Terminal Reset
The Coming of The Wave
By A.E. Williams
DISCLAIMER:
The ‘Terminal Reset Series’ novels are works of fiction and deal with fictional events. Most of the characters therein are a figment of the author’s imagination. Without exception, those characters that are historical figures of fact or based upon historical figures of fact are used fictitiously, and their actions, demeanor, conversations, and characters are similarly all figments of the author’s imagination.
Copyright 2013-2015 © A.E.Williams.
All Rights Reserved.
Table of Contents
Terminal Reset
Prologue
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight –
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
BONUS:
Chapter One
Chapter Two
About This Series –
DEDICATION
The Ninth episode of “Terminal Reset” was nearly complete when the loss of the Virgin Galactic Spaceship Two spacecraft occurred. Needless to say, I am saddened and shocked at the loss of life and setbacks to one of the bolder and most ambitious undertakings in recent history – the privatization of manned space flight. The fictionalized events depicted in this Episode hold up a mirror to an unfortunate and tragic occurrence.
The many people involved in the production of the “Terminal Reset” world would like to dedicate the entire first Volume of the series to Michael Tyner Alsbury and Peter Siebold.
These men exemplify the spirit of adventure, sacrifice, and seeking of knowledge that those of us who have participated in extending our reach into space know cannot be quantified simply.
Since the inception of the space programs of the countries of the world, many brave men and women have given everything they can to assure that we may, as a human race, bond over the richness and vast adventures of travel beyond our world. They have given us this knowledge at the cost of their own lives – and I am including technicians, scientists and others in addition to their more celebrated comrades - the astronauts.
“We have always known that commercial space travel is an incredibly hard project”, to quote Sir Richard.
But, it is necessary to continue to push out our boundaries. It is important for us to learn how to mitigate these risks, and to continue expanding outward.
Our future depends on it.
A.E. Williams - High Springs, FL - 10/01/2015
“If there be light, then there is darkness; if cold, heat; if height, depth; if solid, fluid; if hard, soft; if rough, smooth; if calm, tempest; if prosperity, adversity; if life, death.”
― Pythagoras
"See yonder, lo, the Galaxyë
Which men clepeth the Milky Wey,
For hit is whyt."
—Geoffrey Chaucer
“Time takes it all whether you want it to or not, time takes it all. Time bares it away, and in the end there is only darkness.”
― Stephen King
Prologue
Earth is situated in a spiral galaxy, known as the Milky Way. The name comes from a time when people looked up at the night sky and observed what they believed to be a path for the gods in the heavens. The myriads of stars that make up the Milky Way galaxy were just countless specks of light on a black velvet backdrop to these simple shepherds, and roaming warriors.
Some distance from the flat spiraling disc of the Milky Way, in a direction mostly downward and at an oblique angle to it, was a vast expanse of what appeared as empty space.
In reality, it was the remnant of a cataclysmic event that had transpired millions of years past, almost at the beginning of the Universe itself. The forces that warped space and time had been so intense, that this aberrant thing was born in a manner that defied description.
At one time, this area might have been the birthplace of galaxies not unlike the Milky Way, homes to billions of stars and their attendant worlds and satellites.
Instead, it came to house the voracious and hungering maw of a massive black hole galaxy - a galaxy of singularities, themselves caught by gravity and drawn into the abyssal attraction of a tear in relativistic space-time. The enormous energies that struggled against each other in parasitic and cannibalistic fury created spectacular displays of destruction.
Entire solar systems were extinguished in the terrible flares of energy that reached out light years from their origin points. Appearing as nebulous filaments of gas and dark matter, these flares were immediately torn into new structures of plasma, ionized particles, and radiation as they were scooped into the black holes surrounding them.
In turn, the collisions amongst these dark stars again blasted unknowable forces and rays into space around them, consigning everything in their path to complete and ruinous obliteration.
This travesty of nature continued for millions of years, and the area actually began to take on other properties that were transitory in nature, but also unique in their ability to cause rifts in the space-time continuum.
Vast wormholes arose and collapsed, sending stars and planets into and through singularity event horizons. The titanic forces created another phase of energy, then mutated into yet other fantastic particles, which vibrated at frequencies so high that it is meaningless to attempt to measure them.
The ongoing transformations in the zone went on, creating new energy states, blasting matter into energy, which would become consumed in other weird manners to generate artifacts that would never again in all of space be seen.
Orphaned stars winked out over time, or grew into gas giants, and then collapsed into brown dwarfs, or neutron stars. Occasionally, one would explode into a supernova, showering its dying matter across the field of the dark matter galaxy, and thus feeding the obscene physics that maintained it.
Life was never even a question, in this morass of energy and matter gone mad. The stupendous rending of the fabric of space created x-rays, gamma-ray bursts, cosmic ray explosions, clouds of neutrinos and an astounding amount of tachyons.
