The laser on the space station still weighed over 8 tons and guzzled most of the power generated by the fusion reactor, but it was worth it. It could send a blue-green laser beam so powerful into space that, it was possible to illuminate an object 8-10 light hours away with the average reflectivity of a Shaitan spaceship. That might not sound like much, until one considers that the laser light had to reflect back from that far a distance, and less than a trillionth of that light would be reflected back to the waiting sensors, which had to be detectable. It took a really powerful laser to achieve that feat.
The principle of detection was simple. The laser would continuously perform a sweep of the space looking outwards of the solar system. The computer controlled laser would sweep somewhat akin to the ancient CRT monitor and television used in the 20th century. Ironically such a sweep by a laser misses out a lot of area between the lines of sweep at a close distance, but as one goes further it is an almost complete scan.
The engineers took advantage of one of the weaknesses and limitations of the laser technology. Human laser technology suffered from it, so did Shaitan laser technology – laser de-coherence. Although Shaitan lasers were far superior to the human ones. Lasers remain a sharp pinpoint beam of light only for a certain distance, after which that tight beam of light starts spreading like light from a traditional source like a LED lamp. Thus at a far enough distance, the laser beam spreads enough to cover the gaps between the lines to provide complete coverage.
The other piece of major equipment on the space station was a large bank of light sensors, similar to conventional CCD sensors used in consumer electronics and cameras, but far more sensitive. These sensors were cryogenically cooled to lower their temperature even below that of the cold space in the outer solar system. These sensors could reliably detect a single photon at a time.
Since the wavelength of the blue-green laser was known, the reflected photons from various surfaces would have a known pattern of spectrum distribution. The computer could reliably segregate the reflected laser light, from ambient sources like stars, floating rocks and comets in the Kuiper belt almost 99.9% of the time. Whenever the computer would have any doubts, laser light could be shone on that particular point again and further analysis could be done.
The laser simply provided a bright source of light. When that light would be reflected back was indeterminate, since the far away object could be at any distance. So the sensors had to keep an unblinking gaze at their entire field of vision. Nautilus class ships had been sent very far off into the Kuiper belt, and the Lighthouse tests had been able to reliably detect them.
One huge side benefit of the Lighthouse project to the astronomy community had been that almost each and every rock and comet within a few hundred AU of Earth had been discovered and their orbits documented. For the first time in history, humanity was confident that they would have a far better chance of survival compared to the dinosaurs, if a space rock was headed towards the Earth anytime in the next few thousand years. Also in the very first year of the partial operation of the Lighthouse, astronomers found 26 dwarf planets the size of Pluto, confirming their suspicion that thousands, if not millions of such bodies roam in the dark in the Kuiper belt.
One of the frequent questions asked by laymen was why not have dedicated space stations placed in the two directions of Alpha Shaitan and Beta Shaitan, where an attack is most likely to come from? Unfortunately celestial mechanics dictates that nothing can be standing still in space. A body is either falling towards a larger body, or orbiting it. Gravity ensures that.
So there is no way to keep a space station stationary in the direction of Alpha Shaitan or Beta Shaitan, unless the space station continuously uses its engine propulsion. This is impractical and would wear down the ion plasma engines within a decade or two, even with continuous maintenance. It would also take up a large part of the power of the fusion engines required by the laser.
Instead three space station orbiting in an equilateral triangle configuration in the solar plane and another 3 space stations orbiting similarly in a plane 90° from the solar plane provided an overlapping 100% coverage of every direction. The space stations were taken out to an orbit between Uranus and Neptune, which was a distance that could be reached by the current generation of ships in a reasonable time for regular maintenance by the crew, and yet far enough to give ample warning time.
Unfortunately the limitations on the speed of light meant that any warning that the space stations received, would reach Earth almost 3 hours later. However if an incoming KK ships could be detected 10 light hours out from the space station, then even with the KK ship travelling at 4% the speed of light, Earth would have almost 2 weeks early warning. If ever some method to stop such a ship was found, humans would have ample opportunity to then stop it out in space.
It took almost 3 years and a special budgetary allocation to the USC to complete and deploy the 6 space stations of the Lighthouse project, although the monitoring of space started even with the first one deployed. At the end of deployment of all the 6 space stations, humans would feel a sense of security and accomplishment.
That sense of security and accomplishment would be reinforced in the short run with successes in the next decade. What the people of that age could not have known was that they had sown the seeds of the greatest scourge ever to hit humanity and Earth.
Chapter 10
Rip Van Winkle
Approaching Alpha Shaitan System
June, 2104
The limiting factor in increasing human longevity had also become the limiting factor in human stasis research. The fact that the brain was the most complex and the least understood part of our body was known even to a child. It has been known since medieval surgeons started dissecting human cadavers and scientifically cataloging the human body.
