Brink of Humanity pt. 2
Brink of Humanity
Part Two
This is the third time I have tried to write this part. In the two previous attempts, something felt off. Not about the story, mind you, but about the way I was presenting it. After that previous portion that set the stage for everything that was to come, this second part felt dry. In reality, this part of the story was more fun for me than that first part. I got to see my dreams come alive, I got to see the fruits of my labor. Bear that in mind as you read my accounting of the next five years, condensed into a few simple pages.
The Federal Government refused to answer my calls. When I threatened to come forward, they threatened Angela. Left with no other options, I formulated plans for weeks. Unfortunately, the only one I came up with was highly illegal and had a high chance of failing to save any of the human race. To make an inordinately long story short, I would have to collapse an economy, and steal close to a trillion dollars to get things started. With that in mind, I set out to find some old friends.
In college, I made several friends who would go to the ends of the Earth and back if I asked them nicely enough. Keeping that in mind, it might be a bit tricky to get any of their help to crash the economy of a country and steal a trillion dollars. My Alma Mater was unique in that it had the premiere Aerospace Engineering program as well as having the premiere Global Security and Intelligence program. I had friends in the CIA, the FBI and every agency in between. Of course, I also had friends on Wall Street who had been Business Majors when I met them.
My first task was to bring the two friends I’d need for the job into the loop. My security expert was Roger. Roger was a bit eccentric. Sometimes it seemed he was perfectly normal, and then he’d switch to being paranoid and argumentative in the next moment. Regardless, he was the best I’d ever seen at matters of security. For the business side of things, I went to Julie. Julie was a bombshell, but didn’t fit that stereotype in the slightest. She was brilliant and shy, but she knew the insides and out of business like no one else.
Again to make a long story short, I’ll skip the minutia of the job. The basis was simple: Crash Russia’s economy and using several shrewd business maneuvers, make a trillion dollars. Of course, nothing went one hundred percent to plan, but the three of us made it out alive, with slightly more than a trillion dollars.
The first thing I did was buy a small island near the equator. That would be integral later.
The plan actually involved the construction of a ship, one that utilized my design for a warp drive. To start, I needed to make sure the engine actually worked. So, I began working on a prototype warp ship. The design was tricky, so I brought in my best friend from college, who had up until then, worked for NASA. Dan Weaver had shared every single lab class I had to take with me. We struggled through the most challenging labs conceivable. At the end of our journey, we were the top two students. I called Dan, asking for help. The conversation went something like this, “Hey Dan, I need your help on a project. It’s life and death.”
“I’ll pack my bags.” No questions asked, he hopped on a plane and met me in three hours. After explaining the situation, we got to work. By the one year anniversary, we had constructed the first prototype, with a small variant of my Warp drive. We built it a two seater, and constructed a railgun type system to accelerate us into orbit of Earth without having to use any fuel.
We looked at each other as we lined up our trajectory. If this test failed catastrophically, we’d be stuck out in space somewhere with just two days worth of oxygen in our suits. The nearest I could figure, the drive itself worked logarithmically, we could go from zero to one times the speed of light at one tenth intervals. From there we could go from one to ten times the speed of light at intervals of one, and so on. Based on that, we worked out a naming based on that scale. Warp One was the speed of light. Warp Two was ten times the speed of light and so on.
We had the ship locked to a maximum of Warp Two. We’d fly to Jupiter at Warp One, and then fly back at Warp Two. Seeing as no human had even set foot on Mars, we were about to make history. I looked over to Dan and he nodded, telling me all systems were operating normally. I punched in our exit coordinates, and threw the lever that dropped us into subspace, and into Warp speed.
Unlike conventional rockets, Warp Drives hummed at a relatively low frequency but caused very little noise. As we slipped into warp speed we immediately noticed a tremor shaking through the ship, but after a few very tense seconds it subsided into that low rhythmic hum. The next forty three minutes were spent recording all the data coming in on the consoles in front of us to analyze once we were safely back on Earth.
