The Tethys Report (The Rise of the Chirons Book 1)

by Rian Davis

  “But this is an incredible discovery. Doctor—Alan, I was sent here in order to report back about fossil energy deposits, minerals, and all the rest to my government, but if there is a way to make this energy that doesn’t require anything but some molecules to feed it, that would change everything. There would be no more war. We could all live peacefully.”

  “He’s right Alan. Think about it. We could all benefit from that kind of technology. We wouldn’t have to fight each other anymore.”

  “Impossible. The human race would just destroy itself if they had this much technology. It should stay down here.”

  “With you, is that it?” I asked.

  “I note your sarcastic tone, doctor, and I do not like it. Do you see me with a gun? No, you are the one whom I see carrying one.”

  “I have to. I’m a soldier-scientist. These are crazy times. I know. I can’t go into right now how it came to this.”

  “You don’t’ need to bother. Why can’t I just simply stay here. I’m old. I probably won’t make it out of this ice cube alive anyway, not back to McMurdo, not to my home.”

  “Where is your home?”

  “Vancouver, Canada and before that—Cambridge, where I was born. But that’s not what’s important here. What’s important here is this technology can be used for evil, and I do not trust humanity based on what we’ve seen so far to use it justly, do you? Can you honestly assure me that it cannot be used without harm? Hmmm?”

  I was crestfallen. Here was perhaps the most famous scientist after Einstein and Feynman, and my first meeting was not going well.

  “I cannot, but it is not up to me to stop trying.”

  “Nonsense. Your words are merely noble banter.”

  “Doctor, we have to try! The world is tearing itself apart for dwindling resources, land. People are killing each other for literally scraps of land. Lives are disappearing every day. We have to do something.”

  “Jen, who is this person?”

  “He’s my ex-boyfriend,” she replied.

  “Ah, I see I finally get proper billing,” I replied with a faint smirk, which perhaps only she could see.

  “I see he is quite large and persistent.”

  “Look Dr. Aspect--Alan, if you’re so insistent on dying here, I’ll let you, but I need to let you know that I cannot leave without some way of bringing this device with your notes on it to the folks back home if possible. People are going to die someday soon because we can’t extract enough minerals.”

  “You can’t keep up your overconsumption—can’t keep the beast going, is what you mean?”

  “Something like that.” I sighed.

  “Don’t worry Jake. I shall accede to your wishes, but only a partial victory: I shall return with you to the base, but I shall stay down here for the rest of my days. My reasons for going back with you are twofold. I wish to annoy the good Doctor Kranehouse one more time with my presence, and two I would like to help you return this knowledge back to the world. Your words have affected me somewhat—no doubt you thought otherwise. I am a scientist. I do not wish to hide knowledge.”

  “Thank you Alan. I wish you would come with us, but I must respect your wishes. But can I ask one question?”

  “You already did. Time’s up.”

  I grinned and asked anyway. “How do you propose to transmit the knowledge of this facility? How do you propose to teach others about what you’ve learned here.”

  “Ah that’s the thing isn’t it? I have taken meticulous notes while I was here. Every waking moment, I studied this place, I placed notes. Scientists should be able to make use of my writings and produce something of benefit. I have written scientific papers all my life, so I know what and how to write in the way to be understood by others.”

  “I see. That should be enough then. Thank you Alan.”

  “We should go now,” Jen said. She had a worried look in her eye, and I guessed that it was due to the Doctor’s health, but that wasn’t the only reason.

  “Wait,” said Dr. Aspect. “I need to show you something before we go.”

  “Alan, we have to go. Our people are waiting for us. We don’t have much time left. The oxygen’s almost out.”

  “Just be patient. It will take ten minutes, no more. It is important because someone needs to see what I have seen and I need to teach you something I could not write down.”

  “OK Doctor, but we need to go immediately. You have ten minutes. Then we’re gone, with or without you.” I was getting anxious because there had been no call from base even though we were well past the expected time, and we hadn’t told them what we were up to. Why hadn’t they called?

  “See this room here? Somehow, we are able to walk all along its walls. It’s amazing. It saves space. We can use the entire room to walk and move around. None of it is wasted. Amazing.”

  “Come on Doctor. We go out this way.”

  “I know where to go. Just for your knowledge, I wasn’t stuck in here the whole time. There’s another portal up there that leads to very interesting things, but I see that since we do not have time, I cannot lead you there. Let us go out to the main room. You have a vessel?”

  “Yes, it’s waiting outside the portal in the next room.”

  “Good.”

  “But before we go, I want to show you something that is most amazing. I won’t describe it until you see it with your very eyes,” he said with vigor. I knew he had seen something incredible.

  We followed him into another room I hadn’t noticed before. He hit a panel and a portal opened.

  Chapter 11

  We entered a room that was circular except for the flat bottom and pitch black. There were lights dancing in the middle from a perfectly shaped sphere. Alan hit a button and three chairs emerged from the floor. I hadn’t noticed where they came from, but the floor opened up perfectly to allow for the chairs to emerge. It was the most perfect engineering I had ever seen.

