Terminal Reset Omnibus: The Coming of The Wave

by A. E. Williams

  That the ordinary person was often maimed or killed was merely considered a by-product of the needed evolution towards the ultimate goal – interplanetary travel.

  The families involved in these activities realized that they had been able to unite the world’s peoples into a machine that would eventually deliver any conceivable product to them, given enough time.

  The minds behind the Great Pyramids, massive cities such as Angkor Wat, Constantinople, Teotihuacan, and the Seven Wonders of the Ancient worlds would have shuddered in awe to have had the massed ability of humanity at their service as did these individuals.

  Most of the families were immune to the ravages of these events because careful planning and use of logistics allowed them to remain far removed from the areas of strife and conflict. Their influence had grown over the centuries, and a certain kind of complacency had set in among them. They had had time to make and correct mistakes and learned how to mitigate the most egregious ones with cunning and the capacity for deception.

  But, they were not entirely immune to the effects of nature.

  The point had been driven home by an enormous explosion which occurred near the Podkamennaya Tunguska River in what is now Krasnoyarsk Krai, Russia in 1908.

  Although not well known, at that time there was a facility located in the region which was developing technologies that would have ultimately led to the use of immense zeppelins as transportation. These were not the puny hydrogen-filled gasbags used to carry people from Germany to the United States. The aircraft would have been over two miles in length, with their principal power plants connected much as locomotives were connected to trains.

  Articulated to bend with the stresses involved with that much surface area impinged upon by the surrounding winds, there were ingenious methods of raising and lowering aluminized skins to allow less area to be affected. The engines for these enormous vessels were simple aspirated diesels, with turbocharging technology borrowed from automobile racers of the time. Rudimentary advancements in jet turbine engine technology were also being considered, as well as the infamous pulse-jet that would soon ravage the cities of Great Britain in the Second World War.

  All of this came to an end when an extraterrestrial piece of matter smashed into the atmosphere at over 45,000 miles per hour. The object detonated with a force of a thirty-megaton atomic and blasted the facility and all evidence of it into rubble.

  The explosion created an inverted shock wave that collapsed the surrounding mountains into a subterranean cavern that was millions of years old. The heat from the event melted the bedrock and weakened the pebble strata underneath the Yenisei River so that the area was flooded.

  Subsequent investigations were unable to gain access to the province for decades, with the result that reports were unreliable and conflicted. What was known was that almost a billion dollars’ worth of assets in factories and materials, ten thousand workers and prototypes for four of the airships had been destroyed in a fraction of a second.

  The passage of Comet Haley in 1910 cemented their resolve, as the Earth actually passed through its tail.

  Therefore, over a century ago, many of the most powerful families on the planet Earth had begun an ambitious plan to design, build and outfit a series of extra-planetary lifeboats for their survival. For the next century, all the resources that could be mustered went into the accelerated development of tools and technology to support that goal. The requirements were discussed, analyzed and specifications designed to build these space arks.

  To accomplish so challenging a goal, it was also necessary to restructure the governing bodies of the world, in such a way that no two countries would be able to collude or discern the larger pattern that drove their economies. A social engineering project, as massive an undertaking as the space arks were to be, was begun.

  Resources, systems, terminology and procedures had to be created, codified, tested and ultimately put into practice long before the final design of the ships were finished.

  It was decided that more warfare was warranted, to isolate the needed technologies that had been identified. Atomic motors, pressurized suits, massive environmental controls, mechanical and electrical implements to do work more efficiently, instrumentation for monitoring equipment, techniques for material handling and design, medical advances for staving off death from injury and sickness – all of these were necessary to the mission.

  Parenthetically, much of this scientific experimentation and engineering innovation led to an increase in the ability to sustain or increase the lifespan of the labor class, allowing a more scripted approach to both the social training and skills development. Promising individuals were identified, categorized, psychologically tested, and then put into scripted environments to develop their talents. Artificial stressors were added to push them to their limits.

  A huge machine had been developed that served to accelerate the completion of the arks, completely hidden from those not having a need to know.

  It brought together the finest minds of the time to work on the problem of automating data collection, collating the results, and analyzing the information for trends. The need to perform these tasks rapidly led to giant strides in computing science. Mathematic theory was advanced tremendously through the use of cyphers, cryptographic codes, and encryption techniques. Ancient logic was used to provide the basis for games theory, which in turn produced rubrics for additional psychographic categorization of the workers. People were screened for sociopathic tendencies, and rewarded by being put into positions of unquestioned authority. Autocratic hierarchical organizational structures were developed to assist and underscore the value systems that were being inculcated in children from kindergarten well into college. Separate educational and social institutes were established that encouraged competition, and rivalry. The Prussian model of educating soldiers was modified for use to indoctrinate and segregate students.

  When there were the inevitable mental breakdowns, these were used to test the efficacy of newer medications. Most of this was under the guise of treatment that in actuality many times was only a mere placebo or resulted in adverse effects that could be observed and mitigated by other medical combinations. Vast warehouses of knowledge were being amassed.

