Unwilling From Earth

by Andrew Maclure

  “When people don’t age, after a while they get bored with being on holiday all the time. Imagine being on holiday for a few hundred years.”

  “Oh yes, after two weeks in the Algarve with my parents I can’t wait to get back to work. But I wouldn’t do it if I wasn’t paid and I could get anything I wanted for nothing.”

  “You would eventually get bored - maybe not bored enough to go back to what you were doing, but possibly you would. Just because you worked as a waiter for a while it wouldn’t stop you from training to be a surgeon or a materials researcher or a detective and doing that for a few years or decades if you wanted. There is a work ethic in most of the population of any civilisation that makes it as far as interstellar travel, otherwise, they would have never made it that far, and humans are no exception.”

  “Most of the people I ever worked with are bone idle. They come in late and leave early. I can’t see them wanting to work for nothing, however long they lived. Anyway, we must be hundreds of years away from immortality.”

  “Not ageing is not the same as immortality. If you don’t age you can still get sick and die or get killed in an accident - or on purpose. Genetic manipulation to halt ageing is pretty straight forward. Your medical people on Earth are probably less than a hundred years away from doing that. If humans are still stuck on-planet that can lead to problems, though.”

  “I can see that. Overpopulation is already a problem. If people stop dying, it would be catastrophic.”

  “We are diverging a bit here, but it would give a huge incentive to develop interstellar travel and could give the impetus for the societal changes that need to be made. You already have cooperation in space with the European and Russian joint technology station on the moon - an off-world colony in all but name. There is the Indian and Chinese joint research station in orbit around Mars that also has American, Korean, Brazilian and Kenyan teams working on it. And course the American-led Lagrange international space and propulsion research and development station. You already have the base technology for creating wormholes…”

  “What! We have the technology for creating wormholes! Since when?”

  “Do you recall the incident at Area 51 three years ago?”

  “How could anyone forget? We had a crap summer the year after and you can see the crater on Google maps. You can even see it from the moon with a decent telescope. What’s that got to do with wormholes, that was an experimental fusion reactor that went wrong.”

  “The fusion reactor story was just cover. That was actually a successful attempt to open a wormhole. The US Department of Defence scientists responsible knew a huge amount of energy, by Earth standards, was needed to open a wormhole. What they didn’t know - and this still doesn’t seem to be understood by their scientists yet, is that if a wormhole is established too close to an area of gravitic potential - like a planet for example, that the wormhole is inherently unstable and will collapse releasing an even larger amount of energy. That’s useful as long as you can contain it, you get more energy out than you put in due to the physics of ripping a hole in the fabric of the Universe. If you can’t contain it you end up with a large vitrified glass lined crater and several cubic kilometres of dust in your atmosphere. The scientists involved in the successful experiment to open a wormhole won’t have had the benefit of learning that lesson as they were vaporised along with everything else in the research unit. The wormhole research project was abandoned as being too dangerous.”

  “Interesting. That raises two questions. How much more advanced research like this has been going and how much of it has been cocked up? Actually, that was two questions. There is another one - how the hell do you know this? I’m guessing it’s ultra secret.”

  “To answer your first questions, there is a lot of very advanced research going on in Earth laboratories - not all of it secret. How much of it is cocked up as you put it? Very little. The wormhole experiment wasn’t cocked up. It’s just that your scientists haven’t done all the preliminary research to do it safely yet. They will need new materials and a fundamentally new understanding of quantum and field physics. What they have achieved so far is quite remarkable considering it’s only a brief time since humans first managed powered heavier than air flight. To answer your second question, it’s part of my role as an Archivist to find these things out, otherwise, the archive would not be complete. Your most advanced security systems are trivial to penetrate with the technology I have.”

  “Cool. So we humans are a bit special then!”

  “I wouldn’t go that far, though you are a bit more interesting than the average pre-interstellar travel civilisation. That’s one reason Earth is so popular with tourists. That and the song, of course.”

  “Hmm. I was wondering about that. Did you bring me along as your pet canary to ‘sing’ to you?”

  Alan nodded, clicked and slapped his legs briefly. “No, but that’s quite a good idea.”

  “Getting back to the ‘no money’ thing, I really don’t get that. I can see how people might want to work in their community, but what about the factories? Who owns them?”

  “They are owned in common by all the citizens in the community.”

  “That sounds like communism. That’s never worked out well for us.”

  Alan nodded and clicked a couple of times, but didn’t slap his legs. Mark now recognised this as Alan’s equivalent of a chuckle. “It does sound like it but it is nothing like communism. Communism always works with a command economy. The person or sometimes, people at the top decide what needs to be produced and command it to be done. With the galactic economic model all citizens of a civilisation get to vote on what factories make. Everyone has the right to propose a new factory or product and it gets voted on. Usually, the only people who vote are the ones who have an interest or expertise in that product or who have studied economics. It works well almost all the time and any minor problems that occur are quickly and easily fixed.”

  “Why are there economists when there is no money and there are no banks?”

