Podcast Transcript

---Transcript for Attend to Everything, Season 1, Episode 1--- 

*Intro Music, instrumental loop from Nothing From Nothing by Billy Preston*

Siobhan Lamenski (Host): Hello and welcome. This is Attend to Everything, the limited-series podcast in which we will investigate allegations of theft and corruption at the origins of one of the most consequential business enterprises to have emerged since the turn of the century: Hard Knox Labor Futures. 

Before we dive in, I want to take a moment to thank our sponsor. This programming, with the many hours of research and production that go into it, would never get produced were it not for the Real Eyes Discovery Grant established by the education firm Young Minds Incorporated. YMI's mission is to use cutting-edge cognitive science to find and illuminate the many ways learning can become doing. For more information on how the diverse thinkers at YMI can contribute to your future or the future of your company, visit YMI online or at any one of their 384 training facilities around the globe.     

Now, onto episode one of Attend to Everything. This episode, Who's In Attendance?

*Seg Music, opening of GO! by Common*

Hard Knox Labor Futures, or HK Labor, is widely regarded as the brainchild of Heather Knox. Through its unorthodox approach to the hiring and paying of employees, HK Labor has revolutionized human resources and created quite a stir in the investing world. In 2010, the Nobel prize-winning economist Dr. Robert Lucas Jr. said of Heather Knox, "This very impressive young woman has made plain to the world that the power, and perhaps more importantly, the dynamism of human capital cannot be underestimated. Her innovations have already reshaped our understanding of the economic forces behind growth and productivity."  

The company has inspired business, political, and labor leaders around the world, all of whom have publicly praised Heather Knox and the work she does. 

In February of this year, however, allegations were made, allegations that there is something rotten at the foundation of HK Labor. Some have begun to question how much credit Heather Knox deserves for the success she enjoys. 

This controversy started when Becca Caldwell-Knox published her first post on the popular Usenet forum biz.SelfMade. Becca knows the Knox family very well; she is the ex-wife of Heather's brother Daren. In her February post, Becca asserted that HK Labor would never have come into being without the contributions and sacrifices made by a struggling Avant-Garde theater troupe called The Tarnished Happy Fun Hall Players.

I first learned of Becca's allegations this past summer while working on what I believed was an entirely unrelated story. I was investigating the national spike in incidents of harassment targeting prominent women of color. I was assigned the story by DFW Information Services; they wanted to know if the harassment cases were connected in any way. Well, the story took weeks, but in time, we found that nearly all of the incidents could be tied back to the online hate community Well, Well, Well, My Michelle. After publication, we saw twelve arrests, new regulations for Usenet moderation, and an awareness-raising music festival featuring a Guns and Roses reunion concert dubbed the Bad Obsessions Review. 

I should have been proud of that work. I should have been satisfied to see the impact a solid piece of journalism had on the world. But I couldn't get there. Something didn't fit.

Of the thirty-seven cases of harassment I looked into, thirty-five were linked to Well, Well, Well. The perpetrators were all similar in background and beliefs. They all followed a similar playbook of dumping, doxxing, and ditching. The thirty-sixth case was different, but it was easy enough to explain away. The perpetrator was a jilted lover with a lot of time on his hands. 

It was the harassment of Heather Knox, however, that I couldn't stop thinking about, even at this year's ceremony announcing the Worth Bingham Prize for investigative journalism. Here's a clip from my acceptance speech.

Recording of Siobhan Lamenski: There are people committed to fostering hate. We can - no, we must find those people and expose them for the world to see. Because to reject hatred, we first must call it out. Thank you to the committee for recognizing this important truth. But that alone will not be enough to protect our society from the poison of intolerance. A new information ecosystem has inadvertently created spaces where bitterness can pool and simmer. People who are typically good-hearted, people not seeking out hatred, they stumble into these pools and become mired in hatred. We don't know why people gather 'round to obsess, to target, or to lash out. But they do, and as journalists, we owe it to ourselves to better understand this darker side of the information revolution. Our work is not done [long applause]. 

