by David Myhro
There was heat, heat, heat all over, liquid fire like I was drowning in dragon spit, and the sky was made of scorch. I made no splash as I entered the star, but there was a rumble inside me as the degenerate matter rushed into my lungs to equalize the pressure. In the same way my crystalline container filled with degenerate matter instantly after I was submerged, and immediately after that I could feel the flowing degenerate matter slither over my arms, like I was swimming in mud, as the super magnets guided my hands together in order to marry the cork with the container.
I vomited star guts as the technicians reeled me back in. The star was, of course, blinding without my visor, but I was able to observe my zenith as I was being taken back into the ship. The line connecting my body to the ship just seemed to stretch forever into space, slightly twisting and curving, whipping and belting as it perilously carried any and every stream of force traveling from one end to the other.
My recollection into the ship took far longer than the drop, but I certainly didn't grow tired of looking upon the stars. As I ascended I found myself wondering how much time had passed for the humans because I knew that their clocks were ticking faster than mine. I looked back down at the star, seeing it finally in its true form, and it was brighter than pure white.
Chapter 39
My naked, glowing body floated into the decontamination chamber where they removed the cable from my throat, cleansed me, and then draped a blanket over me. They then strapped me into a bolted-down chair, secured my arms, and began to cut through the crystal. The cross section that was visible after they were finished cutting was very strange to look at because it had partially melted and then resolidified. It was like a liquid—it looked just like a liquid—but it was not flowing.
I looked down at my quantum hands and saw all of the small fragments of chiseled crystal clinging to my skin and the large crystalline casts that were still engulfing my fingers. There have been so many stories about heroes being trapped in crystal, and now that was me.
The humans wanted to remove the crystal from my fingers, but I requested to wear it for a while longer. It was an interesting feeling to tap metal objects with a crystal-encased hand. For days on end I just couldn't stop tapping things. The vibration would go from the metal, through the crystal, and onto the surface of my hand; there it would bounce back into the crystal because of my inability to carry vibrations, and the feeling was very strangely addicting as the vibrations continued to echo back and forth. I couldn't say what it was like, only that it was different from anything I'd ever felt before.
I couldn't help but ponder about the many unfortunate hands that had been chopped off for diamonds. And now it was crystal that was going to be pecked away to recover my hands—a new kind of crystal that was far more valuable than diamond ever was. I had spent so much time in this enlightened society that it was hard for me to believe, despite having witnessed it, that there was a time when human life was considered to be worthless.
I eventually grew weary of the crystal and had it removed, but I longed for it once again during the years of travel time to our space base. Fortunately, I would have more opportunities to wear the crystal between my fingers: in the manner described previously we harvested quite a bit of degenerate matter from the white dwarf star, except—since we knew the extraction was going to be a success—we sent entire fleets for each expedition.
Every time I dropped to that star, every time the star tide swallowed me alive, every time I wore the crystalline cast… every time there was never a let down. It was just so incredible. The stars were always so untouchable, but now that was no longer the case.
These awesome journeys were not without risk. This was the first time that I'd ever been in danger of the ultimate game over—the danger, of course, being that the drop cable could snap and I'd free fall to the core, trapped forever like a seed sown in stone.
But the line never broke. I harvested hundreds of gallons of the electron-degenerate matter, samples that had no practical use other than to exist as a shrine to science. We eventually had to return to Mother Earth because we only had a finite amount of ships on our dock planets and we lacked the local resources to build new ships or repair our existing ones of the abuse that they'd taken. And we decided, when we got home, that we had acquired enough of the degenerate matter and that there was something new that we wanted to do, something that would perhaps be even more impossible than what we'd already done—we wanted to visit another galaxy.
Chapter 40
Traveling through our band of stars in the Milky Way Galaxy required little more than a means by which we could harvest nearby energy sources every once in a while as we followed a zigzag path from one star to the next; traveling through intergalactic space, however, presented many more obstacles. Having nowhere to dock for fuel, supplies, or repairs, a ship will have to be fully self-sustainable for an immense amount of time. With the current technologies it was already difficult enough to create an interstellar space vessel with a lifespan of around fifty thousand years or so; to create an intergalactic space vessel with a lifespan of hundreds of thousands of years was not even conceivable.
Life is able to profusely perpetuate on Earth because Earth is an open system—we are receiving a constant energy supply from Sol. But while in intergalactic space we will be in a closed system with an imperfect method of recycling materials vital to life. Unfortunately, the imperfection of the recycling doomed a trip with such a long duration; even the shorter trek to a nearby dwarf galaxy was simply not feasible for human life. Such limitations, however, did not apply to vessels that were not carrying life.
A few hundred thousand years ago, while I was still rotting away in the vault, humanity had begun deployment of thousands of unmanned space voyagers en route to the various galaxies and dwarf galaxies in our galactic cluster. This was possible because they could power themselves down for thousands of years while drifting through intergalactic space at the optimal velocity; the lifespan of a given voyager would not be drained during this hibernation.
