the new plantings were not performing well enough. It was known that exposure to a six percent concentration of carbon dioxide would be fatal within a few hours, a day at the most. Even lower concentrations would be fatal if maintained for days. And that's for individuals in excellent cardio-aerobic condition. Current projections were that we could not keep concentrations below six percent unless the supported population was reduced to half our present numbers. Unless, of course, someone could come up with some way of removing carbon dioxide from our air. He said no more than that and urged everyone to 'think about it'. To say that it was the talk in the dining hall that night would be a lie. It was more like the elephant in the room. 14 July, 2198 Some of the guys with French ancestry had a bit of a celebration today. Red, white and blue roundels, talk of 'la Gloire', chants of ‘Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite’ and all that. But it did have a more sombre undertone. Robert Boulanger sought permission to make a Bastille Day address over the evening meal. In exaggerated Gallic fashion he told the story about the struggle of the Revolution to establish Freedom, Equality and Brotherhood, despite the brutal opposition from foreigners. In particular he went out of his way (obviously in jest) to blame 'those evil Germans and Russians' for all the loss of life involved. That brought a chuckle from the crowd, which was about one-third Russian ancestry and most of the rest German. I don't know if the Chinese got the allusion, even though they all understand German as the common language. 'Yes, we French have always fought for our brothers. And we remain willing to die for them,' he proclaimed. He held out a page with a short paragraph at the top and what seemed a dozen or more signatures under it. And here his words deserved to be recorded verbatim. He put the text on the net so all could read it and I copy it now for you. 'We, the undersigned Frenchmen and Frenchwomen, completely reject any plan to cull our brothers and sisters. One for all, and all for one! But if such a plan is to go ahead we offer ourselves as the first to be killed. Better that than to live at the expense of our brothers, sisters and children.' The hall exploded in uproar. There was not a voice that didn't cheer. It must have been at least five minutes before the chant started to call the Commander to the podium. He wore a gentle, enigmatic smile as the crowd hushed to hear him. He explained that his announcement had not been a suggestion of what should be done, only a statement of the facts that he felt we all had a right to know. Then he asked Robert for the undertaking and signed his own name to it. 'In two days' time we will have a plebiscite,' he announced. 'It’s only right that this be decided by the whole community. But I will be voting against it, and if it is passed by a majority I will be joining Robert and his fellows. I have to advise everyone before the vote that the selection of who is to live and who is to die will be based on optimising the chances of survival. People with essential skills will be the first to be selected for life. Which inevitably means that after me and these brave French, our children will be the next to die. Think about that carefully.' It was hard to celebrate after that. We all dispersed. I am writing these things now while still stark in my memory, before I go to bed. 17 July, 2198 The vote was taken yesterday and the result was declared this morning. Not one vote was recorded in favour of the cull. People spent today looking at each other with new eyes. They realised that every person they met was prepared to go down fighting, to either save the lives of their fellows or to die themselves in the attempt. It's an uplifting thing, to live among heroes. 20 July, 2198 I checked for messages when I woke this morning, as I usually do. Sometimes there's a change to work rosters or some other urgent matter. One item was a video from Robert Boulanger. It was of him, eight of his friends and two of their children singing the Marseillaise. Bloody antiquarians, I thought. All the old National Anthems had been abolished in 2108 when Ode to Joy was officially adopted at the final integration of the Union. Besides, the Bastille Day celebration was last week. I reported for work, arriving just as a party returned from an excursion. What could they have been doing outside, I asked Otto. But they had not been outside for long. Just long enough to walk from the Garden Dome airlock around to the Habitation airlock, to close the outer door so they could then open the inner doors. What was the problem with the airlock door, I asked. Otto just tightened his lips and tears started to flow. Stupid me, I hadn't noticed that his eyes were already red. 'I hope I never have to have to do that again,' Otto choked out and pushed past me. Marie arrived for work just then. She had been crying, too. What's going on? I asked her. She asked if I had seen Robert's message, and I said I had. 'Ah, but you don't know French,' she said. 'They changed the last line of the chorus. That worried me. So I called around. None of the people in the video message answered. So I called Francois. He told me that he would have joined them, but he's an engineer and Robert had told him that his was an essential skill.' Then she told me that after loading that message for broadcast, the singers had gone to the outer main airlock and spaced themselves. 'Even the kids?' I asked. But Francois had told her that only those with kids over twelve Mars years old were invited and only if the kids agreed. Marie was very shaken. She had two children herself, the older of them eight years old. She had not been approached. {to be continued} |