  World War I came and went, and the arks were still being designed. It was evident that the process would take at least several generations, and there was admittedly an anxiety brought about by the inability to deal with the problem more rapidly. So, a second war was planned and implemented, encompassing the entire globe in discovering more efficient ways to implement change and advance technology.

  At the end of the Great, War observatories were being built, manned, and engaged in scouring the night skies for evidence of other killer space objects. Using the large telescopes of Mount Wilson and, after the Second World War, Mount Palomar, the area around our Solar System was being systematically scrutinized.

  The initial contingency plans called for construction of twelve arks, strategically located around the globe. These massive ships had begun active assembly following the Korean conflict, and it was thought they should be buried in areas of the world that had access to reserves of natural uranium ore. The use of chemical liquid and solid fuel rockets during the wars underscored the physical limits of the problem of reaching Earth orbit, and traveling even further into the Solar System. The science was infuriatingly precise, as it was a simple matter of having enough energy to lift the mass of the space arks against the pull of gravity. Some early attempts ended in disaster, as the chemical rockets proved they were not up to the task. Even severely powerful propellants such as liquid oxygen and hydrazine hybrid systems could not provide the needed impulse without self-destructing.

  The advent of atomics changed the equation favorably. After rigorous testing during and after the Second World War, it was found that the energy would be sufficient to meet the needs of the Ark fleet.

  The propulsion systems used a very simple idea – they would blow up a series
of nuclear bombs in rapid succession, providing thrust for the ship to propel it into space. Originally, a number of nuclear engines were built for the NERVA project, but it was another effort, Project Orion, that provided the engineering breakthrough to power the ships. But the tremendous heat generated using this method melted the propulsion bells of the NERVA nuclear engines, deforming them and causing a catastrophic collapse of the integrity of the nozzles.

  The advent of thermonuclear weapons had heralded a new hope that the propulsive forces of such an engine could be harnessed more efficiently, but tests proved otherwise. The brisance of the fission bombs was orders of magnitude less than those of thermonuclear weapons. The additional force added by the fusion of hydrogen prohibited the use of the usual materials as the failure modes were intensified. This was coupled with the shock wave from the explosion actually creating massive fracture propagation in all variants of the containment vessels.

  The supporting members would deform and bend, causing loss of structural strength. If enough material were to be used to mitigate the effects, then the construction mass involved exceeded any possible thrust to weight curves, and the blast would just dissipate downwards into the rock. As computer simulations became more accurate and refined in time with the adaptation of computational fluid dynamics, it became evident that the fission bomb approach was feasible using the prevalent technology. So, it was decided to continue using the fission bombs.

  The years went on and SALT I and II treaties were crafted, allowing the world to breath a collective sigh of relief as these terrible weapons were ‘dismantled’ during a series of staged propaganda exercises.

  In reality, the nuclear bombs were merely refitted and stockpiled at strategic locations, to be used as potential fuel for the space arks.

  Over three thousand tons of each of the revised propulsion units were inert materials such as polyethylene, (much of it reclaimed plastics from recycled beverage bottles) and also boron salts. The force of the detonations would be transferred to the ark in the form of a conical pusher plate. This conical plate geometry dictated the pyramidal design of the primary structure.

  A secondary function would allow a graphite conical pusher plate to absorb neutrons to minimize fallout, but weight considerations disallowed this particular configuration in favor of one that used materials that produced increased fallout. Calculations were made that showed that the weight of the other engine materials used could be substantially reduced as larger bombs would super-compress the fissionable component, increasing efficiency. The extra debris from these explosions would also serve as additional propulsion mass. Another interesting side effect of these studies was the introduction of neutron bomb science to warfare.

  The ark-ships were immense, almost city-sized affairs. They were tremendously heavy, even though advances in material science had allowed considerable weight savings to be made by retrofitting critical components. Constructed as massive metal pyramids, with sacrificial components that were designed to be jettisoned after launch, the space arks were intended to have enough fuel for reaching a LaGrange point. The ark then became a space station, capable of staying in orbit indefinitely.

  They could carry an amount of personnel equivalent to a modern aircraft carrier, but also had the ability to expand somewhat if procreation was controlled properly to accommodate an additional 450 people.

  There were food and water recyclers, and enough stores supplied for a generation. Breathable atmosphere was created as a by-product of hydroponic food systems, and water reclamation devices assured adequate supplies for irrigation, bathing, and consumption. Recycled waste products would be converted to food or fertilizer, in a cyclically closed loop that would assure a bland, nutritious diet for the inhabitants.

  Power would be supplied by nuclear reactors, and augmented with solar panels. Spare parts and raw materials had been stockpiled, as well as thousands of machines needed for tooling. Most of the technology was based on easily manufactured stock, and most materials served multiple purposes. There was a large amount of computer equipment, but the storage media were primitive by comparison to even a USB flash drive. The dependable magneto-optical WORM media was the preferred data storage device, as it offered proven capabilities of storing information for over 100 years.

