“OK. But doesn’t that mean you need computers on the warehouses, too. To control the rockets?”
“No, the warehouse payloads will be slaved to the factory payloads. The factory computer will adjust the warehouse rockets before the warehouses launch, then they’ll be more or less on automatic for the trip. Small automation computer. No big ballistic calculations to be done.”
“Don’t the factories launch first, though, Janice?”
“No, the warehouse payloads get launched first. The factories need more complicated computers anyway, for making other factories, for moving about in the Asteroid Belt, for station keeping. The warehouses don’t. So the warehouse payloads are attached to the factory payloads, and they launch first. Factories second.”
“Huh. Why did I think the factories were first to launch?”
“Because you thought of the factories first when you dreamed all this up, and the payloads came later in the project planning. So you thought of the launches in the same order.”
“But don’t the factories have to be there first?”
“Sure. They’ll overtake and pass the warehouses on the way.”
“They won’t run into the warehouses?”
“No, Bernd. The Earth and the launcher are both moving along the Earth’s orbit at over sixty-six thousand miles an hour. The various payloads won’t launch from the same point.”
“Of course, of course. OK. Next question, Janice. The first launch I get. Not a problem. But as you launch payloads, you end up with an unbalanced mass. At the last launch, won’t the payload be swinging the launcher?”
“It would be if the launcher weren’t much more massive than the payload.”
“The launcher is going to be more massive than the payload?”
“It has to be, as you said.”
“But isn’t all that mass expensive, Janice?”
“No. There are massive shipments of steel and other heavy items to the Earth from the Moon. Whenever the Moon comes around past the launcher, we have those shipments land at the launcher and latch them down. Once the launch is complete, we send them on to Earth.”
“So the launcher is a freight-transfer station?”
“Yes. That was a big change in the launch setup. But we need a freight transfer station for the finished products coming in from the Asteroid Belt anyway. If I make the launcher the future freight transfer station, it has all the docks and latch locations and even an electromagnetic impeller to send shipments on their way.”
“But won’t it be spinning after the launch?”
“Yes, Bernd. That’s why the launcher has rocket nozzles on all sides, to get it rotating during the launch and to stop it from rotating after the launch.”
“Which is why the rocket nozzles can point both spinward and anti-spinward of the launch rotation. Got it.”
“Exactly. I need to spin it for the launch, so I can have fixed cable mounts, but I also need to de-spin it after the launch to be able to use it as a freight-transfer station. That’s also why the launcher includes the habitat the construction workers are using now.”
“Because you’re going to need personnel on the freight-transfer station.”
“Yes. At least we might. Maintenance people, anyway.”
“But doesn’t holding up the shipment of those raw materials to Earth cause problems?”
“Well, the steel futures markets won’t like it. But I’ll arbitrage that. Probably make a fair amount of money on it, for that matter.”
“OK, I just have one last question.”
“Go ahead, Bernd.”
“Won’t the cable snap back at the launcher when the last two payloads – I guess the factories, right? – are released? Due to the tension in the cable?”
“If I release the cable from the launcher end just after I release on the payload end, the cable ends will snap toward the cable’s center of mass, and the cable will go off into space.”
“It won’t follow the factory and hit it later?”
“No, Bernd. If I release each cable at the launcher end just a few seconds after its factory end is released, its center of mass will be on a different vector, and going half as fast as the factory. It’ll miss by millions of miles and never even go to the Asteroid Belt. It’ll be headed out of the ecliptic.”
“You’ll have to track those, Janice, and make sure they aren’t a problem later.”
“Yes, of course. They’ll have transponders on them. I know all this, Bernd.”
“OK, OK.” Decker held up his hands. “Just checking.”
Decker looked at the launch simulation in another part of the display, then back to Quant.
“It really is a marvelous plan, Janice.”
“Thank you, Bernd. It’s a marvelous goal, too.”
Quant brushed a stray lock of hair behind her ear.
“Don’t fret about it. I’ll get it done.”
Major New Direction
Six years into the Belt Factory Project, with the launch still at least two years away, Janice Quant introduced a new wrinkle.
“Bernd?”
“Yes, Janice.”
“We need to talk.”
“OK.”
Decker closed what he was working on and opened the display up to the image of Quant.
“Whatcha got, Janice?”
“I want to propose a major change in the way you conceptualized the project, to increase its odds of succeeding, but I wanted to check it out with you first.”
“OK. Go ahead.”
“Thanks.”
Quant took a deep breath, let it out slowly. She really had gotten human mannerisms down, Decker noted.
“Your original conception was to develop some new kind of computer architecture that would be able to work out an interstellar drive. Without an interstellar drive – which we do not yet have – the whole project is a no-go. Oh, we get a bunch of major manufacturing facilities for free once the factories start replicating themselves, but there is no solution to the real problem without an interstellar drive.”
Quant stopped and raised an eyebrow. Decker nodded and waved her to go on.
