by Taiyo Fujii
Behind him a screen displayed the space tether blueprint that they had checked over ad nauseam. The sound of keyboards clicking away came from the press-section seats.
“This is the space tether, a spacecraft that can remain in orbit almost indefinitely without propellant. The concept of tether propulsion has been known for some time, but we’ve built space tethers that incorporate a variety of revolutionary new ideas.”
Looking at the quizzical expressions on the faces of the journalists as they held out their recorders, Kazumi imagined the barrage of questions that would soon be directed at him and tried to think where he might hide.
“This space tether was conceived by—” Ronnie stopped, looked right to Kazumi waiting backstage, and met his gaze. Kazumi nodded. “An Iranian astronautical researcher. And the framework to realize this design was developed by a Japanese engineer. Unfortunately, neither of them are here. They are not employees of Great Leap.”
The hand of a journalist went up. “Are you referring to the terrorists responsible for the Rod from God incident?”
Kazumi supposed that the journalist must have read Challengers, Judy’s book about the incident two years earlier. She had written it after getting the American government to disclose the information it was based on with unusual speed. The book explained that an Iranian had created the original design for the space tether crafts that had attacked the orbital hotel, though it had been a Japanese man who had actually developed and operated them dangerously in orbit.
Only the Japanese government had suffered significant damage from the series of events that had followed and, shielding itself with state-secrets protection laws, had declined to make public the loss of the IGS. Perhaps discouraged by this concealment of publicly known facts, there was no Japanese translation of Challengers, despite the fact that it had sold over ten million copies worldwide. However, after the publication of Judy’s book, CNN had conducted a follow-up investigation and revealed in a documentary that the Rod from God had been under the control of a former JAXA employee named Ageha Shiraishi.
Ronnie had been asked numerous times about the connection between all this and the spacecraft with the same name being developed by Great Leap but had so far refused to comment.
“That is correct,” he said now. “The two men behind the space tethers that attacked us.”
A stir moved through the hall. The individuals whose ideas had formed the basis for the project, it seemed, had not just been outside the project itself, but were now considered terrorists.
Grinning shamelessly, Ronnie waited for the commotion to settle. “It is for this reason that we have not patented the space tether. If other companies wish to use the same idea, we welcome the competition. To put it another way, ‘bring it on!’ ”
Ronnie put up his middle finger. Judy put her face in her hands. Akari brought her glass up in front of Kazumi, and Daryl followed suit. Kazumi shifted slightly to make space for where Jamshed and Shiraishi ought to be standing.
Many engineers from North Korea were taking part in the Great Leap, but no one had heard any news of Jamshed. Chris had spent the past two years headhunting astronautical engineers in countries such as Iran and North Korea at the request of Ronnie and the American government, and her best guess was that he was under house arrest in Pyongyang. The three of them tilted their glasses and raised a silent toast.
“Can I get in on that?” A fourth champagne glass flew in through the gap Kazumi had left open. A man with an easygoing smile on his smooth-skinned face had taken the spot intended for Shiraishi.
“Wang, you made it!” said Kazumi.
“And, boy, did I have a time hard time of it. Why didn’t you put the company in Cape Canaveral? I had to cross the continent three times this week alone.”
The three of them were already used to his new name, Wang Jinming. With his previously long hair trimmed short, his body built up two sizes bigger, and his nose subtly reshaped, Sekiguchi looked completely different. Under the Witness Protection Program, he had obtained a new identity as a Chinese American and passed the Great Leap’s recruitment exam that selected from among the have-nots, despite Chris’s opposition and fierce competition that saw only one candidate in hundreds accepted. He had also hooked up with Judy and was so active in the company that he was known internally as “Ronnie’s Third Arm.”
Wang gestured at the ceiling with his glass. “Those Ageha models are slick.”
The other three looked up. Hanging there were life-size models of two spacecraft linked by thin tethers, the Jupiter probe Ageha 1 and the solar probe Ageha 2.
Ronnie’s talk began to touch on the Agehas. “At this time, the two Ageha probes waiting to depart at an orbital altitude of 500 km will be inserted into a Hohmann orbit using the space tether auto-swing-by projection system.”
Ronnie pointed at the models on the ceiling and pantomimed a hammer throw as he began to explain the orbital insertion of planetary probes using space tethers.
“The tether that connects the two Agehas is 70 km long. It is most definitely the largest moving device humankind has ever made. The tethers complete one rotation in thirty seconds, making the Agehas attached to both ends revolve at a velocity of 7.3 km per second. Release them with the appropriate timing and you produce an acceleration inconceivable with any rocket to date. This auto-swing-by projection model was theorized by Kazumi Kimura, one of the Great Leap’s executive officers. Another round of applause, please, for Kazumi.”
Hearing his name called, Kazumi raised his glass in response to the applause and camera flashes.
“Kazumi will break down the details in a very clear presentation later, so look forward to that. For now I’d like to introduce our new space tether. Space industry professionals are already aware of this, but actually we already have ten thousand space tethers in orbit.”
Another stir went through the audience at this previously unreported information.
“However, the images I’m about to show you have probably never been seen by anyone. Hit the display!”
Ronnie spread his arms. A high-definition real-time video feed of the Earth appeared on the screen behind him. Sunlight angling downwards lit up the clouds. The shadows they cast were changing from moment to moment. The reddish clouds turned purple as they ran toward the pitch-black night side of the Earth. There, they were lit by flashes of lightning. The thin veil of atmosphere wrapped around the planet changed from blue to red and then to purple. This was a video of the living Earth.
