PM Hoyle sighed audibly, like she did when her young daughter or son wanted something really expensive and she had already said no’ “Listen, Chattem hurt our ‘special relationship’ with the Americans deeply — apparently more deeply than we had initially thought. President Gates, and his successor, Foss, lost trust and faith with Britain. For years leading up to the war, they’ve seen nothing from us but anti-American, anti-Gates protests; then when the war broke out, PM Edwards’s initial lack of support to NATO, and then Chattem’s outright betrayal, put our nation in a bad light with the Americans. They don’t trust us. Even now, if you look outside the security cordon, what do you see? Endless protests to end the war, and anti-American sentiment. We haven’t exactly been a champion of American support, despite the horrific losses they’ve sustained. Let’s not forget, the Americans already lost over a million civilians when the cities of Oakland and San Francisco were nuked at the beginning of the Korean War, and over a hundred thousand American soldiers have been killed fighting in Europe for a third time in less than a hundred years.
“We have a lot of reputational repair to do with our American brothers before I believe they will trust us with their innermost secrets again.” She paused for a second before adding, “If it makes you feel any better, they didn’t warn any of the other European allies either. Putting this aside, let’s discuss what we’re doing to make sure the loss of our satellites doesn’t have a long-term negative side effect on the economy or the country.”
Home Secretary Damien Mundell responded, “I have a video telecom with my counterpart in the US. After reviewing the read ahead, it looks like she is going to discuss with my department what the US is currently doing to mitigate the loss of the satellite infrastructure. Apparently, they had been working with Google, SpaceX, Facebook, Amazon and a few other technology giants well in advance and have come up with some sort of plan they feel will work around this newly created problem. I’ll have more to brief to you all on this next Thursday.”
Several attendees nodded in approval.
MP Greg Hancock interjected, “My department has been working diligently with BT and Deutsche Telekom to get our communications and internet services back up and running. While our local telephone services have thus far been unaffected, our ability to make overseas calls has been seriously degraded. We’ve spoken with our American colleagues, and for the time being, all overseas calls, international time syncing, and the internet are going to be rerouted though the underseas cables.
“The American Department of Homeland Security has established an atomic clock, located at their Massachusetts Institute for Technology in Boston. It’s the central focal point for their internet activity, and also their connectivity to the rest of Europe and the world. This atomic clock is piped into the internet exchange, ensuring that all connections from the outside world to the American internet are time-synced through them. We’re establishing our own atomic clock syncing in Newquay, on the west coast of the country, where our underwater sea cables connect with the ones in America. The French and Germans are likewise setting up the same system where our cables connect with them, and their cables connect with the Americans. It’s going to take a few days to get everything sorted, but once we have this set up, it’s going to solve a lot of the latency problems and issues we’ve been having with the internet,” he concluded.
“Greg, can you take a moment to elaborate on why this time clocking is so important?” asked PM Hoyle for the benefit of the others in the room.
Sighing at having to explain something technical to a nontechnical crowd, he nodded and proceeded to explain the issue. “The loss of the global GPS satellites immediately affected the world’s economy in many different ways. First, GPS satellites essentially act as highly accurate and synchronized atomic clocks in space, transmitting a uniform time signal to earth. Our receivers on the ground, like your car or smartphone, pick up these time signals from three or more satellites and then compare that time. That allows the device on earth to know exactly where it is. The reason why that’s so important is because we live in an era of just-in-time delivery of nearly everything.”
Seeing some of the MPs were not totally tracking what he was saying, MP Hancock tried to elaborate. “When your wife or husband goes down to the grocery store to buy some groceries, those items are scanned at the checkout counter. That item is deducted from the number of items the store currently has in stock. When that item hits a certain level of inventory, the store’s inventory system will generate a request to restock that item from the grocery store’s warehouse. The warehouse will then dispatch a delivery truck the following day with the requested items to restock the store. Likewise, when the warehouse runs low on something, it sends a restocking request to its food producers, and so on. When the GPS satellites go down, then the computer systems won’t be able to automatically route the delivery trucks to restock the grocery stores. The warehouses and grocery stores will have to fall back on manual systems to do this. This will cause delays in deliveries for the entire supply chain. This is a serious problem because most grocery stores, pharmacies, and other stores currently typically only hold seventy-two hours’ worth of grocery products. This is largely done because of limited storage space at a grocery store, and to limit the amount of food waste that would happen if a store overstocked an item and it didn’t sell.”
Hoyle could see that everyone was starting to grasp the seriousness of the situation. Hancock continued, “For better or worse, our infrastructure is held together by time. Time stamps on financial transactions are the very protocols that hold the internet together. When packets of data are transmitted between computers and the internet nodes get out of sync, the entire system starts to break down. That’s why the Americans immediately began to run all of their external communication cables through their ground-based atomic clocks. This latency issue from being out of sync may cause considerable problems in nearly every aspect of our economy, which is why it’s critical that we get it under control.”
The rest of the meeting was spent on figuring out what needed to be done to get the country stabilized and ready to deal with the new reality of no satellites, at least until the end of the war.
Chancellor Schneider read over a report from Federal Minister of Transport and Digital Infrastructure Jens Scheuer on how they were going to fix the current internet and communications problem the country had been experiencing the past forty-eight hours since the Chinese began to systematically destroy the world’s satellite infrastructure. As she read, she silently nodded in agreement. The others in the room stared silently at her, waiting to see what she would say next.
She finally looked up at Minister Scheuer and smiled. “This is good,” she responded. “More than good — this is excellent. You said the Americans sent this to you earlier today?” she asked.
Minister Jens Scheuer nodded. “Yes,” he replied. “It was the first thing in my inbox. My office has been working with Deutsche Telekom since this morning, and already we’ve been able to mitigate the latency issues we’ve been having with our internet. Once we have everything running through our own atomic clock and synced up with the Americans, our internet should be functioning more or less as it was before. We’ll still experience some bandwidth issues, but this will resolve a lot with regard to searches and queries.”
Minister of Economics Peter Maas interjected, “This will solve part of our problem, but the other issue we have is with our logistics and supply chains. Most organizations have no way of being able to track where their orders are or if they have been delivered. These are serious issues that aren’t going to be quickly solved, even once our internet has been properly time-synced with the Americans and the rest of our EU and Allied partners.” He looked thoroughly exhausted and haggard.