Outward Borne

by R. J. Weinkam

  DePat, JiLo, and I met at Grandfather’s home in late June. DePat thought that the ILUC was in crisis. He was concerned that the integrity of the Commission be maintained. It must continue to be effective and act responsibly. Now ILUC members were under pressure to improperly remove restrictions on some carefully selected out-of-the-way properties, actually a lot of out-of-the-way properties. Something must be done. DePat was adamant that the integrity of ILUC must be preserved. It was more important to him than the ecological issues.

  Should I make the images known? Publishing some secret ObLaDa material at that early date would be a significant risk. Disclosure would reveal that new data existed beyond the knowledge of the government. It would be like waving red meat in front of a starving tiger; it would not just sit there and drool.

  I asked Millie to dinner. We went to a quiet, not too popular University Avenue restaurant, and I told her of my plan. She had been upset with me for not joining in any of her protests. I was never into symbolic gestures, and she did not understand that. Now I had something substantial to offer, something that could make a real difference. This she understood well enough. I had won her over.

  The ILUC had arranged for the Royal Geophysical Society in London to vet any information that might impact the Fallow Land decision. We, therefore, needed to gain the Societies’ support to have any influence. After some negotiation, I gave the Society a small portion of the ObLaDas’ geological survey and environmental data for review. It was limited to images of London and surrounding tidal pools, but they knew that I had comparable data for most of the hemisphere. London itself was no more than a village at that time, with a few buildings, and the outline of some Roman walls clearly visible. The Society members were intimately familiar with the London area, and would immediately see the extensive changes that had occurred in the ecology of that famed land over the centuries. They would not need any prolonged parsing of facts to realize the importance of the ObLaDa data.

  The Society overwhelmingly agreed that the images should be presented to the ILUC, and that any immediate decisions on land sales should be deferred until this new information had been reviewed. The effort was a success, in the end, as the Fallow Land Commission’s decision on redevelopment was indeed postponed. Politicians were happy for a while, the money was flying their way even before we left London, but the new data and its review took long enough for the backdoor deals to unravel, and for the crooked scheme to be exposed.

  For me, the experience had an importance beyond the ILUC. The impact of the ObLaDa data, even that tiny sliver of it, was impressive, and it gave me some ideas on how the mass of knowledge that I had might be used to advantage. That was something Grandfather had been tasked with doing, but he did not know how to do it. Other consequences were not as favorable, however. It was not long before the tigers came creeping about. They, and there were several, now knew that undisclosed ObLaDa data still existed. They did not try to obtain it through the legal process, for the ownership of Voyager material was muddled, and it would involve years in the courts to sort it out. They took a more direct approach, or at least a more devious one.

  There had always been a loose watch on the Voyager community. That activity suddenly intensified. DePat, JiLo, Millie and I were openly followed. I had been careful to keep my work on the Voyager Mission confidential, even Millie did not really know what I was doing, but now it was obvious, and I was the weak link. Jaspar Hudink was a fellow history graduate student, one year before me, I believe. I knew him rather well. I think he gambled rather heavily, as he always talked of his winnings. In reality, he had often lost and was seriously in debt. Not advisable on our meager earnings. Someone under the guise of a collection thug, threatened poor Jaspar, and pressured him to pay off his debts or, since that was not in his always-unlucky cards, to spy on me.

  He planted a record-only camera in my office. It did not transmit so the scanning equipment JiLo installed did not detect it. I do not know how long it was in place, but Jaspar was able to get some screen images of ObLaDa data files. They mounted some small-scale robberies of computer equipment and other valuables from University offices, as a diversion the police said, and then stole my laptop and backup memory. My computer was very secure and highly encrypted; even so, they could see that I had very little data stored in memory. They could not have known how I sourced the files, but they kept trying. My apartment was broken into several times over the next few months.

  The attention made Millie very anxious, they may even have tried to hire her to spy on me. I do not know, but it became too much for her. She could not cope, and we stopped seeing each other. That was hard. I liked her. She was the first girl that I really cared about. The bastards. Surveillance continued to be heavy for a long time, and it was often public and confrontational. JiLo thought that I was at risk, even though I did not know where the data was kept, and if they hauled me away, it would be a big set back, to say nothing of the personal inconvenience. I became nervous and paranoid during that time, it was difficult to deal with, but we carried on for another two years.

  I eventually completed a rough multimedia assemblage of the People’s abduction and life, and something of the ebb and flow of ObLaDa politics that had taken place during the voyage. I decided to spend a week with DePat and show him the work, get his opinion. I am so glad that I did. It may seem strange, but ever since the day DePat told me about the Voyager memory cube, he seems to have declined. He weakened slowly and steadily and withdrew into himself. As he looked at the publication, I could see the old spark in his eyes. He was satisfied, I think, I hope, that his life’s mission would be complete and the Peoples’ story told. He died a month later, the last of the Voyagers.

