Dawn of Hope- Exodus

by Dobrin Kostadinov

  DAWN OF HOPE

  EXODUS

  D. Kostadinov

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, and events are product of author‘s imagination. Resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  Property of Dobrin Kostadinov . All rights reserved ® . No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the copyright holder.

  To Doroteya, the strong woman who stands by the dreams of her loved one.

  Acknowledgements:

  I would like to thank the people I worked with on the publication of this book. Without their professionalism the product of our collective work would not have been the same. Each of them guided and inspired me in expressing my ideas and convictions.

  Edited by: Elena Markova

  Cover photo by: Kaloyan Yordanov

  Translation from Bulgarian by: Annie Dancheva

  Table of contents:

  Introduction

  Chapter One: Prelude to calamity.

  Chapter Two: When Knowledge Beats Fear.

  Chapter Three: Right or Wrong?

  Chapter Four: Accidents of Fate.

  Chapter Five: All or Nothing.

  Chapter six: Life as One Whole.

  Chapter Seven: Horrors in the Cosmos.

  Chapter Eight: Fight for Supremacy.

  Chapter Nine: Becoming a Legend . . .

  Introduction

  Once a child asked a sage what fear was and where it came from. The old man thought for a while.

  ‘Have you walked through a forest at night’ he asked.

  ‘Yes,’ the child answered perplexed.

  ‘Are you afraid when it’s dark?’

  ‘Yes, too scared, but why am I scared since I’ve already walked through that forest in daylight?’ the boy grew even more bewildered.

  ‘Good question. It’s because humans are afraid of the unknown. That’s precisely the sensation that darkness instills, yet fear resides only in us and in our imagination. . .’

  When I was still a little child I was told by a teacher of mine: “There’s no shame in asking questions.” And since we broached the subject of questions, let’s continue in that vein. How did we get where we are now? How did we evolve from small groups of hunters-gatherers living under the stars into constructors of a global civilization? Are we, humans, not the most interesting thing that nature has ever created? Aren’t we beings who are one of а kind, who are thinking, asking each other questions, asking ourselves questions? What is that faculty that makes us conscious beings? Is it the essence of human nature or the thousands of years of accumulated information that has been passed down and refracted through the prism of our forefathers? Maybe it is an invention of the human brain, made up of the most complex matter in the known Universe, and leading to the emergence of individuality. The brain is also self-conscious: it knows itself and its own functioning . . . The answer may lie in the mythical and the divine as part of the religious dogmas or it may well not. To some of us, these questions bear their understanding of life, for others they are of no interest, yet a third group may in fact hold the answer, but the truth lies in each and every one of us.

  Ever since I was a child I have been asking myself questions such as: “Are we alone in the Universe? How did we come to be? To what end were we created? Are there any distant alien places worth seeing?” But the question that engaged me most deeply had to do with space. Do we, humans, realize that we are a mere fraction of the Universe and can we grasp just how minuscule we are compared to our planet? Not to mention the Solar System, the Galaxy and the Universe! But even if we could come to that realization, we could hardly discern it.

  Let us picture the scale of the world that surrounds us as seen from outside the confines of our stellar system and also the place we occupy among the stars. It was probably just a matter of time for humankind to migrate, to start feeling like a citizen of the Universe… In our present, due to the technical progress, we can not only see and feel the world around us, but we gradually started comprehending it; there is nothing better than that, is there?! To know where you have come from and where you are headed, to fathom the purpose of your existence–that is perhaps the most valuable piece of knowledge of all. The nature around us is brimful with questions whose answers are yet to be found. But everything comes at a price. What is the price that each of us has to pay to attain all this? Sooner or later we were going to feel the toll of the thirst for power over our own lives and over the environment we’re living in.

  Why is it that we cannot simply adjust to the living conditions without ruining what has taken long to be built, what has been there even before we came to exist? Why did the primeval feelings such as fury, cruelty, greed and egoism gain more and more credence in our gradually decaying society? Those were no longer mere questions, they were issues that were about to throw their weight upon us.

  Despite all the difficulties, let me tell you a story about times of calamities. A story about power, supremacy, fear, bloodshed and unscrupulous people, but it is also a tale about courage, valour, knowledge, determination, love and most of all about sacrifice.

  All that at the turning point that laid out the path of our fragile fate . . .

  Chapter One

  Prelude to calamity

  Homo Sapiens . . . The human race . . . An element from the planet Earth tried and tested through the years of crises and cataclysms to prove that it cannot only survive but also rule over an entire planet.

  In the early years of 22nd century neither nature, nor we managed to put an end to our existence. The overcoming of a series of financial crises and the handling of some of the exhaustible natural resources were indicative enough for that. But the development of a species leads to a shift in the surrounding environment: a species evolves, changes and procreates. The technological advance helped us “ascend” to the stars, but then it “hurled” us back down to the ground. Along the years medicine attempted to make immortality possible, failing at the task, but nevertheless managing to extend significantly the human lifespan. Cancer cells were already successfully treated, anti-aging medications were available, the „editing“ of the genes of the newborns was one of the latest innovations in that field. Most of the individuals lived almost twice as long as their forefathers did a hundred years before. Scientists healed all types of paralysis or neurogenetic diseases, and even created artificial blood.