  “Please sit down,” he said. We both did as instructed. He then hit some more buttons and the room lit up with various lights and then more came on in an intense light show. Specs of light floated throughout the entire room. There were faint lines made of dark green, others of crimson red, and more made of gold that connected the specs at certain places. All over, patterns emerged from the specs of light. Their source apparently was the walls themselves as they suddenly appeared to emit light from many different places as though small crystals suddenly emerged from their black surfaces.

  “What is that?” Jen asked Alan.

  “That is the Universe—I think. At least it’s our galaxy. I’m not an astronomer, but I’ve looked over the map of the Milky Way, and I can tell you it has a strong resemblance to it.”

  “But what are those lines,” I said referring to the various colored lines. “I can somehow see the resemblance to the Milky Way, but I’m not sure what they are.”

  “I haven’t figured them out yet,” Alan said.

  “I think I know,” said Jen. “I remember reading a journal article about dark energy. It seems that the vacuum energy ran through the objects of the Universe like lines of force—or vectors I think they called them. Maybe that’s what they are.”

  “That would make sense,” Alan said. “Incredible. Maybe they have mapped the entire Universe. Here, I’ll show you beyond our Milky Way galaxy—if that is what it is supposed to portray. Wait until you see this!”

  The lights shrunk and more of them appeared. The lines got thinner. Patterns emerged. The entire Universe composed of lights grew until an egg shape appeared with unevenly spread edges.

  “The known Universe,” Alan said. “Isn’t it wonderful?”

  “That must be the Cosmic Microwave Background—the limit to the Universe. The barrier of light that could not have traveled any further in the fourteen-point-eight billion years of its existence. But wait! It’s showing us what’s beyond the known Universe. Behold!” Alan said, clearly excited—as were Jen and I. “Look at this—amazing!”

&
nbsp; The edges of the known Universe faded, and others appeared. The colored lines simply kept going. A whole web of lines formed, and the Universe grew and grew. Patterns emerged and similarities were pointed out. It seemed that the Universe were repetitions of the same thing over and over again.

  “What does it all mean?” Jen said.

  “Watch and find out,” Alan said. He hit some more buttons on a panel he was controlling. We were zooming out.

  “What?” I asked. “How is this possible? Is this a glitch?”

  As the image zoomed out further and further, eventually the entire ‘map’ of the Universe turned into a black image—a ball—a black hole. It was the one that existed at the center of our galaxy, the Milky Way. Eventually, it was all that we saw, and then it zoomed further and other patterns emerged that didn’t quite look like the Milky Way anymore. Then it became clear that there was much beyond the Cosmic Microwave Background—beyond the boundaries of the known Universe. There was much more beyond, stars, galaxies and clusters—so many. They pulled our known Universe with the Dark Energy with many fine lines of force that we had no way of detecting.

  “Amazing. I’m seeing even beyond the confines of the known Universe.”

  “Isn’t it?

  I had to stop. I got off the chair and the images halted—at least for me. Jen joined me.

  “What do you think?”

  “Amazing—but overwhelming,” I replied. “I’m not sure if that’s really our Universe, and I’m not sure if that’s really how things work, but it was a lot to process.” I thought about all the things that had happened in the past few days. This was the most yet to take in.

  “Wait, there’s one more thing I want to show you. Please have a seat again.”

  “I don’t know, Alan. I’m not sure I can handle another trip like that,” I said. My head felt like it was spinning faster than the Universe.

  “Please. Let’s just look at one more thing, then we’ll go.”

  “OK. Jen, how about you?”

  “I’ll look too. Why not? This is fascinating. We’re scientists. This is what we’ve always wanted.”

  But I wondered. This kind of knowledge came without the cost—without the long arduous research that led to discovery. Somehow it felt wrong. It was knowledge acquired cheaply, and that conflicted with my personal sense of norms. Nonetheless, I sat back in the odd chair and looked.

  “This time,” Alan said. “I will place two objects in the projection—one living and one dead. Behold!”

  We looked at a single fish of some sort—it looked like a tuna. It was sitting there floating in the air. On the other side off to the right was a quartz rock—nothing extraordinary. You saw them all the time. What happened next was that the image zoomed in at a frightening speed towards the surfaces of both. For the fish, the image came upon the skin, then the cell, then the atoms and so forth until we saw lines of force similar to the colored lines from before. On the right, we saw the quartz rock zoom close and then it become molecules and the atoms and then more subatomic particles until it was just colored lines as the fish comprised of.

  “Did you see any difference?” he asked.

  I was dumbfounded. “No, I didn’t. That can’t possibly be it,” I said. “That can’t be all there is to life. That would mean then—”

  “Yes, he’s right,” Jen said. She spoke in a muffled voice with heavy breathing, her words barely containing the energy concealed underneath. “I’ve somehow known the truth all my life. They’re both the same. There’s no line to divide them.”

