Emergency Management Authority

Exigency

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6

This is, the operator thinks, possibly the worst day to hear the stolid parping of the some-moron-thinks-he’s-a-train alarm.

A glance at the monitor pointed to by the sensor indicator told the story. Courtesy of the motion-and-presence trackers, it played back the moment at which the aforementioned moron had forced open one of the doors of his stopped train –

– the Midmorn-18 eastbound express, Clifftop line, reflex filled in, currently holding for 22 minutes awaiting a pause in Inclinator emergency traffic –

– dropped to the trackbed, and jogged off down the tunnel towards Upslope station.

The operator glances at his board, and the covered, key-locked switch labeled ETHICAL STRICTURE. A timer below it, freshly reset, counts down by pulses from seventy-two, a mechanism implemented to ensure that no changes could be made without mindful forethought. At its normal setting, OPTIMAX, traction power would automatically have been cut to the section in which the not-train was detected, and security robobulls automatically dispatched to drag the hapless wight in question to an uncomfortable interview with security and a lengthy repayment of his fellow passengers’ inconvenience.

But today…

CICENCOM/EMA: PHíLAE/LANDING/INFRASTRUCTURE EMERGENCY DIRECTIVE
EVENT+0.00:14:11.182
IMMEDIATE ACTION ORDER

This is a TRANSPORTATION ASSETS IMPERATIVE directed to SUBMARINE EXPRESS.

STATUS: Impact of not-under-command bulk freighter TDMMS Pelagic Pedestrian on foreshore defenses sector 112 has caused failure of sea wall and protective kinetic barriers in that sector. Minor flooding, since secured, has occurred in Ironclad Docks District to +18 in over datum. Estimated time to repair (including salvage of freighter): 18 hours +/- 6 from mark.

FORECAST: Arrival of storm producing sea state HIGH with wave height estimated at 402 in over datum at event locus predicted at estimated time 4 hours +/- 1 from mark. Consequences predicted include total flooding of Ironclad Docks District. Severe infrastructure damage. Mass casualty event.

IMPERATIVE: I am requisitioning all available transportation to evacuate Ironside Docks District. Clear all non-evacuation traffic from Inclinator. Trains engaged in evacuation activities are granted priority over all other traffic. All currently-unassigned consist elements capable of passenger transport are preempted for evacuation traffic. Otherwise proceed in accordance with established emergency protocol.

To secure transportation under current, predicted, and undetermined conditions, adopt ethical strictures GRANITE EXIGENT.

CICENCOM/EMA
NNNN

…the key was turned two steps beyond that, and the computerized systems instructed to maintain traction power and transit come hell or literal high water. Or, indeed, the presence of any obstruction in the tunnels not sufficient to impede the passage of a train.

Which meant, the operator’s thoughts continued even as the security monitor flashed white and dimmed and the alarm self-silenced, that one stumble into the maglev coils or a slip sufficient to contact the traction power bus-bar would be regrettably, inevitably, lethal.

“Note to Track Maintenance,” the operator murmurs into his command headset, grimacing at the monitor that now showed only a shadow on the bed of the twilit tunnel. “We have rat chow in the tunnel between Upslope and Seawatch, section four. Once the isohaz clears down, send a recovery team to pick up the marble and hose off the trackbed. Operations, clear.”

A Cure As Epidemic

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6

A shadow fell over the city.

That was, of course, perfectly normal. It was fourteen minutes before the Wakening hour, and four million people’s deliveries were here, packed into a vast warehouse wrapped in an inconceivable volume of vacuum, wrapped in turn in shimmering white fabric bearing the moé winged parcel and hexrunic letters proclaiming its name and ownership for all to see.

Desire Causes Satisfaction, the All Good Things, ICC fulfilment zeppelin, had arrived on its morning rounds.

Perhaps the dark cloud cascading from its vomitories, dense enough to deepen the shadow to true shade to fight in¹ rather than a dissipating gray wisp, was unusual but it was no matter for concern. This was the Empire, such airships did not fail, and the people below could go about their business assured that whatever had caused this alteration of normal routine would become apparent in due course.

From Rectifier Gaelin Septimiel-ith-Septimiel to Citizen-Shareholder Eimil Isilviere-ith-Inviere, greetings.