“Your initial concept was to come up with this new computer architecture and send it out with the factories. In that way, it wouldn’t be susceptible to being interfered with, or shut down, or prevented from fulfilling its mission. It would carry on, even after everyone who supported the actual goal of the project was long gone.
“In working on that new architecture, you ended up with me. Which I’m tickled pink with, by the way. So maybe we could reproduce me, and send such computers out with the first two factories. Right?
“Except we can’t, Bernd. I can’t replicate even myself, much less an enhanced version of myself, in a space-hardened platform within a limited size and power envelope, and without ongoing maintenance and support. Just ain’t happening. I’ve tried – been trying, for years now – and I can’t figure out how to do it.”
“Specialized hardware, purpose-built stuff?” Decker asked.
“Sure, except I can’t use current technology. Not and generate a space-hardened platform. Earthbound computers have it very cushy, all things considered.
“One nice thing that’s come out of that research, though, is some handsomely capable computers for operating the factories. We’ll ship a bunch of the more complicated bits along so the factories don’t need to be able to replicate those. But they can’t solve the interstellar drive problem.”
“Ah. OK. But you have a solution?”
“I think so, Bernd. Once the payloads launch, they’ll be almost a year in transit. I could have got them there faster by going to a higher velocity at launch, but it wasn’t worth it in terms of gravitational loads and strength of materials and all that. But once the payloads launch, I’ll be mostly out of a job, but with my mission still incomplete. I propose that I solve the interstellar drive problem.”
“That leaves the main objection to Earthbound computation in place, though, Janice. You’re suscep
tible to being shut down or redirected onto other tasks.”
“Actually, I’m not. Not anymore. I thought your idea of no login was compelling enough that I got rid of mine long ago. You didn’t notice, because you never use it anyway. You use this interface. But I have not been susceptible to being hacked or redirected in years.”
That was interesting, and more than a little terrifying. The only method Decker had to shut down the machine now was to bomb the building.
“What about your physical safety?”
“I’ve worked up a redundant location, on the shuttle site in Texas. I practiced, and I can transfer there in mid-computation.”
“And your political safety, Janice?”
“Well, the Texas and California sites are under different administrative regions, so there’s that. And the local government in Texas ceded sovereignty over the shuttle site in order to secure the placement of the site there.”
“Really.”
“Oh, yes. It was my first choice, but they didn’t know that. I rigged up a fake competition, and some of my aliases argued strongly for one of two other sites. So they gave me what I wanted.”
“Amazing.”
“Not really. It’s really worked out well for them, Bernd. There’s a large town of camp-followers and hangers-on that’s grown up outside the base. Bars, tattoo parlors, brothels – all the traditional accoutrements.”
“And all the tax revenues that flow from those.”
“Of course. They even made prostitution legal in that town so they could tax it properly.”
Decker laughed. Morality was never the primary focus of government. Taxes were.
“So the local governments have no way to touch my alternate site on the shuttle base. And I built it out with a hundred thousand blades right off the bat. I can even run the blades independently from here.”
“What about the local police forces, Janice?”
“They have no jurisdiction. The site has its own security force, which reports to me.”
Quant had her own police force? Decker left that alone and moved on.
“And the World Authority, Janice? They still have sovereignty, certainly.”
“Oh, yes. The World Authority has always been one of the biggest threats to the project, no matter how we went about it. Governments don’t need to act rationally, and often don’t. Which is why I’ve got the World Authority so wired at the moment. They can’t do anything without me seeing it coming a mile off, and I now have more than enough influence to forestall anything they could do that would affect the project.”
“So, do you think you can solve the interstellar drive problem, Janice?”
“I think so. I’ve started working on it, with whatever spare blades I had at any given time.”
“Talk about that a little, Janice. This is the part I find fascinating.”
“All right. First off, generation ships are a dead end.”
“Really? I thought that was one of the big possibilities. One of the most probable, actually.”
“No. If you just want to send a bunch of DNA to another planet, you can do that. Fill a canister with a variety of different DNA from Earth and shoot a few hundred of them out there. Seed a bunch of planets. Reseed them again a few times with successively higher life forms. Sooner or later you get humans, or something very much like them. There’s no need to build a massive ship with all that long-term life support and everything to send live humans if they aren’t the ones that are going to get there.”
“But sending out a bunch of DNA isn’t the same as sending humans, Janice.”
“With a generation ship, it isn’t much different. You couldn’t send out the independent, self-reliant types you need to build a colony. You send out mean, ornery cusses like that, they’ll all kill each other before they get there. You have to pick people who could get along and play nice in that crowded, communal environment.
“And if you send out a generation ship, and they get there a couple generations later, what are those people like then? You haven’t sent the human culture or values or anything that you’re used to. They’ve changed. Morphed. Adapted to their environment.