  It was theorized that the ships would only launch in the face of a threat such as an asteroid or imminent comet impact, often referred to as the infamous extinction level event, or ELE. At that point, the tremendous radioactive contamination they would emit would be moot.

  Of the twelve arks that had been constructed, the First Ark had the most modern equipment and materials used. A redesign of the propulsion systems allowed the use of scaled-up Russian RD-180 heavy-lift systems to replace the STS boosters in a symmetric asparagus staging engine launch configuration. Although heavier, and somewhat dirtier, the thrust to weight ratios favored such a procedure, in that, as the fuel was draining from the outermost tanks, depleted tanks with their engines would be decoupled. The next fuel tank would then act as the main fuel reservoir for the remaining engines. The practical effect was that the ark would always use the minimum number of tanks required to transport the fuel it has left while also using all engines it still carried.

  In the aftermath of the Mars Impact, it had been deemed necessary to launch the Arks.

  As the final travelers arrived and were prepared for departure, key personnel were alerted to the proper procedures to be followed in managing the political affairs on the rest of the globe. To be sure, there was going to be a period of adjustment, since the next time they would set foot on Earth would likely be in fifty or more years, unless their projections of the radiation effects of deploying the Ark Fleet were grossly incorrect.

  They would safely avoid the fate awaiting the rest of the population of Earth by launching away from the ecliptic, and then entering a transverse orbit that would bring them back to Lagrange One within two years.

  Logistics required that the arks be launched in phases, depending on where and when the orbital mechanics dictated. As the preparations were made, the position of Earth required that the initial launches coincidentally were of the First Ark, and the Fifth Ark, which was in Atlanta, Georgia.

  As the final countdown to The Wave impacting Earth began, the First Ark gave the command to the remaining arks: LAUNCH!

  The Elite on board cared little for much beyond survival, and the propagation of their lineage.

  *****

  WASHINGTON, D.C

  At first, Roy Walters had thought it was an earthquake. His brain could not reconcile what it was hearing and seeing with his experience as a shop owner on the outskirts of the city, where he had lived and worked since his teens.

  The capitol buildings off in the distance, the Washington Monument, and many of the larger trees seemed to shimmer and then wobble. Suddenly there was an enormous flash of light that instantly blinded him. Seconds later, the neighborhood where his shop had stood for almost twenty years was obliterated in a searing nuclear blast. His last thought was ‘earthquake’.

  Tens of thousands of people were on their way to work, when the rumbling had started. The Beltway traffic was at its usual standstill, and many of the commuters believed an earthquake was occurring. But, as the Ark ship blasted into the air from its secret berths under the Potomac River the devastation wrought by its nuclear engines cleared the highways. The monuments and government buildings were flattened underneath the force of the explosions. People were atomized, the canals and rivers evaporated, and the foliage incinerated.

  The pyramidal shape of the First Ark rose slowly into the skies over Virginia, laying nuclear waste below it.

  The Orion engines, coupled with chemical rocket driven auxiliary boosters harvested from the Space Transport Shuttle program pushed the eight million tons of mass further away from the surface. From a long distance away, it appeared as though a mountain was rising into the air, borne on fiery waves. After a few minutes, the boosters separated. S
een from below, the booster separations created a Korolev cross.

  The whole structure accelerated as it passed the fringes of space, one hundred kilometers above a smoking crater that had once housed over five million people. The resulting cloud of destruction resembled the Hiroshima blast, but on an immense scale.

  *****

  CAMP DAVID, MARYLAND

  Deep under the ground in the guarded, bomb-proof bunkers beneath Camp David, the President sat and smoked a cigarette. He really had thought he could quit this time. It would have made his wife happy.

  He stared at facsimiles that detailed the fact that Washington D.C. was gone. The initial reports indicated some manner of nuclear attack, probably brought in using either one of the commuter train systems, or a series of semi-tractor trailers that had evaded NEST and linked up to form a thermonuclear weapon of immense size. Spectral analysis of the blasts showed the bombs were most likely Russian in origin, and of the type in common deployment during the implementation of SALT II.

  The adjutant with the Football stood grimly by. The President began the details that he believed would result in the end of the world. As he did, he tried not to show his grief. The First Lady and his children had been in the air, en route to Dulles, when her plane was diverted following the Mars Impact transmission. There was no possible way it had avoided the blast.

  His heart heavy, eyes blurred by ready tears, the President signed the Declaration of War against the Russian government. He referred to the ‘biscuit’ for the codes he needed to initiate launches against military and civilian targets in Russia. There was a pause as he wiped his eyes clear of tears with a silk handkerchief, then placed it against the biometric retinal scanner.

  The series of green indicator lights on his console heralded the launch of over two hundred nuclear devices against Russia.

  The President openly wept, knowing he had murdered the entire world.