Voyage

by C. Paul Lockman

  Hal had been incredibly busy, as usual – so usual that it was no longer truly incredible – and the interior of Dvalin was taking shape at breathtaking speed. Our replicator robots were literally turning rock into metal, stone into plastic, dust into water and old meteorites into air. After countless centuries of stasis, the chemistry of Dvalin was slowly changing. Large, square spaces formed docking hangars, lined with metal sheeting and sealed by complex air-locks which slid shut to hide their contents and, in the case of the pressurized hangars, to retain their breathable atmospheres. Miles of plumbing were being created to funnel freshly-produced propellants, fluids and gases from the mined-out sections of the asteroid’s core to the new structures of its periphery. A huge dome, nearly 400 yards across, was half-built, silhouetted now against the curvature of the earth, soon to bid welcome to thousands of visitors. Many would stay. Some would give birth and die here. A permanent off-world human presence was now no longer a fractured dream.

  Phoenix was docked neatly at the centre of one of the larger, pressurized hangars, capable of accommodating dozens of such craft. No bigger than a Gulfstream jet, the Cruiser was almost dwarfed by its surroundings. We disembarked, slightly nervously I have to admit, and were the first humans to set foot on Dvalin’s squeaky-clean white flooring. I don’t remember that anyone said anything in particular – no ‘giant leap’ for us – in fact, the experience was a lot like deplaning at an airport with a particularly sci-fi terminal building. We made our way along a spotlessly white walkway articulated on the floor by thin red lines, and this took us to a door which led into a long corridor. We then heard a voice, signalling a meeting which was very much overdue.

  “Welcome to Dvalin everyone. My name is Hal. I am the artificial intelligence overseeing the Dvalin project.” Evelyn was grinning like an excited schoolgirl but, off to my left, I heard an anguished grunt, then some worrying spluttering sounds. Senator Beasley’s collapse had been coming for some time. We tried to catch him as he dropped to one knee, wheezing, grasping forward for a wall to brace himself. His face was at first beet-red and then ashen, as though the colour had been sucked out by an invisible force.

  “Chris?” I was at his side. “Oh, God, hang on…” He was still falling, slowly and inexorably, his hands losing their purchase on the walls, his breath coming in terrified gasps. He looked at me, the fear in his eyes so compelling that my guts tightened with it. That moment when serious trouble is at hand. He knew it, and I was beginning to realize it. My friend was dying.

  “Hal, get help”. It was redundant – he had sensed the respiratory and cardiac

  distress and was already diverting resources. “The medical bay… I don’t know if it’s too far, but we have to get him there”. Evelyn and I pulled him up, put a shoulder under each of his arms, and half-lifted, half-pushed him down the hallway to the far door. We were walking, I knew, through an invisible mist which was cleansing us of terrestrial pathogens, but it was the decades of stress, and the quadruple-whammy of the past few hours, which had felled the Senator. As the door opened, a golf-cart sized vehicle pulled up and we shoved Chris into the back seat. It took off as soon as he was strapped in and we jogged along behind, having to sprint as the cart reached its top speed. It trundled efficiently along the grey flooring through two hundred-yard hallways, each flanked by numerous doors, and then turned abruptly to enter the medical bay.

  This was a large room, about the size of a high-school gym, whose internal layout was designed to be endlessly changeable. Screens, beds and other equipment seemed to form out of the floors and walls – either sliding out from hidden compartments or morphing out of the floor’s own material – and before we had spent ten seconds in there, a crash-cart was ready, together with a single lectern which was already reading Beasley’s condition. Hal kept up a commentary so we knew what was going on. We got Chris to the cart and laid him down. He wasn’t breathing. Liz was in tears.

  “The Senator has been in ventricular fibrillation for three minutes. We will attempt to stabilize his heart rhythm. There has been degradation of cerebral blood circulation which has put him at risk of brain death”. Liz was properly freaking out, and Evelyn kept her against the wall by the door, away from the cart, arms round each other as they hoped together. I approached the cart, glanced at the lectern and held Chris’ hand. “No…” began Hal, “stand back please”.

  As I did so, a band of blue light encircled the cart. This was the familiar blue of the shield which had kept the US Army at bay in DC; the blue also of the medical beams I had been exposed to during my initial treatments on Takanli, although I hadn’t known it then. The circular band closed tightly around Chris’ body, following his contour and then forming a sheath around him, glowing with healing radiance. “Cardiac sinus rhythm has resumed”. I heard everyone else breathe a sigh of relief. But I knew he wasn’t out of the woods. In good hands or not, I wanted him awake and back on his feet before I started celebrating.

  It is said that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic; inside Chris’ chest, Hal’s beams of healing light were working just such a magic. “Vasodilatation has begun”, he intoned. Chris’ arteries were being broadened, to promote circulation, and I knew Hal’s healing radiation wouldn’t be far behind. I could still, if I tried, summon up the intense heat in my chest, felt all those years ago, which signalled the cleaning out of my own arterial system. Fatty deposits were being scorched from the walls of each artery, leaving them smooth and efficient – a lot more so than before. Cells were repaired, their divisions rectified in the blink of an eye. A therapeutic solution was added to Beasley’s bloodstream, entirely non-invasively (not so much as a needle), and began disseminating a host of healthful bacteria, surgical nano-bots and chemicals. Hal described these processes to Liz and Evelyn, gathered around the lectern, agog at both the technology and the incredible speed of his recovery. Hal was really going to work on the old Senator.

