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?”
1 comment:
Genesis!
To be honest, I haven't read your previous chapters in few weeks so I was a bit out of the loop as to what was going on, but this chapter is very good. The 5000 mile stat is pretty accurate based on the percentage you gave. I see you've done a fair amount of thinking about this singularity idea. It's pretty cool; definetly don't need to get to Trekie with the technical stuff cuz I think it would take away from this book. And I like how easy it is to read your book, much easier than Neuromancer but not as easy as City of Ember. A good balance.
You should print me off a manuscript because it's much easier than reading it online!
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