“It’s not that I can’t hack nights,” Harper explained. “It’s not that at all. In fact, I kind of like them. Fewer people around. I’m not great around people. Don’t ask me why. I mean, I’m a nice guy. Right?”
“Nice as pie,” I said.
“You know what I mean.”
I nodded, not really knowing where he was going with this. I was just glad I wasn’t pulling night shift.
“It’s the fact that it’s the first night on the ship. I’d like to be out there, schmoozing it up.”
“Schmoozing?”
“Meeting people.”
“You just got done saying you aren’t great around people.”
“I’m not great around people in a job setting. Meaning you can’t really talk to people when you’re working. The whole mixing business with pleasure thing.”
“Good thing you clarified.”
“Go ahead, make a joke about it. You aren’t the one working tonight.”
“You’ll get your chance.”
“I’m telling you, Hayes hates me.”
“I’ll be back later.”
Harper tossed his head back against his pillow, defeated. “At least come back with a good story.”
I promised him I would and headed out the door. As I started down the corridor, a door swooshed open to my right and Gloria stepped out of her room. She still managed to look gorgeous in her blue flightsuit. Even without makeup she was stunning.
“Where are you off to?” she asked, walking down the corridor with me.
“Finnigan’s.”
“I should have known. I talked to Flynn earlier. I’m pretty sure his soul was crushed after he found out he was pulling night duty.”
I nodded. “Harper’s in about the same shape. Where are you headed?”
“Just wandering. Want company?”
“Sure.”
I couldn’t turn her down. The whole point of going to Finnigan’s was to see if Lisa showed up. She hadn’t committed. It might be awkward having Gloria there, but it beat sitting by myself, trying not to look awkward.
We passed by the cafeteria, where a few people still lingered at the tables, eating a late dinner. When we reached Finnigan’s it was alive with conversation. Apparently, Flynn had been right about the Irish pub becoming the hive of activity. I might have forgotten we were on a ship floating in space if I hadn’t heard snippets of conversation as Gloria and I sat down on swivel stools at the bar. I could hear people discussing the project, talking excitedly about what we would find when we reached 55 Cancri e. I ordered a Bud Light. Gloria ordered a Kahlua and cream. “I’m still a girl,” she said apologetically.
I scanned the pub. It was a diverse crowd; at least a few people from every department had turned out. I went about profiling the different tables. The group of four that sat in the corner were probably scientists. They all had that nerdy but groomed look. The roughnecks were easy to distinguish. Most of them were sporting beards or had that look about them of having seen years of back-breaking labor. Besides Gloria and I, both Jin and Yuri had the night off, but I didn’t see them anywhere.
There was a long rectangular window on the far side of the bar, opposite the entrance. I could see darkness and stars beyond it, but no view of Earth. The window in the docking bay had been on the other side of the ship. I wondered if the Earth would still have been visible or if we had left it behind. That feeling of peace that I had experienced upon arrival was gone. Maybe it was something you only felt when you had your eyes on Earth.
“Nervous?” Gloria asked.
The bartender returned with our drinks. I took a swallow of my beer, thinking it tasted different, but wasn’t a good judge since it had been a while since I’d had one.
“How do you mean?”
“I don’t know. Just being away from home, not knowing what’s out there.”
“Not really.”
“Honestly?”
“Ask me again after I’ve had a few more beers. What about you?”
She pondered it. She was slow with her drink, and I guessed she wasn’t much of a drinker either. “Average, I guess. I’m a little nervous about hypersleep.”
“Considering we don’t know how long we’ll be out, I think that’s warranted.”
“That’s why I asked.”
“Huh?”
“You’ve been pushing that since I met you. Asking Hayes about the distance. It seemed like it made you nervous.”
“Not so much nerves as curiosity,” I said. “I think anybody would want to know how long they were signed up for.”
“Would it have changed anything?”
“Maybe. Probably not.”
I turned my head toward the entrance and happened to see Lisa entering Finnigan’s. As usual, Thomas was with her. Her ever present wingman, I thought. I waved my hand in the air until she spotted us.
“You came.”
Thomas said, “Don’t ask me why. Not the ideal environment for intellectual stimulation.”
“Did you want anything?” I asked.
Lisa ordered a Coke. Thomas went with water. After their drinks arrived we made our way to a table closer to the window. Lisa seemed nervous. Quieter than usual. I introduced them to Gloria and told them about how we had gotten the night off and how bummed Flynn and Harper had been about working our first night aboard the Astraeus.
“It’s state of the art,” Thomas said.
“What?” He was staring at his glass of water, watching the ice cubes bob up and down.
“What is?”
“The ship. Have you seen the lab?”
“Only in passing.”
“It’s fully equipped. Better than quite a few I’ve seen back on Earth. It’s easy to see where all the money went. I got a tour of the stasis pods, too. They’ve really improved on the existing technology. Bet they could make a small fortune if they licensed it.”
“So it’s safe?” Gloria asked.