It was this last creation, the tachyon clouds, that over a period of what might be called time, (but more accurately cannot really be defined in standard terms of what time actually is) that an oscillation and rotational momentum began. Much in the manner of the black holes that spawned them, the bizarre conditions in the dark area provided the fertile soil for these tachyon clouds to coalesce into something that had never even been imagined.
*****
Over millions more years, (in relativistic space, at least) the tachyon clouds formed accretion disks as they collapsed into denser formations of space-time. Folding on themselves, crashing into each other similar to the waves of an intergalactic ocean, they rebounded again and again from the perimeter energy walls formed by the dark galaxy. The energies heterodyned, phased and increased. They rotated around and within the wormholes, the black holes, and the massive outpouring of strange energies that comprised this blasphemous thing.
And then, they shot off at right angles to the plane of the dark area. Enormous, unmeasurable energy waves launched violently into normal space, tearing the local ether into shreds.
The troughs and canyons of time-space being destroyed caused the internal collapse of the system
, and the dark galaxy translated and rotated through the mesh of our Universal space-time into a region of hyper-galactic space, where it found a multiverse that could nurture it and give it a reason for existing.
It vanished, never to be known to the rest of the Universe, an aborted attempt at chaos, instead of unity, that left its mark, nonetheless. Dark matter, anti-matter, and other more arcane energies remained as the only evidence of its passing.
In death, it created something terrible, wondrous, and vast.
In dying, the Black Galaxy gave birth to The Wave.
Chapter One
As Humanity progressed, observations were made throughout the centuries, whereby many theories were proposed and discarded regarding the nature of the sky. Prehistoric tribes built simple stone monoliths that allowed the changing seasons to be mapped. Later, other cultures built pyramids and ziggurats to aid in the viewing and notation of celestial events.
The ages passed, and religion was born, the beliefs of what comprised the Milky Way also evolved. Many observers found themselves suddenly on the wrong end of a situation when they insisted certain elements of their studies contradicted the beliefs of the kings, philosophers, astrologers, alchemists, high priests or other members of the noble class.
Heresy was punished by death, and a significant number of individuals were cut down in their prime over their obstinacy.
Eventually, in the course of all things, Enlightenment and science came to the forefront of knowledge, and mechanisms to preserve and notate the complex movements of the heavens became more widely known and accepted.
*****
Early mathematicians began to calculate and formulate the intricate dance of numbers that would lead to providing some measure of control over the environment.
Humanity turned its fearsome talents to making war machines, and with that effort began to seriously contemplate the interplay of celestial mechanics, orbital trajectories, and physical effects of gravitation, friction, and vacuum. Instruments were sent into space, orbiting the Earth, and eventually the Moon. Robots were designed and built and sent into eternal trips far out past the influence of the Sun, and the information they gathered was transmitted via radio signals back to the laboratories and scientific facilities that gave them birth.
As the increasing amount of knowledge regarding space was cataloged and examined minutely, it became apparent that there were infinite possibilities in the kinds of hazards that awaited these robotic space-travelers.
Meteors, comets, asteroids, dust, radiation in all its flavors, neutrons, gamma rays, coronal ejections from the Sun, and the enormous range of extreme temperatures were all inspected as possible enemies, and the designs of mankind’s machines were summarily adapted to mitigate their impact.
These dangers were continually updated, and the robots went further and deeper into the black. They uncovered even more arcane and strange objects – white dwarf stars, exploded stars, numerous galaxies similar to the Milky Way.
Humanity developed sophisticated machines to calculate and manipulate the complex equations of mathematics and physics. These ‘computers’ became intricate miniature brains, and as time went on, their levels of sophistication and artificial intelligence allowed them some autonomy.
*****
It was one such autonomous robot traveler, the CPNS-4, (also known as the Copernicus 4), that transmitted its data to Earth, and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s secret division, SPARTACUS.
SPARTACUS was started as an analog to the Lockheed Skunkworks, allowing the finest minds of diverse scientific fields to commingle and share resources in the pursuit of superior observation technology. Although much of the skills and expertise developed ultimately were integrated into the latest spy satellite technology, at its heart, SPARTACUS was a legitimate incubator for unconventional inventions.
For instance, one of its projects produced a small valve that ended up as a venting device on the KH-11 Reconnaissance satellite, preventing the buildup of Nitrogen gas, while not affecting the precision gyroscopic alignment of the cameras. This valve found its way into several interesting applications. Utilized as a stent in open heart surgery, it regulated the amount of analgesics precisely, and in real-time, sending information via the Bluetooth wireless protocol to a small computer that controlled the various compounds.
