Falling Ark

by Leigh Snelson

  “Wouldn’t miss it!” Tony said.

  “Great, see you upstairs then!” I put the little dish down having polished off the bacon slime and headed back upstairs.

  On the way up to the bridge I ran into Ava. She had been busy with Derek the past few days, helping to program the gravity drives. That was the name we had finally settled on after ‘floaty metal beach balls things’ was rejected.

  “How’s it going?” I asked.

  She looked really excited about something and desperately wanted to tell somebody about it.

  “I’ve been looking all over for you!” She was out of breath and had clearly been running around the ship looking for me.

  “I know, we need to have locaters or something” I replied.

  “Yeah, that’s a good idea. Derek and I have put all the drives in position, dotted around the ship in the containers the robots made, just like you said.” Ava informed me.

  Just one gravity drive had enough pulling power to lift the entire ship. The issue was attaching it to something that could also handle the force without it ripping away or snapping the ship in half.

  In the end we decided to put several of the drives around the ship to ease the stress. The ship was large and well-built but the robots had spent days patching up all the little holes and any stress on the hull could easily pop the welds.

  “That’s awesome! Are you coming upstairs for the launch?” I asked.

  “Absolutely!” Ava replied. “But I need to show you this first!”

  She shoved a small tablet computer into my hand.

  “What am I looking at here?” I asked as I spun some blueprints around on the screen.

  “It’s the glass rods that are on the gun turrets.” She replied, the excitement in her voice was audible. “They are some type of laser weapon. The blueprints have just been decoded by Lovelace.”

  Lovelace was the name that Ava had started calling the supercomputer down in the refrigeration unit. This computer was very impressive with some hardware that even Ava had not seen before. Ava called it Lovelace after Ada Lovelace, the very first computer programmer.

  The machine itself was blank, no files or commands, just a basic operating system, like a brand-new supercomputer, straight out of the box.

  We gave this mammoth machine the petabyte of files that we had stolen, giving it the task of trying to decode them and it was making significant progress, much fast than Ava’s laptop now our internet connections were severely slowed and she couldn’t access her network.

  I zoomed out on the blueprints that were displayed in my hand and I finally saw it all together. It was indeed a gun.

  “If you notice, the laser travels down the glass rod which focuses it.” Ava pointed out as she took control of the device again.

  “It’s pretty cool to have lasers on the side of our ship but do we know how to control them?” I asked.

  A huge grin appeared on her face. She was waiting for that question.

  Ava was only a couple years younger than me and when we first met she had come across as a very confident and assertive young woman but recently she seemed to seek me out whenever she discovered anything to see if I approved first. This was a bit of shift of power between us that I was not ready for, I was usually the one doing the chasing in a relationship.

  I suspected that Ava likely didn’t have that many real-life friends which also explained why she didn’t trust people at first, but once she accepted you, and she let you in to her inner circle, you were like family.

  “I have built a basic control system that will allow you take control of the guns on the side of the planes and I have updated the control systems in the tower to match. I just need to train the crew now.” Ava explained, excitedly.

  “You did all that?” I questioned. “That’s amazing!”

  It never hurts to bolster someone’s confidence when they do something awesome.

  “You can control the distance of the shot by either increasing the power or reducing the radius. A long distance shot at something very small is possible if you crank the power way up, but then it takes time to charge again. You can also fire lots of smaller, closer shots before needing to recharge.” She went on while gesturing at the screen with the settings.

  “What kind of weapon do you think this is equivalent to? Just so I can get an idea of its power.” I asked.

  I couldn’t tell if we were looking at a potato gun or a rocket launcher in terms of firepower.

  “I am not really sure, but I would say at close range, say one hundred metres away, it would have the same force as two or three hand grenades.” Ava informed me.

  I whistled at the prospect.

  “It’s more impressive than that.” Ava continued. “There is a whole bunch of setting that I just don’t understand but I think they are something to do with wavelengths and stuff like that.” She tapped at the screen and handed it back to me.

  A familiar screen popped up. It was the screen I had developed for the gravity drives to target which molecules were affected by it.

  I was going to complain that Lara had stolen another idea from me but then I remembered that I had copied it from the replicator in the facility. This used a beam of energy to target and filter out individual molecules. You could put in a block of unfiltered material in one end of the machine and the replicator would fire its lasers and extract elements one at a time.

  “Ava, this allows you to target only certain elements based on their wavelength signature. It’s quite complicated but let’s say you wanted to turn all the oxygen in a ship to plasma. This would do that, without harming the anything else on that ship.” I explained.

  “Wow, that’s really dangerous in the wrong hands!” Ava exclaimed. “You could use this to melt the silicone controls in a vault door and steal the contents.”

