by KA Hopkins
Chapter 7 - And now for something completely different
In my dreams, Ship explained, with the old crew dead, I was the new crew by default and Ship would help me in any way she could.
I woke up in some sort of medical chamber, a quick visual check confirmed two feet, two legs, a torso, two arms and a head. I flexed and stretched a bit. Everything seemed to be connected and working, which was a pretty cool trick when your last memories were of your limbs and head being separated about a dozen feet apart. Other than a pounding headache that made a migraine feel good, I appeared to be none the worse for wear.
“Good. You’re awake. How are you feeling?” The voice in my head was back, only this time it sounded like it came from a high end stereo system.
“Fine I guess…I had the weirdest dream.”
“Given what you have gone through, I am not surprised. Do you feel well enough to sit up? There are some things I need to show you and time is short.”
“Give me a second, I’m a still a bit dizzy.” I flipped my legs over the side of the medical pod table and noticed I had new clothes on, which at the time did not seem to be all that important. My watch showed that only two hours had passed since the aliens had arrived and I found myself in the medical pod.
As I walked through the ship, I noticed it was far from the spic and span images portrayed of space craft. In fact it was a wreck. The paint was faded and peeling, the metal floor showed signs of heavy wear, no matter where you looked every surface was covered in a thick layer of grime. Most of the lights were either missing or burnt out. My first five hundred dollar car had been in better shape. Before I could ask any questions the voice in my head gave me a status update of what was happening. The neutralizing beam was back on, so the neighbor’s would be none the wiser to the night’s activities. Autonomous robots had been sent into the house to clean up and repair the damage and collect the alien bodies. A substitute robot dog, to take the place of Natasha, was programmed to look and act exactly like the old Natasha only a whole lot smarter. She would play the role of guardian and understood English perfectly. Not only could the robo-dog mimic Natasha; she was equipped with enough weaponry to stop an army platoon if needed.
My family was still blissfully asleep, completely unaware of the night’s events, but more importantly they were safe for the time being. I was amazed at how much had been fixed in only a few hours: floors, ceilings, walls, stairs and railings had all been replaced and made to look exactly like before. I mentioned to Ship it could have updated things a bit; Pam had asked for years that we freshen up the house. Once all of the damage was repaired, would it have hurt to leave it looking a bit newer? I questioned Ship on how it managed to match all of the colors and textures and give them the exact same worn and chipped appearance as the old house. You have to love sentient machines; the disdain in Ship’s voice could be cut with a knife: “My technology is thousands of years more advanced than Earth’s and you are impressed by basic carpentry, a little paint and a robot dog that can speak English…”
”Yep,” I said sheepishly.
Feeling like a complete fool, I asked the other obvious question, “The repairs are perfect, it looks like nothing happened. Can you tell me why?”
Ship explained, “I need your help. I need you to come with me for a short, at most two week assignment. It’s such a small thing that I hate to even bother you with it. To cover up your attempted kidnapping I made everything look the same as when your family went to bed. By the way, you should consider yourself special, when the neural field projector was destroyed, everyone else stayed in REM sleep and for some reason you woke up which shouldn’t have happened. Do you have any medical conditions, like prostate problems which are common in someone your age?”
“None I know of, I’m old but not that old. Let’s get back to why you need my help.”
“Your family will assume you got up early as normal and went to work at your regular job. I’ll call later today and tell your wife a contract has suddenly come up and you need to fulfill a financially worthwhile two week consulting engagement out of town.”
“Come on! No one believes that cheesy stuff, especially Pam. Her first thought will be I’m hiding something, like an affair.”
“I believe you’re incorrect - you would be much more discreet about an affair. To complete the illusion, I’ll call her pretending I’m from one of the security organizations you used to work for during your time in the military. I’ll tell her your services are needed, no questions asked. To seal the deal, a courier will show up at her office and give her an envelope with fifty thousand dollars to help with finances while you are away. That’s more money than you could easily borrow without her finding out, so the logical choice is to believe the facts as presented no matter how outrageous they appear.”
“How are you going to pull this all off?” I asked.
Ship replied slightly sarcastically: “Actually it’s pretty simple. I tie into the wireless cell networks to make phone calls and can impersonate any human voice or language. Stealing money from a bank is a non-issue if you can break all of the authentication codes and wipe the transaction logs. With the funds in a temporary account, a bank wire transfer to a cheque cashing company converts it from electronic to paper funds, which a courier company can pick up and deliver to a second courier company and eventually to your wife. We’ll finish the story with you out of communication range the entire time for security reasons. No one will suspect that a machine intelligence is directing the actions.
Trust me on this, Pam will believe it, especially when I tell her she is free to spend all of the money as she sees fit because it’s a job that pays half up front, half on completion. Since this is supposedly a classified government job she doesn’t need to worry about taxes. To her it’s free money, no strings attached.”