The problem with the brain is that it not just more complicated than other parts of the body, but orders of magnitude more complex. While humans had made good progress in understanding the input output signals of the brain, resulting in a practical implantable neural interface, it was amazing that humanity knew as little about the internal mechanisms of the brain at the end of the 21st century as they did at the end of the 20th century.
As a result, while almost all body parts of a human could be replaced by growing a replacement organ or creating a machine replacement, when it came to the brain, there was nothing a surgeon could or would dare to do. No surgeon would take the scalpel to a living human brain, they just didn’t know enough about it to do any repair. They would just end up killing the person. It was a figure of speech, surgeons rarely used scalpels these days, unless it was a very minor surgery.
Diseases of the human brain were still treated the old fashioned way of administering drugs. Needless to say the results were as old fashioned and ineffective as they had been a hundred years ago. Human with access to decent healthcare, who died of old age, primarily died of two causes at that time. First was certain forms of cancer, which could not be cured beyond a certain point, and the second was the deterioration of the brain.
A large percentage of humans had a propensity to get cancer as they grew older, especially as they reached their eighties and nineties. It had never been noticed in earlier generations because a large proportion would die long before that, due to other causes like heart disease, diabetes etc. By the end of the 21st century however there were preventive medicine, surgical implants and genetic treatments available for those types of diseases.
Most humans with access to healthcare would have those simple preventive treatments in their 30s or even earlier to prevent a heart attack, diabetes etc. It had become almost as ubiquitous as vaccination. As a result very few humans died of these causes if they had access to healthcare. The operative phrase being ‘if they had access to healthcare’.
Unfortunately half the population of the world did not have access to these treatments. A quarter of the population probably did not even have easy access to basic healthcare, avai
lable in the developed world a hundred years ago. The world may have progressed technologically, but it had not yet become an equitable place.
However as more and more people did not die of simple causes like heart attack and diabetes, and lived into their eighties and nineties, it became apparent that a larger proportion of the senior citizens were developing cancer. It was recognized that many forms of cancer were a natural way for the body to degrade over time, as human cell multiplication mechanism failed. It was caused by the ends of our chromosomes called Telomere fraying, and thus not being able to hold all our genes properly within the chromosomes.
Not all human were affected by this condition however. If this tendency to develop cancer was avoided by a human being, then like many on Earth they could well enter their 12th decade of life. The population of people in the developed world who were past their 110th birthday could be counted in millions. There was however one form of entropy that the body could not avoid, and there was no known cure.
The brain slowly but surely degraded. One lost one’s faculties and eventually the brain lost its ability to perform basic autonomous functions. Then the body simply became a living vegetable. For some it started as early as the eighties and for others it started well after their 100th birthday, but it did happen.
Humans had identified the extreme case of this phenomenon as various diseases like Dementia, Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease. By the end of the 21st century, humanity understood the spectrum of brain degenerative diseases a bit better, but was no closer to any cure.
It was suspected that this limitation of an intelligent being’s brain might be a universal problem with all intelligent species. This was partly because when the humans studied the large number of Shaitans captured, interrogated and dissected, it was found that the primary cause of death in Shaitans from old age was due to the deterioration of the brain.
So why was all this important to USC in particular and human space endeavor in general? Because this same lack of understanding and biochemical control over our brain prevented putting a human in stasis.
Humanity on its own had made huge progress in the medical sphere. There were now medical, surgical and cryogenic techniques available to slow down every human organ except the brain to a hundredth of its normal activity and then revive it back. There was a slight risk of some of the organs not reviving properly, but those could be repaired or in the worst case replaced.
Other than the brain, the only problematic organ for the stasis researchers was surprisingly the human testicles. As if the cruelty of Mother Nature in leaving such a delicate organ hanging outside the body was not enough, as any human male involved in a brawl would testify, it was one of the organs that also one of the first to get damaged and almost impossible to replace.
A logical species would not have sweated too much about it, but asking any man if he willing to forego his manhood for the sake of stasis, and one would know the answer. So it was not surprising that the second most researched organ for the stasis doctors after the brain was the human testicles.
Other than their own research, some of the major breakthroughs in stasis research had come through studying the two partially intact Shaitan ships that had been salvaged. One in orbit of Mars, which was studied in situ, while the other just outside the orbit of Pluto, which had been killed by the Third Fleet.
The Shiva had managed to stop the dead Shaitan ship and push it gently towards Earth. It would still take decades to reach Earth, but it could be studied at leisure without having to worry that it drifting away.
Every niche on these Shaitan ships, which was the Shaitan equivalent of bunk cum study table cum workstation was fitted with stasis equipment. Enough of them had survived in both the damaged ships for humans to study them and figure out the technology.
Despite the Shaitan biology being fairly different from humans, it was remarkable how similar the techniques of putting an organic being into stasis were. This was because stasis involved chemistry even more than biology. There was very little biology that could be learnt from the Shaitan stasis equipment, but a lot was learnt about chemistry.