  Chris’ liver was quickly repaired after years of scotch. His lungs, improving since he quit smoking ten years ago, needed work, and a thorough clean-out. Two cancerous regions were targeted for longer-term preventative care, in the form of the pills I had taken on Takanli. Hal even put together a diet and exercise regime; it was clear, within ten minutes of our arrival in the medical bay, that Chris was not just on the mend; he was going to walk out under his own power, fit as a fiddle.

  Liz was calmer now, tapping experimentally at the lectern, and Evelyn came over to speak with me. “Thank God… I really thought we had lost him. That look on his face…” We hugged, reassuring and warm. She looked around us at the room, all in Hal’s typical white, with functionality as its architectural guide. “Quite a place you have here.” I nodded, taking in the scene myself. “It would really have been a shame to blow it up”.

  I hugged her again. “Well, now those lunatics are on their way out, I don’t think we need worry on that score.”

  She brought out her PDA, fiddled with it briefly. “No signal up here”, she quipped. “All this technology and I can’t Tweet my latest news to the world?” She chuckled. “On an asteroid with a supercomputer, a revitalized politician, a freaked-out journalist and…” I waited for her to choose the right word. “A legend?”

  “I like the things you say”, I said, with a je ne sais quoi in my voice. Actually, to be honest, we both knew exactly quoi – barring major incident, I was pretty determined to make Evelyn Tanner the first human ever to orgasm on an asteroid. Apart from her stunning looks and perfect figure, she’d impressed me, and the others, with her level-headedness during the escape from the Dirksen building, our flight out of DC, Chris’ emergency and with the whole weirdness of being here. I mean, she was supposed to be in some dreary office today, or maybe stuck in my Senate hearing. Yes indeed, I couldn’t wait to get the others settled, strip Evelyn off and fuck her senseless. But there were a few things on the agenda before we could get down and dirty.

  “Hal, download the latest Dva
lin structural schematic to my nano-memory please”. There was a slight pause. “Thanks. Now I know where the hell we’re going.” I turned to the cart. “Chris, how are you doing?”

  The Senator was still on the cart, but was working on opening his eyes. The three of us gave him some room, but made sure that the first thing he saw would be our smiling faces. The relief among us was intense. Apart from anything else, I’d have been mightily disappointed to have killed one of Dvalin’s first guests just with the shock of being here.

  He coughed slightly, clearing his throat. “Hey everyone…” His voice was a little weak, but we’d soon fix that. From the floor, and I literally mean, arriving like a slow, plastic fountain out of the floor’s material, came a four-foot white and green rectangle. The edges tucked in, other places folded over, yet others bulged slightly, and before we knew it, there was a standard-type bathroom cabinet with a set of metal spigots on top. A stack of cups appeared on the work surface by the spigots. I held a cup under the nearest one and it filled with an amber liquid which I recognized straight away.

  “Chris, I want you to sit up and drink some of this. It really, really is the shit.” He groaned slightly as his muscles obeyed, lifting his head up sufficiently to take a drink. After my forty years of interstellar sleep, Hal had pre-arranged this sweet elixir, and I knew it was just the ticket. Chris’ eyes bulged momentarily, and he sat up further, the better to drink down the rest of the cup. I refilled it and we repeated the process. The colour returned to his cheeks, his eyes gained their accustomed sparkle, and within moments he had swung his legs off the cart and was sitting straight up, imbibing as much as I would give him. After three cups we switched to a purple drink which would provide all the vitamins and minerals an old man could need.

  Liz had recovered her mojo and was peppering me with thoughtful questions: Was I confident the US wasn’t going to attack Dvalin in some other way? Could the House and Senate resolutions be guaranteed to pass? What kind of transitional government could be envisaged? Had I done something irrevocable, something bad to the US political system? People feared change, she reminded me.

  To be honest, and you can always rely on me for that, I didn’t much care what was going on inside the White House. Although previous administrations had co-operated tightly with the project, this one was… well, a bit disappointing. The President himself was a full-blown knuckle-head and his advisors were little better. It was back to the bad old days for a few years: get the oil; revamp Homeland Security; America First and other such selfish crap. How could a fast-living hippy genius possibly work with such people? Beasley was my lifeline, the only way an unelected earthquake like me could gain some political currency, some public legitimacy. Seeing him collapsed like that… my brain had whirred far quicker than it should have, given how much I love the man, and was already contemplating a post-Beasley political environment. Shit, that was a tough concept. Thankfully, the old man was improving by the second. Right at that moment, I think he was chatting up Liz, who was loving the attention. And it meant that she had stopped asking me impossible questions about minutiae going on 36,000 miles away.

  “So, what’s the plan?” Chris asked, to a background of giggles from a creased-up Liz. “Want to show me around our new moon? Or do I have to stay in for observations, or something… because, I tell you, I feel great!” He flexed his biceps for us, then jumped off the counter and did a neat handstand. The three of us applauded wildly as the Senator got to know his new body.