Siobhan: Success and recognition were not enough for me. I was hung up on this last case, on the case of Heather Knox. It just didn't make sense. Her harassers had different levels of education. They came from different cultures. Ages ranged from twenty-three to fifty-two. Their professional backgrounds were varied. There were four women in the group and seven men. They only had one thing in common; they were all failed or failing entrepreneurs. And for reasons I had yet to divine, these people began targeting Heather Knox with what can only be described as pranks. Some were harmless, her car covered in those elastic sticky hands you'd find in the goody bags at a child's birthday party. Some were merely inconvenient for Knox; for an entire month, she was visited daily by a series of singing telegrams. But several of the pranks were potentially dangerous. And then in May, what appeared to be a children's toy - just a ball really - flew through a windowpane and into the Knox home. That day, a line was crossed. The molded plastic ball cracked open, exposing a liquid core that filled the room with poisonous fumes. Knox was hospitalized. The injuries to her throat will take months to heal, leaving her voice changed and her sense of personal safety shattered.  

To understand the events that led up to that day, perhaps it's best to get to know Heather Knox a little better.

*Seg music, intro from Stereo by Pavement*

Siobhan: Heather Knox is a Chicago-based entrepreneur who rose to local prominence in the 2000s in what I will call... a most unexpected way. In 2005, Knox founded a small business providing a service to retail businesses in her North Lawndale neighborhood. Bathroom attendants. For a reasonable fee, restaurants and stores could have a bathroom attendant on duty at certain times of the day. No one, including Knox herself, expected the success that would follow. Over the next two years, the enterprise, which Heather had named Requesting Your Attendants, grew at a stunning pace. Employees from Requesting Your Attendants could be found throughout the Chicagoland area. They earned themselves the moniker Rye Guys, both men and women attendants alike. Some say that name was the result of a hasty acronym; others suggest the ubiquity of the service in Wicker Park cocktail bars during a resurgence in the popularity of whiskey drinks, or perhaps it was something else. Shane Handle, a former manager at the Violet Hour reflected on that question.

Recording of Handle: No, I'm not sure if you can pin that nickname down so easy. Sure, the acronym is there and we were serving old fashions like it was nobody's business, but it wasn't just that. They were funny. It was funny. The whole thing seemed kinda funny. Like we were being post-post-ironic. Because we knew how these people were getting paid. No tips. The Rye Guys would refuse even an aggressive attempt to tip. That was the most common complaint I got about Rye Guys at first, "Why won't you let 'em take any tips? It seems wrong." But it wasn't me, you know? I didn't make that policy. These bathroom attendants were bringing home more than thirty-five hundred dollars a month, and word got out, and everybody knew, and we all kinda liked it. They'd done this thing. They found a way to pay bathroom attendants enough to live in this city, like kinda well, you know? Yeah, it was funny. Like we were all kinda laughing at these customers who were thinking, "Ah, this poor sap working the bathroom must be miserable." But they weren't, and they made the place feel more upscale. They made the place safer. They kept the place cleaner. And the customers were so happy, and we were all smirking the whole time. So, yeah, Rye Guys? I think there's more than one way to spell that.  

Siobhan: That was Shane Handle reflecting on the rise of Requesting Your Addandants in late 2007. His focus on the way Rye Guys were compensated is an important part of the Heather Knox story.  

Recording from a 2006 episode of Tucker: On tonight's curious situation, there's an entrepreneur making waves in Chicago where she's offering to pay bathroom attendants over $3,000 a month. You heard that right. And what's more, she guarantees that salary for at least two years. This might sound curious to some viewers, but sure enough, there's a woman in Chicago who thinks cleaning a bathroom should earn you a life of luxury. Stay tuned.

Siobhan: Knox appeared on a Curious Situation segment during MSNBC's show Tucker with Tucker Carlson.

Recording resumes:   

color

Heather Knox's husband, since the family became financially independent, has become a performance artist.

He directs and performs in shows in which he reenacts episodes of the seventh season of Night Court. He performs as Christine in a 34-minute show in the band shell in Grant Park every Thursday night at 7:30. A jazz quartet plays the theme and interludes at the commercial break. The episode being reenacted is projected on the screen behind the cast, played on a VHS cassette with the tracking set to distort the image a bit. 

He often has trouble getting musicians to fill in for the gig when the drummer flakes. 

He films the show from a seat in the middle of the empty venue. 

At one point he needs to repair the tape.

Heather describes the American dream as something White people can aspire to while people of color must work through America's waking hours

Story Structure

 The complete story is told in a series of linked vignettes.

Each vignette has an ending that links to another vignette, but there are also a number of tangents that emerge in the middle of an ongoing vignette.