  I will not talk of his funeral, and all of the ceremonies that followed. They were all public rituals. I believe he was a great man who was given a difficult and important task under unique and challenging conditions. He was the sole possessor of a treasure beyond value, and needed to learn on his own how to use it to benefit mankind. He also knew that if he let his knowledge fall into the hands some local power, it would probably be exploited to prolong the nation-state struggles that had done so much lasting harm.

  On our last evening together, DePat told me that he never intended to wait so long, or to keep the ObLaDa knowledge so late into his life. The ones he had chosen along the way were compromised or proved incapable, he said, or the times were impossible. I believe he was referring to his imprisonment and the death of Grandmother. I was his last chance.

  He expressed one wish that I was unable to honor, however. DePat believed that the ObLaDas data should always be maintained and controlled from within the Voyager community, but the scope of the information proved to be too great and too complex for me to manage, or for anyone then within that small body of people. I needed to make it known, or perhaps as the ObLaDas had done, to make it a worldwide community project.

  Chapter 24 Knowledge is Power

  I made a deal. It was necessary to distribute the ObLaDa data on a wide scale, but that would never be possible if various governments and industry interests were trying to steal it. I offered, promised, to provide access to the technical data in return for government protection and funding. The first step was the release of the Voyager’s story. We let it be known that there would be a completely new work on the Outward Voyager mission. In spite of the announcement, and our disclosure of some original images, many people speculated that it would be little more than a rehash of old information and that nothing new could be coming out after so many years. Somehow, one short clip of the Frits ice-skating was leaked, and it captured the public imagination. Interest soared. There was some speculation that these were ObLaDas, but most decided that was not likely, they were too cute. The collected Voyager information was a large and rather complicated multimedia assembly and was received with a substantial demand. It all went well, although it proved difficult to distribute such large files to so many.

  There was some cri
ticism of my work. Some thought it an unwieldy and overly technical conglomeration, but, ironically, many people were drawn in by the intimate details of the Voyager’s and the aliens’ lives. There was a fascination, I believe, because these were the lives of real individuals, true facts, and not just engaging fiction. There was a lot about ObLaDa technology, fabrication techniques, and their collection and use of interstellar matter, but very little information about the planet ObLa itself. Virtually everything was new, or present in much greater detail than had been known.

  There was much left to do, and I made a mistake doing it. I established a center to analyze and publish some of the remaining ObLaDa information, and I relied on the government for protection. We were going to markedly expand the original data set on planets and alien species by including some of the information that came from ObLa itself. It was a big and exciting project.

  The tragic interview came four years after the Voyager history was published. It was a sit-down, informal setting, and I was asked if any more revelations were to come. Unfortunately, I said too much. “As you may know, the Outward Voyager visited a number of planets and succeeded in capturing eleven intelligent alien beings, including us humans. We are now delving into the information the Outward Voyager received from the planet ObLa. They had been in radio contact with several additional civilizations, and had acquired information on more planets and alien life forms.” Foolishly, I told her that there was an excellent team of scientists working on the project so that it should not take long to complete our analysis. “Unless we continue to find new stores of data, which has been our problem up to now, if you want to call it that.”

  The team worked out of a single-story building on the old Lucas Ranch, near Marinwood. It had very good computer networking and security facilities, but the area was unpopulated and the building was rather secluded. It was not hard for the raid to succeed. It was a criminal organization of some type that did the job. Drug money funded, of course. I was at home, preparing for a trip to Austria. Several others were working late as they often did in midweek. It was winter, and dark by six. As many as ten operatives came up through the creek bed and hid in the scrub manzanita, waiting. They had already knocked out the two guards and rigged the locks. When it was time, they ran into the building and grabbed my people. They utilized some type of fast-acting drug to knock them unconscious. Winnie Wysoki sent an emergency signal, but it did not help. They took all of our computer equipment and searched the building, even ripping out walls, to find any hidden servers. Three helicopters landed during the break-in, they were all gone within twenty minutes, disappearing into the coastal hills and valleys.

  The primary ObLaDa data was never in that building. We had it networked in from a secure server, so the thieves did not get much of what they were after. I do not know if they wanted to exploit the knowledge for themselves or just sell it, but I received a call to deliver more data in return for the four hostages’ lives. I guess that was their backup plan. It was three weeks of hell. The FBI took over the case from the beginning, and was very tight with its investigation. The Bureau knew that we had access to the memory files and that none of us were willing to have our people hurt over a set of data. It had been our plan to make the ObLaDa data, including the material that had been stolen, universally accessible in due time. We proposed to move up the release date and render the thieves’ stolen data worthless, but we were not allowed to do so.

  Things got tense after they released Winnie Wysoki. She had not been hurt directly, but she was in bad shape, half starved, and disoriented from being kept in a dark secluded room for thirteen days. I suppose the kidnapers thought Winnie’s condition would reinforce their threats against us, but they did not need to do that. None of us had any desire to keep this situation going, but it was out of our control. The FBI was able to get enough information from Winnie to locate the hideout, and they convinced themselves they could break in and release the hostages without them being hurt.

