"Roger. Request acknowledged." The Security Officer said into his headphones and then turned to report to the Captain. "Sir, Environmental Systems is back online. Block Five has been deposed. There are a number of casualties from the assault, however. The inmates are requesting Dr. Graham come and take a look at the wounded." "You think its safe for you to go?" George Voorhees inquired of Frank Graham. "Sure. I've saved their bacon by being honest with them." Dr. Graham said, and shrugged. "I expect they feel they owe me one." "Go then. Do your duty as a doctor." Graham was a hundred percent correct. As he made his way aft to Environmental, inmates clapped him on the back and shook his hand, offering their thanks. These people, always so violent and depressed, seemed at peace and happy for the first time in many years. Graham took it all in stride, praying his son wasn't one of the casualties. His prayer was fruitless. When Graham got to Environmental, he found over five hundred wounded, and almost a hundred dead. Johnny wasn't dead, but he'd been banged up pretty bad. He was unconscious from several blows to the head. All the indications were positive that Johnny had a very bad concussion. He was lucky. Magus Dormacher would never lead another revolt. The in-mates who'd stormed Environmental Services had made sure of that. Dormacher had been kicked and beaten into a shapeless mass of dead tissue. Graham sighed and went to work. For the first time since his posting, Dr. Graham performed as a medical doctor that day. It felt good. He grieved for those who had died, but kept in mind that it could have been a lot worse. He'd almost forgotten how good it was to be a healer. Maybe he couldn't heal the minds of these lost souls, but then again, he wasn't God. It wasn't his responsibility. He could only do as much as he was able. To expect anymore of him was unrealistic. He'd just have to learn he was only human. He was as imperfect and prone to error as anyone else from Earth. He knew, as he bandaged the head of his son, that it was worth it. He could live with his mistakes, provided he learned from them the first time. Physician, heal thyself.
"True. The whole crew is." Graham admitted. Very few people knew the real reason Graham had been involved in live dissection. It was all very personal. The need he had, once upon a time, to understand why insanity existed to begin with. "Who told you about that? My son?" "Yeah. He's here with me. Want to say hi?" "Not right now. Right now I want you to turn the air back on. For your sake." "No can do, Doc." Magus said. "What are you going to do? Put your pressure suit on and let all the inmates suffocate?" "That's one option we have. I'd rather it not come to that." "You don't understand doc." Magus said, frustration making his voice harsher than normal. Then he sighed. "I'm not doing this because I want power. I'm doing this because we'd all rather be dead than in this perpetual limbo." "Everybody? Or just your block? Did you even bother to ask anyone else?" It was just like the man to assume that what he felt, everyone else agreed with. "Death is permanent. At least, as long as you're alive, there's a chance things will change. You're making that choice for a lot of people who never had a chance to voice their opinion." "Doc. I've been here 20 years. Things won't change. Not for me. Not for them." Magus began to rant quietly. His tone was soft, but filled with venom. "The Fed has found the perfect way to keep us from harming their precious body politic, without actually resorting to murder themselves. I'm not letting you have that option, anymore. Either you let us die, or you give us what we want. Ignoring us is no longer an option." Here's where it got tricky, Graham thought. Magus was right. They were doomed to this existence. They were being ignored. All of them, the crew included. The Fed would never give them a quality life. The government saw them as a waste of resources. A war of attrition had been declared on the defectives. "Graham? Are you still there?" Magus voice broke into his thoughts. "Yes." "Johnny wants to speak to you." Johnny was Graham's bi-polar son. What he had to say to the man who'd fathered him to this hell of existence was anybody's guess. They hadn't spoken since his trial. "Put him on." Frank Graham said, and sighed. He still loved his son. Had always loved him. He had ignored his Hippocratic oath to try to find a way to help him. Look where that had gotten him. "Dad?" His boy said. The first words he'd heard from his son since his trial. "What, son?" "I know you were only trying to help me, dad." His son said in a whisper, through the same lips that had called him a monster at the trial. "Help me now. Get me off this ship." "It's not that easy son." If only it were that easy, Graham would do it in a heartbeat. The horror of what he'd done, the people he'd turned into vegetables with quick