For example, when Mariel contacts her brother, a reader can link that story and read about the brother's day cleaning the 39 public schools on a city-at-sea. The citizens there do not consume AM media and harbor a number of conspiracy theories about the roots of the global society.

If readers keep reading, they can link back to where they left off or loop back in when Mariel reaches out again later.

These linked vignettes tell a more complete story but allow for wild swings in narrative and tone

Béla's Intuition

"Space people. Universal love."

- Clinton & Worrell 

Sitting at the command console of the Kis Dió, Béla lit a joint and nudged the volume up on Planet Claire. 

He was in the final stages of a relatively large unsponsored salvage job 1,750km above the surface of Earth. His fleet of drones could handle most of what work remained. So, Béla took the opportunity to unwind a bit as the moon rose over the Arabian Peninsula. 

"Absolutely goddamned awe-inspiring," he exhaled. 

Béla was talking to himself. 

The Kis Dió wasn't built for company.  Other than the command console's cushy chair, it was a pretty spartan affair. Behind Béla there was a workbench, a zero-g water closet, a cot, and the door to the cargo bay. Béla kept a clean ship and wasn't much for decorating. The cabin looked like it had just cleared the assembly plant, for the most part. There were two little flourishes that made the ship his own.

The first was a printed snapshot Béla had stuck to the console shortly after purchasing the Kis Dió. It was a photograph of his childhood sailboat. Béla had captured the shot himself while standing waist-deep in shallow water. The little Pirate dinghy is moored to a buoy in front of the shoreline reeds of Balatonlelle. No one is on board. The sail is up but slack. The lake has that familiar cloudy blue glow of white silt and sunlight. To the right of the Pirate and just a bit closer to shore, a collection of brightly colored fiberglass paddle boats are anchored and waiting for renters. Béla was fourteen when he took the photo. It was shortly after he restored the boat and dubbed it the Nagy Dió. 

The second flourish hung beside the door to the cargo bay. It was a framed theatrical poster for The Ice Pirates - not the reboot. Beyond that, the walls were white and the floor was industrial grey. Really not much to look at. Which was fine because Béla spent most of his time aboard the Kis Dió looking through the large forward porthole. With a massive row of thunderheads over the Caspian, Béla inhaled a bit extra, wondering if he had time to get out the easel to do some painting.

An indicator lit up, tugging at Béla's attention. The status signal for his drone fleet began to pulse a steady tone just out of sync with the B-52s. His bots had each caught their assigned hunks of a long-defunct communications satellite. They would now link back together before coupling with the Kis Dió. 

Béla tapped the console, acknowledging the transition. He muttered, "Easy is sexy," nodding in agreement with himself as he turned back to take in more of the view.

Béla was happy he got to this job when he did. The sat's orbit had started to decay just twelve hours earlier. His personal network of scanning probes caught it before Near Earth Safety posted anything on the cleanup schedule. It had probably been struck by unidentified debris. 

Clearing out the scrap was bound to become a NES priority; the larger parts were certainly going to present a threat to low-orbit infrastructure. But what was even more concerning, according to Béla's models, was the unacceptably high probability that the debris would strike Anchor's tether. It was urgent, even if NES hadn't figured that out yet. Nevertheless, the job was simple enough, and getting here fast gave Béla enough time to capture the stuff worth recycling. 

Once the drones were linked and coupled to his module, Béla would haul the whole mess back to his workshop on Anchor. Once there, he could repurpose the scrap, building more drones for his salvage operation. Closing that loop was always deeply satisfying for Béla.

And he would have enjoyed that sense of satisfaction this go-around were it not for the distress call from La plaça del Diamant.

He read the details on his monitor.

Béla wasn't happy about it, but he was gonna have to drop the scrap. 

Lives took priority. He extinguished the joint.

He logged the debris and, along with his video record, submitted the job into the Global Waste Removal League's leaderboard. It pushed him into the top three. So, at least there was that. 

He was about to guide the load into a clean re-entry burn when he noticed something unusual. His drones had used nearly a quarter of their charge already. It didn't pose a problem, but that was way more than they should have used at this point in the job. 

The drones were little more than electric propulsion units on robotic arms fitted with magnets and clamps. They captured debris and hauled it back to the command module. Nothing fancy. But Béla had been at this long enough to know how much charge it should have taken to reach the linking stage of the operation. 

