When NASA sent a manned probe to the colony, they employed ion propulsion for the first time and it took eight months to reach the colony, orbiting just inside the solar system’s asteroid belt. By comparison, a colony spacecraft made the same trip in mere days. The combined Russian/European Union mission powered their manned probe by using nuclear propulsion, which was powerful enough that their travel time was shorter by two weeks over the NASA mission. Every country would give anything to possess gravity-based propulsion. And, if they did make the same discovery as the colonists, perhaps they could break the embargo keeping them planet bound.
Over half the countries around the world had standing orders for their military to do everything possible to try to capture any of the colony’s spacecraft, including extraordinary measures like forcing such a spacecraft to the ground. But so far, the ships stationed in lunar orbit had not descended any closer than ten miles above Earth’s surface in the process of interdicting any rocket launches. Firing missiles or rockets toward any spacecraft was pointless. However, the American rail guns could easily hit the spacecraft from their ground- and ship-based installations.
As America’s navy had just three ships equipped with the large-bore rail guns, the Chairman of the Joint Chief’s plan to equip several additional ships with the weapons made perfect sense. And although there were two privately-owned space ports in the Sonoran Desert, very few military payloads were launched from there. However, if the Army deployed their share of the new order of rail guns across the United States, should a launch originate from a private space port, hundreds of projectiles could target a colonist ship as it chased a rocket overflying the country. General Archer was playing long ball, taking the chance that the railguns could damage the colony’s ships, but not destroy them, along with planning to destroy the space station in lunar orbit no matter the cost. The first country on Earth that managed to capture one of the colony’s ships would become the undisputed master of the planet once they duplicated the engine and built their own ships. General Archer fully planned to do just that for the United States, ensuring America’s undisputed military mastery over the rest of the world.
General Archer’s arrogance, combined with his massive ignorance, was dangerous.
* * *
Valerie Wyatt was compiling her latest rendering program code to test how well it would display the virtual reality neighborhood loaded on her supercomputer. Checking the countdown clock on her screen, she saw she had enough time to brew a cup of tea.
Wyatt, a graduate in computer information sciences from Spelman College eleven years back, was one of the world’s leaders in virtual reality technologies. Most of her work was for computer game companies, law enforcement, and the military. The latter two clientele focused on training applications for cops and soldiers. Those contracts paid the bills and paid very well.
Starting her own consultancy nearly a decade ago had been very difficult, constantly bumping into all the slights and prejudices women fell victim to in tech industries. Being black imposed an even harsher penalty on her startup, but that didn’t deter her.
Wyatt now lived in and owned a combined work/live space in a home that cost her $2.4 million, perched on the side of a hill surrounded by some of the most expensive homes in the San Francisco Bay area. She had a fiber-optic data link connecting her to the global network that was one of the fastest connections in the Bay area, commercial or otherwise.
One of the services she provided to the Fortune 500 was the world’s highest capacity VR video conferencing servers. Video conferencing had been around for decades, and several online VR environments had grown in popularity, but no one had developed anything with the promise of online VR described in Neal Stephenson’s 1992 novel Snow Crash. Wyatt was within a year of rolling out an online community that would be the closest analogue to the promise of Snow Crash. People had been using the online user community Other Life for years and had created some remarkable pocket environments over time. Some believed that the Other Life site would eventually live up to Neal Stephenson’s novel, but even with the gradual increases in residential and commercial bandwidth in Internet access, real-time rendering of realistic environments simply wasn’t possible. The amount of data needed to render even a stationary scene with several avatars, simulated persons, getting all that data to a user’s computer was still beyond the capability of all but a minuscule fraction of the users around the globe.
Wyatt’s new approach, which she was very careful not to reveal, was to compress the data using a proprietary algorithm and a hardware add-on, boosting graphical display performance over a hundred-fold. Rendering a full scene, including real-time updates would be within reach once she released her software. But first, she was going to make damn sure she benefited financially from her quantum leap in technology before it was copied. The downstairs of her hillside home was devoted to research and development. There was a large VR studio taking up about seven hundred square feet of floor space. Hanging from the middle of the ceiling was a platform nine feet above the floor containing projectors and lasers that painted scenery or code on every wall. In the middle of the floor was a slightly raised platform with a guardrail set four feet up from the floor. The base was covered with small rubber balls that rolled under a standing person’s feet, each with sensors that monitored the direction they turned. This was Wyatt’s VR platform, and when she wasn’t wearing goggles and a headset, the whole room became her VR stage. The top floor was where she did business doing demos for her high-ticket clients. Her work was impressive, as was the view over the bay.
While she waited for her code to compile, Wyatt pulled out her mobile phone.
“Hi Aidan, it’s me.”
“Val! It’s great hearing from you. Did that new calibration app straighten out the lasers okay?”