  “There is an economy without money. Supply has to meet demand, there has to be enough food produced to make sure everyone has enough to eat.”

  “OK, I think I understand, but why is it important that I know this? We’ll be checking out pre-interstellar civilisations won’t we?”

  “Have you wondered why you just get what you ask for? Why you don’t pay for your meals and clothes?”

  “No, it hadn’t crossed my mind.”

  “When it does, you’ll have the answer. As a Friend of the People, you are a member of the People’s economy now.”

  “Oh, OK.” Said Mark, thinking “Big deal.”

  “We’ll leave it there for now. I need to close off the Earth archive and then we’ll leave for my - our - next assignment. I’ll be a while, why don’t you look around Mother. If any doors are locked, it’s because the contents could be dangerous to you or there might be something in there that you could break. I’ll set arrows to appear on the floor which will point back here bringing you back the quickest way. If you need me, you’ll have to use your tablet for now. I’ll send you a message if I finish before you are back.”

  Alan got up from the table and sat at the main console. He started to tap and swipe on the console with his lower hands while making gestures above it with his upper arms.

  Mark felt like he had been sent out to play while the grown up did some work, but he was happy to wander around exploring, so he left the Command Centre to walk down the corridors.

  From Here To There

  Mark wandered down corridors, turning right and left randomly at the corridor intersections. Every door he opened led into large empty rooms. After he had been walking for a couple of hours Mark was feeling the need for a cup of tea and a rest and it occurred to him that it would take almost as long to walk back as it had taken to get to where he was - as long as he didn’t stop along the way to check out any more doors. Turning round Mark could see a faint but clear arrow o
n the floor pointing back the way he had come, so Mark turned around and started to walk back. After he had walked down the same corridor for quite a long time Mark began to feel uneasy. He wasn’t sure how far he had come as there was no way to measure it. The light came uniformly from the ceiling, so there were no ceiling lights to count to measure the distance and the infrequent doors were at irregular intervals. He had no way to measure time. Like most people he didn’t wear a watch, his mobile phone was flat with no way of charging it, and there was no clock function on the tablet Alan had given him. He could have set up a counter on it when he left the command centre but it was a bit late to do so now.

  The further down the corridor Mark went, following the arrows on the floor, his unease turned into concern. He had thought about contacting Alan but didn’t want to appear to be stupid enough to get lost in a straight corridor, even if he was just following the arrows. As Mark walked, his concern grew until he noticed a dark patch on the left-hand wall in the distance. As he drew closer, he could make out that it was a dark line running from floor to ceiling, and as he got closer still, he saw it was a full height double door that had black bands about half a metre wide running down either side of it. Mark walked up to the door and it slid open to reveal the command centre.

  Alan looked up. “Did you enjoy your walk?” He enquired.

  “Yes, fine thank you.” Replied Mark. “Getting back here was a bit unusual though. Despite taking several turns on my way out, when I turned to come back I followed the arrows and they brought me back here in a straight line down a single corridor. I don’t know how that happened. It was very strange.”

  “The main AI would have realised you wanted to return so rearranged things to give you a direct route back.”

  “Oh, it was really helpful. How the hell did it do it though? On second thoughts - I bet that’s complicated and to be honest - I don’t really care. I didn’t find out much, the only doors I could open were into empty rooms.”

  “You didn’t plan your exploration very well. Most of the enclosed spaces aren’t configured until they are needed. Next time be more explicit when you’re telling the AI what you want to see.”

  “Mmm. Planning my exploration.” Thought Mark. “That’s not a bad idea.”

  “I’m glad you’re back.” Alan said. “We’ll be ready to leave soon.”

  “Leave? Where to? Are we going back into the orbiter?”

  “We’re going to my, or should I say, our next assignment.”

  “In the orbiter?” Mark asked again, hoping to get an answer this time.

  “No, of course not. Mother is taking us.”

  “So where are we going?”

  “A planet called Chookli’ch. It is a slow developing civilisation centred in one continent. They are just starting to explore the rest of their planet. They are beginning to consolidate their fragmented city-states, clans and kingdoms into larger nations. The larger nation states give them the resources and social structures for them to start to develop their arts and sciences. As they appear to be slow developers, we probably won’t be there long. We’ll just to do a preliminary archive and we’ll come back again later to update it.”

  “Why don’t we just come back later and do it all in one go?”

  “Because they are beginning to develop the organisations to have the capacity to fight each other until they destroy their civilisation. If they do, we need to record what they had achieved before they reach that point.”

  “Seems logical. But, I’ve been meaning to ask this, why do you ‘need’ to record that and why do you do this at all? You mentioned before that being an Archivist is considered the most important thing anyone could do - but why?”

  “That’s complicated.”

  “It always is.” Sighed Mark. “So how far away are we going?” Asked Mark.

  “A long way.”

  “I sort of guessed that, what with there not being another inhabited planet in the neighbourhood. Can you be a bit more specific?”

