Human Starpilots

by F Stephan

  The third tower, home of the simulators, was located just above the student apartments and the main cafeteria. But to reach it, they had to walk back to the main hall and then through a series of round double doors. Leopold, who had grown in a war zone, pointed out empty weapon emplacements securing each double door. Even with half of the weapons removed, there were still enough weapons here to decimate a full armada.

  “Why so much security inside?” wondered Brian.

  “I don’t know, but when the Federation arrived, it required a full commando brigade to retake it.” Willfried joined the conversation.

  “The academy has always been untouched, protected by its security. It could have lasted more than ten thousand years. No one knows when it was built except through sparse legend of the old times,” added Leopold.

  “What did you find about those legends?” Willfried never resisted a story.

  “The Federation claims that they are the inheritors from an ancient human civilization that spanned the stars ten millennium ago. You know this part.” They all nodded. “It is rumored that when the ancients collapsed, this building was one of the last coordination points in their conglomerate of worlds. They were a beacon guiding the surviving ships for as long as they could and until they reached a safe planet. But when they saw the planet revert to barbarism fast, they knew the technology within the building was too dangerous. They could not destroy it because it would vaporize part of the planet. So, they spent their last moments creating a defense system that would cover the eons that would follow them, until the locals had regained enough to go through. The most dangerous items were locked in the third tower and they blew them partially, creating the crater we can see. The building looked at the city through the different ages, reminding of the greatest that had been here once and was now lost. Can you imagine living proof on Earth of Atlantis visible daily in medieval Europe? That would have changed their vision of the world”.

  “Leopold, you think this is related to the third tower?” asked Emily. There were three towers. One held the simulators used to learn space flight; one held a gigantic holographic representation of the stars a thousand light years around Adheek and the third was a mystery.

  “No, it is still locked from any access, and its contents are uncertain. I would guess there could have been a command center. That would fit with the size of this building and the housing. But when they sealed this place, they used a technology beyond what the Federation can manage today. I’ve been at the entrance, and you can hear some motors humming inside.”

  “If you ask me, the Federation didn’t try very hard to enter. They were more interested in rebuilding all the lost seals around the sector and the security systems that control the accesses. Whatever is in, they don’t want to let out. They just came to use the other towers,” said Wilfried.

  Emily sighed and then smiled. “Conspiracy theory again, eh?” She moved ahead and joined Sonter up front.

  “And what about the simulators?” asked Brian.

  “Finding them was a major breakthrough for Adheek, and the planet has since received the full support of the Federation. Oddoril told me they wouldn’t have made it through last century without it,” answered Willfried. Oddoril was one of the girls from Adheek who had graduated with them.

  “It’s quite normal that Federation gave extra support. Those devices are the only ones currently capable of preparing us to cross hyperspace,” intervened Emily, who had joined them. “Same thing with the star chamber in the middle tower. There are only four such rooms in the whole Federation”

  Brian had been to the chamber. It created a gigantic 3-D projection of the hyperspace around the Federation and allowed pilots to map their trajectories between stars. The system went well beyond what existed on Earth. This was a virtual reality a thousand times more precise and detailed than anything that could be built by Earth currently. It didn’t need a physical link to the individuals but replaced all senses, talking directly to the brain. Brian had been both frightened by the technology and awed by the perspective it offered.

  Finally, they all reached the tower entrance ten minutes before the course. At fourteen hundred sharp, Master Reinkel opened the door to the tower and welcomed them into a large square room, ten meters wide, with a large central shaft. Light flooded from the glass ceiling. On the west side, a steel and glass elevator provided access to the four floors above them. Around them, in each corner was a room with a metal cockpit connected to large electronic controllers. Every piece of equipment was flat and smooth, without any mark or features anywhere to rest the eyes on.

  “Students, you will find that your pilot bracelet opens your simulator and only yours. Also, they only work during the courses. Your names have been indicated for today in the elevator with each floor and on the simulators. This will disappear by tomorrow. Is that clear?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Good, now, go to your simulator, get in, and learn to use the command interface. I will activate a small simulation in an hour. This will give us a baseline on your reaction from which we will evaluate our work. You will find a red button in front of you. It is there to be used. Don’t play with it, but use it even if you feel only unsettled. It will stop the simulation immediately and alert me.”

  Some murmured in acknowledgment, notably the five from Adheek. This left Brian with a chill as they all moved toward the elevator. He was on the third floor with Emily, Sonter, and Troum, a shy blue-haired girl from Nelom. They all held their breath and looked nervously at each other, even Sonter, as they waited in front of the cockpit for the signal from the teacher.

  “Get in your simulator. Send a signal whenever you want to talk. Do not shout; you will all be linked together and with me. I will walk you through the first commands. Send the signal when you feel ready.”