He was going to have to run a diagnostic when he returned home. He retained the closest load of scrap to facilitate that diagnostic. That closest load was in the cargo bay before the more distant drones had even started recoupling with the ship. So, it didn't delay him from carrying out the rescue order.

He did have to get a move on. The distress call was urgent, and according to orbital logs, Béla was commanding the only catch and capture fleet in the vicinity. So, once the remaining drones coupled with his module, he calculated an intercept course and set off. 

The Kis Dió only had to alter its current heading by a few degrees before accelerating enough to create three-quarters of a g. Béla took advantage by doing a few jumping jacks. After only three minutes, warning lights flashed, the ship began to reduce the rate of acceleration, and Béla buckled himself into the captain's chair. Back at zero gs, the command module flipped and the ship began to decelerate. 

The feel of some gravity returned, but Béla stayed seated this time. There wasn't really enough time to properly use it. He did clip into the pedals under his console to get a few RPMs in before the ship returned to zero gs. That was better than nothing.

The 

Chapter One - Kindread's Ascent

 

These semantic aspects of communication are irrelevant to the engineering problem. The significant aspect is that the actual message is one selected from a set of possible messages. The system must be designed to operate for each possible selection, not just the one which will actually be chosen since this is unknown at the time of design.

Claude E. Shannon, "A Mathematical Theory of Communication" - 1948

 

Kindread hadn't read the Times while on drugs since his days at school, but he needed something to occupy his mind on this longer stretch of the orbital lift network. So, he read, and as he did a growing sense of personal pride nearly eclipsed all of the concerns that had motivated him to book passage from the Lake Weatherford Liftpoint to the Anchor Solar Platform. 

Tension slowly seeped out of his neck and shoulders, allowing him to take a deep breath for the first time since he'd set out that morning.  

During the first leg of the journey, Kindread sat and quietly worried aboard a sixty-four-foot tall passenger module named the E. V. Debs. That lift carried him up a 300km tether to the Sankara Orbital Ring. For the entire assent, he couldn't stop replaying the morning call he'd had with his team of editors. Everyone was panicking about what they'd seen broadcast on the Anchor feed, and Kindread couldn't lead the way he'd like to because he was still hours away from finding out if he could even identify the source of the problem. 

After ending the call, he cut off all communications, marking himself publicly as "occupied" before boarding the lift. He hoped that was vague enough. 

On board, he tried to gather his thoughts. The lift had the smell and feel of regularly sanitized public transit. He found a seat on the fifth level. To his left sat a teenager on her way to the Philipines where she would sit in as bassist on a classics of Industrial Metal compilation recording session. On his right was a retiree who clearly wanted to strike up a conversation about his plans for this trip to Patagonia. Kindread buckled up, noting the distant tinny rhythm of Jesus Built My Hotrod escaping from the teenager's headphones. The retiree leaned forward to take in Kindread's profile, who, in response, reclined his seat and pretended to sleep, a ruse he committed to for the majority of the forty-minute ride. He just kept his eyes closed, let the nervous sweat bead on his forehead, and considered all the disastrous implications of what looked to be a compromise to the global information network. 

When the Debs reached the Sankara Orbital Ring, Kindread transferred to a maglev train, traversed the ring, and disembarked at the Salley Gardens Equatorial Waypoint. The layover at Salley Gardens was just long enough for Kindread to have an espresso before boarding a relatively small torus-shaped lift dubbed La plaça del Diamant. 

That is where he started reading the Times. 

For this final leg, he was one of only seventeen passengers and four crew members bound for Anchor, the geosynchronously orbiting solar power station which Kindread suspected sat at the center of this unfolding crisis.

From "Orbital Ring Systems and Jacob's Ladders" by Paul Birch (1982)

Fortunately, it was difficult to remain on edge in this lift. La plaça del Diamant was managed by the eponymous Barcelonian art collective. They had covered the outer wall in a mosaic of tiny ceramic tiles, fusing Gaudi's medium with the iconography of Miro. The figure of a bird floated among dozens of stars on a field of Mediterranean blue. An accordion and double bass duo were riffing on A Minor Swing just out of sight from where Kindread sat at the well-lit bar hugging the interior wall of the lift. Behind the bar was a facade of exposed brick with inset shelves full of bottles and glassware. The bartop was a glass case from which Kindread could select from any number of tapas.