  The rate of natural increase in the Third-World countries skyrocketed due to the readily available and comparatively accessible medical services. The high birth rate and the exceptionally low death rate were the prerequisites for the overpopulation of the Earth – our most horrible nightmare. In the near future, a little after a century following the second financial crisis, the UN introduced a bill on birth control on the entire planet. It aimed at controlling the population that had long gone past the boundaries of the permissible. A planetary census was taken in 2118. The data collected revealed shocking news . . . Almost 37 billion people were suffocating and squirming on a planet that could hold and feed no more than a third of that number; we were forced to live on that planet. Some went as far as to call the large cities gigapolises instead of megapolises. Cities of 100-120 million citizens were formed and spread out over thousands of kilometers of suburbs. Those cities had a different climate in each neighborhood and were divided into different time zones. All this was maintained and developed by a sophisticated control system to which both the police and the armed forces answered directly, the main idea being the strict law abidance. Corruption was reduced to a minim
um, but despite that there was no shortage of all sorts of crimes whose number grew by the minute. The population was growing exponentially, yet the living conditions weren’t improving along with our technological advance. The world’s economy was barely managing to satisfy not the whims of the average citizen, but their access to food and goods of immediate necessity. Most problematic were the ghettos which formed as a result of the enormous population, the class differences between the living, and the rapid impoverishment of the ordinary people in those times of crisis. It was in those regions that the general part of the population lived and it increased with no obvious control, like a parasite that had sunk its teeth into the perfect host.

  Poverty and the poor level of education and culture brought about major problems. Apart from enjoying a large number of domestic crimes and the most significant birth rate of all city zones, the ghettos were home to children who grew up without anyone to take care of them. Abandoned, disposed of and living at dumpsites–that was the fate of more and more of the newborns. If those urban areas were left unsupervised, grisly crimes, robberies and murders took place. The worst of it was that they developed at such a pace that they quickly spread over to the adjacent neighborhoods. Diseases, penury and misery implanted themselves ruthlessly in the thus created urban environment. The United Nations enacted measures to feed the population that had gradually begun to eat itself. They achieved partial success through genetically modified food, stock-breeding farms and lab-grown artificial food, but there were further complications. At a later stage the food issue was to become a global scourge for the people in Africa, parts of Asia and other areas as well.

  From a certain point onward the planet began to die slowly. The time that marked the beginning of the end of human self-assurance and impudence had come. Almost nothing was left untainted. The sea water was poisoned, the soil was unfit for crops. Air pollution was one of humanity’s gravest problems. Due to the large amount of liberated carbon dioxide almost everyone was subjected to the greenhouse effect. Prolonged drought and torrential rains appeared in areas where they had never previously manifested themselves. Most of the mineral and overall resources got completely exhausted in the past two or three years. Even the clathrate hydrates, so hard to obtain from the bottom of the oceanic basins, were long forgotten. The last reserves of raw materials were stored in underground warehouses, but they were to last for a few months or a year at the most. A ray of hope was offered by the still existing at that point iron and aluminium ore deposits, but that was all. A major role was played by the renewable energy sources which provided the better part of the electricity on the planet. We had light and energy but nothing to eat . . .

  Due to the heavy consumption of timber there were nearly no forests left at all, the natural filter of the planet was gone. There was hardly any fish left in the seas and the oceans. Everybody’s hopes rested on the crops, but they, too, were affected by the climate changes, the new strains of plant diseases, the squandering of resources and the poisoning of the soil. Even the alternative of the alternative was exhausted. A small part of the icy decoration of the poles was left to “suffer” in its attempt to “stabilize” the climate. Eventually that attempt proved futile and deadly to those icy remnants. Some of the seaside cities on the planet were flooded as a result of the rise in the water level. They were reorganized so as to tackle the global issue that affected a large part of the population. We also had to face the rising of waves of climatic refugees. If we add to that the other calamities regarding the climate changes, all that cost too many financial, labor and energy resources. And that was just the beginning . . .

  2119 was marked by destiny as the year of the most terrible catastrophes ever. “Mayak”, the nuclear waste storage complex located in Russia near the border with Kazakhstan, was shaken by the most powerful earthquake for the past hundred years. The displacement of the Earth’s crust and its split caused the opening of fissures at the sites over the warehouses that held the nuclear waste of all of Europe and half of Asia. Destructive fires that took days to put out deteriorated the situation additionally. The fires were followed by a devastating cyclone that spread radioactive dust across almost the entire world. It was as though the Mother Nature was determined to drive us away and to punish us for our wastefulness and for being the only living organisms on the planet who never learnt to adapt to the material environment without ravaging it. That was a warning brought forth by the true soul of the planet Earth.