strokes of a laser, made any thought of his son painful and full of guilt. He'd do almost anything to atone for that. But he couldn't help his son, not now. "I may be part of the crew, but I'm just as much a prisoner as you are." "You're the only competent member of the crew. What you did to be here, you did out of love. The rest of the crew is here...because they're too stupid not to be." His son said. "If anyone can find a way, you will. I trust you dad." "Thanks, son. For what its worth." Graham looked over at the Captain, who was distracted by the Navigations Officer. "If you trust me, trust this. I can't let you off this ship. That is one thing that will never happen." "Then I'm going to die." Doctor Frank Graham stared at the control console in front of him without seeing it. Maybe it would be the best thing. To let them all die, the crew included. He could rig that. He was the one in charge of the pressure suits. He could rig it so they all faulted but his... But then, who would fly the ship? He was a doctor, not a naval officer. "Not if I can help it, Johnny." He said, "Not if I can help it..." "Graham?" Magus's voice again. "Are you there?"
"Any suggestions on how to handle this, Doc?" The Captain asked. He wasn't a very competent leader. Competence wasn't something the Fed looked for to fill this posting. They had requirements that were quite the opposite, actually. "What chance is there of regaining control of Environmental?" "Only one. Environmental is completely locked down. With the size crew we have, there's no way we can retake it by force. Not against an entire Block." The Captain's hand produced a vague gesture that ended in another shrug. "All the crew has to do is get into their survival suits and wait until the whole boat is asphyxiated except for them. But what will the Fed think of that solution?" "What will the Fed think if we find a suitable planet and dump these people there instead of healthy, productive colonists?" The question was rhetorical. They both knew the answer to that. Unacceptable. The whole reason these people were here instead of on a planet was because they were a waste of resources. Which begged the question of what the government would think if the crew let them suffocate. They'd wonder why the crew didn't suffocate, too, and save everybody a lot of grief. It was an old idea given new life. Thousands of madmen had been loaded onto incompetently crewed cargo ships during the Middle Ages of Earth, never to see land again. Madness wasn't fully understood back then, people just knew they didn't want the crazy people around. It made for bad business in an age where the merchant class had begun their rise. Now humanity had sociology and psychology, and still, the incurables ended up adrift and outcast. Capital punishment had been abolished, but the government could still neglect a criminal to death. So they did. They accomplished this neglect with ships like the Stultifera. "What do we do?" The Captain asked. He took his cap off and wiped his forehead with a handkerchief. The strain of command was starting to wear on him, especially at a time like this. So many lives were at stake. He'd been this route before, and cracked. Which was why he was here instead of commanding a warship. Nobody cared if he lost it on board this ship. Not in the government, anyway. "Let me talk to Magus." Graham said. "Then, maybe, I'll have a suggestion or two." "Be my guest." George Voorhees put his cap back on and pocketed the handkerchief, happy to have somebody doing something. "Intra-ship line twelve connects to Enviro. That's the line he gave his demands on. Since then, no word." "Ensign? Could you patch that line to my science station here?" Graham asked Ensign Albright, the Communications Officer. The stocky, red-faced cadet nodded, looking a bit worried. He touched a few buttons at his station, "Just press the com button, sir. The line is open." Graham donned his headset and pushed the indicated button. "Magus? This is Dr. Graham." He said into the microphone. "Can we talk?" It took a few moments to get a reply. "What do you want, Doc?" Came Magus' gravelly voice to the earphone eventually. Obviously Magus was a very busy psychopath. "If you don't have news about a planet, I suggest you start breathing really shallow." "There is no planet, Magus. There isn't going to be. You think you have the upper hand here. But you don't." Dr. Graham said. "As usual, you're going to lose. In the meantime, like before, its possible that a lot of people are going to die." Magus snorted in derision. "We're dead already, doc. You call this living?" "I'm not going to argue about the quality of life here," Graham retorted. "Do you think, even as part of the crew, that life has been any better for me?" "Don't hustle me, Doc." The gravel voice had a tone of anger to it now. "I know about the vivisections. You're one step away from being an inmate here yourself."