He had already made his way through most of the croquettes he'd ordered when he started reading the Times. The attendant behind the bar was about to ask if he wanted anything else when she noticed that Kindread had started staring intently at an empty portion of the bar top. Mariel, who liked being good at her work, was pleased to have caught this. She slid a black placemat into his field of vision, making it easier for Kindread to read. 

She didn't serve a lot of readers. Most preferred to listen to the Times. 

Curiosity and a slow shift prodded Mariel to inquire into Kindread's background. She took in his profile and wondered about who he was. The information came to her quicker than expected because, to her surprise, she already knew a great deal about Kindread's work. 

She lifted her eyebrows and nodded to herself as information about her customer clicked in with what she already knew. 

It was no small thing to be serving the architect of variable-audience messaging - and consequently the entire landscape of contemporary human information processing. It felt like big news. Mariel tried to let her partner know, but the soft tone of a return signal indicated he was offline and wouldn't get the notification for at least an hour. 

Mariel wondered if there was anyone else she could tell. She hesitated and then thought, "Fuck it." She let her brother Bastion know. They got back to her right away with a slew of inappropriate questions related to a constellation of conspiracy theories that had, among other things, ruined a number of family dinners. 

"Are his shoelaces blue? Does he have a vein protruding from his right temple? Is it possible he's wearing a wig? Does he smell of ham? Is there a woman on board who appears to be keeping track of his movements? Did he order fried food? When you touch him, is there a powerful static shock? Where are his hands right now?"

It wasn't a surprise when Mariel cut Bastion off. She wasn't as dismissive of her brother's rantings as her parents, but Mariel was at work and thought of herself as a professional. She sent, "I let the customers open up to me, but as a rule, I don't pry." 

Her brother laughed and wished her well.

Back to work. She started securing the bar for the period of low gravity that accompanied the transition to deceleration. It was busywork that allowed Mariel to occasionally peek at her famous customer.

She'd assumed Kindread would have a tick or something else that gave away his abilities. But no, here sat a skinny black man with handsome angular features, thick salt and pepper hair, and a calm demeanor. He'd come a long way since his first brush with fame. As she continued working, Mariel recalled images associated with a younger Kindread, a teenager in the Kenyan megacity of Mboya. 

An aerial photo of the city's wild skyline briefly floated in Mariel's field of vision. The city was a tiny patch of super technology, a home to over fourteen million people surrounded by the green unspoiled earth of Kenya. Mariel was reminded that these memories were over 32 years old. The city of Mboya being remembered was relatively young, established in 2019 after the Kenyans agreed to host the world's first equatorial tether. Nevertheless, it had come into its own well before these memories had been recorded. With its collection of glass domes, spires, vertical farms, sprawling elevated green spaces, and brightly painted housing clusters, Mboya was all color and light twined throughout the five-square-mile block that rose sixty stories up from the floor of the savannah, all of which sat beneath a trio of 200-hundred story towers leaning in towards each other as they reached skyward, eventually joining at a single point. From deep inside that city, Mariel saw photos of the Young Minds Incorporated campus where a teenager's suffering was about to launch the educational reform movement. 

The photos of Kindread were leaked to sensationalist media outlets and shared widely to a global readership still addicted to outrage.

He's curled up on his dormitory bed in a red school uniform wet with sweat. He's teary-eyed, quivering, and drooling after the hour-long "Actual Message" session that served as his groundbreaking final project for the YMI Institute. That was before the pharmaceuticals caught up to his abilities - before he taught the news how to reach people.

Kindread noted and appreciated Mariel's gesture with the placemat. He was enjoying his solitude.

Despite everything the Times had earned him, Kindread rarely had a moment to enjoy his work - to step back and admire it from the reader's point of view. What Kindread normally read of the Times was not a set of stories; it was hundreds of thousands of feeds rushing into the Dallas-based hub where he and his editorial team rendered the data into actual messages or AMs.  There the team customized the AMs for every registered reader using a fluid set of linguistic rules, the ethics mandate, and Evolving Audience Profiles.  The result was the Dallas Fort Worth Times, the most useful daily on Earth.

