Outcast

by Guerin Zand

  “Hello, Cindy.”

  “Hey, Guerin. My parents have asked me to invite you to dinner tonight.”

  “Really? You want me to meet your parents? Why?”

  “Well, you already know my father, but my mother has been asking to meet you. I don’t know why. So will you accept?”

  “I don’t know. On Earth, when a girl brings you to meet her parents, it sort of has a special meaning.”

  “What does it mean?”

  “Well, when a girl is interested in a guy, and they’ve known each other for a while, her parents want to meet him. You know, to decide if they approve of that man.”

  “You don’t have to worry about that. My parents totally don’t approve of you.”

  “Then why do they want to have me over for dinner?”

  “I don’t know. My mother has some reason. You can ask her when you meet. So, will you go?”

  “Ok, I guess.”

  “Good. Then why don’t you pack an overnight bag and then we can head down to my shuttle.”

  “Wait. I thought we were just going for dinner. Why do I need to pack anything?”

  “They’re not on this ship. They live on a station in the Large Magellanic Cloud. If we leave soon, we’ll have time for you to do a little sightseeing. You’ve never been to one of our stations.”

  “Is that the same station that Milly is assigned to?”

  “No. Milly is living on a station in the Andromeda galaxy.”

  “Ok. Give me a few minutes to pack. Prima, do you and Maria mind taking care of Gamma while I’m gone?”

  “Of course not, Guerin. That’s what I’m here for.”

  “Great. Just remember, I don’t want Maria feeding her any of her vegan crap. There is a list of approved foods for Gamma stored on the replicator.”

  “Jesus, Dad! Will you give it a break?”

  “Never!”

  I went back to my bedroom and packed a few changes of clothes. I wasn’t sure exactly what I should take, so I packed twice as much as I probably needed. I considered packing my 45 in my go bag. I still didn’t like knowing it wasn’t close by. It was hard to ignore my pirate habits, but I decided against it.

  It didn’t take long to arrive at the station in the LMC. As usual, we spent most of the time maneuvering in the local traffic of the Earth ship, per the dockmaster’s instructions. When we arrived in the vicinity of the station, I enabled the external view in the galley where I was during the whole trip.

  Excuse my French, but the station was FUCKING HUMONGOUS! It was an actual Dyson sphere. The diameter was so large you can only describe it using astronomical units, AUs. An AU is an Earth measurement used typically when calculating orbital mechanics within a solar system. It is defined as approximately 93 million miles, the mean distance between Earth and the Sun. According to the information I pulled up on the viewer, this station’s outer diameter was 1.732 AUs. In comparison to the station, the shuttle was smaller than a single grain of sand.

  All the stations like this were of similar sizes. The size was determined based on the size of the star they were built around. Typically the radius of the sphere was determined by placing the inner surface within the area we refer to as a star’s Goldilocks, or habitable, zone. A planet at this distance from a star was one that could possibly support human life. For these spheres, it was determined that this was also the best distance to use to make the energy radiating from the star manageable. The inner surface of the sphere was essentially a gigantic solar collector that converted the stellar radiation to power for the station. Humans had theorized about such structures but for the most part, outside of sci-fi stories, considered them impossible.

  “So, Cindy, do you just, I don’t know, bulldoze all the planets in a system to build one of these stations?”

  “Not exactly. First, there is an extensive study made to find just the right system where it is feasible to build such a structure. The star is typically what you’d call a young yellow dwarf. These types of stars are usually stable for 5 to 10 billion years. We don’t want to build them only to abandon them in a few million years.”

  Ok. Maybe Cindy didn’t know it, but that was my first clues as to how old the Bree and some of the other Collective civilizations might actually be.

  “Then we choose a system where the formation of a habitable planet, such as Earth, won’t occur because we obviously don’t want to interfere with the natural evolution of life in the universe.”

  “Oh no, Of course not,” I said sarcastically. Cindy didn’t appreciate my attempt at humor.

  “Anyway. Then we have to determine that there is indeed enough raw material around the star to build such a structure. As I said, we start when the star is very young. Most of the other matter in the system has not formed into any bodies much larger than the Earth’s moon. This makes the collection of the materials for the construction more manageable. When we find a star that is a good candidate, it takes a few centuries to do all the engineering studies to determine if a station is even feasible. If all of that pans out, then we’re looking at several centuries of actual construction.”

  “That seems like a lot of time to spend on such an endeavor. Is it really worth it? I mean, what benefit is such a large project?”

  “Power. That’s the simple answer. The amount of power we can generate from one of these stations provides the power we need to build main ships and shuttles. Besides being the homes for trillions of beings, these are our main manufacturing plants. We can do smaller manufacturing jobs on the main ships, but the really big jobs are all done on a station like the one you see here.”

  “You guys really do enjoy showing off, don’t you?”