One of the things we had built in for these prototypes was a timer to track how long we were in warp. At forty three minutes seventeen seconds, the timer stopped and we dropped out of warp seventy thousand kilometers from Jupiter, a safe enough distance for our purpose. After a full suite of system checks that lasted close to an hour, we dropped back into warp for our return trip.
At Warp Two, it should take about four minutes 20 seconds to return to Earth. Unfortunately, at Warp Two, the ship had a very bad habit of shuddering the entire trip, so as we arrived back at Earth, and the timer stopped at four minutes nineteen point six seconds, we were ready for solid ground again.
After that first test, we went through two more variants before attempting anything greater than Warp Two. We had to do a complete redesign of the ships structure to avoid the Warp Core vibrating at the natural frequency of the ship. The current version had a natural frequency that would be nigh on impossible to achieve with the Warp Core.
Our test with version three was to fly out to Pluto, who had recently been returned to Planetary status. The trip at Warp Three would take four or so minutes, and the return trip at Warp Four would take just over twenty-five seconds. Having grown up in the town where Pluto was discovered, it would be a life changing moment to see the little ball of ice up close.
This time, we parked the ship about one thousand kilometers off from Pluto, and began to take data of all our systems, making note of the accuracy of our navigation system. The return trip was smooth as could be, so we decided to really push things, to really get a feel for the systems. At Warp Five, we could make it to Alpha Centauri in four hours time, and make it back in twenty three minutes at Warp Six.
Four and a half hours later, we were back on Earth having seen things no one had before. For now, that speed would be sufficient.
In the six months since I got home, Angela had become more distant. To be fair, I was away a lot, and when I did see her, it was only for a quick word here or there. It didn’t take a lot for me to read her silence. She felt that I had something to prove, that I was trying too hard to prove that my story was true, and worse yet, she thought I was fabricating the whole thing rather than tell the truth.
This hurt, but I knew there was nothing I could say to change her mind. The only way to do that would be to show her the ship in its finished version. So, for the next three years while construction began and progressed, I saw Angela even less.
Dan and I worked together to design The Exodus, as we were calling her. The construction would take four years at best, and would suck up close to the last of our resources. Below is the original sketch of the ship that was made during this design phase.
Over that three year period, I worked at developing the technology we’d need to survive in space. The Warp Drive was the big one, and it was constantly being revised with updates as I thought of improvements. Apart from that, there were three other important devices.
First was artificial gravity. We’ve learned that prolonged exposure to a microgravity environment can have a detrimental effect on human physiology, so having gravity similar to Earth was an important thing. I got that one figured out by the end of the first year, and the solution was trickier than it should have been. But alas, no one ever said Physics was easy.
Second was a way to travel in space without having to use liquid propellant. We’re talking here about short distances, distances too short to use the Warp Drive safely. That one was done with a variant on the warp drive. Since I based my theory on Star Trek, I decided to call it an Impulse engine even though that isn’t anywhere close to what it actually is. The engine basically harnesses the dark energy of subspace and pulls the ship along like pulling yourself on a rope.
That gets us to the third device. Inertia is a real *****. Speed up too fast and you get slammed into the walls behind you, slow down too fast and you get thrown forward. To counteract this, I developed a system that slips the ship into and out of subspace for a nanosecond at a time, and that counteracted the effect of Inertia for the times when we needed to move without the Warp Drive. In theory, we could also use it to generate shielding that brings the ship out of phase with anything coming at us.
With that out of the way, I gathered my crew as construction continued. Dan had agreed to be my Chief Engineer, so that wouldn’t be a problem. I had several friends who were pilots, but the one I chose to be on my main crew was Ivan. For Science on the bridge, we’d have my biologist friend Kelly. Our communications would be put in the capable hands of Willard Mullins, Mullins to anyone who didn’t want a punch in the face. Security as I said before was in Rogers hands, and Tactical would go to my friend who designed our weapons, Cathy Simmons.