Graham was still trying to tie his tie when he stepped through the pneumonic portal onto the bridge. The sound of the alarm was diminished on the bridge but the atmosphere was still hot and stuffy. And it was still difficult to breathe. Discipline was the highest he'd ever seen. The tension was ambient in the hot and oppressive air around them. Ten people, including the captain and himself, were the bulk of the Command on the Stultifera. They were all on the bridge at that time. The entire crew amounted to only fifty souls. He took in the tense, expressionless faces around him as he tied his tie, combed his short blonde hair with his fingers, reset his cap, and walked toward the con. "Reporting as ordered, Captain." Captain Voorhees spun in his command chair and looked down at him with bloodshot eyes, his gray hair greasy and uncombed under his service hat. It seemed Graham wasn't the only one who'd been rudely awakened. "We have a situation Frank." George Voorhees and him were never big on formality between each other. This ship was not a posting where discipline normally meant much of anything. They both knew they were being punished for past misdeeds with this assignment, and thus took pains to make it easier on both of them. "What's the situation, Cap?" He replied, moving to his own station to the left of the command chair, behind the coffin-like black VR unit of the Helm. The steersman was inside, immersed in a holographic model of the universe as he shifted the ship through interstellar space at light speed like a swimmer through a vast ocean. The Navigator to the right of Grahams post altered that model as new information became available. Graham was the ranking science officer as well as the sole surgeon, and had been since he'd been assigned to this tub. He was responsible, in part, for providing the Navigator with that new information. The Galactic Federal Navy didn't allocate redundancies to protect the operation of this sort of ship. If it got sucked into a black hole, oh well. Good riddance to bad garbage. That would be several thousand less "useless" mouths for the Fed to feed. So each officer performed at least two duties. Except for the Captain; and, of course, the steersman. That one never left the Helm...not even to pee. "Block five is revolting." The Captain explained. "They have seized control of Environmental Systems and are threatening to suffocate the whole ship." "Oh? What do they want?" "Off." The Captain shrugged. "Right." Graham snorted in disbelief. He brought up their current position on his computer. There was nothing but empty vacuum for several parsecs. "Straight into the void. What are these people thinking?" "Block five, or more accurately, Magus Dormacher, says that if we don't find a planet suitable for the inmates to live, on their own, before the oxygen runs out, then we all die." "Magus. I should have known. What about the rest of the blocks?" "We've managed to keep them unaware of the situation." Voorhees shrugged again. "But not for much longer I'm afraid." "How did this happen?" "Nobody knows." The Captain said, and then continued, "They've gotten out of their block and into Environmental. Since then, this damnable alarm has been going off, which we can't shut off as long as the Algae tanks are offline. The rest of the ship has to know something is up. It's just a matter of time until they know the details." "Damn Magus!" Magus Dormacher was one of the longest residing in-mates. "He knows why he's here. He never learns." Magus was power-hungry and psychopathic. He'd been on-ship for over 20 years after he'd tried a military coup on Alpha Centauri. Graham didn't doubt he'd at least try to follow through on his threats. He'd killed half a million people on Centauri. A few more thousand wouldn't bother a man without a conscience.