  They staged something akin to a military invasion of that little building. Six people died including Lick Umdohar. It was a completely unnecessary waste of life. I hope that was the last time they ever do such a thing. Ego trips and war games, quests for glory, whatever, it was personal self-aggrandizement rather than reasoned law enforcement, and I hope the Agency has been thorough and efficient in clearing their ranks of such people. Even so, they never disclosed what happened to the organization behind the kidnapping, or even who they were. Payoffs pay off again. Those events remain a sadness to me that I will never set aside.

  A great deal of ObLaDa information, much more than has been disclosed, was still unpublished. It included historical data about ObLa before they went into space, and much of the information that ObLa had received from other planets. It was unknown to people on Earth, although some of it could not be released until the future was more settled. But it was all taking too long for my teams to sort it out. After the kidnapping and all that followed, I had a better understanding of the very technical material that remained unstudied and the limitations of the small team that had been trying to master it. It became clear to me that another approach was needed, something more organized and on a larger scale. WE needed an organization that would provide a structure around the release and management of the ObLaDas’ gift. This idea turned into a series of International Institutes that were created and dedicated to the study of the Voyager’s memory. Private, independent, non-profit, with academic credibility, they would seek to gain the maximum advantage from whatever remained in the ObLaDa data files.

  To be honest, the idea for the Institutes was never so pragmatic. I confess that there was a bit of revisionist autobiography in that story. The necessity for creating the Institutes fell from the realization that my staff could make sense of only a superficial slice of this massive work. Others in the Voyager family that would follow might do better, but likely not enough. The depth of my deficiency, almost mismanagement, was made clear by the UC Berkeley Mathematics Department. They have a way of doing that to history majors.

  The ObLaDas learned a great deal from, and about, other civilizations, particularly those that had achieved some level of technical competence. From the start had a concern about those civilizations that failed or declined after reaching so high a level. They spent a concerted effort to understand the course of events that transpired on those planets. One tool they developed was a mathematical model for the progression of events from emergence to demise. It used some type of algorithm that I could not follow. At first, I dismissed it all as a lot of hand waving, but it stuck uneasily in my mind. The ObLaDas seemed to have placed great stock in the approach and its conclusions. One rainy fall day, I arranged a lunch with a few of the mathematics faculty. I showed them how the ObLaDas had modeled civilizations. They immediately became very excited about the system, as it was something that they had not envisioned, a great advance, not unlike Newton’s invention of the calculus, they said. They claimed the best economic models were like a slice, only a cross-section of the broad scope that would be accessible using the ObLaDa model.

  You can construct an equation to calculate the path of a toy car coasting down a slope. It would include acceleration due to the force of gravity and the slope of the incline, and will give a reasonable estimate of the car’s progress. If you add terms for friction and air resistance, you would have even more accurate model. But what if a part of the track became wet, or a gust of wind blew in from time to time? The ObLaDas had developed means to include instantaneous probability of transient factors that were highly predictive. Well, I was never able to understand what the excitement was about, but it did convince me that there was a lot more depth to the ObLaDa records than I, or a few selected keepers, could hope to master.

  It was this humbling experience, but it convinced me to establish an Institute of Scholars to study the ObLaDa data. All the Institute’s data and findings would be open to universal access, of course. Who knew what new Einstein might emerge
to make sense of it all? But more positively, a full-time, dedicated core of the best minds could do more to understand and communicate the fruits of the Voyager legacy to all of us than any other means that I could imagine. The U.S. government initially opposed making the ObLaDa data known, they still maintained that it was their property, but under a great deal of public and international pressure, they dropped their threatened legal objections - that pressure plus an agreement to locate the first two Institutes in the USA.

  Years have passed since the Institutes were established. Times have changed, but people still talk of the Outward Voyager and all that happened on her. People in Europe, especially, and parts of Asia have shared the ObLaDas’ fascination with the alien civilizations that went into decline. They conducted studies, as the ObLaDas had, on the apparent fragility of those beings and their institutions. Some concluded that their technologies, or an excess of progress beyond some imagined natural boundary, were the cause. A strong anti-technology movement took hold for a while, but the facts and the ObLaDas’ analyses, which completely rejected that view, won through. It was not technology or the power that it bestowed on individuals living under its influence that imperiled life, but the inability of the long-established civilizations, or their key components, such as religious beliefs or political traditions, to manage the consequences of their own progress. Inevitably, it seemed, once advances in knowledge and capabilities began to occur, they fed upon themselves and developed at an increasing pace, ever more rapidly producing profound, world shaping changes, but the social mores and taboos of the established way of life remained in place, hamstringing efforts to adjust to the demands of change. The rate at which these two forces adapted to new challenges differed, often with fatal consequences. Sometimes the planet reached the brink of catastrophe only to pull back at the last moment, but sometimes it stepped over.