For example, new chemical compounds that were compatible with organic beings which prevented large ice crystals from forming within frozen cells. This prevented tissue damage and organs could be frozen safely without damage. New mastery was achieved over organic antifreeze that allowed certain critical parts of the body to keep ticking over slowly even in deep stasis.
These new compounds and techniques had been tried and tested on all higher mammals, human organs individually and even on a few humans in hospital dying of degenerative diseases. They could not be saved, but the degeneration of their bodies could be slowed down, while their brains and some parts of their body remained functional. It proved that it was possible to put humans in stasis and then safely bring them back.
However all this would come to a naught if the brain could not be put into stasis. The person’s brain would not just age normally, they would be in a hellish nightmare, where the entire body is paralyzed while the brain is fully awake and aware in darkness. It would certainly drive the brain mad if left in that state for a few weeks, let alone a few years.
There were thousands of medical researchers working on this problem across the world, but the best they had been able to come up with was to put the brain in a state of coma. The brain would still age, but at least the person would not be aware of what was happening. There were also side effects of putting the brain in coma for a long time, which were not clearly understood.
The real breakthrough in putting the human brain into stasis came from the records of Ramses the Ka-let. While he was famous in popular culture for his logs documenting his and his people’s tragic story. Ramses the Ka-let was first and foremost a Ka-let physician and a stasis expert. His medical records and references were exactly what the medical researchers needed to be able to shut down the brain and then revive it back safely.
This was helped in no small measure by the fact that the Ka-let biology was remarkably similar to that of the flora and fauna on Earth. The Ka-let biology had evolved to use the same ATP cycle to harness energy of sugars within their cells, like the animals of Earth. There was however a major difference. While Earth animals used a right-handed sugar molecule, the Ka-let used the mirror image left-handed sugar molecule with the same formula.
The two life forms on the two worlds may have converged on bio-chemistry by accident or due to similar condition on their individual planets, but they were not exactly compatible. Unless a virus were to mutate and be able to latch on the other’s biochemistry. A human could have eaten Ka-let food safely and even felt his stomach fill up, and yet would have slowly died of starvation, as they would not have been able to extract any nutrition out of the food. The same held true for a Ka-let eating human food.
Still, the biochemistry was similar enough, that most of the techniques of stasis of the Ka-let were applicable to humans. Many historians considered the stasis capability as the biggest Ka-let gift to humanity, greater than their harvester technology. In many ways it was the stasis technology that really enabled humans to undertake long interstellar voyages.
Captain Brogan had been awake for almost a whole week now. He had been awakened from his four year slumber, put through his paces on the recovery machines and certified by the doctors as fit and ready. He had suffered from no major damages on reanimation, except for the skin rash problem that he had suffered. Doctors had said that it was owing to a genetic quirk of his, that he had inherited. It wasn’t a major concern and that the rashes would subside within a week.
That didn’t mean that he felt 100% at the moment. The first few days had been terrible. He had felt lethargic all the time. Although the doctors had advised that he take it easy and rest a lot, Capt. Brogan was not that kind of a person. He could not be lying around in his bunk, he needed to walk his ship. Every muscle had ached during the first few days, and even now slight exertion drove him to exhausti
on. His stamina was next to zero.
For the first few days, Capt. Brogan had difficulty focusing his attention on anything, or remembering even simple details like his own birthday or the color of his sister’s hair. The memory would be hazy and just beyond reach. The neural connections storing those memories slowly reactivated and the memories came into sharper focus after a few days. Everyone called it the Rip Van Winkle syndrome. However it reminded Capt. Brogan of something else.
The technique of putting humans into four year hibernation, and then reanimating them for at least a year before putting them back to sleep was something that had been learnt from the Ka-lets. It had been adapted for the human biology, but was essentially similar. His own awakening from hibernation, reminded Capt. Brogan of the logs of Ramses the Ka-let, and his own complaints about reanimation, and how it never got easier.
Somehow Capt. Brogan felt kinship to that 80 thousand year old dead alien at that moment, even though he and his kind thought of the humans of that time as no more than just animals. Capt. Brogan was thankful that this was his only hibernation for the journey. Within a few months they would be closing in on the Alpha Shaitan system and to war!
Chapter 11
The Soldier and the Pacifist
Approaching Alpha Shaitan
August 2104
Now that everyone was awake and no one was scheduled to go into stasis sleep for a long time, Dr. Mary Kramnik was relatively free after spending almost 3 hectic sleepless months getting every soul in the ship out of stasis. There is a lot for a doctor to do to assist recovery of a human after a long hibernation sleep than most layman think. Every patient’s vital signs have to be monitored intensely for many days, and then the person has to be kept in observation for weeks as their process of recovery of muscles mass from slow atrophy followed.
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