Around thirty thousand years ago the humans began to receive transmissions from the voyagers that were arriving at the nearest dwarf galaxies; the same method, of course, could be used to send a vessel with me in it to any location, arbitrarily distant, since the engines and the vast majority of the electronics could be held in stasis indefinitely.
Chapter 41
We began construction of a special telescope that would be anchored on Charon. The upper lens of the telescope was to be the largest ever constructed in the history of mankind, and that's saying a lot if you consider that by now it was almost a million years after the invention of the internet. The telescope had to be high above the surface of Charon since the celestial object clutched to a slight trace of an atmosphere that hovered over the ground like a morning mist. In a large circle around the telescope there were guns stationed on the ground that were set to deflect any space dust or debris that might threaten the lens.
(The telescope on Charon was actually the master telescope, not the whole telescope. The whole telescope was a bit strange—it was a system of slave telescopes working on a network with the master telescope on Charon. The slave telescopes were in space, in the orbital path claimed by Pluto and Charon. Together the telescopes produced, with the usual ingenuity of the engineers, an image unimaginably more refined than anything that the master telescope could produce by itself.)
Once completed, we used the telescope to observe stars in Andromeda that would have been otherwise too dim to scrutinize. We weren't interested in the stars that we were able to study without this new technology since they would have been either part of a stellar orbital group or else too large, powerful, and dangerous to support human life. We searched for solitary, main-sequence stars—stars like Sol.
Spectroscopy, together with the observation of a star's wobble, allowed us to deduce the properties of the star's planets and determine the likelihood of whether or not a g
iven planet could be terraformed to support life from Earth. Checks and inspections were performed on every indirectly observable candidate planet in Andromeda until we finally found Terra 1A.
There was also the issue of making star maps, and the process was, due to the sluggish speed of light, quite a bit more complicated than it might seem at first. The vastness of the void between Andromeda and the Milky Way Galaxy might make you think that the actual size of Andromeda could be thought of as negligible, and that, in projecting the movement of the stars in the galaxy and the movement of the galaxy itself over the anticipated travel time to the galaxy, we would only need to take into account the two-million-year photon delay. But the galaxy was over a hundred thousand light-years across, and so our photographs would depict, due to the galaxy's orientation in relation to us, light from the back end of the galaxy that is about a hundred thousand years older than the light from the front edge. This was no longer something that we could just fib away because I was actually going to be landing on a hard surface, a very precise set of coordinates in comparison to a whole galaxy; it was clear that even slight imprecisions could cost hundreds of years to correct. We needed to not only have perfect calculations and extremely accurate data but also the ability to make navigational refinements as often and as precisely as needed.
And, of course, much more than navigation would be required of the deep-space vessel. Since so much of an emphasis had to be placed on its traveling abilities, the mammoth vessel was constructed entirely in space and completed without the ability for it to dock on the hard surface of a planet. It was a mothership, and it had a brood of thruster pods that would actually go down to a planet's soil. The ship was miles long, and it was so fragile and anti-aerodynamic that it would significantly disintegrate before much of it could fall through our atmosphere and onto Earth's surface.
I'm sure the biggest objection that any twenty-first century rocket scientist would propose is that of propulsion since the ship would have weighed thousands of megatons on Earth and was designed to be accelerated almost to light speed. Such feats of propulsion almost sound preposterous, but the majority of my velocity would be gained from many uses, reuses, and abuses of the tried and true gravitational slingshot method; for this purpose we had, on previous ventures, exploited a binary black hole system.
Whether or not you can agree that the propulsion was technically possible, I think we are in agreement that certain other deep-space problems were not much a problem at all. For one thing, most of the travel time would be in intergalactic space, a place where there would be no hazards at all for a creature like me; while roaming the interstellar space and interplanetary space of Andromeda, however, there will be the issue of space debris. Given the predicted travel time within the galaxy, the ship will be unavoidably pelted by meteoroids. Anything over a certain size will be either avoided or deflected by the ship's defense system, but the smaller rocks—such as those that are the size of a grain of sand—will be permitted to pass through the ship at the risk of colliding with me. This would only be a nuisance, and nothing more, since I could not be injured and since the important data, mission materials, engines, and all other critical things onboard were in armored sectors (and the defense system would make an exception for a small projectile if it threatened vital areas). There was also no risk of explosive decompression since the interior of the ship maintained a constant vacuum.
The ship was completed, the star found, the planet presumed. Maintenance of my sanity was the first priority, as I was to be the sole operator and observer. In stride with this endeavor the humans were going to maintain interactive contact with me in the very beginning, so that part of the voyage, at least, wasn't at all going to be like being in the goddamn vault. Additionally, they installed a reality simulator wherein I could interact with the artificially intelligent programs that were indistinguishable from real humans. What they could not do was prevent the floating, which began, just as I was foretold, after I had acquired my optimal velocity by slinging around a couple dead stars.