A less altruistic use was for the injection of lethal chemicals for prisoners who were sentenced to death.
Another area where it found a significant use was as a regulator in NOS deep-diving systems. The mechanical failure of this valve was sometimes spectacular, as it often was used for high-pressure gas applications. When failure occurred, the resulting pattern of debris was often used in diagnosing the cause of the collapse of the internal diaphragm. It had become a repeatable and observable event.
Many times this occurred during missions involving top secret photography of vital installations on Earth, such as missile bases, while tracking nuclear submarines or carriers of varying types and militaries, or while observing troop movements. When the failure happened, the analysts assigned to deduce and interpret the data in the photographs would become agitated. They came to name this particular kind of failure. They called it “Milky Way Algorithmic Diaphragm Failure Mode.”
Some very smart people solved the problem handily, and for six years, all was well.
The venting valve also was commonly used in robotic space travelers, such as the Copernicus 4.
*****
Dr. David Harding was going over the latest reports from SPARTACUS, regarding an oceanic missile launch site in the equatorial area of the Pacific. There was speculation from the White House that the Chinese and Russians were co-operating in a joint venture. According to the usual news sources, an effort was underway to build an underwater plate tectonics laboratory. In reality, what was being tested was a novel method for nuclear missile launches.
The construction was being performed under the guise of launching sonobuoys and other benthic exploration equipment. It had been uncovered that the SINO_SOVIET team was creating a modification of the Truex Sea Dragon launch system, from the early 1960’s. According to a recent analysis, the nuclear missile was to be towed out to sea attached to the bottom of an unusual vessel that superficially resembled a super-tanker. It would be lowered from the underside of the ship, which in reality was a complete mobile launch complex. The tracking and guidance systems were all controlled from the ship, and the missile would right itself by filling a series of annular ballast tanks with sea water. Once upright, the rocket would be fired directly into its target trajectory, much as a nuclear submarine fired its missiles while submerged. This particular missile was known in intelligence circles as “Crimson Seahorse” although some had unofficially christened it the “Red October”.
An enormous weapon, it carried eighty-five separate MIRV warheads. It was speculated that with only four of these missiles, the tactical deployment of MIRVs could blanket all of North America’s strategic resources. The very real concern was the excess capability of the device, as it could theoretically obliterate every major American metropolis, most of the power grid, and almost all of the on-ground military resources at one blow.
Several analysts had taken the position that the advantages of a first-strike, coupled with a collaborative Electro Magnetic Pulse attack from pre-positioned Russian space-based satellites (which had been orbiting since the late 1980’s) could provide an irresistible temptation to the two Superpowers, if they could create an allegiance against their traditional enemies in the West.
Harding, 55 years of age, and no stranger to politics, did not put much credence into the reports, since he was of the opinion that there were far greater global issues to which the resources of countries should be directed. As he looked over the data, his official goal was discerning which of the seventeen support vessels might be housing an illegal nuclear power plant. He noticed some interesting temperature variances in the layers below the ships, especially the bathayal z
one between the Mesopelagic and Bathypelagic layers. He began to imagine some connection between the images and the recently elevated temperatures being reported from the South Polar region.
Since the Russian intrusion into Lake Vostok, much of the information coming from there was difficult to receive through official channels, and many times incomprehensible.
He rummaged through some stacks of paper on his desk, which was buried under the detritus of his research efforts much of the time in what appeared a tremendously disarrayed manner. He unerringly seized upon the three-page facsimile that had SECRET stamped on its cover sheet.
Discarding the first sheet, he quickly glanced at the numbers and zeroed in on the area where he suspected a connection to the bathayal layer temperature recordings. Just as he was circling the particular readings with his pen, he was distracted by a video popup on his computer workstation.
Dr. Tatania Golovonov’s face appeared as a tiny pale oval at the lower right of his monitor. She did not look particularly happy to be there.
“Yes, what is it?” asked Harding. Dr. Golovonov grimaced at him and thrust an Ipad at the camera. “LOOK at this!” she shouted. “I do not care at what you are doing, you MUST LOOK at this immediately!” Harding grunted, put down the pen and tossed the fax back haphazardly at the other stacks of reports on his desk. He glanced over at the monitor.
“Why didn’t you just email this to me?” he said. “For God’s sake, David! Look!” she said. “This has just been processed from the CPNS-4. Look at it!” He took a slightly longer look and said “Milky Way occlusion, so what?”
Dr. Golovonov threw the Ipad across the room and frantically began typing on her keyboard. Simultaneously, she dialed three cellular phones. Harding knew that one phone was an encrypted device much like the one he had been given when he began work near the NORAD facility. That particular device connected to only one network, and when it was being used, the shit had definitely hit the proverbial fan.
Terminal Reset Omnibus: The Coming of The Wave Page 1