Speaking of Weapons, we sported a new type of pulse cannon that, by all accounts, could lay waste to a battleship in two shots. Hopefully that would do the job, but if something with a little more oompf was required, we had a store full of Antimatter warheads that could, theoretically, destroy L.A. in one shot.
My second task for the three years was selecting forty thousand people who we would save from Earth’s destruction. Based on Kelly’s research, a stable colony needed at least forty thousand people, with twenty three thousand males and females of reproductive age, and the rest being made of adolescents and the more elderly. If we finished The Exodus early, we’d take as many as possible to our first colony.
The selection process was difficult. We tried to find people without genetic defects, and enough people to keep the gene pool diverse, but we also tried to find people without violent tendencies. That last one was the tricky part, so we decided it would be better to remove genetic defects from non-violent people who fit the bill.
Using that process, we compiled a list of one hundred twenty thousand people who we would try to take with us. The Exodus could hold forty thousand if necessary, but it wouldn’t make for a comfortable ride. Normally, the crew complement of The Exodus would only be one thousand people, just to give a scale.
My final project during the three years was finding several suitable colonies for our exodus. Taking week long trips at Warp Seven and a very efficient search pattern, I covered ten thousand lightyears of space, and found five suitable planets for colonization with no hostile life, and rich ecosystems.
The three years passed quickly, and The Exodus was close to a eight months ahead of schedule. We were about to launch into orbit to finish the final construction of the interior components from there. I had moved into my quarters a month ago, leaving Angela my house for her use. Nova and I had been living pretty comfortably, while I kept track of the final preparations and the transfer of as much of the internet onto the ship’s computer system.
Then, out of the blue, I got a call from Angela. I missed the first five words, as I thought of how long it had been since I’d heard from her. It had to have been five months. Anyways, I refocused in time to hear, “...you. I can’t believe that all this time I’ve been thinking… God, do you even know what I’ve been thinking? I thought you had been with another woman in Europe, and were making up this crazy story for my benefit, and to cover your ***. God what a fool I’ve been. I’m so sorry, can you forgive me?”
I replied simply with, “A ticket will be waiting for you at the airport, pack your bags.” and then a smile broke out on my face and I ended with, “I love you.” and hung up before she had a chance to say anything. With that, I finally felt like we would be successful in saving a piece of humanity. I then made my phone call to the airport and made sure a ticket for the next plane was waiting at the counter under the name Angela Wells.
The five hours for her flight to land at the nearest airport were some of the longest in my life. She got off the plane and saw me standing on the tarmac and ran over to me. I was barely able to keep standing as I was hit with the biggest hug I think I had ever received. Walking arm in arm, I led her to where we had a helicopter waiting to take us to our little island and current home of The Exodus.
The ride was long but Angela and I had a lot to talk about. Actually, it was more of me explaining what we had done in the last three years, and asking her not to apologize anymore, than anything else. When the island finally came into sight, Angela’s jaw dropped as the Exodus came into focus. She shook her head as we stepped out of the helicopter and walked toward The Exodus.
She was an impressive seven hundred meters in length, with a base height of one hundred meters before the warp rings were added. She was four hundred meters at her widest, with the central ring having a diameter of four hundred forty meters. The two outer rings were smaller at three hundred eighty meters. From the outside she looked completed, but as soon as you stepped inside, you could tell there was a lot of work to be done before she was fully prepared to leave.
“Barring any complications, she’ll be done in four months. All the basic systems are in place; the warp drive, the gravity generator, the impulse engine and the inertial compensators. We still have to get the weapons mounted and calibrated, and we still have most of the rooms to furnish. The command quarters are two decks down from the bridge, with the crew quarters one below that.” As we talked, I showed her around the ship, showing off the highlights as we passed them.
