Escaping the Sun

by Rhett Goreman

  I remembered now. Yes, as requested by my father I had volunteered to be amongst the first completely healthy people to be put in stasis, frozen in suspended animation, waiting for the day when it would be necessary to re-build civilisation after some major natural disaster.

  It seemed only moments ago I had been counting to ten. Then I remembered the sight of people being vacuum packed under a thick plastic film. I assumed the final stage of the process must have been for us to be put into a deep freeze. But now my packaging had been cut open by someone. I was still alive and breathing. Perhaps they had not gone through with the procedure after all.

  A beautiful girl with shoulder length, snow-white, hair and dressed in a glossy-white, single piece, body hugging uniform was looking closely into my eyes. ‘Perhaps I have died. Is this what an angel looks like?’ I thought.

  ‘It is important you remember your revival exercises,’ said the angel, ‘Roll your eyes. Stretch your face muscles. Rotate your shoulders. You will have many questions I am sure. Whilst you are coming round I’ll brief you on what is happening. But we must be ready to evacuate this place in less than 20 minutes now. So listen up.’

  ‘After the Great Asteroid impact, all life on the surface of the Earth was destroyed. Most animals and plants that lived on, under the ground, eventually died during the dark ages that followed, mainly from starvation. You are the last human to be revived.’

  I asked, ‘Where’s my father? Can I see him?’

  The angel replied, ‘Do not worry. Your father is nearby. But I expect you know he has important work to do, of a highly secret nature. It’s impossible for you to see him at the moment.’

  ‘You must come with me now, so you can get together with the others of your kind,’ she insisted.

  ‘What do you mean “of your kind”?’ I enquired, becoming increasingly concerned.

  I was somewhat taken aback when she went on to explain, ‘I am one of the Elite. We are here to serve you. To preserve humankind. You must come with me now. The life support functions in this bunker are failing. You are needed several hundred miles away. You will be safe there. We have built an enclosed oasis for your kind. We call it “Abidgica”. We must get there before daybreak.’

  Feeling rather anxious now I probed further, ‘You said “we are here to serve you,” but you are no robot. I am pretty sure I can recognise flesh and blood when I see it. If you are not human then what are you?’

  The angel explained, ‘Whilst you were in stasis, electro-mechanical robotics had not developed beyond the ability to keep your people alive. And I have to say not many stasis pods have survived. It has taken many years to find this bunker. It was buried under thousands of tons of rubble.’

  She continued, ‘On the other hand, those bunkers where basic genetic samples were stored happened to be controlled by biological computers. At times of extreme stress they could be freeze dried along with the samples they were guarding. Both the samples and the computers could then be re-hydrated when conditions were more appropriate. Over millions of years this cycle was repeated. Each time “improvements” were made to the specification of the biological computers and also to the stored genetic material. I was a child of that genetic material, a test tube baby if you prefer to call it that. As with all members of the Elite, I enjoy good health and fitness, and now I have grown to adulthood I should live to a great age.’

  ‘Just hold on a minute,’ I exclaimed. ‘You said “over millions of years.” Just how long have I been asleep?’

  ‘One thousand million years,’ she said.

  My jaw dropped.

  ‘You have not only survived the Great Asteroid collision and the fallout from that, but also major epochs of global warming, super-volcano eruptions, many ice ages, and blasts of radiation from solar flares and nearby supernovae.’

  And as if that was not enough to take in, she continued, ‘But now, the days the Earth has left are numbered, and the Elite are about the leave this planet for good. So can you stand up for me. We must leave now, this minute, or we could get left behind.’

  Chapter 10 – Cerrina

  I now know the Solar System, I found myself waking up in, was literally worlds apart from the one I had been taught about in my youth.

  I never imagined the possibility of our Sun, turning itself into a red giant, would become a real issue I would personally have to come to terms with. Yet I had been catapulted a billion years into the future, at the starting point of that very same disaster scenario.

  Seen from space, the Sun was still white in colour, and only slightly larger than I remembered. It would not look red, or grow significantly, for at least another four billion years. Nevertheless, it was about ten percent hotter than I was accustomed to and that fact in itself threatened the viability of all remaining life on Earth.

  At the time of my awakening, a large proportion of our world’s oceans were already suspended as hot dense steam clouds in the atmosphere. The presence of steam had resulted in a runaway greenhouse effect, boiling the seas around the equator, so producing more steam and trapping more and more heat. Any sunlight, managing to reach the Earth’s surface through the thick cloud layer, was tinged a deep orange. Violent storms raged all over the planet.

  Whilst I was asleep, the Moon had been slowly moving away from the Earth and huge Dark Matter engines had been built to move them even further apart. A side effect of this intervention, was that the rotation of both the Earth and the Moon had been slowing down. The extremely long days and nights were causing tremendous temperature swings both on the Earth and on the Moon. Nevertheless, the plan was to completely halt the rotation of both bodies, with respect to the Sun. The sun-ward side of each globe was to become a solar radiation shield; whilst on the dark side, temperatures would eventually plunge well below the freezing point of air. However, along the terminator, the boundary between the permanent day and night, it was expected that a milder habitable zone would be produced.