  “Then there is no difference between living things and dead—they’re just information and complexity. They both have forces inside of them,” I said. “I’ve always known on a per-volume level the sun was far less complex than the human brain and committed energy much more than the sun did at the same volume in terms of structure. If what I just saw is correct then that means that—”

  “All things are the same. All things are in a sense alive and dead,” he said.

  “Is that correct?” I asked. “Could that really be true?”

  Alan shrugged. “Who knows? It’s an interesting hypothesis though isn’t it? It could be true, and that’s all that matters. Even with all that I’ve learned—the incredible discoveries I’ve gained, I doubt I can definitively answer that question. Doubt always remains. I fear that I will never live to see the answer more clearly with further evidence and research.”

  “If it is true,” Jen said. “It changes everything.”

  “Yes,” Alan said. “Yes it does. That’s why I’m determined now that my colleagues have to know about it. I will help you leave now. We should go as you say.”

  Chapter 12

  “What happened to the pod?” Jen asked. “The one you used to get here.”

  “Well there was the accident, and it was no longer tenable for me to keep her here.”

  “I see. Is there something else you need to show us before we go?”

  “It’s not a good idea,” I said. “We really need to get back.”

  “It won’t take long. This is the last thing. I promise!”

  Jen gave me a look that said, I’m game if you are. “There will be just over twenty-four hours of air left about when we arrive back if we leave pretty soon,” she said.

  “Follow me. We don’t need to go back out into the central area.” Alan led the way.

  I hadn’t thought about the danger for Alan. We had only two suits with us, and we would have to either share or find another way to get him out, assuming he didn’t have one stashed away somewhere. That was always possible.

  That fear was averted, however, when he opened a portal I hadn’t noticed before.

  “Let’s go this way. Come on. As you said, time is valuable.”

  I hadn’t thought I used exactly those same words, but it was good enough.

  We followed him into the next room, which turned out to be another one of those circular rooms, but bigger. There were also more objects that looked like thick TV sets and other items, in the room, and I had no idea what their purpose was. There was also one big thing that wasn’t in the other room: a large monitor or window looking out onto the miniature sun. It must have been filtered if it were a window because there was a lot more information and indicative lights than what should have been.

  “Look at that! The panel is showing what the fusion core looks like in all its glory. I note that it is not, in fact, the force of gravity like the sun that fuses the hydrogen elements to create energy but the force of electromagnetism, which is far stronger than gravity. The Chirons have cheated nature, and made their own sun far more efficiently than the Gods could ever do.”

  “You said ‘Chirons’? Is that the name you give them? Those people who created this city?”

  “Yes, that is the name I gave them.”

  “Why do you call them that?” Jen asked.

  He looked at her in thought—as if gathering his words carefully.

  “You see, they have this chiral nature, especially in their building blocks. What I mean is that in chemistry we often find that nature loves stability, namely a left-hand and a right-hand. Most living things on life, however, are made of homochiral building blocks—L-amino acids and D-sugars. But why is that? But these beings have the opposite: They have D-amino acids and L-sugars in their makeup. That is very strange! Symmetry should be complete, not one sided like we see in life. This is a problem that has befuddled scientists for many years. That is why I named them Chirons. They are built with the opposite-handedness that we, and indeed all life, are built upon. Why did nature decide to do that? Why don’t we see anything in the world built like these beings?” he was pacing back and forth, looking at the ground.

  “What’s more, they have this affinity for discrete numbers and music. They have achieved progress beyond which we could only dream. I have been studying to find how they did it these past many days.”

  “My god,” I said. I had only a vague understanding of w
hat he was saying. I was out of my league. “Who or what are they?”

  “Why, those are the ones who built all this—all you see around us—this city—that miniature sun you see there,” he replied. He seemed extremely proud of the accomplishment of decoding their technology, and I had to admit I was very impressed. “They are magnificent beings—creatures that have accomplished things we could only dream of.”

  “Those must be the beings I saw from the remains back at the base. Dr. Laennec showed me. Those are the ones who built all this? That’s amazing. I wish I knew more about them,” I said.

  “Yes, the one you saw on the statue outside—I named him Leonard. I cannot reconstruct the name he gave himself from the binary readings I have just yet. And ah yes, the remains I found. Those were of Leonard’s mother. He was the last Chiron to live in this city—the one who turned the lights off—so to speak.”

  “It seems he didn’t do a very good job at that,” Jen said indicating the massive view panel.

  “Fortunately for us since we depend on their creation—even now. Of course his mother, whom I have not named, was the last woman. I suspect that she was impregnated via one of their systems, not in the way we are used to.”

  “What are you saying, Dr. Aspect,” Jen said. “That they controlled the offspring that they produced? They edited the genes of their newborns?”

  “Of course,” Dr. Aspect replied. “And we do it too. Of course no one reports it nowadays. We have few offspring because of it. However, most of them are in good condition and very few are underachievers. Of course, I was born in 2001, so I was under the old system. It’s one of the reasons I left society to disappear the way I did. I couldn’t fathom why society would permit such a world to emerge.”