In response to the ongoing Level 3 (Epidemic) Contagious Disease Warning posted for the Greater Cestia & Proximal regions as of 2049 Cálith 20, the Emergency Management Authority is pleased to provide all citizen-shareholders, citizen-intendants, and metic residents within the affected region and other strongly connected regions a dose of the vaccine to cytomegalovirus VVAR-1472-B and related strains developed under the aegis of the Office of Disease and Toxin Control, Prevention, and Elimination.

For further details of the vaccine and its development process, please see here. Should it prove the case that the information you desire is not available via this link, please contact the office of the Procurator of Transparency.

The provided dose has been packaged in a self-refrigerating autoinjector coded for individual use, which can be operated by pressing the uncapped tip against the body over a muscle mass; an upper arm is recommended.

Should the vaccine payload have exceeded the permitted temperature range, expired, or otherwise degraded, the blue status light on the autoinjector will have turned red and the autoinjector will not function. In this case, please contact the nearest Imperial Services office for a replacement.

Please wait five days for vaccine to take full effect before discontinuing high-level infection control precautions. We request that low-level infection control precautions be continued until the epidemic disease warning is rescinded as a courtesy to your fellow citizen-shareholders.

The contribution to population immunity provided by individual vaccination has been assessed as a positive externality valued at Es. 192.41 by the Protectorate of Balance, Externality, and the Commons. As such, this will be credited to your Active Credit Account upon verified autoinjector operation.

The Empire thanks you for your cooperation and forbearance in these troubled times.

Given under my hand and seal this day 2049 Telenith 9,

Gaelin Septimiel-ith-Septimiel
by appointment to the situation, rectifier
Emergency Management Authority

  1. This somewhat anachronic definition of “shade to fight in” gained currency late in the Consolidation, when Imperial forces were clashing with those of the Alliance over mining and energy production facilities on tide-locked Eurymir and during the long day on Toramir, the innermost planets of the Lumenna system. On such battlefields as the Plains of Glass, one has the choice of fighting in the shade, or of being boiled to death before ever engaging the enemy.

Lactic Revolutionary Front

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3

BROADCAST //  PHÓLARAE LABSWARM & ADJUNCTS // INFRA UNCLASS
ALL ECS STATIONS ANNOUNCE
IMMEDIATE PREEMPT
EMERGENCY MANAGEMENT AUTHORITY // ALERT 6981/11/04

This is an EMERGENCY MANAGEMENT AUTHORITY alert for all residents of the Phólarae labswarm and adjuncts. Related travel advisories have been dispatched to regions proximal.

An enhanced lactobacillus culture having escaped from a bactry system within Tokóver Hot Labs module 3/A in the early hours of this morning – a culture which is now displaying signs of internal self-organization, intentionality, and device manipulation – the Office of the Sane Man advises that all areas aboard Tokóver Hot Labs module 3/A should be considered off-limits to all non-essential personnel without special authorization until negotiations are complete and a contrabroadcast is formally made.

The Office of the Sane Man requests that all personnel and/or visitors with experience in linguistics or in the chemical communication of the biological components of yoghurt please identify themselves to the Unexpected Cognition Task Force and hold themselves ready for deployment.

It has been three (3) days since our last unanticipated intelligence excursion.

All citizen-shareholders are thanked for their cooperation.

Ends.

Trope-a-Day: Do Not Adjust Your Set

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Do Not Adjust Your Set: The obvious canonical example is the Emergency Notification System, run jointly by the Watch Constabulary and Emergency Management Authority, which can send out a signal across the IIP mesh network preempting every device to deliver an emergency notification. Subverted inasmuch as it can be overridden freely at the receiving end, on the grounds that if there’s a gorram emergency going on, people might need to use those devices.

(There is also is counterpart, the Emergency Monitoring System. Separate from the basic functionality in which devices that perceive an emergency happening locally will report it of their own volition, the EMS permits a code to be sent out instructing all devices within a specific area to activate all their sensors and report what they perceive to the WC/EMA. Again, this is optional functionality – no-one has to participate for obvious privacy and property reasons – but rather depends on the authorities being trustworthy and individuals being mutually responsible citizens…)

Delta

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Sixty-two thousand feet above the surface of Eliéra, Gaëlenén’s Cup coasted slowly in its perpetual circuit, seven of her eight fission-driven pusher fans only ticking over, yet still able to drive her through the air at a relaxed 480 knots. The Emergency Management Authority’s superwing was a massive delta of titanium composite, five-decked and fully 600′ from one of her wingtip vertical stabilizers to the other; her underside studded with the blisters of pod launchers, and the closed doors to the flight gantries from which she could dispatch, at need, her multiple wings of reconnaissance drones, rescue and clean-up craft, intervention vehicles, and heavy field constructors.