Enthusiastic applause came from the audience, their breath taken away.
“Until now,” Ronnie said, “we were unable to view a real-time image of the Earth in such pronounced 3-D. This too was made possible by the low-cost space tether craft that are able to orbit indefinitely—what, Judy?”
With her cheeks puffed up indignantly, Judy was pointing at her wristwatch.
“Oh, right. I almost forgot. Time to release the Agehas.”
Judy gave the signal and stage staff dashed out hurriedly and began to rearrange the room. A spotlight shone on the ceiling models. This all unfolded in front of the astonishingly vivid image of the Earth.
Akari came over to Kazumi. “This reminds me of the last time we were here.”
“Yeah.” Kazumi remembered watching the video of the Earth sent by the space tethers for the first time two years ago in the penthouse suite directly above the hall. Though he had seen it many times since, he still felt as though he might get sucked inside the image on the enormous screen. He thought of the man who had come up with it. “Shiraishi-san saw this too, right?”
“I checked the logs the agent from the North brought. Apparently, Uncle Ageha only watched this image once, for about two hours.”
“Just once? What a waste.”
“Yes. It’s so beautiful—hey, is that them?”
In the dark sky, two dots approached, rec
eded, then approached again. They were moving in a circle. Half-closing his eyes, Kazumi raised his champagne glass so that it overlapped with the Earth and calculated the location of the two celestial bodies. At the bottom he could see the continent of Africa. Moving in the direction of the equator, the camera was accurately— “There’s no mistake. The one that just moved right is Ageha 1, and to the left is Ageha 2.”
The two devices bearing Shiraishi’s name were embarking on a long journey. Ageha 2 would head for the sun and deploy another space tether sunwards of Mercury. Rotating along a precisely circular orbit corrected by Lorentz force–generated electrical power that would never run out, that tether would become Space Lighthouse Number One, transmitting a precise clock almost indefinitely.
Ageha 1 would deploy a massive one hundred kilometer–long tether near Jupiter, the largest planet in the solar system with a magnetic field twenty thousand times that of Earth. With powerful thrust derived from this mighty energy source, it would descend into the upper region of the atmosphere and extract helium-3. Four years later, it would detach from its tether and make a beeline for Earth. That was when the next Ageha helium-extraction craft would head for Jupiter. Signposts for these missions would be provided by Ageha 2 and successor craft inserted later to serve as space lighthouses, together forming a solar positioning system. Essentially, they were creating a mill wheel that directly scooped up fuel from Jupiter for nuclear fusion: a foothold for the cosmos. The crafts would traverse space with the accurate positional information obtained from the space lighthouses and establish a space tether interplanetary rapid transit system to carry helium-3. This would provide an endless supply of energy, allowing humankind to reach new celestial bodies and secure a habitat in orbit. That had been Shiraishi’s plan.
Ronnie called loudly from the stage for a toast. The sound of glasses striking each other spread through the event hall of the hotel like ripples on water.
The cable connecting the two Agehas detached. The two points flew away from each other at unbelievable speed. The spacecraft envisioned by the two men who had dreamt of space shook off Earth’s gravity and flew into the void.
Listening to happy sounds of celebration, Kazumi and Akari watched the points receding from Earth.
About the Author
Taiyo Fujii was born on Amami Oshima Island—that is, between Kyushu and Okinawa. He worked in stage design, desktop publishing, exhibition graphic design, and software development.
In 2012, Fujii self-published Gene Mapper serially in a digital format of his own design. The novel was Amazon.co.jp’s number one Kindle best seller of the year. The novel was revised and republished in both print and digital as Gene Mapper–full build– by Hayakawa Publishing in 2013 and was nominated for the Japan SF Award and Seiun Award. His second novel, Orbital Cloud, won the 2014 Nihon SF Taisho Award, the Seiun Award, and took first prize in the “Best SF of 2014” in SF Magazine. His recent works include Underground Market and Bigdata Connect.
HAIKASORU
The Future Is Japanese
Rocket Girls—Housuke Nojiri
Yukari Morita is a high school girl on a quest to find her missing father. While searching for him in the Solomon Islands, she receives the offer of a lifetime—she’ll get the help she needs to find her father, and all she need do in return is become the world’s youngest, lightest astronaut. Yukari and her sister Matsuri, both petite, are the perfect crew for the Solomon Space Association’s launches, or will be once they complete their rigorous and sometimes dangerous training.
The Ouroboros Wave—Jyouji Hayashi
Ninety years from now, a satellite detects a nearby black hole scientists dub Kali for the Hindu goddess of destruction. Humanity embarks on a generations-long project to tap the energy of the black hole and establish colonies on planets across the solar system. Earth and Mars and the moons Europa (Jupiter) and Titania (Uranus) develop radically different societies, with only Kali, that swirling vortex of destruction and creation, and the hated but crucial Artificial Accretion Disk Development association (AADD) in common.
Saiensu Fikushon 2016—Edited by haikasoru
Three new stories from three of the best science fiction writers in Japan:
“Overdrive” by Toe EnJoe—How fast is the speed of thought?
“Sea Fingers” by TOBI Hirotaka—A small enclave survives after the Deep has consumed the world, but what does the Deep hunger for now?
“A Fair War” by Taiyo Fujii—The future of war, the age of drones, but what comes next?
Saiensu Fikushon is Haikasoru’s new e-first mini anthology, dedicated to bringing you the narrative software of tomorrow, today. Now more than ever, the future is Japanese!
www.haikasoru.com