The Times, as it read, was a thing worthy of Kindread's pride.  The comprehension interface was effortless, monitoring his eyes, his facial activity, and his cognition. The words scrolling across the tabletop never lagged nor lost him.  The stream's reaction was fluid when he wanted more in-depth coverage of a story, and it moved on just as smoothly when his interest waned.  A lot of Kindread's contributions were in that stream.  He had refined the association protocols that brought the stories together into something close to a narrative.  His input taught the Times how to use the second person in a less off-putting manner.  But perhaps most importantly, it was Kindread's contributions to the Evolving Audience Profile that made the Times what it was.  Through the EAP, the Times helped each reader understand how the news touched their lives.  The readers had a stake in the affairs of the world, and it was the Times that told them why:

"...in addition to those savings you will see, the waste management initiative has generated 84 local jobs.  The new jobs were included in the global unemployment numbers for June, which reached a record low of 1.162%. 

"Hill Country Labor Securities predicted it will be able to place workers before the end of the quarter. A spokesperson from the DAH Chamber of Commerce announced this morning that 'continued low unemployment numbers will put more upward pressure on regional wages.' 

"In response to predicted wage hikes, your employer and your labor securities cooporative has agreed to a 'preemptive salary increase of 1.5%. Arnold Gaffner, CEO of the Times, believes the wage adjustments will 'keep employee incomes six weeks ahead of rising consumer prices.' 

"If Gaffner is right, by next week you should be able to purchase outright a signed first edition copy of The Forever War by Joe Haldeman.  You marked the book as the next item you would like to purchase once your overflow savings account allows.  There is one vendor that recommends purchacing the item today with credit. While the vendor's recommendation is part of an advertisement, the DFWT has independently confirmed the recommendation's value.  In a recent survey conducted by the Schroeder School of Economics, the vast majority of investment advisers agreed that using credit to purchase durable goods is a wise strategy for personal finance.  Several advisors participating in the study cited a recent Congressional Labor Committee prediction: 'The labor shortage is not likely to abate in the years it would take' to pay off The Forever War. 

 "Beyond continued low unemployment, uncertainty in the energy sector is suspected to be another driver behind the spike in consumer prices.  That uncertainly stems largely from the recent 'Declaration of Independence' that was broadcast from the Anchor Solar Platform..." 

And there it was. Anchor was spinning. 

There was no denying it.  Even with his compulsions tamped down by psychotropics, Kindread spotted the spinning.  His team couldn't have missed so many piques in close succession, "suspected" in the passive, "behind," "spike," "largely," and another use of the passive for "broadcast." 

The trigger words had already set off Kindrick's edit compulsion.  He was sweating and his skin felt tingly, like the flu coming on. He started silently mouthing his thoughts, "Readers will be pushed." His body began an almost imperceptible rocking. "These words generate unlinked interest." 

And then he felt worse when he realized the issue would be exacerbated on audio feeds. Those piques were going to undermine thousands of person-hours worth of editing. 

Sabotage was the only explanation. 

One of the pillars of the Times' ethical mandate was, "When reporting non-editorial material, the words in and of themselves should not generate additional interest."  Kindread had built his EAP protocols around that principle. 

Sure, Kindread conceded to himself, there were plenty of readers with connections to Anchor, or connections to orbital colony development, or energy production, near-space technology, extra-planetary politics, transit infrastructure, or any other number of links to the story.  Kindread knew how the system would remind such readers of those links. He knew how it monitored their interest. He wrote the code that updated reader profiles based on how much of the story they followed.  But that system was not designed for a story that included so many piques.

His left hand started twitching, searching for the edit bar.  But there was nothing to do. He was more than 700km above his editing suite, and the story had been published already. Without a means to remove the triggers, Kindrick's discomfort was only going to grow more intense.  He grabbed his bag, loosened the drawstring, reached inside, and pulled out his self-administers - low-dose tabs that dissolved on his tongue - a fail-safe.  He used them to supplement his regiment when things got bad.  He didn't turn to them nearly as often as he used to, but he certainly knew to keep the tabs close at hand.  There was only one time he'd ever forgotten them. The police found him trying to adjust the hat of every man exiting the Kennedy tram station. 

"I was just trying to fix them." he'd explained.

Mariel saw the sweat on Kindread's brow and a woosy look in his eyes. 

She was reaching for a bottle of water to offer him when the first piece of debris struck the lift. 

There was a loud crash followed by a siren's wail. Then the second impact tore a coin-sized hole through the western-facing wall of the lift. Ceramic tile, insulation, and a pearl of carbon-scored metal clattered across the floor. A whistle-turned-wind howled as the cabin depressurized. 

Mariel did not panic. She raised her voice above the cacophony and spoke with trained authority, "Stay seated. Prepare for segment seals. Fasten safety belts." 