Chapter 42
When my speed, relative to the Milky Way Galaxy, had become a certain value that was slightly greater than 0.99c (that is, 99% of light speed), the inertia of the ship became so immense that it was very much impractical, given our technology budget, to maintain the precision thrusts required in order to further escalate my velocity via gravitational assistance. It took tremendous energy to reach 0.99c, but it was worthwhile: even this close to the speed of light, even with this much time dilation due to my velocity, the destination was simply so far away that I would still need hundreds of thousands of years, on my clock, to get there.
Once I reached my optimal velocity the engines were shut down. And when the deep-space drift began, so, too, did the floating. Technically speaking there were, of course, many ways to solve this problem—sort of. Even in your day this problem could have been solved via magnetic boots or Velcro carpet with Velcro boots. There were similar remedies that the newer technologies offered me, but they were all just as worthless: even with my feet steadied on the ground I would still have the floating sensation in my body, and so I rejected all such proposals.
The humans had also offered to make me a centrifuge ring on the ship that would be able to simulate gravity: if I were to lodge in such a structure that was constantly spinning to a desired degree, then I'd feel right at home. I declined this offer as well because dedicating energy, space, and structural accommodation for such an endeavor would inescapably subtract from the maximum potential volume of the ship. At all costs I wanted the ship to be as large as possible so I would feel less trapped… trapped like how I was in the vault. Additionally, the centrifuge ring would restrict my movement to a plane, whereas a zero-g environment would offer me something more like a cube in which to roam.
Like I already mentioned, the humans wanted to do all that they could to keep me mentally stable; to this end they not only designed the ship to my likings but also kept in contact with me as I progressed through my journey. As I distanced myself more and more from home, fluid conversation evolved into a system of delayed news updates due to the photon lag; the gaps in transmissions got bigger and bigger until I was essentially cut off—transmissions were taking thousands of years to be received.
I was officially in intergalactic space. Every being in the universe had some address: planet, star, galaxy. I had no address. I had no galaxy. If some intelligent being were to ask me my location, then I'd respond, "Nowhere."
I felt my identity starting to slip away as well. The reality simulator was supposed to help ease the burden of such a long journey—and in this regard it was successful—but sometimes, during a lifetime, I would spontaneously wake up, unsure of which world was real and which was a dream. The humans were unable to completely avoid this occasional error because my body was impenetrable. I was receiving all of the sensory data that was consistent with the situations that I was encountering in the simulator, but there was no prod or wire that could communicate directly with my brain.
I could do anything in the simulator. I was born, I lived, and I died—and it was all in real time. There was little confusion about the difference between reality and the simulator when I ended the program properly—that is, by death—because there was an addendum program that would be activated to assist with this matter.
There was an extensive database of personalities and environments, some fictional and some nonfictional. Most of the time I would choose to live in the recreated historical world, setting my birthdate to the various times during which I was preoccupied with the vault's interior.
I'd check for new transmissions from the real world between lifetimes, but whenever I woke up by malfunction I felt the need to silently gaze upon the galaxies. I was chasing light with such aggression that all of the galaxies were crunched together, as if they were fleeing from me. I would sometimes be filled with terror at this sight, at the sight of the entire universe being so
very small and so very distant, at the sight of an unedited, unaltered image being so alien to my intuition. I sometimes had the fear that these relativistic effects would be irreversible, even if I slowed down.
It was difficult to distinguish one galaxy from another without the help of a rigorous computer that was blind to the awe of it all. But in spite of the warped image and the vague fear there was a familiar motif, and it somehow helped remind me of who I was. Each dot was a world full of worlds, and there was so much that we would never, ever know about the cosmos.
I was the first child of the earth to exit the Milky Way Galaxy and observe it from the outside. I could see the brightness in the middle and I could see the starlit nebulae collectively forming their swirl shape, but I could no longer see my home.
Chapter 43
At this point in time I was closer to Andromeda than I was to the Milky Way Galaxy. I'd spent the last hundred years or so out of the simulator because I'd just grown so bored of it; I decided to use the time to perform some of my necessary tasks. Aside from these tasks there were the two main objectives to the mission, and it could not quite be agreed which was of greater value to science.
One of the objectives was to sow life throughout the new galaxy. The ship was carrying, for humans and various other modifications of Earth life forms, artificially sequenced DNA, the vast majority of which was that of single-celled life. The DNA did not exist in physical form, but rather in the computers; there were the necessary substances onboard to generate the digital DNA when the time was right.
It wasn't believed that any planet's atmosphere could naturally form into something like that of Earth's—by "naturally" I mean without the assistance of microbes to process the atmosphere. So my task was to find candidate planets (the main requirement being the presence of liquid water) for this process, sprinkle large amounts of artificially enhanced microbes on them, and then later return to these planets for testing. I would revisit the first planet after I was done with the last; even with the most efficient path planning the process would take over half a million years on my clock due to travel time. We had already located one candidate planet, Terra 1A, before I even set sail into space, and the computers on my ship were to seek out more during the very long transit between galaxies.