“Nothing’s a hundred percent,” Thomas said, “but I’m less leery than I was. If it’s as stable as they want us to believe, then I would say it’s relatively low risk.”
“We were just talking about that before you showed up,” I said. “You guys heard anything about how long we’re going to be in stasis? Are we going to be in our sixties when we wake up?”
Thomas’s eyes went to his water glass and stayed there.
I said, “You know something?”
“We’ve been over this. Even if it were to take forty years, if we were traveling at light speed, you would age at a much slower rate.”
“Yeah, I know, that’s basic stuff. But you know something you aren’t telling us. Your poker face sucks.”
“I’m not supposed to talk about it.”
I leaned forward in my seat. He had my interest.
“C’mon, spill it.”
“He’s not supposed to talk about it, Jake,” Lisa said. “I don’t think it’s fair to put him on the spot.”
“It isn’t fair, but don’t we have a right to know what’s going on? It’s our lives after all.”
Lisa glanced at Thomas. I could tell Thomas was thinking, weighing it out. I knew he was going to spill the beans, his mind just had to catch up to the fact. He was struggling with protocol. But I also knew that he was eager to tell somebody. It’s like having a shiny new toy. The fun isn’t the toy itself, it’s the fact that everybody else wants it.
“Listen, our lips are sealed. Whatever you tell us, it won’t leave this table. Who would we tell anyway?”
“It doesn’t leave this table?”
“I can pinky swear to it if you want.”
Thomas slid his water away and said, “I think I need something stronger than this.”
I waved my hand over the small opaque dome that was affixed to the center of the table. A holo
gram of the bartender blinked into existence. I ordered another round and added a screwdriver for Thomas. The hologram vanished.
Our drinks arrived several minutes later. Thomas took a tentative sip of his screwdriver and must have decided it was acceptable because he quickly followed it up with another. His voice lowered to a whisper. “All right, this doesn’t get out.”
Thomas paused. He gulped down the remainder of his screwdriver. I immediately ordered another. The better half of me wanted to tell him to slow it down, otherwise he was going to be a mess in the morning, but I wanted to hear what he had to say. Far be it from me to caution moderation if it hindered the extraction of information.
“Naturally, the question of duration came up almost immediately once we had been shown the stasis pods. Bertrand, the Chief Science Officer, laid it out for us. But not before he made it clear that the information was classified. Other than the flight crew, I would wager to guess that only about five of us are privy to this knowledge. It’s advanced stuff. I have a grasp on it, but don’t fully understand it myself. The magnitude of – ”
“Get to the good part,” I said.
Lisa eyed me sternly. What she had said about Thomas might have been true, that they were only friends and nothing more, but it was clear she didn’t like me putting him on the spot. I didn’t want to piss her off.
This was important though. I could apologize later.
I glanced at Gloria. I wondered what she was thinking. When she had asked earlier if I wanted company, I doubted that she had anticipated that we would be learning classified secrets in a darkened corner of a bar on an interstellar spacecraft.
“First off,” Thomas said, “the ship isn’t capable of traveling at light speed. Not anywhere close. At best, it can travel at about the speed of a conventional craft.”
Maybe Harper had been right. Maybe they had discovered a wormhole and we were going to travel through it.
“And we aren’t traversing a wormhole or a black hole either. Have any of you heard of the Alcubierre drive?”
I shook my head. It sounded vaguely familiar, but my brain could have been making that up. Lisa and Gloria also shook their heads.
“I’m not surprised. It is a relatively obscure idea. I don’t think anyone has ever given it a high amount of credence. It was devised by Miguel Alcubierre back in the nineties. The nineteen-nineties. Basically, what he proposed was that a spacecraft could achieve faster-than-light travel if an energy-density field lower than that of a vacuum could be created. It wouldn’t violate Einstein’s laws of general relativity because instead of exceeding the speed of light it would contract the space in front of it and expand the space behind it, which would result in faster-than-light travel. For all intents and purposes, Alcubierre had found a loophole that circumvented general relativity.
“This is really speculative stuff,” Thomas said after taking another sip of his screwdriver. “We touched on it briefly in school, but it was something that was generally dismissed as highly unlikely if not outright impossible. It hinged on too many improbabilities. You’d need a specific type of exotic matter with the correct properties. And even if the theory was consistent with general relativity, it doesn’t take into account quantum mechanics or the theory of quantum gravity, which would seem to negate Alcubierre’s solutions. That’s not even getting into the issues with time travel.”
“Like traveling backward in time,” I said.
“Yes, like I said, that’s something we don’t need to wrap our heads around. I firmly believe that backward time travel is impossible. Even if it was, at best we would be observers. Hawking’s chronology protection conjecture or the Novikov self-consistency principle would kick in, preventing any outside interference.”
“What about the many-worlds theory?” I asked. I was surprised with how well I was keeping up. I was nowhere close to an expert, but I had read a few books on time travel. What kid doesn’t?
“Right, and then there’s Everett’s interpretation. If you went back in time and changed anything, instead of affecting the past or creating a paradox of some sort, an alternate universe would be created in which the change would play out separate from the past which had already occurred.”