  For far too long did the humans take advantage of the assets of our only home without spearing a thought for their renewability and for the repercussions that came along with it. The technological advance failed to free us from our greatest sins–hatred, avarice and fundamentalism in all of its forms. That’s why famine, isolation, misery and unemployment were among the factors that accompanied the everyday life of 70 per cent of the population over the past two years and the situation on the planet could be described in three words: hard to live. A little after 2120 an International Assembly was set up, the first of its kind, that brought together representatives of all states and organizations as well as members of the most developed megacompanies that provided employment for a third of the entire population. Every TV channel in every country broadcasted the Assembly in all existing languages so that every person could see where the world was headed and to comprehend that the end was coming soon.

  The most difficult thing to do was probably becoming an interplanetary race, overcoming all of our differences and wrangles in an attempt to set out for the stars. But we seemed to have taken the reverse way which was turning us into a technological race that fell into ruins. Our civilization was on the brink of self-destruction. Hence, we had to make forecasts and they showed we shouldn’t expect anything good. The probability of a global scourge like a disease or an atmospheric poisoning taking place was not just high but real. The list of human universal fears was topped by terror. The greenhouse effect, the complete absence of an ozone layer as well as the all-around-the-world civil war that was to put an end to the civilization–that was a small portion of the list of anticipated disasters that covered a five-year span or an even shorter period. All of it came as a result of the deeds of humankind, not to mention the threats coming from the Cosmos . . .

  So, the governments reached a conclusion that an exodus was needed. But that was no exodus from city to city, or from country to country, but rather something much graver, an interplanetary journey which had to be undertaken very soon. The great minds pronounced the sentence: we had to leave the planet if we wanted our species to survive. That presupposed a gigantic leap for our civilization–to acknowledge and accept the problems as they were and to mark the beginning of a mindful existence. The participants in the UN council signed two rather important declarations that had to be abided by as though they were the 22nd century religion. They were united under the name “Hope for Humanity” and they had to be observed alongside with all of their provisions, so that the two declarations could function properly . . .

  The first one had to do with the development of a program whose objective was to reduce the levels of harmful gases in the atmosphere, thus limiting and eliminating fully the greenhouse effect. Terminating the poisoning of the water in the oceans and in the soil was of vital importance. But that was just the beginning. The scientists went on to make forecasts and plans that, if fulfilled, our home was supposed to be dragged straight back into the 17th century. Maybe it was all going to be reality in less than twenty years as they said; the clean air and the limpid mountain rivers were no longer going to be just a myth, but an end goal. But who knew what was to happen . . .

  The second declaration treated the development of a global scientific approach to the exploration of the Cosmos which made possible the collaboration between civilian companies and firms and the military ministries of the UN member states. The private sector was exceptionally powerful at the time and some corporations were wealthier than entire countries.

 
Their cooperative work and joint resources marked the beginning of the building of the spaceships that were to carry out the exodus and provide the development of life on the new planet. The idea was for them to be used not only for transporting people but also for shipping resources back to our ravaged home.

  Part of the planet’s population was against leaving our home, another part yet protested against it, but no one paid them any attention, for even they had a premonition it was going to happen. The other matters on which they could voice their discontent were far more problematic . . .

  The world’s economy set aside large amounts of money for researching the Cosmos, but the largest sums came from the German megacompany Helios whose main business activity was designing aerospace technologies. Having absorbed the best from all over the world and being the product of a few company and corporation mergers, it was the wealthiest independent company that had the most well-trained specialists at their disposal. Their collaboration with NASA and the military ministries of the European Union and Russia, brought forth the implementation of the Cosmos-research-related projects. People’s consciousness reached new heights: humankind finally comprehended the meaning of the motto “Unity Makes Strength”. All of them, supported by the UN, initiated a purely technological advance. A large portion of the population, more precisely those experienced in the field, was mobilized. Our forte has always been and will forever remain our intellect, and when it is set in the right direction it produces ideas and forges destinies; little by little the march of progress made everything fall into place . . .

  Shortly after the engineers were ready and the spaceships for the exodus were waiting at several locations loaded with all the necessities required for such a passage. They were fitted with two types of engines, both the pinnacle of the technological advance. The secondary ones, also called electromagnetic ion generators for acceleration, were to make sure the gigantic iron birds would take off, land and maneuver easily. They also aided the process of a continuous thrust, nearly reaching the speed of light. The other type of thruster, that is the primary one, as its inventors called it, used dark energy as fuel. It was equipped with a technology for spatial manipulation that just twenty years before had managed to change human perceptions of physics and travel through spatial matter. Now there was no need to interact with the temporal dimension to travel through it. That meant that wherever we went, we were going to find ourselves in the same clock time as that on the Earth (gaining or losing a few seconds or minutes at the worst). Or so they said . . .