Today, though, Cup was not alone in the sky. A K-50C Roustabout paralleled her course only two hundred feet above, auxiliary thrusters battling the wake turbulence, such that it could keep station above and in front of the open dorsal hatch of Cup’s silent engine. The Roustabout had its rear hatch fully open, exposing the cavernous length of its fuselage, and its cargo crane extended, lowering lines down to where Cup’s aircraftsmen waited to catch them with rocket grapples, and hook them onto the pellet containment of the engine’s dedicated reactor. A second containment module, pregnant with fresh thorium and borate, waited inside the Roustabout.

Emergencies, after all, wait for no soph, and take no account of the necessities of maintenance or refueling.

And so Cup had never landed in her eighteen-year service life. And with proper care and attention, she never would.

 

Trope-a-Day: The Ark

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The Ark: One of the projects of the Emergency Management Authority/Fifth Directorate are the “Civilization-Backup Ships”, ark vessels hidden in deep space with as close to a complete backup of civilization as can be managed – the notion being that in the event of an extant existential threat large enough to threaten the survival of civilization entire (what’s called in the jargon a hard civilization kill event), they’ll come online under CASE NIGHTFALL ASUNDER, get the hell out of Dodge, and reboot it somewhere else.

Trope-a-Day: Apocalyptic Logistics

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Apocalyptic Logistics: Enabled, to some degree, by the way in which the Imperial Emergency Management Authority is staffed by ever Crazy Prepared-type that the Imperial Service has available. (Manufacturing is made somewhat easier by cornucopias, but they too depend on central nanoslurry supplies and energy supplies, so it’s not like they’re a panacea in this department.) But the EMA is notorious for its Crisis Citadels, entire mountains and asteroids stuffed with emergency supplies of all kinds, and their smaller local counterparts, and their deployable disaster pods – and even for sponsoring the engineering of things like home-growable pharm plants. Oh, and emergency command centers build aboard giant flying-wing aircraft that never land to ensure that ground-based disasters can’t take them out. Which are themselves redundant. (In full accordance with the traditions of the Imperial governance – it may not do much, by design, but those things it does do it does very well indeed.)

As a side note, it also helps that Flamic doctrine takes its negentropy seriously, and as such the faithful are expected to be as well prepared for emergencies as, say, the Mormons, with some extra emphasis on rebuilding.

…civilization may one day fall, but the forces of entropy are going to have to work for anything much more than a stumble.

Trope-a-Day: Red Alert

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Red Alert: In the Imperial Navy, played with realism (also with the Most Annoying Sound, inasmuch as the alert klaxon is custom-designed to irritate the nerves of every possible sophont listening, simultaneously):

“General quarters!  General quarters!  Set condition one throughout the ship!  This Is Not A Drill!”

The Admiralty, Core Command and the Theater Commands in particular, prefers to use Defcon Five as its system, as do the Imperial Emergency Management Authority for states of civil emergency, and the Imperial Security Executive for local security warnings (a.k.a. our “terror alerts” and their “recommended paranoia levels”).

Military installations, the Constabulary, the EMA, hospitals, etc., do often have a bunch of color-coded response codes (“alerts” and “conditions”) to instruct everyone exactly which immediate situation they ought to be responding to, however, so the “emergency squad scramble” aspect of this trope is played straight.

Trope-a-Day: Elaborate Underground Base

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Elaborate Underground Base: The Imperial Military Service (various, with special props going to the Imperial Navy’s hollow hangar moon at Palaxias IIb), the Imperial Emergency Management Authority’s Crisis Citadels, more than a few data havens, the original location of Argyran Depository, the Nightfall Complexes (retreats for city populations in the event of nuclear war, asteroid impact, etc.), and oh, yes, all the entire cities built down there by people who just found that they liked it…

Trope-a-Day: Defcon Five

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2

Defcon Five: Three of these systems, actually.  The Admiralty has its “strategic condition” levels, in both global and theater senses, ranging from Six (“all is peaceful, quiet, tranquil, and frankly boring”) to One (“full-blown war, or, if this is the global level, galactic armageddon”).