The blaring of the ship's alarm awakened him. The air was hot and stuffy. It was hard to breathe. That meant there was a big problem. Air was always a big problem, on a starship. "What now?" Doctor Graham said, and flipped on the light by his bunk. White, sterile walls and counter-tops and neatly stowed equipment met his sleep-matted blue eyes. He stretched his thin, wiry frame, tossing the sweat-soaked blankets aside. He completed his stretch with a muted shout and swung his feet onto the floor, stumbling into the head to relieve his suddenly full bladder. Not everyone on board had a private bathroom. His cabin reflected his position on the ship. He was a ship's surgeon, on a ship where his services didn't mean anything. What could he possibly do for a catatonic, besides have a nurse bathe and feed them? They couldn't be healed. It wasn't just a matter of faulty wiring. He didn't have the ability to fix their brain. Nobody did. If hell had never existed before, it did now. If these people, his supposed patients, weren't already in hell, then they were headed there, in a very large, fusion-powered hand-basket. Their problems existed in the mind, in a universe separate from that of a physician, and Dr. Graham knew this. He thought about this as he brushed his teeth.
The people aboard the Stultifera Navis were there for a reason. They were all either incurably, criminally insane or incurably, and in some cases, dangerously, incompetent. That's what this ship was for. It took the problem people, with all of their permanent problems, away from the colonies, permanently. It was, indeed, a ship of fools. "Ship's surgeon to the bridge!" The PA system blared to life over the wailing of the alarm. "Dr. Graham? The Captain orders you to the bridge. Please comply!" Graham snorted. It wasn't like he'd be able to go back to sleep in this stifling air and ungodly racket, anyway. He set about getting dressed. * * * * * * * *
Applejack is a strong alcoholic beverage produced from apples, originating from the American colonial period. It is made by concentrating hard cider, either by the traditional method of freeze distillation or by true evaporative distillation. The term "applejack" derives from "jacking", a term for freeze distillation.
From the fermented juice, with an alcohol content of less than ten percent, the concentrated result contains thirty to forty percent alcohol, is slightly sweet, and usually tastes and smells of apples. Freeze distilling concentrates all of the alcohol by-products of fermentation including ethanol, methanol and fusel alcohols. Distillation by evaporation can separate these as they have different boiling points. Due to the relatively higher cost and lower yield of alcohol produced from fruit fermentation, commercially produced applejack may be composed of apple brandy diluted with grain spirits until the drink reaches the desired alcohol content.-wiki, emphasis added.
Trust me on this I did four separate flasks four different weeks with four different substrates. I measured all masses, volumes and molarities. 12.4% was the highest molarity I could achieve and that was with a cane sugar substrate. Damn rum.
I don't really think you have any concept of what I believe, but be assured that my beliefs are based on laws observable in nature, and not from anything that might be construed as illogical, except in the sense that the quantum world is illogical.
If so it has been allowed to evaporate or has been fortified. 12% in a closed system kills the yeast, with maybe a +/- 0.5% margin for error either way. 14% is much to high to be from a closed system.
Euclid did the Malthus shuffle. Arithmetic vs. Geometric progression. Not really rocket science where that's headed. Simultaneously, the 12% threshold in wine-making was a very observable phenomenon even then. I'm sure Aristotle pondered that for days. Why won't wine get any stronger? Because the yeast dies in its own waste at 12% by volume.
I would agree that liberals spread liberalism as an argument from ignorance as either a choice between them and both small and large "c" conservatives. I have also observed that conservatives argue from ignorance that there is no third option either, and with much the same vehemence.
"You are either with me, or against me" seems to be the mantra on both sides.
Offering the opinion that liberals suffer from a mental disorder, per Savage, does nothing to lay any groundwork for reasonable dialogue across the aisle, however, just as Franken's characterization of some of his adversaries as "Liars" does nothing to open a reasonable discourse either.
As a moderate, I both see a third option and recognize its inherent repugnance to both sides of the aisle. That is both listening to and recognizing that both sides have something to offer, while both, simultaneously, have their short-comings.