Walls that divided the lift into eight segments dropped from the ceiling, shutting Kendrik and Mariel into a wedge of the lift. The howling stopped. The siren seemed quiet by comparison. They were each fastening their safety belts when the third piece of debris struck. The nearby crash was followed by the sound of a distant explosion. The wedge went dark. The only light was sunlight reflected off the Earth and in through the single port hole.

The cabin shuttered and swayed as its ascent slowed and changed course. The segments were being jettisoned away from the driveshaft and tether. The wedge was now an escape pod. Emergency thrust pushed Kindread down into his seat as the pod was guided up and away from the tether, and if emergency protocols were successful, eventually into a rescue orbit. Through the port hole, both Kindread and Mariel watched the Earth's horizon drop out of sight just before they caught a brief glimpse of another wedge from the lift, a bluegrey emergency craft shaped like a perfect clove of garlic, turning slow flips on its own axis, a gash easily ten feet long cut into the side and exposing the smoke-filled interior. 

Kindread kept his eyes on the port hole as he said to Mariel, "Send a message to the last person you contacted. Tell them you're alone, unharmed, and awaiting rescue."

Mariel repeated the word, "Alone?"

Kindread nodded. "It's me they're after, but they'll let us both burn up in the atmosphere if it suits them."

Mariel sent her brother the following: "I'm safe, but you're going to hear about an incident on La plaça del Diamant. Passenger pods have been jettisoned. I'm onboard one that is intact. Others weren't so lucky. On my own. Looks like I had a rare stroke of luck. May be offline for a bit. Tell Mom and dad I'm safe."

Through the port hole, Mariel could see that their pod had steadied itself onto an escape trajectory. The tether was still visible beneath them, getting smaller as they drifted away. Two other intact escape pods could be made out on the tether's opposite side. Debris from three damaged pods was scattered in a cluttered sphere, detached yet still somehow ascending, riding the inertia it had built before the strike.  

Mariel saw shadow flit across the debris. The rescue effort was arrving. She shifted in her seat to look toward, but no into the sun. She was stunned and heartened to see the familiar shape of the Kis Dio, the famous scavenger craft designed to resemble a 1965 Corvette Stingray. It dipped and pivoted as it slowed its approach and deployed its eight drones that would link to the escape pod. 

Anchor and the elevator

 The tech of a space elevator:

The low earth orbit rings follow the principles laid out by Paul Birch in his 3 papers. 

The discovery of a material strong enough to construct circular rings is the result of a fusion of mechanical engineering and witchcraft guided by Theo and Helena's insights. The two of them guide Jessica, a young ME student at UW-Madison, through a psychedelic experience that allows her to manipulate the Hold in a way that forms a new self-repairing crystalline carbon tube they dub the Lizardo Structure. The carbon nanotubes draw energy from the subatomic vibrations caused by our universe coming into contact with other universes, and this powers the self-repair.  

This discovery is followed by research into nanomachines capable of traveling within the tether that can detect degradation and provide the raw materials required for the structure's self-repair. 

The majority of the material required for the construction of the tether is obtained from the mining of asteroids - an emerging industry that got a jump start in the late 90s when Theo began redirecting his earnings from his post-college investing hobby. 

The lift is powered by a laser. During ascent, after reaching an altitude where the pull of gravity decreases, the lift accelerates to create a sense of gravitational pull for half the journey. The interior cabin then rotates, and the lift decelerates to create that same sensation. 

Bela explains why he could see the end of capitalism coming

After Bela rescues Kendrick and commits to defending Anchor, he explains that he knew this reckoning was coming. When Anchor declared independence, he made his way there because he recognized the spark that would set events in motion. 

Theo asks Bela how he knew.

Bela replies, "I was born inside the corpse of a long-dead empire. Born into a family certain that their precious kingdom was not only still alive, but that any day now, it would lift itself back up and regain all its former vitality. They flew old flags outside our home and hung maps with defunct borders on our walls. They sang songs that celebrated a time that was never as simple as the songs would have you believe. 

"I was surrounded by people clinging to what little they could find that did not yet appear rotten. We flew supplies to Anchor and eventually helped build the first ring and the second, a ring that made oil and gas obsolete. We melted the borders that had defined us and finally admitted our own empire's lifeblood was nothing more than the fermented remains of countless empires that had died before our own.

"How did I see this coming? Honestly, I can't understand how so many people didn't."