Singularity - Chapter 10: Priscilla

Chapter 10: Priscilla

The president didn’t look up as an aide entered his office. He had been interrupted too many times today, and he was behind on reviewing the monthly Senate summary. If he didn’t get through it soon, he would be late for his appointment at the club. His table golf partners never seemed to respect his position of power the same way most others did. He was powerless in their presence, since most of them were old business associates of his father’s, and many had great investments in the purification industry. At any rate, he enjoyed spending time with them, it was a relief to be able to relax once in a while, and just enjoy a few drinks. Still, the interruptions were becoming an annoyance, and his response to his aide was less than gracious. Eyes closed, he grumbled, “What is it now?”

“I’m sorry sir.” Was the reply, but what surprised President Rennet was that the voice was female.

He looked up to see Dania at the door. Immediately, his voice softened, “I’m sorry Dania, it’s been a tough day. What can I do for you?”

“Priscilla Faust and Garst Jasper have returned from Mars. Albrick Hunter would like to have a word with you about their findings.” Dania was obviously shaken from the President’s reaction a moment ago, and her voice was slightly shaky as she spoke. “May I send him in?”

“Yes, please do.” The president arranged the papers on his desk as Dania returned to the door. “Oh, and please let Mr. Hunter know that I only have a few minutes, so he should be brief. I find these meetings go much more quickly if the schedule is set beforehand. Thank you Dania, as always, you are a terrific assistant.”

The door had almost closed as Albrick shuffled through, and helped himself to a seat across from the President’s desk. He was always annoyed by how the president never acknowledged him when he came in, but just kept his eyes on his desk, as if there were more important things to do. It could be very disarming, but Albrick refused to let it bring him down. He determined that he would just be bold this time around.

“Mr. President, I thought…”

“Hold on Albrick.”

Albrick lost his focus. How had the President done it again? How could he consistently get under Albrick’s skin, and throw his mind off of what he was there for. It was as if the President enjoyed conflict so much that he had to find a way to incite it. Albrick sat in the chair, tapping his fingers on the lightly padded armrest.

The president looked up as he set some papers aside, “Ok Albrick, what do you want to say?”

“I was hoping to give you an update on the status of the Homestead mission.”

“Homestead? Oh, right, the Mars thing.” The president said, with obvious mock disinterest.

“Two of our staff members returned unannounced from Mars, Priscilla Faust and Garst Jasper.”

“Didn’t we send four?”

“Yes, precisely. We sent four staff, only two of our staff returned. The craft only has space for 4 passengers, so two of the staff, Elliot Adams and Sarah Angler remained at the base on Mars. The reason was that Faust and Jasper returned with two other people.”

“Wait, other people? What other people?” The president’s voice contained tangible interest and wonder at the idea of mystery people returning from Mars. Albrick was happy, he had finally gotten the President’s full attention.

Albrick grinned, “My question was the same. It turns out that the previous Mars missions from Pre-Travesty had created a base on Mars as a sort of research station. The Homestead team arrived, and to their surprise, they were met by a very full base of people. The people there had survived many generations on Mars, and had no contact with Earth during the time, due to the lack of communications satellites after the wars.”

“Fascinating. Albrick, hold that thought a second.” The President pressed a button on his desk, “Dania, can you bring me the files on Faust and Jasper? Thank you.” He released the button, “Albrick, please continue.”

“So after some discussion, and catching up, they discovered that the Genesis people, they call their base Genesis, I don’t think I mentioned that, the Genesis people were stationed there for the purpose of studying deep space travel to neighboring stars. Apparently, they discovered ways to do it, but after one journey, gave up on it because they didn’t find much when they got there. Anyway, since then, they’ve been living there, and have survived all these years.”

“Wait, they figured out how to travel to other star systems? That’s amazing.” Albrick could tell that the whole story had touched a special nerve in the President’s heart, which brought out a child-like curiosity. “Tell me more!”

Dania walked in and left the files on the president’s desk. The president didn’t even notice, he was so engaged in what Albrick was saying.

Albrick continued, smiling to Dania as she came in, “Well, we don’t know much else at this point. The Genesis people have said that they have certain secrets that they don’t wish to share just yet, they wanted to have discussions with us here on Earth before they shared any of that with us. At any rate, they sent two of their leadership staff here to have discussions with you, and see if there’s any way to come to a cooperation agreement.”

As if a switch were flipped in the President’s mood, he shifted back into Presidential mode. “It’s unfortunate they don’t trust us. We will need to remedy that. Of course I will discuss things with their ambassadors, but I’d like to debrief the Homestead staff first.”

He looked at the edge of his desk, suddenly noticing the files Dania had brought. He looked at the door, and then back down at the files. He opened them up and briefly scanned the first pages of each. He read quickly, with the occasional ‘mmhmm’ and ‘uh huh’ before putting each aside.