Operating from a stance of personal responsibility is the first step toward making this country, and this world, a better place. It does not matter what the other person, country, or star system does. We are still responsible for the manner in which we react, and we cannot fail to be criticized for our criticism until we take the higher path ourselves regardless of the consequences. We cant preach nobility and simultaneously be treacherous and be taken seriously.
And now, I resume my stance in the rafters to be rebutted in whatever fashion you deem fit. Even with silence, if you so desire, since you deem my ideas so alien and unfit for human consumption.
Keep the mysticism out of the science. I tend to agree alot of ancient prophets saw something true about the future. I don't agree as to the why though.
God has nothing to do with it in my opinion. These "omens" are related to events that are a natural result of a closed system becoming overpopulated. There's no creator figure necessary in this, its just a natural consequence of human nature combined with overpopulation.
What like the Patriot Act? Now there's change you can believe in. Notice Obama doesn't have a problem with it now that he's CIC. It's only a problem to people who aren't the government.
Please. Let's not let this turn into an ad hominem against bebe. Because I do not agree with her doesn't make her unworthy of respect, nor does the fact that she made a mistake make her unworthy of respect as well. Continue with the debate on issues and leave the personal stuff in the past.
You implied superiority by considering yourself worthy of bestowing the honor of superiority in intellect upon yourself and awarding me prizes for my lower intelligence. So. Apology accepted, hypocrisy, not.
I would just like it if people acknowledged that they're not any better or worse than me simply because they have a different opinion. Maybe that's really what this thread is all about. People mistake my kindness for weakness. I will defend my honor.
I have some friends who were in ANZAC in the early nineties. They saw action in the first Iraqi war, as well as during Somalia and the Bosnia crisis... Aussies, Kiwis, and Canucks are a major part of the UN peaceforces.
One thing I did learn in a run-in from police recently. Not to try to lie to them. They take that personally.
I left the scene with no citations, merely a warning, just by being honest. So, never let it be said that they're unreasonable people. Some of them may be, but, like any other organization with a diverse constituency, it takes all kinds.
Galactic_bodhi Forum Posts (9,196)
Ship of Fools
"Roger. Request acknowledged." The Security Officer said into his headphones and then turned to report to the Captain. "Sir, Environmental Systems is back online. Block Five has been deposed. There are a number of casualties from the assault, however. The inmates are requesting Dr. Graham come and take a look at the wounded.""You think its safe for you to go?" George Voorhees inquired of Frank Graham.
"Sure. I've saved their bacon by being honest with them." Dr. Graham said, and shrugged. "I expect they feel they owe me one."
"Go then. Do your duty as a doctor."
Graham was a hundred percent correct. As he made his way aft to Environmental, inmates clapped him on the back and shook his hand, offering their thanks. These people, always so violent and depressed, seemed at peace and happy for the first time in many years. Graham took it all in stride, praying his son wasn't one of the casualties.
His prayer was fruitless. When Graham got to Environmental, he found over five hundred wounded, and almost a hundred dead. Johnny wasn't dead, but he'd been banged up pretty bad.
He was unconscious from several blows to the head. All the indications were positive that Johnny had a very bad concussion. He was lucky. Magus Dormacher would never lead another revolt. The in-mates who'd stormed Environmental Services had made sure of that. Dormacher had been kicked and beaten into a shapeless mass of dead tissue.
Graham sighed and went to work.
For the first time since his posting, Dr. Graham performed as a medical doctor that day. It felt good.
He grieved for those who had died, but kept in mind that it could have been a lot worse. He'd almost forgotten how good it was to be a healer. Maybe he couldn't heal the minds of these lost souls, but then again, he wasn't God. It wasn't his responsibility. He could only do as much as he was able.
To expect anymore of him was unrealistic. He'd just have to learn he was only human. He was as imperfect and prone to error as anyone else from Earth. He knew, as he bandaged the head of his son, that it was worth it. He could live with his mistakes, provided he learned from them the first time.
Physician, heal thyself.