“Sure did,” she replied. “But that’s not why I’m calling. I need your help on something.”
“Hey, anything. What’s on your mind?”
“I want to send you something, it’s a hardware-based bandwidth enhancement that I need to test out data streamed between my servers here and a remote location. I figured since you’re on a fiber backbone, and have some really cool equipment there, you could help out. And I want to pay you for any equipment you need to upgrade to the same specs as the lasers you installed here, sort of a mini stage, like mine,” she explained.
“Val, Val! Who are you talkin’ to here? I’d love to check out your latest. You sending an NDA?” he asked, making her laugh.
“Aidan, if I can’t trust you by now, I’m already screwed. You should expect the package by 10 A.M. day after tomorrow. I’ll send the software drivers electronically later today. Use that same encryption key I gave you before.”
“No problem. I’ll have the stage set up by the time the package arrives. I take it this is without the goggles?” he said excitedly.
“Full room, extremely high res. Your platform still works?”
“As far as I know. I’ll make sure everything’s ready. I can’t wait!”
“Me either. Talk to you in a couple of days,” she said, then hung up. Wyatt got another cup of tea, then returned to her desk. Checking the countdown clock in the corner of one of her screens, there was five minutes left. Wyatt activated the voice interface on her terminal, preparing to give the new code a test run.
The layout of her VR suite was simple. All the walls were painted with white, reflective paint, like a theater’s movie screen. All the walls could be used in a 360º virtual reality display or, if need be, anything she could display on her workstation monitors could be projected on the walls, allowing her to make changes to the program on the fly. The voice interface was several generations ahead of those used in the run-of-the-mill mobile phones and computerized home electronic appliances. Those programs were still rudimentary, relying on rules-based parsing of spoken commands, along with lightning fast searches of database information to formulate responses.
When
her code had compiled, Wyatt loaded the scenery subroutine and then executed the new VR code. Once the program was running, she took her place on the platform, pulling on her VR gloves. She closed the safety railing, watching as her VR neighborhood painted itself on the walls. When the scene was fully rendered, the lights dimmed and Wyatt clapped her hands twice, activating the program.
She started walking across the balls on the surface of the platform, watching the rendered scene pass by her, looking for any glitches in the image. Watching closely, she started walking faster, still looking for image artifact, indications of difficulties in processing the video data stream. Her new rendering algorithm was working flawlessly.
She clapped two more times, bringing up the command menu. She then began to cycle through several of the online communities located on the world’s network. Every one of them rendered flawlessly as her combined hardware/software graphics subsystem processed the online images as if she were truly walking around outside in each neighborhood. She recognized exactly how significant her advances were going to be across the entire virtual reality industry, especially the corporate and military concerns.
When the front doorbell rang, she clapped twice and selected the intercom icon on the wall.
“Yes, may I help you?” she asked as a window opened showing the image from the camera mounted above the door.
“Package pickup,” the uniformed woman announced.
“One moment.”
Wyatt opened the safety railing and retrieved the package for Aidan from her desk, taking it to the door.
It only took a few moments for the package to be scanned. With little to do until she could test the network, she decided to take the rest of the day off and head into San Francisco’s Japanese shopping district to eat.
* * *
Global Space Technologies, the largest corporation on Earth, suffered severe setbacks with the colonists-imposed Earth’s blockade from space. GST had invested half a trillion dollars on the manned space probe Jove, in cooperation with NASA, taking a crew from Earth to the colonist’s space habitat. The spacecraft performed flawlessly traveling out to the colony, taking eight months in transit. using ion propulsion for the first time ever in a manned mission.
GST also built an orbiting space station to construct the Jove mission spacecraft, which was now languishing cleared of personnel in Earth’s L5 position, dragged there by the separatists. GST had a loss of one and a half trillion dollars in two years, more than the gross national product for most of the countries on the planet. But because of the immense wealth and financial reserves GST had on hand, they were able to pivot, focusing their manufacturing and services on military hardware, communications, and transportation technologies. GST’s board of directors never gave up their single-minded dream of acquiring the space colonists’ technologies.
GST’s military division focused on non-nuclear technologies just short of mass destruction, the crown jewel railgun technology. The railgun was simple. A projectile was electromagnetically accelerated to a speed of over five kilometers per second which impacted targets to devastating effect, all without propellant or explosive payload. Although the cost of the railgun itself was high, the cost of projectiles was extremely low, consisting merely of base metals or even extremely dense, depleted uranium.
GST’s flagship railgun could hit targets scores of kilometers away, making the destruction of targets in Earth orbit child’s play. The United States Navy had three ships deployed with the largest railguns ever manufactured, and thirteen other ships deployed to sea with smaller railguns as their primary armament. GST was enjoined from selling any model of railgun to anyone other than the United States military, ensuring the country’s military supremacy over that of competing country’s forces.