“I’ll send them to talk with you.” Albrick said as he got up to excuse himself, determined that he would leave on his own terms, just as he had entered.

“Albrick, hold on a minute. Don’t bother sending Jasper, he’s just a meathead. I just want to talk to Ms. Faust for now. Thanks Albrick. This is a very exciting development, I think the Earth’s prognosis just got a lot better. You can go now, Al.”

Singularity - Chapter 9:Genesis (Part 2 of 2)

Ok, so I'm excited about this section. It's probably the most technical section of the book, so I hope it doesn't turn people off. See if you can follow it, and then leave me a comment telling me how good/awful/interesting/unrealistic it is.

The Homestead team spent a week at the Genesis base. Garst met with the engineers around the base, gathering as much knowledge as he could about their transport technology, which was surprisingly basic, but had a few points of light that he could use. Priscilla gathered information about their life support systems, and some of their computer technology to bring home. They had agreed that Elliot and Sarah would stay behind at the base, to open space in the return craft for two of the Genesis people to go back to Earth.

They all agreed that the information about the people on Mars had to be kept under wraps for a time, until the proper people were notified, and a plan was put in place for what to do with this knowledge and how to notify the people of Earth. The Genesis staff, and Tom specifically insisted that their new technology be kept secret from the Homestead crew until after they had the opportunity to meet with President Rennet and some other Earthdwellers to be sure that they could be trusted. Priscilla protested, but Tom stood firm.

By the time the craft left the surface of Mars, Elliot and Sarah had already begun making friends with the staff and people of Genesis. Once they got past the accent, they found the people very interesting to speak with. They were, quite literally, like speaking to someone so foreign that you don’t even share the same frame of reference. Sarah was basking in all the knowledge she could gather from the others.

Elliot spent a lot of time with Tom. He enjoyed talking to him, he was a visionary type of man, and Elliot just got excited when he was with him. It wasn’t long before there was a genuine trust between the two men. About a month after Garst and Priscilla had left the base, Tom invited Elliot into his private quarters. Elliot arrived and took the seat offered him. Tom was smiling like someone who was keeping a secret.

“Hi Tom, why are you so happy?” Elliot asked jokingly.

“Elliot, I think we’ve got a certain understanding. We trust each other, right?”

“I think so, don’t you?”

“Absolutely. I know I said I wouldn’t share our biggest secret with your team for a while, but I think it’s time I brought you into the loop. I think our team could use your perspective in the next phase of the project.”

“Tom, are you sure? I’m honored, but I don’t want you to regret telling me.”

“ Of course I’m sure. Now just be quiet and listen.”

Elliot sat back in the chair, and took a drink from the glass on the table next to him. He settled in, as Tom told him a story. Tom’s storytelling style was engaging, but not over-simple, very easy to listen to.

After the first trip to Alpha Centauri, the Genesis people decided that it wasn’t worth all the effort to travel that way. It was too costly in time and materials, and the lack of any suitable landing planet in the system highlighted the problem of what to do when you get to a foreign system. The fact was, it could be decades before they even stumbled upon a good place to land. They returned home, scrapped the program and focused on other priorities.

One of those priorities was potential environmental refunctioning of the planet of Mars. There was evidence in the lower regions of the Martian underground that there could have once been life on the planet, and they theorized that they could one day return to that state. The problem with creating an atmosphere is that it took a tremendously long time to accomplish. To solve this problem, a brilliant young physicist backed into a theory that would allow for travel forward through time, which after several years of diligent work, he was able to prove conclusively, when he created a machine to successfully send himself a note from 10 minutes in the past.

The full efforts of the base were re-directed at developing this technology for human travel. The goal was to set the environment on a course for change, and then transport thousands of years into the future to benefit from the intervening years. After decades of development, the whole civilization was celebrating the success of properly scaling the machine for human sized transport. A young woman volunteered herself to be sent forward 10 minutes in time. To the amazement of everyone present, she materialized out of thin air 10 minutes after disappearing in the machine. To their horror, she died 15 minutes after the jump.

The experiment was attempted several more times, with other brave volunteers, and they discovered that the further forward in time the person travelled, the faster they died after the transport. The cause was relatively unknown, but it was as if time were stretched like an elastic band and released, snapping the traveller. This was an unexpected side effect, and effectively shut down the time travel project at the Genesis base, the equipment was boarded up in a closed chamber. The program was forgotten for several centuries.

In the 50 years prior to the day the Homestead team arrived, the Genesis people were again exploring intergalactic travel. A maintenance man stumbled upon a door that was welded shut behind several stacks of boxes. After cutting the door open, he discovered the time travel chamber and all the records of the original time travel project. The program was re-opened, and the top engineers in Genesis were tasked with resurrecting any technology from the time travel device that they could.