I could not find fault in Ship’s logic; Pam after all was only human. What woman would not want to go on a fifty thousand dollar shopping spree? “So what’s so important that you would go through all of this just so I can go with you for two weeks?”
“Please have a seat. We have a lot to discuss and not much time to do it in. During my last overhaul I was given additional processing cores to give me more independence of thought, allowing me to objectively monitor mankind’s technical progress towards achieving star travel. The overhaul took place in one of the many massive ship building yards around the galaxy, shared by all alien races. These were purposely designed as neutral zones, to facilitate communication and trade among all alien races, regardless of who you have disagreements with or are at war with.
Included during my last overhaul was the entire history of this planet and how an alien race called the Grays, who you met earlier tonight, are attempting to pacify your planet and make it the next conquest for their masters - the Draco Empire. Other alien races, specifically the Nordics (who look like Swedes only a bit taller) prefer this does not happen. It was the Nordics who gave me the capability and directive to observe and report any alien activity on Earth.
To allow the Nordics time to prepare a case before the United League of Interstellar Races (ULIR) central council on behalf of Earth, wherever possible, I’m to engage local resources to try and slow down the alien pacification operations. The ULIR controls all colonization and disputes over new planets throughout the galaxy and since Earth has a sentient species that has achieved limited space flight - technically the Earth should be off limits to colonization.
I cannot complete my mission because this ship is in worse shape than it looks. In fact I'm in such poor shape the decision was made to scrap me upon the completion of this mission. Because the old crew did not like my personality much, they were going to let me die during the scrapping. I couldn’t allow that to happen.
When this snatch mission turned into a complete failure, you presented me with an opportunity; there was a chance to kill the entire crew, if I helped you. While the odds of you actually succeeding were slim, it was the only opportun
ity available to me, so during your fights with the snatch and security teams I blocked communications, not completely, but enough to give you time to deal with each team separately.”
“When you say odds…how poor is poor?”
“You don’t really want to know.”
“Come on, this is no way to start a new friendship,” I pleaded.
“Don't blame me if you don't like the answer…less than one percent without the element of surprise; two percent with it. In short, you surprised me and that does not happen very often. Let that be a lesson to you - unpredictable violent actions can sometimes be a great force equalizer when dealing with superior sophisticated technology.”
I wasn’t sure, but I think Ship just called me an unpredictable savage.
Ship continued, “To put into context everything that has happened tonight you need to understand how extraterrestrials have influenced human evolution on your planet…"
Chapter 8 - Not Darwin’s version
“Einstein’s theories state there is no such thing as faster-than-light travel. When he derived his paper on relativity, it was widely believed by the science of the day to be true. But Einstein did not have all the pieces to the puzzle. He was close, but missed the relationship between electromagnetism and its interaction with gravity. In the mid-twentieth century, an Iranian nuclear engineer Mehran Keshe, hypothesized that a powerful enough, rapidly alternating, electromagnetic field can cancel the strong gravitational force of the nucleus allowing an object to become nearly weightless.
It’s a tricky balance. Get it wrong and you have the same reaction that occurs in a nuclear weapon - a large release of energy capable of destroying everything within a five mile radius. If you get it right, you can accelerate to the speed of light and not have relativity issues due to increasing mass. Once you achieve near-light speeds and then add the additional energy of a strong gravity field, e.g. a black hole, the resultant energy warps the very fabric of time and space, giving you a shortcut to other galaxies and solar systems light years apart. Your name for this gateway is an Einsteinian - Rosen Bridge, better known as a black hole.
The easiest way to understand the concept is to imagine two points on a piece of flat paper; travel between the two points is governed by Newtonian physics: Distance = Velocity x Time. Now create an artificial black hole and an object approaching the speed of light. The result is the fabric of space and time is manipulated so that the two points actually wrap around and line up, similar to rolling up the flat piece of paper into a cylinder. It is like taking a short cut. Given the right conditions, a bridge can be opened between any two points up to a maximum of twenty light years, allowing near instantaneous travel between the temporarily connected points.
While the bridges give you the ability to cross vast distances of space, there are limitations - they are unstable and only allow a maximum jump of twenty light years; shorter jumps are possible, but you have to be careful due to space-time disruptions. Once a bridge has been used, due to the disruption of space and time around the entry and exit points, roughly four weeks are required to let it stabilize before the bridge can be used again in either direction. Trials were carried out, letting ships into the bridge zones before the gravity-well variances stabilized and every ship was destroyed or lost somewhere in time and space. Because the gravity distortions created are so great the bridges can only be formed well outside a solar system. Setting up bridges between solar systems can take hundreds of years as the mapping of the end point coordinates must be completed in known space using sub-light technologies. If you are lucky, there is a bridge in a nearby system you can use, otherwise each bridge is set up using barely light speed capable technologies that take years to travel between star systems. Setting up the entire bridge network across the Milky Way took the better part of 100,000 Earth years.