  “Yes.” Cindy smiled back at me. They were an arrogant bunch of assholes for the most part, but still, it was impressive. I could tell she really enjoyed seeing me trying to figure it all out. I had a lot more questions but tried not to act too impressed. It was best not to encourage their arrogance. Instead, I just used my comm interface to the alien information stream to look up many interesting facts.

  The traffic around this station was just as impressive. If the shuttle was like a grain of sand in comparison to the size of the station, then the traffic around it looked like a sand storm that engulfed the station. I guess when Senri and I visit one of these with the Vengeance we should probably follow the standard docking protocols. At least the first few times, until we got the hang of it. Still, it only took a few hours to dock with the station.

  Getting off the shuttle and entering the spaceport, there were actually several hundred spaceports, I just stood there taking it all in. A single spaceport would have been gigantic, and probably very hard to manage. As a matter of fact, the whole station was divided up into thousands of what I’ll call, modular units. These modules could be living environments, manufacturing, power generation and several other types of functional modules. Each one of these modules was bigger than one of their main ships. The difference between the sphere’s inner and outer diameter was approximately 2000 miles.

  The modules varied in size depending on what they were used for. On this station, for example, a module used for living habitat was essentially a frustum of a quadrilateral pyramid. That is the best way I can describe the shapes of the individual modules. Since they were sections of this spherical shell, these pyramids had a curved base and top. The base of these pyramids being the outer surface of the sphere, and the top was the inner surface. Imagine carving a square wedge in a pumpkin, with the outer surface square larger than the square on the inner surface. The edges connecting the base and top corners of the squares were radial line segments from the outer surface to the center of the sphere. In a way, the structure was several of these frusta of varying size assembled in a giant three-dimensional jigsaw puzzle. Since the circumference of this sphere was almost 500 million miles, and the radius around 80 million miles, the curvature over 2000 miles was essentially negligible. The typical living habitats were essentially cubes with 2000 s
quare mile faces.

  Now the alien unit of measure used wasn’t miles, so I’m giving the approximate English unit of measure to make all of this more understandable to the reader. I could go into a detailed dissertation on the various standards for several different measurement systems, but I won’t. That’s not what this story is about. I stick with the English standards for the most part because I’m an American, and I can.

  The smallest modules had a 100-mile square base and they increased in size in multiples of that smallest size. The largest being almost 10,000 miles, which was larger than the Earths diameter. A module of this size was generally used to house an entire ecosystem. It could be used for agriculture as well as to preserve animal life from worlds that could no longer support them, a Noah’s Arc of sorts. The ecosystem modules were essentially wildlife preserves and were quite popular among visitors. These module types had cylindrically shaped interiors with a height of 2000 miles, the thickness of the sphere’s shell. The direction of gravity was always normal to the outer wall of the cylinder. Because of the immense size of these modules, they appeared to be no different than the surface of any planet.

  Some of the manufacturing modules were actually used for the construction of the main ships. According to Cindy, it made it easier for the construction to be done inside the modules since there was a breathable atmosphere. Although a lot of the actual construction was performed by machines, there were always a lot of people working on and testing systems throughout the whole process. The outer surface base for these frustums could be several thousands of miles square.

  I thought gravity was confusing on the main ships, but on a station, it just wasn’t worth the time it took to try and figure it out. In the manufacturing modules, there was typically no gravity and gravity in all directions. It just depended on where you were. In one of the living habitats, gravity, if I can even call it that any more, acted in a uniform direction, but it could be different in each habitat depending on how it was designed.

  There was an intricate system of transportation tubes that you had to use to get between these modules and travel throughout an individual module. In the individual modules, they had their own local transportation systems, but they were nothing like the system on one of the main ships except for the use of transport pads for travel over short distances. If Cindy wasn’t with me I probably would have just stood there with my thumb up my ass for days on end. I can barely describe this colossal station with a few words. It would probably take at least 1000 pages of technical mumbo jumbo to just communicate the basics. Cindy, of course, was enjoying my confusion.

  Cindy asked me what I wanted to see first. I just looked at her and said, “Well let’s start with somewhere we can grab lunch and a drink. I think I need a few right now.”

  We went to the closest transportation tube and entered a spherical car for the lack of a better description. These spherical cars had a radius of approximately 20 feet and had twenty very comfortable seats around the outside for long-distance travelers. In the center, you could mingle with others, sit at a table, have a meal, or work on a viewer. Each of these cars had your basic bathroom and a small galley. From the information I downloaded, a car on an express route could travel about 1,000 miles in 5 minutes. That’s fast, but remember these alien transportation systems negated all inertial forces on the travelers. It was like sitting in a room as far as the rider could tell. Traversing a larger module could take over an hour including various stops along the way. When you placed your palm on one of the readers to request a car it also noted your destination. The brain behind the transportation system would determine what was the best route and what stops to make to satisfy the needs of all the other people requesting transport.

