No Sleep.

Our tragedy here in 2019 is not so much the diseases that are untreatable, like ReDS; ou r tragedy is the loss of life continuously from perfectly treatable diseases. The World Health Map tells the story, cholera is almost always up very high on this list. Usually the problem is poor water quality. Political strife and famine underlay these issues nearly every time.

If you are keeping score of what is going on you know that we have made some progress. The ravenous update tells us people are finally tearing down fences. The techniques already in use in India and Africa are slowly filtering west. Of course the news from DCAR and India is grim these days. Already India has dealt with a massive human tragedy of epic proportions when the country was split in the last century. It has been difficult to struggle past the cultural and political differences most of all in the regions along the border with Pakistan.

After I spent a long day in video conference with the Director of the Federal Foresight Agency I just can't sleep. There were about four of us most of the conversation and the information saturation about the plight of the most vulnerable feeding stations was intense. Maybe its the moon, really its so intense and bright tonight that I thought the sun was coming up already. Of course the situation has been dire for children in these very vulnerable situations for awhile, of course in some ways things are no different tonight than they have ever been.

Still no sleep.

We need new myths. In the old myths when Sarasvati jumped its banks and dried up the people followed Shiva to the Ganges. With the help of the mystical plant they made their way to a new river. The key was surviving with an utterly new food source, and being willing to find a new way of creating a home and food and fiber and fuel for your family.

For a long time the seed work was enough. Ark saving and keeping diversity in some of the more useful plants is rewarding because you can see real physical results from your work. The strain work with the cyano and the algae and now fungus is even more rewarding because they cycle very quickly and because such a great number of people are working on the project now. I even heard that someone in Ventura California used one of my old cyano strains that liked brackish salty water was bred to not only produce quality cellulose, it was developed with a mild green bioluminescence which beyond being amazing to look at in the new clear acrylic tanks set with fiber optics. The bio luminescence serves as a useful marker for when the batch is nearing maturity. Its easy to see the extracting layer when you put it in the spinner too.


Every year we get faster, more collaborative, there are more bright green answers. Of course there is more noise injected into the system these days. The news is so amazingly bad, that we have learned to mostly ignore it and focus on our SEHI networks. It has been gratifying to have so many eyes and ears worldwide and the children have really enjoyed sending out seed packages.

The system noise has gotten so intense its hard to know how bad things really are. It took almost a week for us here to sort out the details of who really truly had a relative in dire straits and who was being griefed. Ten of our G team members rode out in the last week headed for the city, maybe for good. There is work in the world and some people care more about the survival of the human social colony than they do their own personal safety. There was a call out for black rock rangers to come fill civic duty slots at the refugee feeding centers outside Sacramento. These G team members have a lot of muscle and a lot of tech to bring with them. Mostly they are working on setting up aquaculture in the rice fields.

Annie May earned her first three fish yesterday. These are the clear acrylic skill markers that we use in our penguin game. Her face was flushed with excitement as she ran up to the house to show them to me, leaving Tarran trailing behind with his persistent loping gait. She had a bright pink one with a number one on it for numbers, a bright yellow one on it with an "A" for letters, and a clear one with an eye on it to show that she had learned to name all of her primary body parts. Tarran was smiling as I waded through the torrent of alphabet letters that immediately came pouring out of the little girl as she touched her necklace of colored dangling fish. His cheeks were still a little golden from the sun even though it was mostly rain this week, and his blonde and brown beard had a small touch of salt and pepper in it from a few Grey hairs. He was an amazing man to take on and care for our little volunteer orphan.

It was official as well. Before Jacob started working for the District Attourney's office in Eureka he used to work as a "child snatcher". He would go into the worst scenarios imaginable and literally get the kid out. That was another reason that our Annie Mae knew to go to him. The kids and the people in the Hobo squats knew who he was, he had a sort of dark angel reputation. Annie Mae was not the first kid he got our of a bad scene probably just in the nick of time.

It was funny to watch her sort of twirl around the center of the workshop reciting and reciting her recently learned tools. It was easy to see that she would be reading in short time. Her movements had started to change and her whole body had a new softer character. Some of that was the change in her diet and the amount of fat she was allowed to eat now. It was mostly brain building grease...there wasn't time to grow much else. She ate a lot of seed butter and toast. Some of it was that she had stopped moving and trying to act like a man. Or even more so like a Hobo, always exhibiting signs of distress, always fretting. She seemed more like a child now with the rapt open gaze of someone taking in the world for deep information.

As soon as she had made it through most of the colors in the room (her next fish she was chasing after) she calmed down. One of the experimental algae tanks had some guppies breeding in it in somewhat of a closed system that cycled with other tanks of cyano to see how much use the tech had for aquaclture. For a few moments Tarran and I watched her as her face was illuminated by the fiber optics bringing dim cloudy sunlight into the tank. Annie Mae mouthed the colors of the guppy tails to herself as she watched them in the tank.

"I guess we are going to move Martha and Stump and their two kids over to the Blue House" Tarran said by way of getting down to business. "I think Annie Mae is almost ready to start going up the hill with the other kids to school a couple of days a week."

We walked out towards the back door as I asked the next question. "What did the judge say?". I tried not to let the nervousness creep into my voice but the long day longbroading with the future fed guy had worn me down.

"He said that I was lucky there was really no where else for her to go" said Tarran. "her mom never showed up at all or filed a report and there is no trace of her... not even entirely sure who she is." Tarran lowered his voice to make certain that he was out of range of the child as we watched her sing to herself watching the aquarium fish. As we exchanged long glances that pretty much communicated that we feared that Annie Mae truly was an orphan she placed one of her little acrylic fish on the wall of the tank and made it swim.