By now the questions had paused, just for a breath, as they all wrote furiously. No longer were they waiting for the sound bite, they realised they had to ask the key question, the one that would make their story sell, and these stories would sell. Many of the journalists were quietly offering thanks to some unnamed deity that they had made the last minute decision to attend.
“Sam Thomson again; I’m sure I’m speaking for most of us here, this is pretty unbelievable stuff! You’re just telling us out of the blue that you’ve found some sort of second Earth?”
“Yes, though for the countless enthusiasts out there, this is not quite out of the blue. Since the first extrasolar planet was found back in 1992 we have detected thousands of planets beyond our solar system and since then we have been improving our detection methods at such a rate that for some time now it has not been a question of if but when. Before we sent up the JWST we already had a catalogue of Earth sized planets to check out, some of them we already had calculated would be within the habitable zones of their parent stars. In fact, all we had to do was keep looking; it was becoming pretty clear we were going to find something, if not this year then maybe next year or the year after. As long as we kept looking the probability of finding increased. So Sam, no this is not a discovery out of the blue, and it’s not unbelievable, since we first looked at the stars and wondered what they are, we have been on the path to this discovery.”
Chapter 2: November 2025
The chain rattled against the galvanised steel bike stand while John Peeters attempted to control his numb fingers and direct the fiddly little key into the bicycle lock. That was it, winter was coming, tomorrow gloves would be dug out of the bottom of his sock drawer. It was cold, late November cold, surprising for Cadarache in the south of France. Surprising because the last three Novembers had been the warmest on record. Probably the wind was sweeping in from the Alps. John remembered the first November he had spent there and how the change in the weather had caught him by surprise then too, but that was seven years ago, and he had been young and fresh out of college and lucky to land himself an internship at the time.
He and all his friends had been terrified of unemployment. Economies had been slow to recover from the financial crisis that absorbed so many years and so much potential. Not that things had improved massively, now young people were still unemployed in huge numbers, all that changed is that it was no longer seen as a problem, it was reality, and society and economics eventually adjusted to this new reality. Oh there were solutions like job-sharing and equalising wages, but politicians did not have the will to bother trying them.
Since that time, John had fleeting bouts guilt born of some responsibility to feel grateful for his job. On mornings like this his guilt was usually, and quickly, gotten rid of by remembering how much he missed his bed and would rather still be there, where it was warm. His favourite part of the day was that time between the four alarms required to wake him up, that time when consciousness floated between layers of dreams, reality and imagination, carrying elements of one into the others. His least favourite part of the day was just after the fourth alarm when obligation and routine overcame sleep in the great war for consciousness. John was bored out of his skull, and the only thing that kept him arriving at nine a.m. on a daily basis was the need to pay his bills. Most of humanity feels like this most of the time, made worse by the torment of aspiration. He did feel grateful for his job once, but as soon as the main components of the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor, better known at the ITER project, had been in place, the workload dropped, everything became routine and that vague promise of something better was nullified a thousand times by the tedium. While the physicists and engineers around him had practically wet themselves with excitement when the Tokamak reactor was fired up and achieved first plasma, John just felt a sense of loss. He was still necessary for the day to day replacement of broken parts, or the ordering of components for jerry-rigged modifications, but the days of timing the arrival of equipment so massive that building’s had to be constructed around them, or making sure suppliers in Japan and the United States were talking to each other so when their additions to the project arrived they would actually fit together, well those days were over for him.
His friends didn’t understand it. Sure they were aware of the giant fusion project in their locality; they had been since the project was first announced. That was the problem, they were too aware of it. Even John’s parents back in Ghent knew about the ITER project, and they had only ever taken the minimum amount of interest that parents normally pretend to take in their children’s jobs. As far as his friends in the café, and Mr and Mrs Peeters were concerned, John had one of the most important jobs in the world and therefore it should be one of the most interesting, therefore he was just going through a bad phase at the moment. Except it wasn’t just for the moment. John wasn’t an egotist; he actually despised egotism in others and did his best not to be like that, but yet in bouts of severe melancholy he found himself comparing his life to that of Neil Armstrong after walking on the moon, the Pharaoh Khufu after he finished the great pyramid, or an American President after they retire. What do you with the rest of your life once you’ve had your greatest achievement?