  These cars didn’t run on a regular schedule, or not exactly. It was more of a random schedule, but because of the sheer number of cars, probably in the millions, it didn’t appear that random. Each transportation tube was itself a group of tubes, imagine the barrels of a Gatling gun, with thousands of tubes in one of the main tube shafts. When you requested a car one would be removed from the main tube to the transportation access port where the request was made. It might travel along this access tube for a bit, picking up other travelers before it was reinserted into one of the tubes in the main tube trunk. The tube used depended on the distance until the next stop. It was a million times more confusing trying to figure out this system than figuring out the Tokyo subways.

  It didn’t take long to reach our destination. I figured it was our destination since Cindy grabbed me and led me out of the car. If she hadn’t been there I probably would have never gotten off. Cindy explained that this was a recreational as well as an educational habitat. It was full of restaurants, green areas, and all sorts of other things for people to enjoy. The outer surface of this module was made of that “diamond glass” so you could enjoy the view at night time. During the day the light from the local star was somehow redirected to that surface and reflected back throughout the module. The one good thing was the entire station ran on the same clock, so there weren’t day / night sides to worry about, at least not between the living habitats I was told. In the manufacturing and other working modules, it was always daytime.

  We entered the module on one side, about halfway up. That’s if you consider the top to be the outer surface of the module. I did, since gravity seemed to be making me stand oriented like that. To be honest, I had no idea what up and down meant anymore. Cindy explained if we wanted to get to the other side we would have just stayed in the car and it would have taken us there. Remember, it was about 2000 miles across. In the center of the module there was a giant tower that essentially ran the entire 2000 mile height of the module. This tower, which had a diameter of almost five miles, was essentially just another massive tube containing hundreds of tubes. It also had multiple tubes connecting to the sides of the module at each level at a regular angular interval. Like a wheel’s hub with spokes running all around. These tubes, or spokes, also contained multiple tubes. These maybe contained 10 tubes based on their size. Along these tubes, on each level, were multiple access points for travelers.

  Where these spokes intersected the outside of the module they connected to even more of these multiple tube systems that also traveled the entire height of the module. The system would have deflected us into one of the tubes in this tower, or on the sides of the module, like a pinball being hit by some electro-magnetic flipper, to direct us to the level we requested, or shoot us straight through to the other side. There were also those transportation pads to move you over smaller distances on each level, or even between levels.

  I never liked big cities, and this was a bazillion times worse than any big city. It was like a really, really, really, bad acid trip. I just wanted to find a quiet little corner to hold up in and wait for it all to go away. Then I remembered the spaceman’s axiom. Well, I guess it was my axiom since I was the spaceman. Just ignore all the confusing shit and act like you know what you’re doing. Don’t give the alien show-offs the satisfaction of seeing your confusion, and don’t act impressed.

  There were probably a couple of hundred levels inside this module. If you think of the module as a cube, it’s a lot easier than a frustum and accurate enough, then there were several levels that extended hundreds of miles towards the center tower from each side. There was a small gap, small being a relative term, between the levels and the center tower that was approximately five miles wide around the tower. The levels themselves were essentially large cities with all sorts of stores, restaurants, entertainment, museums, learning centers, theaters, or whatever you could imagine, and a lot of shit that defied my imagination. The lower levels were where all the power and other utilities existed needed to run these little worlds.

  I decided we should have just stayed on the shuttle until it was time for dinner with Cindy’s parents. Then they could have put me in a stasis chamber and shipped me via UPS, or whatever, to her parent’s residence. Hopefully, I’ve been able t
o convey just how massive this one little module was. My brain was overloaded with questions, and I was having a hard time coping with it all.

  Finally we arrived at a restaurant, bistro, or whatever you want to call it. It was located on the center edge of whatever level we had ended up on and overlooked the abyss that was the center of the module. I quickly ordered the strongest intoxicant available. That was what I asked for without even caring what that would be. The waitress returned shortly with a small glass of some orangish looking liquid. I slugged it down before she had even placed Cindy’s drink on the table. I ordered two more.

  “It’s a bit overwhelming the first time, isn’t it, Guerin?”

  “It’s a fairly impressive little station. Quite frankly, from the way others had described these stations, I would have thought it would have been a little bigger.” That’s right. Never admit your impressed to these show-offs.

  Cindy laughed. “Right.”

  I smiled at Cindy. It was time for some stupid questions. “So, how do you get between modules? I mean, some of them can be several million miles apart. You can’t use the tube cars to travel those kinds of distances.”

  “You’re right. It would be impractical to travel those distances using the internal transportation systems. It really depends on where you need to travel. Of course, in our case, we made sure to dock our shuttle close to the module we wanted to visit. If you need to go to another module, that is far enough away, you can just use your shuttle to travel around the sphere to another spacedock. In some cases, it would be easier to travel across the interior of the sphere. The transport system would then use portals to move your car directly to the required tube on the interior of that other module. The portals are timed, in tandem with controlling the velocity of a car, so there is only one portal open at any instant. Since the travel time through a portal is more or less instantaneous, the duration of any portal is quite short. It is rather complicated, but tearing a gajillion holes in spacetime, in a relatively small area of space, is not a good thing.”