  Alan walked over to the conference table with Mark following him. As he leant over the table an image of the galaxy appeared on it, with six lines radiating out from the centre, dividing the galaxy into six equally sized wedge shaped sections.

  “We are here.” Said Alan putting his finger down about half way between the centre of the galaxy and the outer edge, in one of the two galactic spiral arms.

  “I thought we were further out than that.” Mark said. “I seem to remember our position in the galaxy described as being in the unfashionable outskirts of it.”

  “That’s a fair description.” Replied Alan. “In the somewhat eccentric way humans measure galactic distances, the galaxy is about thirty kiloparsecs across…”

  “Hold on, I have heard of parsecs - they get a few mentions in Star Trek but nobody seems to know what one is. I can grasp, sort of, a light year.”

  “Mmm. A parsec is 3.26 light years but don’t blame me for that, it’s an entirely human measurement system. There is a mathematical description of a parsec, would that help?”

  “I’d be amazed if it did, so I’ll pass on that thanks.”

  “As I was saying, Earth is about eight kiloparsecs or twenty six thousand light years from the galactic core and we are going here.”

  Alan touched his finger down about two-thirds of the way out from the galactic core into an empty looking area between the swirls of the galactic arms, roughly one hundred and twenty degrees north-west of where he had shown Earth to be.

  “But that’s miles from here!”

  “A great many miles from here.” Alan agreed.

  “But - how long will it take to get there?” Mark demanded.

  “Oh, no time at all.” Replied Alan.

  “Oh God.” Thought Mark. “This is their bloody stupid ‘perceptual time’ thing. Nothing would happen between leaving here and getting there, so as far as Alan is concerned, even if it took thousands of years, ‘no time’ would have passed. This could get very boring. I-Spy will lose its appeal after a couple of centuries.”

  “So do we go into suspension while we travel?” Asked Mark.

  “Suspension? You want to be hung up?”

  “No, you know, suspended animation.”

  “Why would you want to do that?” Alan asked, sounding somewhat incredulous.

  “To stop us getting older? Me anyway. You seem to have cracked the ageing thing so maybe it doesn’t matter to you, but it would stop us from getting bored.”

  “But I told you, it takes no time at all.”

  Mark sighed. He had heard of time dilation as you moved more quickly and wondered if they would go so fast that time would dilate so much it would take no more than a few years.

  “So how fast will we be travelling?”

  “Your question does not make sense.”

  Mark frowned. “OK, but we'll be travelling faster than light though...”

  “Travel faster than light?” said Alan “Good grief - no.”

  “But, but that looks like, I don’t know, forty thousand light years? That means it will take us well over forty thousand years to get there!”

  “It’s closer to thirty thousand light years in your primitive human measurements and as for your absurd method of measuring time - hah!”

  Alan turned and walked back to the central console. “Are you ready to leave now?”

  “I haven’t packed all my stuff yet - oh no, I was forgetting. You made me leave Earth with just what I was wearing and since then, you’ve recycled them all. So, I have nothing to pack.” Mark replied sarcastically. “I guess I’m ready when you are.”

  “In that case, we’ll leave now.”

  “Seriously now, roughly how long in Earth years will it take to get there?” Asked Mark.

  “I told you it would take no time to get there. We’ve arrived.”

  “Arrived? Where?”

  “Chookli’ch of course. Where did you think we were going.”

  “Oh, I see. When you say ‘We
’ve arrived’, you mean ‘We’ve left’”.

  Alan tilted his head to one side. “What are you talking about?”

  Mark frowned again. Perhaps Alan’s translator was broken. “You said we’ll leave now, then you said we’ve arrived. We can’t have left and arrived at the same time. Is there a problem with your translator?”

  “No, that is correct. As we leave, so we arrive.”

  “Thirty thousand light years?”

  “Distance is not relevant.”

  ”But - how does that work? A wormhole? You mentioned those before.”

  “Do you know how wormholes work?”

  “Er, I think so. A wormhole is where two points of the space-time continuum are joined together even though they are far away from each other. It’s like having two separate points on a sheet of paper and folding it so the two points touch each other, even though the distance across the sheet of paper hasn’t changed.”

  “Succinctly put. You understand the concept of moving between distant points without actually travelling far. Good. This is nothing as primitive as a wormhole. Wormholes are messy to set up and sustain, and you have to set up both ends. They can’t be set up too close to a gravity field - remember what happened at Area 51? So, with wormholes, you are left with a lot of travelling either end and despite the theory that as you enter one end you come out the other, in practice it takes some time and travelling through a wormhole is so tedious.”

  “So is it like the transporter in Star Trek?”

  Alan nodded, clicked and slapped his legs briefly but didn’t answer.

  “OK, so how does it work?”

  “It’s complicated. I mean really complicated. I’m not just saying that because I can’t be bothered to explain it to you like I usually do. One of our engineers tried to explain it to me once, but I must confess I didn’t understand it. I’m not sure they did either.”

  “You didn’t understand it? I thought you had a brain the size of a planet!”

  “No, it's only about three thousand cubic centimetres.”