One of the engineers on the project had been exploring the machine and its controls, and discovered that the machine had a forward orientation programmed into the software that operated the machine. After reconfiguring the machine, he was able to send a wrench backwards in time, where he found himself holding two identical wrenches for about 10 minutes. The discovery was a breakthrough that opened a whole new course of exploration. They were able to successfully transport a person forward in time, and immediately back to the instant from which they left. The key was to have the person transport back quickly enough that they didn’t die in the future time, and the time period known as the Time Elasticity Interval became irrelevant when they returned to their natural timeline.

This engineer theorized that there was a point infinitely into the future at which the Time Elasticity could be stretched to the point of breaking, allowing the traveler to remain at that point in time for an extended period. Because of the infinite nature of this point in time, it exists at a point that is always infinitely far from any point in time, which causes the Time Elasticity Interval to remain constant. A person could remain at this point indefinitely, and travel back to the time they left without being affected negatively. The timeline for a living thing that travels to this infinite point in time would freeze, since the place does not literally exist on any timeline, but actually outside the literal timeline itself.

The theory was finally tested once the engineer was able to calibrate the machine to an infinite time horizon. The engineer who devised the theory was the first to test it. What he found when he travelled infinitely into the future was that the point was not only infinitely far from his home time, that this point in time, by its very nature exists outside the universal timeline and thus outside the physical universe as well. He found that he existed outside time, between matter, everywhere, nowhere, and all the time. He called this point in non-time and un-space the “Infinite Singularity.” The phenomenon became the central focus of every effort of Genesis from that point forward.

The time travel device was modified and replicated. The device was able to transport everything within the chamber, living or inanimate to the Singularity and a small handheld console was able to transport the objects back to the point where they had left. Time for the physical person would suspend as it entered the Singularity, and they would resume their timeline upon their return.

The biggest breakthrough was the discovery that because a person at the Singularity could exist at all possible locations simultaneously, the physical re-entry could be targeted anywhere in the physical universe. The machine was calibrated so that the re-entry time was fixed to the instant from which they left, but the physical re-entry was variable, expressed in relative position from the origin. This could be calculated relatively accurately, however, the possibility of sending a person to another planet presented some serious difficulties. The problem with the vast distances involved in some of this travel meant that even with pinpoint accuracy, the point of a pin was still ridiculously large. 99.9999999999% accuracy over only a single light year of distance is still a 5,000 mile margin of error, which only grew more and more as distances stretched out over parsecs, or for intergalactic travel, over distances of Megaparsecs. The chance of re-entering the timeline at the exact right location to stand on the surface of a foreign planet was so minute, it was hardly worth trying.
The Singularity Matter Transference Theory was proven on the surface of Mars, with several people successfully transporting across the planet instantaneously via Singularity. Even over that short distance, on one occasion, the traveler re-entered the timeline about 10 centimeters too low, and was forced to dig her own feet out of the ground. This margin of error was too much of a risk to attempt to send a person to another planet without assuring precision and accuracy of the coordinate system.

The plan devised to solve this problem was a brilliant one. The transport chamber was scaled to the size of a small space probe. The probe would be sent through the Singularity, and re-emerge in the vicinity of the target planet. The probe would land on the planet, run several tests, and send back data recorded on electronic media that it transported through its on-board Singularity chamber back to the Genesis base on Mars. The probe data was read, recorded, and it was determined whether the planet was a candidate for human exploration. The probes determined to be safe locations were referred to as Guideposts, and served as nodes in what became a significant travel infrastructure. Presence of a Guidepost allowed a traveler to link directly to the precise location of the probe’s linking chamber. The problem of accuracy had been solved, opening wide the gates of intergalactic exploration.

When Tom had finished with his explanation, he paused to give all the information some time to sink in for Elliot. “Kid, you look shocked. How you doing?”

“A little confused. I have to admit, a lot of that went over my head. What I really don’t understand is how all of this has anything to do with me.”

“Yeah, I was going to get to that, just thought I’d let you absorb that info first.” Tom said sympathetically, “As you may have guessed, the guidepost probes are a little costly to build. We have sent a few of them out, and haven’t yet found a planet suitable for human travel. It’s a tough thing, you know, to find a planet parsecs away with the possibility of even walking on it, much less breathing the air, or being remotely comfortable.”

“I can imagine.”

“Well, we’re hoping you might be able to help us find candidate planets, so we can narrow our search. Your friend, Sarah says you are somewhat of an expert on planetary positioning and the relationship to atmospheric formation. We’d like to have you jump in with the team that has been collecting star system data, maybe you can make some sense out of all of it.”

“I’m happy to help where I can.” Elliot said, “Now one question, could you just explain the whole Singularity thing to me again?”