Because John was only twenty nine, it felt even worse. Did he have another sixty years of life remaining in which to do nothing but come to work and remember the time he helped bring never-ending and affordable energy to the world? John is a project assistant. After proving himself as intern his boss, Graham Hutchinson, was so impressed that he practically went on strike to have John hired. The European Commission had, and will probably always have, horrible hoops for staff to jump through if they want to be made permanent. They made John jump through hoops alright, but at least Graham managed to get him an opening to sit the exams. Graham was a logistics genius. When he was brought on board the ITER project was miles behind schedule. Graham didn’t bring it on schedule, but it could have been a damn sight worse if he hadn’t cracked a few decision makers’ heads together. This was the first thing he had taught John following a very tense phone call with a supplier on the first day of his internship. Graham had slammed down the phone on a Japanese company mid conversation, took several deep breaths, turned to John and said: ”lesson one. So called ‘decision makers’ are paid a lot of money, more than you or me, but remember they will still serve your ass on a plate to shift blame from themselves on to you. They actually don’t make decisions willingly they are so afraid of pissing off some other ‘decision maker’ above them. You work in logistics. Arrival dates and departure dates are inevitable and dictated by things beyond your control. But you have that information and that makes you the decision maker. Be it a screw or a ten million euro database, it arrives when you tell them it can arrive. You may not have the salary, but you have the power.” John hadn’t believed this at first, but after a few months he had taken this advice to heart and it had made him a pretty successful project assistant, unfortunately it didn’t sort out the rest of his life.
John was unhappy, but not depressed as such. The boredom of work extended into much of the rest of his life. He hadn’t had a stable relationship for years, just the occasional one night stand and the occasional crush but that was it. John was attractive. He was tall with short red hair, but not skinny, he had wide shoulders and generally dressed well. Women were attracted to him, but he had been so obsessed with work that he was usually oblivious when someone showed any interest in him. Now that his workload had eased off to such a great extent and ennui had taken hold, the rest of life suddenly appeared before him, the things he had ignored for so long. He realised he was lonely; most of his close friends from college had gotten married, and besides, they all lived back in Belgium. Sure he had a comfortable salary and had saved well, but that still didn’t make him happy, and now he had lots of time to think about it. Every morning he would get out of bed, alone, perform his morning ablutions, have breakfast and cycle to work. Most evenings
he would cycle home from work, eat his dinner, watch some rubbish on TV or read a book, perform his evening ablutions and go to bed, alone. This was occasionally punctuated by trips to the cinema with friends or coffees or drinks, he wasn’t a complete loner and had a pretty healthy social life, but still he felt bored and incomplete. Now that he had time to reflect he felt that part of his life was missing and that all the work he had done, while noble, was not worth it. Decision time was coming, somehow John had to take back control over his life, but he couldn’t leave his work, there were bills to pay and he had no guarantee of a job elsewhere, no one had anymore.
On this November day though, he would have a decision to make, a decision that would put his vague middle-class sense of unease into perspective, or a decision that might cement it. His first choice that morning though was whether to have some birthday cake or not. Claudine, the receptionist was an excellent baker, and today was her birthday, so true to form she had made a delicious dark chocolate fudge cake, doughnut shaped like the reactor and left it sitting beside the coffee machine, the one place everyone went first thing in the morning. It was sure to be delicious. John normally wouldn’t have a piece, he had a savoury rather than sweet tooth, but it had been sliced so carefully and so evenly by Claudine that he couldn’t resist it. When he was a child John would normally be asked to cut cakes, or distribute sweets equally amongst his friends. He loved the order of distributing things precisely to everyone’s satisfaction, so much so that he would never give more to a friend or less to somebody he didn’t like, not out of some moral or ethical duty, but because the beauty of accurate and precise distribution was sacred to him. From birth John had been a project manager, it was a greater part of him than he realised, and the reason he had sacrificed so much for his work, was because it ultimately made him more content than if he had not. The cake was delicious as expected.
John’s office was next to Graham’s, since they had both been there when the office building was being completed they had made sure to snatch their own offices at the beginning and then hang on to them for dear life. They had a list of reasons prepared for the human resources department as to why they couldn’t be moved; the cohesion of the team, a Vitamin D deficiency so Graham needed to have an office facing south (he had a doctor friend who supplied him with a note for that one just in case) and John’s own favourite; the mouse problem. No one wanted your office if they thought you had mice you couldn’t get rid of. Graham hadn’t arrived yet, which was unusual. He was an early bird and generally would be ploughing steadily through his inbox from 8am, his quiet time when he got annoying little tasks out of the way, so he was free for annoying meetings, which would generate more annoying tasks, such is the cycle of office work. John had the feeling that Graham was suffering from the same boredom he was. His pattern of behaviour was changing somewhat; he used to be on the move all the time from one part of the plant to another but now he tended to be in his office most of the day, also the frequency of his sighing was increasing, always a sure sign something was up, but it was very difficult to tell with the British. One thing you could be sure about in the south of France is that if a French colleague had a problem they would tell you about it, whether you wanted to know about it or not and whether it was any of your business or not. This wasn’t a complaint really, overall it meant they dealt with problems better and so were easier to work with in the long run. However, John often worried that Graham never voiced his problems, and some day that could lead to some sort of rash decision out of the blue.
As it so happened, that day was today. The decision that John would have to make, the decision that would change his whole life in ways he could not yet imagine was dependent on his boss Graham making a move of midlife crisis proportions, despite Graham being a sprightly sixty two years of age. At half past eleven, while John was on the phone, Graham strode into the office, smiling, and proceeded to tap the Galilean thermometer on John’s desk trying to make the coloured baubles inside move.