  “Should it worry me that your first thought was to use this to steal stuff?” I commented. I looked at her but only got a huge grin back. “Yes, you could do that, very easily. You could also use it to target cancer cells, clean contaminated water or destroy radioactive waste. Really the possibilities are endless when you’re talking about manipulating molecules.”

  “I suppose they are better uses.” Ava conceded.

  “This is awesome technology though, start training the crew, you never know when they might need it.”

  Ava continued smiling at me and together we climbed the stairs to the control tower. I heard the klaxons ring out and that meant we were about to take off.

  Derek had been in the control room all evening, putting the final touches to the flight program. He was now explaining to Sam the different controls and buttons on the touchscreen panel.

  Ava and I walked into the room and Hank followed not long after. He had been working with the crew trying to get everything in place and strapped down ready for take-off.

  “Take a seat.” Sam said, and gestured to the new viewing gallery that he had installed in the middle of the room.

  It was just a bunch of chairs he had acquired from various parts of the ship, but he had bolted them onto a raised platform, and it gave a great perspective out of the window. Like being at the cinema but with a live view.

  I sat down on the front row. Several of the crew were already there sitting on the back few rows and I wanted to make sure I sat next to Ava.

  Over the past few days we had gotten to know the crew quite well. They were mostly German with a few people for Eastern Europe thrown into the mix. They all seemed hard working and they all had a grudge against Lara after she bought up their shipping company and then removed a lot of the basic rights that they had previously. Policies like health insurance and family benefits.

  They felt like she didn’t care about the crew, she only cared about the cargo and they took delight in knowing that she would be upset that her biggest ship had been hijacked.

  They had already sent messages home with the crew that left on the lifeboats. In these messages they explained that they were safe
and not to worry. They also sent out a different message for Lara. They wanted her to know that they had defected, that she can’t treat her staff this way, they had unionised and joined the rebellion that was going to overthrow her. It was a sentiment I knew only too well.

  “Two minutes.” Sam said announced to the room.

  We all leaned forward to get a good view out of the window.

  “Sorry we’re late” Tony said as he held the door open for Julie.

  “You’re just in time,” Derek said as he pressed a dozen of the buttons on the screen in front of him.

  The gravity drives that surrounded the ship, keeping the wall of water around us stopped and let go of the millions of gallons they held suspended in the air. The sea came crashing down to the surface along with a roll of thunder and accompanying mist.

  It was difficult to see as the haze settled, but I think I saw the little orbs float back to the boat like well organised drones following orders. They all flew into a container that sat on top of a stack with its door open. The last one snagged a rope on the way in and shut the door behind it. It reminded me of sheep herding, as they all entered the pen.

  “Over to you now.” Derek said to Sam before spinning around in his chair and lifting his hands above his head, stretching out, his part of the job complete.

  “Put your arms down, you’ll stink out the cabin” Hank laughed and smirked at Derek.

  “3... 2... 1...” Sam counted down and then, unceremoniously the horizon started to move and sink below the front of the ship. The waves and the mist that were created from the huge water plumes disappeared underneath us.

  The feeling was strange. It didn’t feel like we were floating up, but instead, we were staying still and the whole world was falling away from us.

  “It’s working!” Ava shouted and she jumped out of her chair and ran over the window to get a better look.

  We all took this as a sign and followed. All of us except Hank, he stayed put in the middle of the room.

  “Hank, come and take a look.” I gestured.

  From the edge of the tower you could see over the side of the ship and down into the sea. There was little to look at just the waves slowly getting smaller.

  “I’m alright, I can see perfectly well from here.” Hank said, his eyes firmly fixed on the horizon.

  “No worries!” I said. I was not about to push a man of his size out of his comfort zone.

  “Well Sam, you did it!” I mentioned as he approached my side after putting the ship into auto-pilot. “You have just changed the world forever.”

  “What do you mean, me? I’m just the pilot, it’s your invention, don’t start blaming all of this on me!” Sam laughed and together we watched the Sun trying to disappear over the horizon. It tried but we wouldn’t let it go.

  For the next hour we chased it around the planet and experienced the longest constant sunset anyone had ever seen.

  Chapter 21

  “Now what?” I asked Sam once the control room had cleared.

  The ship was floating a hundred kilometres above the sea. This spectacle was great at first but after a couple of minutes people soon lost interest and had other, more pressing things to get back to.

  Julie and Tony had been the first to leave, heading back down to their little forest where they were creating all kinds of things that both impressed and terrified me.

  Next Hank took a collection of the crew down into the hull. They were still moving things around down there to make best use of the space. They were also inspecting the new planes and weapons that we had on board, it was like Christmas had come early for Hank, getting to play with all the latest military toys.

  Derek and the Captain Webber soon disappeared too. I wasn’t sure what they were doing but I guessed Derek had wanted to play cards. He was currently fleecing all the crew out of their belongings, but the captain was proving his equal.