So far, all branches of America’s military forces, except for the Coast Guard, had railguns deployed on land and sea-based platforms. The Air Force deployed their railguns on naval cruisers assigned to protect aircraft carrier groups, but none had been installed on aircraft. The technical difficulties had not yet been solved for deploying such weaponry on a jet or helicopter given the massive recoil.
Theodore “Ted” Franks was GST’s liaison to the very top tier of the U.S. military. He was one of the few corporate flacks who could pick up the phone and immediately be put through to the heads of every branch of the Armed Forces and quite a few U.S. Senators as well.
When he hung up the phone after his conversation with the Chairman, he sat there, working through all the variables of providing the military with an order of twenty-five of their DS500s and how to parlay the number to fifty or more. GST knew better than to try to sell any of the units to another country under the table. One thing the GST board of directors knew was that the space embargo would not last forever. They already had a fully functional space station in lunar orbit that wouldn’t take much effort to bring back to full operation once the space embargo was lifted.
Gearing up to manufacture and install another twenty-five DS500s wasn’t a problem, except for retooling the manufacturing plants for the DS500s instead of the DS100s. He logged on to the manufacturing network and looked at the delivery schedule. Unfortunately, the production line was scheduled to continue the run of 100s for eighteen more months. That would not fly with the military; the Chairman was not someone who was easily denied.
There was a possibility that several of the offshore manufacturing plants could be quickly retooled to produce the parts necessary, but GST decided that the manufacture of all railgun parts would only take place within the U.S. Even the plans for the weapons only existed in highly encrypted, hidden storage facilities controlled by several key managers and the Board of Directors. Even the assembly of crucial components was spread across several different geographical locations. Maintenance of the units was performed by GST personnel permanently assigned to the military. It wasn’t that other countries weren’t working on perfecting railgun technologies of their own, it’s just that GST’s research and development departments were populated with a formidable number of the best scientific and technical minds on the planet.
When the military published the railguns specifications, one of the top priorities was the ability to destroy satellites in Earth’s orbit from the ground, and the DS500s could easily accomplish that. In fact, the DS500s could hit a satellite as far away as lunar orbit. Astrophysicists were formulating strategies, even running simulations on using railguns to deflect asteroids on course to impact Earth. With kinetic impacts equal to that of nuclear detonations at a fraction of the cost of atomic explosives with no launch vehicle needed, the advantages were obvious. Railguns were strictly the province of the United States military.
Ted emailed his immediate superior, outlining the military’s “request,” and that there was no way they could deliver on time given the current production schedule. He requested they meet to see what they could come up with to satisfy their current string of orders, and what they could do to try to fulfill the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs’ demand: having their cake and eating it too.
The discovery of people living on the moon didn’t directly impact many on Earth. But there were Americans whose lives were peripherally affected: upper echelon African Americans in the military were moved out of their positions when the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs decided that every one of them was a potential security risk. Or when all the black Secret Service Agents assigned to the White House detail had their loyalty questioned by the President’s Chief of Staff. They turned in their weapons and exited the White House to avoid any appearance of potential risk, before being called back by the President himself.
In the intervening years, a quarter of a century later, there were incremental changes in the issues of race in America. For example, whenever a white policeman was interacting with a nonwhite on the street in America, the first thing bystanders did was pull out their mobile phones to record them. Even though the police shooting and killing statistics barely ticked do
wnward, there was a chance for an officer being held accountable as never before. But it was still a hostile world on the streets of America, some of that hostility was borne of jealousy over the imagined riches the blacks in space possessed.
And as the colony’s A.I. was constantly monitoring programs broadcast over the Earth’s satellites, colonists interested in Earth’s events were only minutes behind those living on the planet watching the news. Genesis would aggregate the coverage of the world’s disarmament and destruction of their stockpile of nuclear weapons in a monthly report to the colony’s council. Genesis also monitored the world’s military and scientists to continually assess Earth’s threat to the colony or their space station in lunar orbit.
The events were closely monitored by a few of the colony’s residents, those concerned with history, psychology, sociology and the American culture they left behind. Lola had been a Black American History major until shortly before she was recruited. Currently she was working with the colony’s former recruiters, Lucius Walker and Sydney Atkins, to maintain a documented history of the colony and its people, in concert with the events occurring on Earth.
Keeping track of the events transpiring, especially in the United States, was important to the colony. Earth was the only sanctuary in the solar system should some catastrophe befall the colony. What if there was a contagious illness that struck the colony and Earth had the only cure? Far-fetched, yes, but it was possible. And although the colony had brought back five shipping containers of useful items during their last secret shopping trip, because the U.S. military had the means of tracking their gravity-based spacecraft, there was no way they could approach and land on the planet without the military knowing. But as much as the colony steadfastly remained isolated from Earth, there were certain realities about their tenuous relationship.
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