  There was a really good reason for this massive feat of engineering. Rather than harvesting thousands of asteroids, the Elite had mined and re-engineered the Moon as just one huge lifeboat.

  Any day now, the massive Dark Matter engine on the Moon was to be brought up to full power and the Moon would be sent on its way to the outer reaches of the Solar System.

  Once freed from the clutches of the Earth’s gravity, the Moon was to become a true spaceship and officially adopt its new name of ‘Cerrina’. Eventually, after a few hundred years, Cerrina would become a new moon of Neptune and return to having sensible days and nights.

  On the Moon, the Elite had set up the same hierarchical society they had brought about so successfully on Earth. Once again they enjoyed a symbiotic relationship with humans. Working together, Elite and humans had built honey comb shaped living spaces and greenhouse atria as first pioneered on Earth - although it has to be said the technologies used to construct the cells of the honeycomb on Cerrina were rather more sophisticated.

  Nano-Technology and Biological Quantum Computers were everywhere and nowhere. They were woven into the very fabric of the buildings, tools, and clothing both the Elite and humans relied upon.

  For millions of years there had been a software application in existence for every task imaginable. If there wasn’t an ‘App’ then, ‘Why would you need to do what you want to do?’ As a result of this dogma, the art of writing software had been forgotten thousands of years before.

  Instead, there were many different types of cloned intelligent materials, each incorporating a network of Quantum Computers, genetically programmed to rapidly grow to their specified dimensions, and carry out a specific task. Moreover, that task could be as simple as becoming a blanket or as complex as becoming a human-like personal servant.

  Significantly, as I had foretold on my first day at the Academy, all these smart materials were in communication with each other, and they were also aware of what was going on in the environment around them.

  As you might have ex
pected, all that highly distributed and networked computing was only good until something went wrong - and things frequently did go wrong.

  Chapter 11 – Demolition

  I had hardly managed to stand upright, when the girl opened the door to the room and grabbed hold of my hand. She then pulled me from the light, into a darkened, austere looking corridor, and we began to run.

  My billion year old legs found it difficult and painful to keep up with her. I stumbled a few times, but she held onto me, and after passing several, now empty, storage bays, we soon arrived at the exit of Bunker 7.

  The blast door, although rather distorted, was still firmly shut. However, the concrete wall to one side of the door had been breached. There was a hole big enough to drive a tank through, and it looked as though someone might have done just that.

  Clambering over a few boulders, we emerged out into the open, not that it was possible to see very far. We were faced with a wall of horizontal rain, that was competing with a broiling fog. Everything, ahead of us, was bathed in a deep orange light, tarnished by the rust red glow of impending dawn. It was as hot as hell. There was a howling wind and the sound of large diesel engines being revved up.

  Through the maelstrom, I could just make out a row of three armoured vehicles with huge tyres. The one on the left was beginning to move off. The other two had their rear ramp doors fully open, each shining a large angular shaft of white light into the swirling sea of orange mist.

  I have never felt so under-dressed. I could just make out Ellie, Tom, and Gerland running up the rear ramp of the second armoured vehicle. They must have had more time to don full combat gear. I was still barefoot and wearing the thin cotton pyjamas intended only for use during stasis.

  As my friends’ shadowy outlines melted into a floating wall of white light, the ramp was raised and their vehicle set off, leaving a cloud of dark brown smog in its place.

  Still being pulled on by the Elite girl, I had to run across a patch of open ground towards the third and last transport vehicle. Every step of the way, my bare feet complained about the rough treatment I was inflicting on them. My face was lashed by violent flurries of hot wind and blistering raindrops. Heavily saturated with water vapour, the air took some effort to breath.

  Running up the ramp and into the vehicle, my clothes were soaking wet, my heart was pounding, and my chest heaving. I collapsed into the first seat I came to and the girl helped me to buckle up before strapping herself in. There was a whine from an electric motor, followed by a loud ‘thud’, and then a comforting ‘clunk’, as the back door ramp rose up and locked out the howl of the gale.

  I noticed there was only myself, the Elite girl, and a driver in the vehicle. I guessed the driver was also one of the Elite, because he too had snow-white hair and wore a pure-white suit.

  The driver pushed a lever forward. There was a loud roar from the engine, and we started to move.

  Looking at the girl and shouting over the noise I asked, ‘What kind of vehicle is this?’

  She shouted back her reply, ‘We don’t really know what it is. It’s from your time. I had hoped you could tell us. We took them from the Bunker I extracted you from. We call them Hippos because of the thick hide of armour plate they have. We reckon they will come in handy when we cross the minefield.’

  ‘MINEFIELD. What minefield?’ I shrieked, but before I could launch any further protest, I saw our driver reach over to the empty passenger seat next to him, to press a button on a fist sized gadget. Having noticed him do that, I am sure what happened next was no coincidence.