  Ava was the last to leave.

  “When you get a second pop down to the fridge.” She told me as she left, “I need to show you around Lovelace, she’s pretty neat.” Then she hopped out of the room and away leaving Sam and I alone.

  “We are going to need some friends in powerful places if we plan to last much longer. We can’t hang out in the clouds for the rest of our lives.” I said to Sam as we walked back over to the holographic control table.

  I never grew tired of the effect the table had on me. One moment it was a simple piece of black glass, then the next, after it had tracked your face, you could see all kinds of displays and readouts, structures and whatever else Sam had been working. I always had to blink a few times for my brain to register the change.

  Now the holotable displayed the ship in real time, the sun gleaming off the blue hull as it started to set below the horizon.

  “I have a few contacts.” Sam said rather sheepishly.

  Sam had spent a lot of his adult life with highly influential people, arranging deals and contracts. It didn’t come as a surprise that he would know people who would be interested in destroying Lara and her company.

  Now that I had begun to see a side of Lara I never suspected existed, I imagined she had no end of enemies.

  “Is there anyone we can trust?” I asked, trying to read his mind.

  “Possibly.” Sam replied, “He hates Lara as much as you do, and he has the right connections to help us out. You have probably heard of him. His name is William P. Jones.”

  “Bill the Billionaire!” I said with alarm. “You know Bill the Billionaire?”

  Sam rolled his eyes. I was sounding star struck and I knew it.

  I had been a fond follower of Bill ever since I read his biography when I was at school. I remember explaining to Sam in great detail why he was the visionary of our time.

  This was many years ago, and my opinion of him has not altered.

  William P. Jones or ‘Bill’ as he preferred to be known had basically created the field of data science, or at least he had mastered it. He always claimed to know more about you than you knew about yourself and he had built a huge company around this idea.

  It all started when he was younger.

  His parents ran a small group of general food stores around Lexington in Kentucky, they were a tiny rival to the huge national corporations but they were proud of their local roots.

  Bills grandfather operated the first store and prided himself on knowing the name of every customer that walked through the door.

  He would often make sales because he knew his customers and would buy things specifically for them. This wholesome business community filtered through to his son, Bills father.

  When he took over the business he expanded, adding a half dozen, meticulously chosen locations and expanding the number of products each store stocked. He also took pride in the business, knowing that every member of staff knew who their customers were.

  Bills dad was well known for dropping into a store unannounced, picking a random employee and asking them questions about the customers. He would take them into the security office, look at the CCTV cameras and point to someone at random in the store.

  “Who is this person?” He would ask.

  “Oh, that’s Dolly, she works across town at the car factory as a painter. I haven’t seen her in pet isle for months though. That must mean that she is having trouble with her fish tank. A year ago her fish got fin-rot and although I thought we treated it, perhaps it has made a return.” The salesclerk would say.

  “Or perhaps she is looking for a chew toy for her dog Benji. Of course, it’s Benji’s birthday next week, he’ll be five. I know just the toy that little rascal will like.”

  Then the employee would be expected to go out onto the shop floor and make the sale.

  That was always the story that was used in the depictions of Bills father. It was an impossibly high standard that the company set itself, but it seemed to work. The large, national corporations couldn’t compete with that level of service.

  As Bill grew he unde
rstand the power of this technique but he lacked the social skills to talk to the customers.

  Over the summers, as a child, he would work the shop floor just as his dad had done before him but he struggled to approach people and get to know them. He wasn’t as charismatic as his father or grandfather.

  During the summer of Bills seventeenth birthday he decided to investigate the company accounts. His parents assumed that he was getting ready to be an accountant, a reputable job that matched Bills personality.

  They gave him the files and instead of finding ways to save the company money he started to send out parcels to people’s doors without them ordering anything.

  His father, when he found out, went ballistic.

  “Who sends free stuff to customers without their consent?” he asked. “We’ll be bankrupt by the end of the month if we post all our stock away!”

  Bill argued that he had done nothing wrong.

  He had predicted what customers were going to need and sent it to them. Items like dog food, toilet paper and other basic consumables.

  “That is madness. Customers don’t want that!” His dad would shout.

  To say his parents were sceptical was an understatement but as soon as the cheques started flowing, they quickly changed their mind. Happy customers reported that they were pleased they didn’t have to drive across town to do their shopping.

  Bill took this concept and ran with it.

  He created an online store where people could browse for items and indicate their preferred brands. Then he tied credit cards to their accounts, tracked their purchases in store and started sending them products he knew they wanted, days before they were due to come and buy it.

  It was also an honest system. If customers didn’t want the goods, they didn’t have to return them, just leave an explanation describing why and Bill could adjust his algorithm.