“ahum…..yes….so you’re saying if I want eighteen of these 3cm thick lead plates I have to wait two months?.....no…..I can’t really wait that long. Look, ill check with another firm in Scotland, they helped us at short notice in the past. I’ll be back in touch with you this afternoon…..ok, chat then….yep, bye.”
“Is Professor Knuttel insisting on more lead plates for his project again?” said Graham in his soft almost BBC accent with just a subtle hint of Sheffield for flavour.
“Yep, who said alchemy was a dead science! So what has you smiling?”
“Well, I spent a little longer in bed this morning, then I went for a very interesting coffee, and now I’m just back from Human Resources.”
“Visiting HR is no reason to be smiling surely. So who was the coffee with?”
“Ah John, it was with a very mysterious woman, a woman who made a very indecent proposal, I could hardly resist, not at my age.”
“I am sure Theresa and your thirty year old kids will be devastated. I hope you used protection, you know, a defibrillator.”
They both burst out laughing; sarcasm is only funny if you eventually build it up to the point of laughter. Their senses of humour matched well which is probably why they made a pretty formidable team. John still didn’t have an answer though.
“Well, so really, why are you in such a good mood?”
“As I said, I had a proposal from a woman over coffee, a proposal I want to discuss with you, because, I could be wrong, but I think you might be interested. Hang on; I’ll be back in a couple of minutes.”
Graham walked out, leaving John none the wiser. The whirr of the coffee machine started in the corridor, and Graham returned a few minutes later with two cups. This was the first time in six years that Graham had ever made him coffee. He placed them on the table and took the phone off the hook.
“This must be serious; you have never made coffee for me before?”
“Well, it is serious. I’m going to explain everything to you, and at the end I want you to think something over, ok?”
John paused, “Sure.”
“John, as you know I’m sixty two, my kids are grown up and this project can more or less function without me from this point on. Theresa has been offered early retirement from her school and to be honest I’m not ready to retire, I’m not even ready to settle into the day to day humdrum work of this place, I’m a big project man, I love tackling the impossible, I love starting new things. Oddly enough it was Theresa who suggested I change something, she said I was sighing so much she thought I was deflating.”
“You’re a damn lucky many to have married her”, replied John, “You’re leaving aren’t you?”
His stomach lurched at the news, this place wouldn’t be the same without Graham and someone new would probably be made his boss. He was a bit taken aback that he should feel something beyond sadness or shock, John felt dread at the thought.
“Yes John, I am. I’ve found a new project, something that really gets me excited, a big idea, perhaps the biggest I could ever dream of. But it’s all theoretical; it’s to plan a project, as many details as is feasibly possible. I don’t mean to brag, but after the complexity of ITER I am probably the most qualified person for the job, but I was still pretty surprised by it. The mystery coffee woman from this morning, she was from the “100 year Starship project” or 100YSS for short, organisations must have their acronyms, have you ever heard of it?”
“It’s been around for years hasn’t it? I first heard about it back in college but I haven’t been following it until that NASA announcement a few weeks ago. I guess to get to a planet 30 light years away you need a ship. So they have had a spike in donations from the public to be able to afford you?”
Graham laughed, “I’m taking a big pay cut. I contacted them about 2 years ago, It was just a general enquiry, but I guess I must have at some level have realised I would need something else once this place was up and running. Naturally they took my call, they were fascinated in what we
do here, but they pointed that out they only had voluntary funding and would probably never be able to afford me. I still wrote a few articles for them and kept in touch. As you said, they had a spike in funding, and now they need a project manager.”
John sat there in silence for a moment.
“I guess that’s why you went to HR then, you clearly said yes. When are you leaving?”
“In one month, basically enough time to get the handover notes done. That wasn’t the only reason I went to them. You should replace me, it’s only natural, or at least I thought so since you’re practically doing the job now, but apparently you don’t have the number of years they require and you won’t have for another six years.”
“Well, that’s not surprising; the rules on promotion are pretty strict,” John grinned “I still have nightmares about the last time I sat those exams, it was worth it though.”
“Well it took some pushing, but it was worth it, I knew you would be great for the job and you were. That’s why I think you’d be good to work with me on my next project. My mysterious woman has already said they can pay you too if you come work with me, not quite your current salary, but close.”
The rest of that day was a little odd for John. Graham had at least given him a couple of days to think it over. He tried to get those lead plates ordered from Scotland, but a task that had seemed like nothing more than a run of the mill pain in ass in the morning had suddenly turned into something so trivial that for the first time in months John asked himself if it was worth the effort. He could see that the task was important, to Professor Knuttel, to the Scottish suppliers, to the experiment, but it didn’t feel important to him anymore. Someone else could do this job just as easily, so why was he still here?
The Project Manager Page 2