The Cosmic Calibration E-Book

Felix Terborg

• Herausgeber: Books on Demand
• Kategorie: Fantasy und Science-Fiction
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 54

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Beschreibung

Rust can't wait to leave the human-infested earth behind. The only problem now: people traveling with him to Proxima Centauri.

Das E-Book The Cosmic Calibration wird angeboten von Books on Demand und wurde mit folgenden Begriffen kategorisiert:
Space Travel, Space colonization, Alpha Centauri, Time Travel, Cryosleep

Leseprobe

Felix Terborg

The Cosmic Calibration

A Drill-Universe Short story

The journey from Sol to Proxima Centauri took 50 years. A whole life, if one assumed the average life expectancy of an earthling. Plus or minus five to ten years, to be exact, for a human being no longer lived as long as he once did. In the preceding decades, one crisis had followed the next – war, disease and overpopulation had laid the foundation for a century that could no longer escape from misery. No sooner had one problem been solved than a new one presented itself to them. Many lost hope. Certainly, there had been attempts to eliminate hunger, to fund new projects, and to make room for mankind on a new planet. But Mars could not be made inhabitable. Above all, the red planet lacked a magnetic field that would have enabled it to keep out the radioactive radiation from space.

Gradually, the universe dropped its mask and revealed itself as the hostile place it really was. The earth had lost its ice. And all the perfect conditions that had once been frozen there melted into the ground like dew. Humanity, too, could no longer help but notice that there was no longer any place here. Not in Sol.

Where they were going, there was still hope. Even if they should have known better because of their experience, they were counting on Proxima Centauri 3 to be a sustainable refuge. Gigantic cargo ships were sent ahead of their fleet of settlers. In them were the Centuri-Converters, which used artificial intelligence to analyse the planet and terraform it afterwards to make it Earth-like.

They might find a radioactive wasteland, but that image, though some had certainly taken it aboard with them, was not voiced by any of the passengers. Thus, the destroyed homeland pushed them away. Their ship was driven only by the unknown ahead and the opportunities it might bring ...

1.

It was the year 2100. By the time space cruiser 73c reached its destination, it would be 2151. The passengers couldn't sleep through the journey; artificial cryogenic sleep was a recent discovery, and little time had been spent researching its safety (less time, in fact, than a phase of operating such a cryo-capsule would last). But what choice did they have?

At the end of each ten-year sleep period, some of the occupants were awakened. This allowed them to gather on the personnel deck and exchange ideas while the robots carried out maintenance on their sleeping capsules.

Rust was one of the first to reach the frontal terrace, a huge area in the bow of the cruiser enclosed by a star dome. It included three intertwined emporia. Rust immediately recognized that the points of light were a digital projection. He wasn't really looking at space ...

Green shrubbery climbed up the banisters – oxygenating houseplants lined every level. If Rust recognized them correctly, they were palm trees. They were meant to make the artificial environment a little more homely.

After a while, he decided to use the little time he had to get to know the other settlers. A couple and a ship's sailor had already gathered at a seating arrangement, consisting of Couches and a table in the middle.

"Which one do you think is our destination?" the woman asked.

The man in uniform looked sheepishly at the ceiling. "Well ... I don't really know. I'm just working at the machines ..."

Rust cut in, "That red one." He pointed to a faint glowing dot directly at eye level.

"That little dot?" She bristled. "Is it that far away?"

"Of all the stars, Proxima is actually the closest to us."

Suddenly, the woman seemed much happier. He noticed that her husband (Rust assumed they were married) struggled with tears. He put his face against the woman's shoulder and sobbed.

"If it's this close, the others still have a chance to catch up," she said to her husband. Rust had to grin. He had expected this kind of sentimentality, even when he had set foot aboard this ship ten years ago. Although only settlers without family ties were supposed to travel to Proxima, there were certainly some who didn't obey that. You're scared, Earth would have been your grave, and now you're leaving your loved ones behind to save your own ass, he thought but said nothing. Rust thought that was pathetic. That’s how he saw people: figures who followed convoluted logic. Charity and the will to survive fought for supremacy until the latter won. Because of such conflicts, he generally avoided people. Machines acted more logically. That's why he was the ideal candidate to colonize the Proxima Centauri star system. I can help create a machine-driven world. Open up a new land where there are few people. A world still built on logic before an exploding population fills the perfect ensemble with its chaos.

He had considered the math: At current population growth rates, as Earth was known to have, all the settler ships combined would bring little enough people so that there would be no significant population until long after Rust was dead. There he would find his rest. Rust observed the other three.

He had to get along well with the settlers, however.

"Why are we flying so slow?" the man asked after detaching himself from his wife's warm shoulder.

"Slow ... Well ... Ehh ..." the engineering officer muttered.

"Actually," Rust explained, "we're about the fastest ship that ever flew. It takes light about four years to get from Earth to Proxima – we cover the distance in about fifty years."

Only the Typhon 1 was traveling faster, but it had already arrived at Proxima by now and was converting Planet 3.

"And every ten years we are unfrozen ..." said the woman, "... so that ..."

"... We can gather here five times," Rust spoke, "once every ten years to face the future."

Now the sailor suddenly said, "Actually, only four times," and raised his eyebrow. He smiled rather stupidly for his age: Rust estimated that the man was in his late thirties, considerably younger than Rust was.

Rust was about to retort that he counted the last time they woke up as well, although they would have reached their destination by then, but a noise cut off the conversation. A barrel-shaped android came wheeling through a small hatch onto their level and slowed down just in front of them. He looked at the group with his square cameras. "Settlers of Group 3-8-4, please return to your sleep pods – your cryo pods have been recharged."

"How much time do we have left?" the woman’s husband asked.