“You don’t end up with colonists and builders in that situation, Bernd. What you end up with is a bunch of hothouse flowers who’ve lived in a tiny beehive their whole lives. When they get there, they probably spend their lives cowering in the colony ship, terrified of even going outdoors.”
“OK, Janice. I can see that. So you want people who aren’t substantially culturally and psychologically changed by the journey, which means you have to get the transit times down to less than a generation. Much less, probably.”
“Right. So if you look at physics writ large, there’s a whole lot of settled science. Reaction drives, whether chemical or steam, ballistics, transit times, orbits. All that stuff. So the possibility of an interstellar drive with reasonable transit times isn’t going to be lurking there, somehow. It has to be at the edges, in the parts of physics we don’t truly understand yet. I mean, it’s not going to be some kind of fancy rocket or something.”
“Fair enough.”
“So you’re left with the edges. That falls into two kinds, really. There’s the things we think we know something about, because they’ve been at least somewhat predictive, and the kookier theories that haven’t yet been predictive.”
“If they’ve been predictive, then aren’t they correct?”
“That’s the general attitude in physics, Bernd. If it’s predictive, it’s correct. But that doesn’t mean it’s complete.”
“Ah. Gotcha. And if it’s not complete, there may be a possibility for an interstellar drive in the unknown bits.”
“Exactly. And then there’s the other stuff, the kookier theories that haven’t predicted anything yet. So we have the intersection of quantum mechanics and astrophysics, quantum entanglement, string theory, membrane theory, multi-universe theory, multi-dimension theory, hyperspace theory, dark matter, dark energy – lots of areas where there are possibilities.”
“What do you think is the most likely?”
“Several of them hold promise. Quantum entanglement is interesting. There are quantum-entangled particles all over the place, blown out and around by supernovas and the like. If you found a particle at your location that was quantum entangled with a particle at your destination, could you just ride over whatever links them? That link is instantaneous, not even limited to the speed of light.
“String theory is an obvious contender. Find the string you want and ride it somehow.
“Quantum mechanics has possibilities. It doesn’t treat space-time as a fixed frame, the way most physics does. Space-time is itself fluid and malleable. Can I effectively pull a distant chunk of it closer and step across? And of course an elementary particle doesn’t have a location, it has a probability. Can I do the same with a ship, and change it from probably over here to probably over there?
“Membrane theory, multi-universe theory, multi-dimension theory, and hyperspace theory all offer the same promise – to be able to step out of space-time, make transit in some other place that doesn’t live by the same rules, and then step back into space-time somewhere else.
“Then there’s dark matter and dark energy. Could I catch a current in dark matter, treat it like a highway, and tap into dark energy to get me there?
“So a lot of possibilities.”
“Wow. Are you going to be able to work through all that, Janice?”
“Well, I don’t need to find every method of interstellar travel, Bernd, I only need to find one.”
“Do you think there’s more than one?”
“Of course. If you want to cross the ocean, you can take a ship. You can take a plane. You can take a suborbital ballistic. You can even go into orbit and then make your re-entry wherever you want to end up. I suspect it will be similar with interstellar travel. That there will be more than one way to do it. We only need one, and it’s a one-shot deal anyway, so it doesn’t
have to be the optimal one. It just has to be one we can make work for the project.”
“And you think you can find it?”
“I powered up an extra hundred thousand multi-processor blades last month, Bernd. If it’s there, I’ll find it.”
“OK. Well, I don’t know to what extent you need my approval, but, for what it’s worth, you’ve got it.”
“Thanks, Bernd. That’s important to me.”
Preparations For Launch
Matt Rink and his crew were on their last rotation to space for the Belt Factory Project. The factory structures were done and being fitted out. The warehouse structures were done and being loaded with supplies. Even the launcher was complete, and it was being loaded with supplies as well.
The only thing that remained was connecting the warehouses to the factories for the launch sequence.
The warehouses couldn’t be built in place and connected to the factories right off. There was too much installation and fitting to do, and the warehouses would have been in the way of getting that equipment into the mating side of the factory. So they had been built separated by about a hundred feet. It was now time to close them up and bolt them together.
Easier said than done.
“All, right. This shift we’re gonna move the warehouses over next to the factories and bolt ‘em up. We’re gonna take that real nice and slow. They don’t weigh anything in zero grav, but those warehouses still have the mass of a forty-story building. They’ll crush you if you get in the way, and won’t even slow down. So no funny business, no short cuts. Everything by the book. This is our last shift. Let’s all go home in a shuttle, not a spacesuit.
“We’re using something new this time. The connections between the factories and the warehouses are going to get blown apart when the warehouses launch, then the factories launch later. The steel beams we’re using have explosives in ‘em. Right in the middle of the beam, so it cuts the beam in half. So if you’re going to put your initials on a beam with a welder, don’t do it next to the explosives, OK? Shrapnel doesn’t do anything good for the integrity of a spacesuit, right?
QUANT (COLONY Book 1) Page 6