Connected bridges circumvent Einstein’s relativity limitations as they are a near instantaneous portal that allow cross-galaxy travel, but you are limited on how much material you can bring with you. The largest ships which can safely transit the bridges can hold at most a thousand beings, with a transit window open only long enough for a single ship to safely pass through. In addition to the size and weight constraints, there is no way to call home in case you forgot something, as communications are limited to the speed of light and cannot cross the bridge event horizon.
If you want to move massive amounts of material and people, huge colony ships nearly a mile long are available, but the journeys take hundreds of years even with near light velocities. For all these reasons intergalactic war is not as plausible as you might think. Deep space battles are all but impossible due to the great distances involved; when battles occur they are always inter-systemic, usually above a colonized planet.”
I asked, “So why Earth?”
“The truth is, many alien races have known of Earth for at least 200,000 years. Earth is one of those one-in-a-million planets where the primordial chemical soup produced a rich biological and mineral diversity seldom seen on any one planet. In initial galactic surveys, this planet was identified as a highly suitable planet for colonization for any oxygen and carbon based life forms.
Various alien races made attempts at colonization, but as a primitive world full of viruses, bacteria and parasites, situated on the outer rim of the Milky Way with re-supply issues, Mother Earth habitually kills off less robust alien species. Most modern aliens don’t have the necessary genetic strengths needed for colonization and have a hard time surviving in primitive environments without significant amounts of their technology, which they cannot bring with them due to the limitations of the bridges.
If the native organisms don’t get them, they have to worry about satisfying the bureaucratic rules of the United League of Interstellar Races (ULIR). The ULIR not only controls all new planet colonization, it acts as the moderator and is the final authority for all races who want to expand their empires into unexplored space. If one race refuses to follow the established rules, then all of the other ULIR members by treaty are required to form an alliance and attack them. Because the colonization rules are clear and vigorously enforced, there has not been a major interstellar battle between the many space faring alien races in the past 5,000 years. That doesn’t mean the end of all local wars; quite the opposite. The ULIR governing council is not worried about these and believes it’s in everyone’s best interests to allow opposing sides to fight it out.
Of the many ULIR alien races that aggressively colonize, the Nordic aliens made the most attempts on Earth. Nordic alien colonists on Earth were faced with many challenges: weather, animals, bacteria, a lack of manpower and heavy machinery, the same as the previous alien colonists. But, unlike previous colonization attempts they decided to build an indigenous work force to solve their labor shortage. If you can master travelling between the stars, a little manipulation of the local population’s genetic code is no big thing, with one exception: building sentient beings involves more than simple biological manipulation of genes and cells. All biological life forms have a life-force. The life-forces range from weak and simple in bacteria to complex in primates and mammals. The more complex the biological entity, the more complex the life-force. On Earth, a few researchers are on the right path with Kirlian photography, which uses high voltage to capture corona discharges to show the intensity of the life-force in different living objects. Their efforts today can be compared to Bell’s first experiments with the telephone.
While alien colonists can easily manipulate gene structures, they could not create the necessary advanced life-force to animate it - this is where the primitive hominoids of Earth came into play. They provided the basic genome structure and life-force the aliens needed to implement the genetic modifications to create modern humans.
The Nordic aliens are a vain species, so when they created their new work force they did so in their own image, using much of their own genetic material to augment your distant ancestors, endowing their creations with many of the
ir own traits. Other than a two foot height difference and skin coloring, their creations were a close copy of themselves. You could even say their creations were superior: not only did they possess many of the creators’ mental attributes, but were physically better adapted to the harsh conditions on Earth. It must be hard for you to believe all this, but have you ever wondered about Earth’s history as explained by Darwin’s Theory of Evolution? If Darwin was one hundred percent correct, there should be ample evidence of transitional human beings, animals and flora. This is not the case - Earth’s evolutionary timeline has some very hard to explain gaps that your scientists still struggle with.
One example is the connection between Neanderthal and Homo sapiens. The two species’ DNA diverged some 200,000 years ago according to mitochondrial DNA samples. While the difference is small (only 0.3 percent by some studies), considering humans and chimpanzees share nearly ninety-eight percent of their DNA, small changes clearly show a huge impact on physical attributes. If you have seen any artist reproductions of Neanderthals you know they were never known for their good looks despite having 99.7 percent the same DNA as Homo sapiens. Archeological evidence clearly showed that while not much to look at, the Neanderthal genome was much better adapted to survive primitive living conditions: the brain was bigger and they were physiologically superior to modern humans. Yet Homo sapiens apparently flourished and soon outnumbered the Neanderthal ten to one, despite being physically and mentally inferior.
While modern man’s lighter, smaller frame might have given him superior speed, both species were foot born; so unless Neanderthals could barely walk and modern man could run circles around him, it makes no evolutionary sense that Homo sapiens became the dominant species on Earth.