Bad Kitty

The reason to write a history-themed book, whether history, alternate history, or "archaeological thriller" (which seems to be the only common catch-all term for "things from history impact a story set in the present") is to enjoy history. Both the well-known, but also the lesser know. Or, at least, lesser-known aspects of the well-known.

And sometimes that involves changing the history, because real history is too messy and hard to cram into a plot that has the right story arc to it with dramatic payoff and proper resolution, or is just has some inconvenient date or location.

My feeling is it is better to change it than to lose it entirely. As long as your changes are to the letter of it (June instead of July) and don't change the underlying meaning (it had to be July because that's when the monsoon season begins).

In July of 2014 an explosion occurred at the Waste Isolation Plant Prototype in the southeast corner of New Mexico. It released radioactive materials and caused the complete shut-down of all operations for a number of years. The barrel of waste at fault began at LANL (Los Alamos National Laboratories) during their own trouble years (specifically called out in some reports as between 2008 and 2016), and was the fault of the use (by apparently a subcontractor) of the wrong brand of kitty litter.

I really want this incident to be mentioned in my New Mexico murder mystery, set in early 2019. I want to (will) use as a clue, a silly little logo of kitty litter in the circle with a line through it, used as a jokey promotional item by a rival waste clean-up contractor.

That contractor, who is currently going by "EvilKitty" in my notes, (pretty sure I'm going for something like "Patriot Compliance Solutions" as the company got big at the tail end of Reagan's presidency), may be all over Penny's little mystery. And is the element that ties both plots together; the victims of the nuclear industry, and the Cold War secret that someone is willing to murder to keep. Oh, and also make a neater way of getting Lon Davis, the Atlas F site outside Roswell, and Penny's investigation of the dead body at White Sands into one single whole.

The timing is bad, though.

There was an earlier incident at LANL with some plutonium rods. That one was in 2011 and really kicked off the Los Alamos exodus that all but crippled their plutonium work for several years.

2011 is also closer to the ballpark for another important clue. Sand. The White Sands Footprints were discovered in 2009 and may have been because an unusual amount of sand had dried out and been lifted by the wind (a typical cyclic event of the dunes) following the drought of 2006-2008.

I decided I very much still want The Thrice-Dug Grave (which would have been a lovely title if I was doing straight mystery stories and not a series that was supposed to be archaeological thriller). For that grave to work it needed to have someone digging the body back up around ten years before the date of the story. Chose a zone around 2011 and this is pretty close to the sweet spot when Freeman would have left LANL, Juan Baca's body was dug up in search of The Source (aka the McGuffin), the refilled grave would be about eight years old when Penny dug it again during the Bell-Bleekman excavations just outside Holloman AFB, and enough white gypsum sands would have been in the backfill to provide an important clue.

But I really wanted this to happen at the same time the Test Bed (nearby in WSMR) got a final clean-up, and it would be really, really handy if someone could drop a matchbook...err, a cheap little pin with the cat piss logo on it at that site.

But not only is this jumping the gun on the shut-downs at LANL and WIPP, it almost makes more sense with the timeline and politics that much of this clean-up happened within a smaller number of years following the redirection of Star Wars from brilliant pebbles...and a ambitiously wunderwaffen-type effort to pull Project Pluto out of mothballs as yet another proposal Reagan might have been willing to pay for.