  Up close, the simulator was a perfect ovoid cockpit resting on a polished metal frame. There were no demarcations showing a door, but when Brian approached and touched the firm metal, a whole section disappeared into a thin mist. He went in and found a chair in front of a red button—and nothing else. Brian fought the claustrophobic panic he felt in the empty cabin and sat in the chair. The sounds were attenuated inside, as if they couldn’t travel well inside. Immediately, the mist congealed again into a door, and the chair molded itself to fit him. He touched it sweating profusely and was repulsed by the sticky feeling. He screamed himself hoarse in an instant and closed his eyes.

  Illoma and Shanak had warned him the previous evening. But, warned or not, this was not a place for living people. It reeked of metal death.

  “Nanites,” they had told him, “the ancients used nanorobots to adapt the cockpit to each pilot. It is used to do a lot more than that and run the cockpit entirely”.

  “It is not possible,” Brian had answered. “Can you imagine the amount of nanites required to build and hold a door of one by one meter?”

  Emily had completed the sentence «They would need billions of them. That represents several centuries of current Earth production probably, just for one simulator”.

  “And no one in the Federation can bind nanites together like they managed.”

  “That’s surely dangerous for the health”. Brian knew he was finding excuses but the prospect of being enclosed in the middle of billions of tiny robots scared him.

  “True warriors do not stop at such ideas”, had answered Shanak seriously.

  “And look at the age of our teachers,” had added Emily, raising a hand to stop his further arguments. “Now, you are going to go and test it and we won’t be far”.

  He opened his eyes to find the cockpit adapting to him. Arms had grown to the chair to ease his posture. A belt had appeared, and he buckled it—even if useless in a simulator. Screens sprang into life all around him. He opened a window to Emily. The girl radiated sheer pleasure. This was something beyond imagination for Brian but he had seen it so often with her he didn’t surprise him. Yet it reassured him somehow. Other picture of all st
udents appeared around him.

  Finally, when the space was full around him and his breathing under control, he sent the signal.

  He heard the clear voice from Master Reinkel. “Now, I will activate the manual mode. It is the simplest by far. You will use the stick to pilot and a series of commands will appear on the console to guide in the different possible actions. The screen will show the use of each command. It will then plunge you into space for a first flight. Follow all instructions while I monitor you.”

  Brian followed each instruction carefully, fascinated and eager to learn. But, three hours later, he emerged from the cockpit sweating, with three virtual ships blasted to ashes and with the worst headache of his life. On that first day, too many sensory inputs had overwhelmed him. He had smelled the speed, heard the trajectories and vectors and saw the virtual parameters from the ships. Sometimes the senses had shifted in the middle of a flight, smell becoming vision or the reverse, as if the nanites were trying to understand how he worked. His brain had tried to follow as best he could but there was too much and the headache had grown intense over the hours.

  Emily and Shanak were no better, but Sonter seemed cool, looking at them with his superior airs. No doubt he had already seen a console with his father and worked through manual controls, as they did not require any special skills. Probably his dream was more used to interacting with the nanites. In many topics, he had an advantage on them, and Brian resented that.

  They all slowly found their way back to the ground floor, where Reinkel had set up the comparative table of their achievements and failures.

  “Students, you have supposedly been trained for this day. Spent countless hours preparing. And for what?” All had destroyed their ship several times, even Sonter, and Reinkel had harsh words for all of them. “I can understand. Our simulators are a lot more advanced but that does explain simple mistakes you could and should have avoided”. They took a good hour to review the key issues and prepare the program for the next few days. Brian recorded all, numb from his headache. For once, even Emily was massaging her temple instead of listening.

  Then, at the end, Reinkel opened a drawer below the main console, hidden behind a mist of nanites, which parted for his hand, and gave each of them a small book.

  “This is a physical copy of The Flight Handbook, volume one, a vestige from the past. It is the best introduction to space flight we have. You will read it and copy it entirely yourself by hand within the next month. I want you to know it by heart, as it explains the fundamentals you need to know. I want your body to remember it and you to be able to write it eyes closed. For those who have the question, no, we do not have the volume two. You will be interrogated at random starting in two weeks. Dismissed now.”

  More work, they were always piling work on them. Brian was already working every night until late, and it looked as if it had just worsened. Then, he glanced at Illoma and she returned his gaze smiling. They had grown closer in the last days, flirt growing into a relation. Maybe he would need to ask again for her help, smiled the young man. She saw the world differently from him, daughter and sister of starpilot, intent at becoming one of them herself, but sharing their two experiences on each topic helped them both move forward.

  Tasha nudged him. “Want to tell me something?”

  “Well, you guessed the obvious, didn’t you?”

  “Yes. Want to say more?”

  “There is not a lot to say. There is something deep running between us. It is unsettling”. Brian hadn’t really settled on Earth for long-term relationship and this feeling was new for him.

  “This is great. I am happy for you”. She had her bright smile out with the news. “That’s more fun than those simulators”. Then, his face clouded, and she added. “Wait, what didn’t you tell?”

  “She has set up strict conditions. The minute we are split in different ships, our relationship stops. She doesn’t want to live a relationship from a distance”.

  “Ah, have you ever lived such a relation?”