  There was a massive explosion behind us. I could feel the thud of the blast through the back of my seat and on my chest. Twisting around to push my face up to a tiny window in the rear of the Hippo, I could see the glow of a huge fireball through the swirling fog. It was much too big to be caused by a mine. Judging by the scale of the fireball and the size of the blast, I could tell that half the hill, where Bunker 7 had been, was no more. It had to be a deliberate act of demolition. I worried about my father, but I was not given a moment longer to think about what might have happened to him.

  As our Hippo picked up speed, it began to lurch from side to side and up and down. The pilot style harness I was wearing kept me roughly in my seat, although every few seconds the buckle felt like a rubber mallet hitting me squarely in the middle of my chest.

  The driver shouted over his shoulder at us, ‘The weather is getting worse now and I’ve lost sight of the track we were on. We need to get to the far side of this tundra as quickly as possible. Hold on tight. It’s going to get very bumpy from here on in.’

  I craned my neck to get a better view through the portion of the narrow driver’s window being swept by windscreen wipers. Sure enough, all I could see was a dusky red fog punctuated by splashes of blue-white lightning some way off in the distance.

  I was expecting the rumble of thunder to join in with the cacophony of sounds around us, but then it started.

  The racing Hippo began running over one landmine after another. It seemed the plan was to ride over them at speed, to catch them by surprise. Each mine took a short time to detect the vehicle passing over it, before rising out of the ground to explode about chest height just behind us. Every detonation jolted the Hippo forward, pushing us back into our seats and head restraints.

  I tried to look backwards, through the now cracked little window in the rear door. I just caught a glimpse of a mine exploding, then another one went off underneath us. The armour held but we were lifted into the air for a moment and came down for a hard landing. We were neither damaged nor deterred by this and the mad dash continued.

  To make matters worse, the electrical storm was getting much stronger and closer. Then the biggest bolt of lightning, I have ever witnessed, hit the ground just ahead of us.

  But even before we were bathed in the anticipated clap of thunder, every landmine, in a 50 metre radius around us, rose up into the air. They must have been triggered either by the electrical discharge itself, or by the resulting tidal wave of sound.

  Our highly armoured Hippo might have been able to survive the plethora of exploding mines. However, the combined force of all the explosions caused an underground maze of old tunnels to collapse, a short distance in front of us.

  A huge and very deep crater appeared before our eyes and we ploughed straight down into it.

  Chapter 12 – The Creche

  Meanwhile: Life, for everyone on our Moon, continued as it had done for the past hundred years or so, with one major exception. There was a welcome air of excitement. Our lifeboat Moon would soon be leaving Earth orbit to become a spaceship in its own right, taking on the new name of ‘Cerrina’ as it finally embarked on the long slow migration that was to take its passengers to the outer reaches of the Solar System.

  The thought this historic voyage was about to start had put a broad smile on the face of Khonen, the Elite leader of a team of construction engineers. He was also pleased with some new growth in demand for the work of his team. The population on the Moon had been slowly increasing, and there were also plans for one final influx of Elite from the Earth. As a result of this, the ongoing programme to expand the living quarters and other facilities had been given a new impetus.

  Despite the characteristic snowy-white hair, Khonen was both rugged looking and handsome. He had a short fringe with neatly trimmed sideburns, a square jaw, and steel grey eyes.

  An experienced engineer, he had learned his trade during the construction of the concrete containment vessel and other buildings associated with Cerrina’s massive nuclear fusion reactor. He often recalled his apprenticeship with pride, because the reactor he had helped to build was being used to provide the power for the mission critical Dark Matter Engine, as well as lighting and heating for all the living areas; particularly when they were in shade, and recently they had been in shade for weeks at a time.

  *

  Khonen, was in his element driving a huge electrically operated constru
ction vehicle - a type of bulldozer fitted with caterpillar tracks. As usual, he was enjoying his work and felt quiet comfortable sat in the pressurised and air conditioned cabin.

  Flexible hoses, strewn along the ground from the nearest building, supplied electricity and various fluids to the vehicle. Cooling or heating the wheel bearings and the outer skin of the vehicle was essential because the temperature outside soared to +300C (almost the melting point of lead) in the caustic white sunlight and fell well below -100C in the shade.

  Khonen’s bulldozer was flanked by other large vehicles driven by the human members of his team. This small group of big machines always worked in unison to clear and flatten a plot of land ready for the next hexagonal habitation cell. Khonen maintained constant radio contact with the other drivers to co-ordinate their efforts. He had to make sure none of the vehicles ran over their vital life support supply hoses.

  *

  Every hexagon was excavated a couple of metres into the ground, and then filled with an airtight sealing compound. The compound provided both a solid foundation and a smooth floor surface for the cell. More compound was sprayed onto the sides of the excavation to form retaining walls. Airlock doors, and also ducting for power cables and air supplies, were fitted into the walls where they bordered onto adjacent cells.

  The final stage of construction involved placing a very special cylinder of smart material in the centre of the floor surface. The cylinder would then expand in all directions forming a thick viscous bubble. The bubble gradually filled the entire area of the hexagon until it butted up against its neighbours.