“Or the past you traveled back to would already be an alternate of our own past.”
“Correct. But, like I said, none of that matters in this case since we’re not discussing time travel. In fact, with an Alcubierre drive, we wouldn’t be traveling faster-than-light ourselves. We would be riding a warp bubble or warp ring. Nothing inside the bubble would be moving faster than light. What’s clever about this idea is that relativistic effects like time dilation wouldn’t apply.”
“Meaning time wouldn’t slow down for us while it kept going as normal on Earth.”
“Yes. When we returned, thousands of years wouldn’t have passed on Earth. The passage of time would remain consistent on both ends since we wouldn’t have been traveling at or beyond the speed of light.”
Gloria said, “It sounds complicated.” She hadn’t touched her drink in a while. “You’re saying that we created one of these drives or whatever, but it doesn’t sound like that would be any easier than creating a wormhole or a ship that can go at the speed of light.”
“It isn’t.”
“Then how did we do it?”
Thomas gave us a nervous smile and took another gulp of his drink before he said, “We didn’t.”
“What do you mean ‘we didn’t’?” I asked.
“I mean that we didn’t create anything. No one on Earth created an Alcubierre drive.”
“I’m confused,” Lisa said.
“Which isn’t out of the ordinary,” Thomas said.
“That’s not true and you know it.”
“If we didn’t create it,” Gloria said, “then who did?”
“Beats me. Someone a lot smarter and a lot older than us. See, one of the problems that the technology faces – or faced, I should say – is that a guy named Krasnikov speculated that an F-T-L trip would require forcing exotic matter to move at local faster than light speeds. That would require the existence of tachyons. However, he also said that it could be accomplished without tachyons if devices programmed to operate in a preassigned manner were placed along the travel path in advance. The trouble with that is that whoever built the devices would have had to have started building them as long ago as it took to reach a specific destination.”
“Okay, now I’m confused, too,” I said.
“Thank you,” Lisa said.
Thomas rolled his eyes. “All right, I’ll admit, it’s somewhat advanced. So think of it like a giant interstellar subway system. In our case, because fifty-five cancri e is forty light years away, then the intelligence that built the subway system would have had to have built it at least forty light years ago, otherwise there wouldn’t be a way to ride it to our destination. They would have created these bubbles, or ‘subway tracks’ if we are to consider it in the context of our analogy, all along the path to the destination. Essentially, we jump on the tracks and it’s programmed to take us directly to our destination. The train is on auto-pilot. Our theoretical train ride is contingent upon all of the required infrastructure, the warp bubble devices, being in place ahead of our journey.”
“Aliens?”
“It’s safe to assume. They would have been far more advanced than us, and this would most likely have been a million years ago.”
“But where are the bubbles?”
“The closest one that they know of, which is the one we will be using, is near Jupiter.”
“Jupiter?” I asked. “It’s been there all along?”
“That’s the assumption, yes.”
“How didn’t we know about it before this?”
“I don’t think we really know. Space is a big place. If you aren’t looking for something, it is easy to miss. Eith
er that or the device hasn’t always been active. If whatever intelligence built it left it on standby, we probably never would have found it. What I do know is that one of the telescopes picked up an anomaly. This is probably years after the telescope collected the data. There’s so much of it, it takes a long time to sift through. The anomaly didn’t correspond with any known occurrence we knew about. They sent a probe to investigate.”
“And found a warp bubble,” Gloria said.
“Initially, they didn’t realize what they had stumbled upon,” Thomas said. “They sent a probe through it and it road our metaphorical subway car to its destination.”
“Which was fifty-five cancri e?”
By this time I had finished my bottle of Bud Light. I hailed the holo-bartender and ordered a screwdriver. Thomas was working on his third and appeared to be holding his own. The drink had loosened his tongue and he was rambling a bit. You could tell that his mouth was having difficulty keeping up with all the thoughts racing through his mind. What I knew at that moment was that this trip had been worth it. Less than twenty-four hours on board the Astraeus and Thomas was telling us that aliens existed. Had to, since the interstellar subway system – the Alcubierre drive – hadn’t occurred naturally. Someone had built it, and it sure as hell wasn’t us.
Thomas said, “We’ve actually known about fifty-five cancri e since the early twenty-first century. We knew it was largely composed of carbon in the form of diamond. What’s the next best thing to visiting a planet with alien life?”
“Visiting a planet that contains a fortune in diamond,” I said.
“Yes, and mining it and bringing that fortune home.”
“But if an advanced alien race built a subway system to the diamond planet, wouldn’t they have mined everything by now? Why else would they go there?”
“We can’t predict their motive. It is possible that they would have collected whatever resources the planet had to offer, but it is just as likely that an advanced civilization wouldn’t have a need for those resources at all. Chances are that this isn’t the only subway system they’ve built. Another aspect to take into consideration would be why point ‘A’ of the transit system is so close to Earth. It’s almost as though they left a gift on our doorstep.”
Project Diamond (Jacob Lansing Series Book 1) Page 8