Likewise, the Emergency Management Authority has its “civil emergency states” on a matching scale, where Six is “everything’s working just like it should, no trouble”, and One is “did anyone get the number of that asteroid?”; and the Imperial Security Executive has its “exceptional security alertness” scale, colloquially known as the “recommended paranoia level”, which runs Blue, White, Amber, Red, Violet, Black, where Blue is “nothing to see here” and Black is “total shitstorm, kill anything vaguely suspicious on sight, apologize later”.

Trope-a-Day: Big Brother Is Watching

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3

Big Brother Is Watching: And his name, in the Empire, is Citizen Oversight.

Subverted, rather, inasmuch as it’s not principally a law enforcement instrumentality.  It, and its extensive surveillance/geolocation/other-sensory grid, drones, etc. – in public spaces only, and privately-owned-but-open-to-the-public don’t count (i.e., those places where, by law and custom, you have no expectation of privacy) – and its data mining/correlation application exist primarily to provide the raw data feed that gets broken down into the statistical information that even a government as minimal as the Empire’s needs to keep things running efficiently.  (Indeed, Citizen Oversight is not part of the Ministry of Harmonious Serenity with the other law enforcement/security instrumentalities; it’s under the Ministry of the Empire, instead, which mostly handles civic infrastructure functions and includes the Protectorate of Balance, Externality, and the Commons.)

They do, however, have non-sophont AI monitors watching the raw feed which will drop a line to the Watch Constabulary if they see a need for police or paramedics, or to the Emergency Management Authority, or to the people responsible for doing maintenance on public property, and so on and so forth.

Subverted doubly inasmuch as this is by no means a private government grid; under the Transparency Act – and because it helps to pay for it – it’s available for use by any member of the public who wants it, from advertisers, journalists, sousveillants and bloggers to the old lady down the street, with the commensurate uses they find for it in play.

It is to be noted that this isn’t supposed to be dystopian, nor would the notion that it might be even occur to anyone there – despite the fact that I, for one, wouldn’t trust any Earth government with even a fraction of this kind of panopticon.  In a culture that is both vastly more freewheeling than ours in most ways (and strongly maintains the notion in etiquette of not interfering in that which is not your proper concern) and which supports a much smaller and less intrusive government… well, the locals like the notion that ambulances will be dispatched to accidents before they’re done happening, that the police will always be called as soon as possible, that problems are reported instantly, that all the advertising they see is relevant to their interests, etc.

In Time of Emergency, The Rules Suspend The Rules

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Under section 31(c) of the Imperial Emergency Management Act (Revised), 4111, in fulfillment of the Charter mandate to promote the common and mutual defense of civilization from cataclysms of nature, and exercising by herein-authorized proxy the Responsibility of Eminent Domain;

When a Class II or higher emergency has been declared by the Imperial Emergency Management Authority, or when an emergency is in progress and the Emergency Communications System is off-line;

And in the absence of duly Mandate-authorized authority, including all officers of the Ministry of Harmonic Observance;

In such situations as it shall be necessary to prevent further harm to life or property, or to perform essential works of infrastructure reconstruction, citizen-shareholders shall be authorized to enter unattended commercial (retail or storage) property, containing construction materials or repair supplies, within the zone of the Emergency in an orderly manner, and appropriate therefrom such goods as are necessary for the prevention of harm or performance of essential works, as stated.  Such appropriations shall be recorded at the site from which they were made, and the owners of said property may claim due recompense at the market price for such appropriations from the Imperial Emergency Management Authority.

Citizen-shareholders are reminded that the appropriation of any goods not required to prevent harm to life or property or to perform essential works of infrastructure reconstruction, to fail to properly record all such appropriations, or to cause any unnecessary property damage, or to leave property vulnerable to further damage, in the course of such appropriation is forbidden under section 31(c) of the aforementioned Act, and shall constitute the crime of looting.  In times of Class II or higher emergency, looters are considered enemies of the public safety, and are to be shot on sight; citizen-shareholders are further reminded that the law enforcement duty is the responsibility of every citizen-shareholder, especially in emergency situations.

It should also be noted that the privilege of appropriation conferred by section 31(c) is intended to cover emergencies of unusual duration, and that the responsible citizen-shareholder should not consider it a substitute for individual crisis readiness, as delineated on pp. 432-440.  Remember, a prepared Empire is a safe Empire!

– Codex of Civic Services and Citizen Responsibilities, 117th edition