“Do you have space enough for me?” Angela asked hesitantly, as if afraid of the answer.
“Would you like to see your quarters?” I replied with a smile. At the time, we were standing in front of my quarters.
“Very much so!” She replied nodding. I took her by the hand and told her to close her eyes, then I led her in a circuitous path around the floor, ending back up across from my room. I pointed her in the right direction and told her to open her eyes. Looking around, it took her several seconds to realize we hadn’t gone anywhere. “You knew,” she said, “you knew all along.”
“I wasn’t about to leave you here for when the world ended…” I smiled and showed her all the amenities offered by one of the command quarters.
The next day, it was time to launch into a geostationary orbit. There was a skeleton crew on board with Ivan, Kelly and myself on the bridge to oversee the process. Angela had elected to stay on Earth to get her things in order. With Nova at my side, I barked, “Take her up.” With a roar of the impulse engines, we felt the brief tug of acceleration before it was quashed by the inertial compensators. Mere minutes later, we had achieved our target orbit, and could finally finish construction.
With the artificial gravity operating as it should, I walked back to my quarters and prepared to sleep my first night in my future home, dog curled up at my side.
The next five months went relatively well, with only one minor mishap, ending in the decompression of one section between two bulkheads.Fortunately, everyone made it out alive. Every component was now in place, every system operating, all air scrubbers and food services working at peak efficiency. Mullins had finished analyzing the alien database, and learned seemingly everything but their name.
As it turned out, the aliens had very limited Warp capacity, making their journey significantly longer than ours. At their speed, we could run laps around them. Unfortunately, if they ever caught us, we’d have a hell of a time defending ourselves. With this in mind, and seven months to go, we started shuttling our colonists to their new home.
The place I had selected turned out to be perfect for human life, and with the first batch of colonists being engineers and construction workers we got the base camp built in no time. Since we had seven months, we were able to take things slower. We could shuttle a group there and get back in just over two weeks. This left ample time to prepare those we couldn’t take.
As you could imagine, the rest of humanity was starting to get restless. Publicity agents were hounding my crew at every chance they got. If it hadn’t been for the fact that the government was silencing most major news networks, I think we would have had a hard time under that much pressure. With each successive batch of colonists, we saw the progress at their new home. With advances in technology, we decided it best to have a form of government that was in line with a direct democracy. We also did our best to make sure everyone had what they needed, and any amenities could be purchased with labor or work, or a simple form of credits gained from such endeavors.
With just three weeks to the estimated arrival, we were loading the last group to be transported. All of a sudden, the proximity sensor on the bridge began to blare. Our sensors had detected a ripple in subspace that could mean only one thing. They were early. Just as the last shuttle made it up from Earth, the first ships broke through.
At that precise time, we set two actions to occur. First, we sent a worm into the internet which erased all scientific data we had ever collected, to ensure the aliens gained nothing. Second, a video went live on every monitor and screen across the world, being translated into each local language.
“Citizens of Earth,” an image of me spoke. “The time has come that you know the truth,” and with that I told of the government coverups and the events that led to today. I then promised, as soon as we could return and drive back the alien force, we would liberate them. “Until then, save yourselves. Do as they tell you but never lose hope for the future. I don’t know when, but we will be back.”
By the time the message ended on Earth, we were already past Alpha Centauri. With a heavy heart, I transmitted the message across the ship, and we took a moment of silence for the fall of Earth.
We stayed on New Earth, as the colonists were calling it, for several weeks, helping to make sure everything was prepared for the colonists to survive on their own for up to a year without us. We gathered our crew, and set a course for the outer regions of the galaxy, setting the sensors to alert us if we passed within a dozen light years of any planet or celestial point of interest.
Our journey was one of exploration, but we could never escape the taint left by the occupation of Earth. At each stop, we’d try and find any way to liberate our people. The odds seemed slim, but we always had hope.
Part Three - Coming Soon
