Throw Away These Numbers

Throw Away These Numbers is a story written by Himawari. It ran in Issue 52 at http://s2b2.livejournal.com/, and will be mirrored Wednesday at http://www.shousetsubangbang.com/.

Summary

Cameron Darling: father, industrialist, widower, solar sail pilot. He puts on his best smile for the cameras, but some folks know better.

Connections

This story includes a character from $LoveStory and {Holographic-synthesis-waltz}.

Author's notes

I needed to write about these men, but the story just wouldn't come together, so ultimately I had to figure out what I could put in place so that you could see EMINA's amazing illustrations. I could have done an entire story about the re-entry jumping if I could have figured out how to make the whole thing about that: it's a technology we're working hard on right now, but it wasn't a good candidate for the subject of an entire story, because it wouldn't be something we're still working on _then_. I'm also fascinated by the idea of yacht racing with solar sails, and with space elevators, and with magnetic levitation trains, and with mass drivers, so you got a hodgepodge. I'm going to ramble about how I got there.

There's an Arthur C. Clarke story called "The Wind From the Sun" which is about a solar yacht race. I've never read the whole story but it was made into a comic here.

There's also a great P.J. O'Rourke piece on realio-trulio rich folks racing yachts, that I read bits of: it's called "At Sea With the Americas Cup" from the book Holidays in Hell. Ultimately, I got more excited about the space elevator, solar sail development, and re-entry jumping than about rich people racing. For the sail design part I got a lot of information from the UP3 website and I strongly recommend the documentary Between the Folds about the mathematics and materials science of origami. The sail fold design is based on something they're doing with solar panels at Brigham Young University. (See this video and accompanying story.

The re-entry jump was originally earlier in the story. It grabbed me and wouldn't let me go work on the rest of the story. Sometimes the answer isn't to kill your darlings, exactly, but to split them out into stories of their own. It's important to notice and make use of those moments of passion, even though they do tend to throw a story way off course. (I'm paraphrasing Brian K. Vaughn in Saga, here. Or the words of the author in Saga, I forget, exactly.) I didn't manage to remove this darling because I was running out of time to finish something, so I reorganized the plot and put it nice and late to be climactic and stuff. Here's why it was important to me.

I was in my friend Ben's living room. I'd gone for a run while he was making his awesome banana muffins, and he'd turned on NPR while I was out. As I walked in they were covering on the shuttle Columbia's landing and quietly reporting what little they knew, that something had gone wrong and the shuttle had fallen out of contact. I can remember sitting on his futon, my intention to shower forgotten, listening to that broadcast. It was February 1, 2003. I can remember reading, about a year or so later, that Dr. Jonathan Clark, the husband of Dr. Laurel Clark who had died in that event, was not only on the panel investigating what happened (he's a doctor, sure but he's discussing the remains of his wife and her coworkers and their ship, bloody hell!), but was hard at work on technology that could enable future space travelers to re-enter atmosphere safely without a ship. That guy is my fucking hero, I'll tell you what.

Much later, I was fascinated by the RedBull Stratos mission, because I knew that the idea of "jumping from the edge of space" was a step toward safe human re-entry equipment. Cameron and Olin borrowed a lot of their vibe from Felix Baumgartner and Joseph Kittinger, who were the jumper and the CAPCOM for that project. They were very honest about how flat-out fucking scary it is to do a jump like that, and how Baumgartner struggled with it, and how Kittinger was the only man whose voice he wanted in his ears. Meanwhile, I was researching the re-entry system they used, and I thought, hey, I wonder what Jonathan Clark is doing these days, does he work for the company that makes these suits, or something? He was the medical director of RedBull Stratos. Again, I tell you that Jonathan Clark is my fucking hero. Some of the RedBull Stratos altitude and speed records have already been broken, but the full video of the Baumgartner jump remains one of the most intense things I've ever seen.

Let's end on a cheerier note. If you've read The 100th Thing about Caroline by Lois Lowry, which was one of my favorite books as a child, you'll recognize the bit about Cameron's socks. And if you haven't read it, oh man, find someone you love and share it with them.