  “No, not really. And you?”

  “I did. He left Russia for Mexico for a full year. I hated every minute of it. Try to understand her. Maybe she knows more about this than we do”.

  12 Brian

  Brian finished his daily work in his room. He closed his console readers, stretched and lay down on his bed. Illoma, who had joined him for the evening revisions, went into his arms, saying, “Now, read it and let’s be done with it. We will learn it soon enough.”

  He picked again the Flight Handbook and read aloud the first paragraph.

  Thou hast been chosen as a Starpilot and thou art now the most select and elite branch of humanity, the new hope that will transform us into what we were meant to be. Welcome to this new, elevated status, and be you worthy of the trust given to you by the Builders. You leave the world of metal and machine to become more.

  Your first requirement shall always be to find your way into simultaneous inputs and outputs, while maintaining your true identity at the core of your being. The onboard intelligence will manage every single issue the spaceships face. You are the integration, the unpredictable version of the data, and the one who decides.

  In all you do, your task is to choose a possible course among the infinite possibilities and let the onboard systems apply their dedication to implement that course. Thou art a vessel within the vessel, and your nanites are a second skin around you. Warily, you could fly in your cockpit alone and with the singularity behind.

  Brian had a hard time deciphering the old language. He was working on a copy in modern English. He had another one in modern Federation, translated by Emily, on his desk, and he compared it regularly with his copy. There were five requirements in the Handbook, and they more raised questions than brought answers, at least for now.

  “I am missing too much. What is a singularity?” he said.

  “Hard to explain. It is a point of infinite gravity, like the center of a black hole. We cannot create them but the ancient could. They created those points and built ships around them. It allows the ship to breach the normal continuum of space and go in and out of hyperspace, like a needle”.

  “This is so alien”.

  “I know. My father told me about the Handbook.”

  “And?” From all his talks, Brian had surmised that there was a strong hereditary part in a pilot. Sonter, Illoma, and six others were the son or daughter of pilots.

  “Like you, he had a thousand questions. What was this old civilization? Why have they disappeared so violently? And why did they leave behind them only dead buildings and dead relics?”

  “When you read it, who is those Builders? What is the hope of humanity? They talked of onboard intelligence. Is it the console that equips the ships? Is it different from the one in the simulators?”

  “I’ve seen them on board our spaceship, but I was never authorized to work with them. And I never heard of onboard intelligence.”

  He activated his bracelet and made a note to breach the topic with Master Heikert. His tutor had already refused to answer on the Builders and the transformation of man. But he had not yet asked about intelligence. He would try. He would also reach out to Mathias to see what he could find on the topic.

  He sighed and closed his eyes, holding Illoma tight. There were so many unknowns around him that he felt himself sink in the infinity. But then Illoma turned in his arm and kissed him. “You are thinking far too much for your own good, you know?” He didn’t think much afterward.

  13 The aliens blog – 2135 AD

  From your favorite alien hunter Mat, hidden, always at your side.

  Dear readers! You want the latest news on our visitors; I have it all. You will not find anywhere else in the world more information than your Mat can share. And I am happy that you are all converging on our blog!

  First, more follower’s join me weekly, and I would like to thank you all. We are all together building a new awareness.

  Our candidates have been gathered i
n the center of Australia. This red-rock area has been only accessible in winter for the last fifty years, and that barely due to the extreme heat. The new Contact Organization has reactivated the old network of bunkers built at the end of last century during the Asian Wars to house the pilot classes. Our “chosen” are now fewer than one hundred. The first to fly off should go within a year. Then the next will go three years after. This is supposed to allow us to have more feedback on how they deal with the courses.

  Where are they going? Apparently to a planet close by, but we do not know which. Why now? Why so fast? No one of our contacts has been able to obtain that information. What are we exposing our kids to?

  The aliens promised they would help our climate and environment. Since the first contact, the situation continues to get worse. Have you seen any change provided by them? We have heard that there is a huge database of information that would share with us the knowledge of all worlds. Have you accessed it?

  We are facing grave perils on the home front with the global warming increase. Recurring typhoons, landslides, ocean rising, islands lost to the sea. We need all our forces to manage it. Why are we investing so much time and effort into sending a handful of youngsters away without any compensation? Many political parties have joined us in our quest.

  Request officially that the President explains his actions. Add a comment to the blog, and join us everywhere for the popular demonstration on the first of June at 18:00 UT! Show your discontentment with the current policy, and demand full transparency.

  If you have information, please comment! The truth cannot be stopped.

  Your servant, Mat

  Likes 910,834,123 Comments 121,789,763

  14 Don Mariano

  After six months of repeated requests, Don Mariano had obtained an appointment with Master Azam Puil, financial advisor from the Federation to the Adheeken government. His office was located in the Federation building, on the top floor, with an incredible view of the city. During the day, the heat made all building slightly blurred around the edge. The window was specifically shielded not to let the heat in, with the best of the Federation technology; yet the office was a bit too warm to be really comfortable.