  “No observations needed, Chris”, I chuckled as he walked on his hands in a neat circuit around the cart. “In fact, let’s get out of here”. I had, for the thousandth time, the curious experience of knowing something without ever having learned it. A map of Dvalin’s fast-expanding, hollowed-out interior was in place, within my memory, although I’d never seen it with my own eyes. I knew, for example, that the accommodation and recreation areas were a couple of hundred yards down a corridor. I knew, too, that the overall shape of the habitable spaces was that of a donut torus (a little like the Pentagon but much cooler) which radiated out in concentric rings. Hal’s design was ingenious. Efficient carts would act as transport (all electric, of course) although Relocation would eventually, I knew, become preferable over longer distances. I just hoped people didn’t abuse it, as they had the automobile on earth. A little exercise is a healthy thing, no matter how sci-fi the healthcare system might be.

  The main control centre of the asteroid was actually within Hal’s brain, so there was no ‘bridge’ or ‘mission control’. In fact, the most obvious place for us all to hang out was a rather nice lounge area which was one of the first non-functional places to sport windows. The view would only change if something truly drastic happened (we were in geostationary orbit, after all) but it was never-ending in its beauty. Even at night, like now, a carpet of lights articulated the shapes of the world’s landmasses. On the far horizon there was the glimmer which the whole hemisphere would soon experience in its fullest, and they would call it ‘daytime’. Up here, we met the new day just before the sleep landlubbers down on earth, its rays warming the ancient, orbiting rock a few moments before Gabon felt the same dawn.

  There were comfortable armchairs and sofas, which Hal arranged for us, and a Replicator provided lunch, sodas, ice water and plentiful champagne. Liz wanted to ask a thousand questions, so I did my best while getting to work on my first, tall glass of bubbly.

  “I’d like to understand just how this amazing day has come to be. I feel like I’m missing parts of the jig-saw of the last few years.”

  I took a gulp of Veuve Clicquot and then set the glass down on the round, glass-topped table between us. “Well, it’ll help if we share the long view”, I advised. “I saw a stream of events which seemed, even in 2008, to be leading to dark places. Once I got to Takanli and had to endure news of another 40 years’ news and disasters, I became certain that humanity, just through its own self-programming and communal laziness, was about to destroy itself.” I briefly relived the heart-stopping terror I had felt when I first read the news bulletins from Earth. It was too terrible for me to linger long.

  “I had another source, too… A vision…” I hesitated to bring up my friendship with Samuel L Jackson – Liz would have freaked out and insisted I be committed to an asylum – but what other way was there to reveal how certain I was of our doom?

  “A vision of…?”

  I drank more champagne. The chances of getting actually drunk were slim, but I resolved to give it a solid try. “By what method I’m not sure, but I was shown the future of my own street, in Wales”. The only one of my homes not actually known to the public, remarkably enough. Which was just fine, as Hal was effectively housed there. “It was after a nuclear exchange. It was explained to me that our greed inevitably brings us to such extremes.”

  Liz was running to catch up. Her background in political philosophy wasn’t as strong as some, and she’d been under the impression that the democratic-capitalist model was something other than a giant sham. “So the antidote to human greed is to bring us a big rock and tell us there are aliens out there?”

  I chuckled at some length, allowing her question to puncture the stiffened atmosphere I’d caused. No need to get too serious. Even if these were weighty matters, you had to consider your audience, as Hal had reminded me almost daily. “Something like that”.

  Liz was writing on a conventional notepad with a cheap, yellow Bic ballpoint. I smiled at the idea; the most sophisticated of man’s achievements, and it was being reported by one of its very most simple forms of communication. “I don’t think my readers are going to get this. Help me out?”

  “Utopianism”, I began. “The belief that humans are able to create a society which is close to perfection, one which is without shortage or under-resource of any kind. Once everyone has everything they need, and are educated so that they live out their true potential, certain old ideas begin to fall away.”

  “Like what?” Liz wanted t
o know.

  “Jealousy and resentment come under assault due to the new, flattened shape of society. Technology would remove most of the dull labour, while ensuring that every child, and adults too, receive spectacular levels of cultural immersion, and terrific quality, lifelong education.”

  Liz was nodding, writing furiously in her personal form of shorthand. “With no real social classes to speak of, and everyone well remunerated for their work, a fair tax system could draw funding for communal needs from individual gains. The value of personal ownership is eroded, and sharing of things like transport, media, food resources and methods of production becomes commonplace. Rather than shareholders who only seek a greater dividend, production can be organized into co-operatives.”

  Liz had stopped nodding. “Sounds a lot like Marxism to me.”

  “It should!” I laughed. “He would recognize a lot of the plan Hal and I have devised.”

  “But where does Dvalin fit in? It’s just a rock, right?”

  I drained my third glass of champagne, refilled with gusto, and animatedly began my answer on this, one of my favourite subjects. “Sure. Just a big rock in the sky. It’s been floating around in space for tens of millions of years, minding its own business.” Liz took a gulp of the good stuff and waited for me to continue.